Politics, Government & Public Policy: June 2012 Archives
The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, and it strikes me as extremely unlikely to be repealed by Congress. Even if Romney wins the election the Democrats in the Senate will filibuster any attempts at repeal.
It's no surprise that the stock prices for the major health insurance companies are shooting up now that they're guaranteed a bunch of new customers by law.
I think the ruling is likely to be very bad from an employment standpoint, and it's going to be bad for Obama politically.
As a healthcare consumer with (knock on wood) excellent insurance it's hard to see how I and my family won't be hurt by the ruling.
From an analysis standpoint: The four dissenting justices all co-authored a single opinion (as opposed to "joining" an opinion), which is very unusual for a dissent. It seems that the popular theory now is that the dissenting opinion was expected to be in the majority, but that Roberts didn't want to overturn Obamacare with a party-line 5-4 vote because he was concerned about what such a ruling would do to the Supreme Court politically and in the public's eye. So when the conservatives failed to attract even a single liberal justice Roberts decided to flip and write the majority opinion himself (which is his right as the Chief Justice). He wrote it pretty narrowly and upheld the individual mandate as a tax, getting the majority to specifically reject the argument that the mandate was allowable under the Commerce Clause. That alone is very politically significant: none of the supporters of Obamacare wanted to call the individual mandate penalties a "tax", because that makes Obamacare the largest tax increase in American history.
Mitt Romney is going to address the NAACP and I really hope he is able to make the case that black voters should seriously consider the Republicans in 2012. More blacks are starting small businesses than ever, and the Republicans are definitely on the side of the small business owner. Social Security transfers a huge amount of wealth from working black men to white women (who tend to live much longer). While only 12% of the population is black, more than 36% of abortions are of black babies. The list goes on.
Mark Steyn nails the problem with our soaring national debt: we've got nothing to show for it.
Self-pity is never an attractive quality, and in an elected head of state even less so. Obama whines that his opponents say it's all his fault. One can argue about whose fault it is, but not, as my colleagues at National Review pointed out, whose responsibility it is: It's his. He's the only president we have. And he made things worse. He increased the national debt by some 70 percent, and what do we have to show for it? No dams, no railroads, no moon shots. Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy.
Don't forget persistent unemployment, inflation, and a housing market on life support.
To step back in Steyn's essay:
Take, for example, the attempt at soaring rhetoric: "That's how we built this country - together. We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together," he said, in a passage that was presumably meant to be inspirational but was delivered with the faintly petulant air of a great man resentful at having to point out the obvious, yet again. "Together, we touched the surface of the moon, unlocked the mystery of the atom, connected the world through our own science and imagination. We haven't done these things as Democrats or Republicans. We've done them as Americans."
Can anyone really imagine America accomplishing any of these things now? Ask yourself why not. Impoverishing ourselves to employ zillions of bureaucrats is reason number one.
Has anyone done more to rehabilitate Bill Clinton's reputation than Barack Obama? Well, maybe George W. Bush....
The stories the chart tells are amazing.The first is how much government spending fell during President Bill Clinton's eight years in office and how low it was when he left office. When he became president in 1992, government spending was 23.5% of GDP, and when he left in 2001 it was 19.5% of GDP. President Clinton, in conjunction with a solid Republican Congress, cut government spending by more than any other president in modern times, and oversaw one of the greatest periods of economic growth and prosperity in U.S. history.
Sadly for fiscal conservatives, the biggest surge in government spending came during the last two years of President George W. Bush's eight years in office (2007-2008). A weakened Republican president dealing with a strident Democratic Congress, led by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, resulted in an orgy of spending.
I confess: when Bill Clinton was president I loathed him. I was wrong.
Dana Milbank recounts the horrible June the Obama Administration is facing.
Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a "cascade" of national-security leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that the "private sector is doing fine."Could it get any worse?
Early Monday morning, Obama learned that it could. His aides delivered the news to him that his commerce secretary had been cited for a felony hit-and-run after allegedly crashing his car three times over the weekend. In one incident, the previously obscure Cabinet officer apparently rear-ended a Buick, spoke to the car's occupants, then hit the vehicle again as he left.
Hey, the month is only one-third over! Things are sure to look up for the President. Isn't the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare soon?
Unions and public employees shouldn't mix.
There was a time when even pro-labor Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt would have regarded it as obvious that collective bargaining was incompatible with public employment. Even the legendary AFL-CIO leader George Meany once took it for granted that there could be no "right" to bargain collectively with the government.When unions bargain with management in the private sector, both sides are contending for a share of the private profits that labor helps produce -- and both sides are constrained by the pressures of market discipline. Managers can't ignore the company's bottom line. Unions know that if they demand too much, they may cost the company its competitive edge.
But when labor and management bargain in the public sector, they are divvying up public funds, not private profits. Government bureaucrats don't have to worry about losing business to their competitors; state agencies can't relocate to another part of the country. There is little incentive to hold down wages and benefits, since the taxpayers who will be picking up the tab have no seat at the table. On the other hand, government managers have a powerful motivation to yield to government unions: Union members vote.
Public employee unions are simply money laundering operations that (a) transfer taxpayer dollars to unions who (b) give a cut to the Democrats who then (c) pass laws to strengthen the unions. There's no logical reason for this scheme to be legal.
Peggy Noonan has the best line of the day:
And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour's house. He's busy. He's running for president.But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be.
Social Security needs to dramatically raise the retirement age.
In 1935, when the Social Security Act was passed, the average American lifespan was 61.7 years.Today, it's 81.7.
Suddenly, keeping the retirement age at 60 doesn't make much sense. Or so says AIG Chairman Robert Benmosche, who favors increasing the retirement age to 80. An economy with a rapidly aging workforce can only survive, he argues, if it "keeps pensions and medical services affordable . . . [to] take the burden off the youth." This means pruning the roster of costly retirees.
Where I disagree with Mead is in his assertion that the change needs to be gradual:
These wars against the young and against arithmetic are undesirable and unsustainable. If European and American pensions and social security benefits are to continue, we will eventually have to link national retirement ages to expected longevity. This doesn't mean we should do it all at once; reforms should be gradual and made with sensitivity to current and prospective retirees, who have planned their lives based on the old system.
I agree that rapid changes to the retirement system will be disruptive for current and near-term retirees, but I don't care. Just because they've built their lives around the prospect of looting and pillaging my generation doesn't mean that they're entitled to succeed. They're attempting to use democracy to transfer a massive amount of wealth from my generation to theirs by borrowing money to spend on themselves that we are going to have to pay back. I say no! I say that we link the Social Security retirement age to longevity and push it back dramatically effective immediately.
