Archive

Author Archive
November 27th, 2013 at 11:22 am
America’s REAL Thanksgiving Story

Most of us remember story of the “First Thanksgiving.” According to lore, in 1621, the Plymouth colonists, in what is now Massachusetts, and the Wampanoag Indians gathered to share an autumn harvest feast in first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies.

In reality, history scholars general have concluded that this tale — and the idyllic images of Pilgrims and Indians sharing turkey and a hearty laugh – is pretty much total baloney.

There is, however, a real, and much more important, story of hard work and bountiful harvests that should serve as the basis for Thanksgiving in America, because it ultimately became the basis for the America itself.

•••

In May 1607, King James of England sent three ships filled with 104 people to what is now the Tidewater region of Virginia to establish the Virginia Company.

When they arrived, the settlers found themselves surrounded by a bountiful environment. Mussels, oysters and fish; turkeys and eggs; strawberries, raspberries and mulberries; deer and plenty of fertile soil were all readily available.

Despite this abundance of food, all but 38 of the original 104 settlers died within six months of establishing Jamestown — mostly of starvation.

Two years later, in the summer of 1609, the King James gave the Virginia Company another try. This time, 500 colonists were sent from England to Virginia to attempt to establish a permanent settlement on the coast of North America.

The second time proved an even bigger disaster. Even in this land of plenty, 440 people — all but 60 — starved to death.

The famine was so great that journals record at least one occurrence when several colonists resorted to digging up a newly dead Indian and turning him into a meal. Archaeologists recently discovered that a 14-year-old girl was also among those eaten.

•••

In a dire, last-ditch attempt to save the Virginia Company, the business’ leaders in England sent a British military officer named Sir Thomas Dale to asses the situation in Virginia and determine why the settlers were having such a hard time making it.

Upon his arrival, Dale was shocked and confused to find that these starving settlers spent their time bowling in their yards, rather than farming or hunting.

Dale realized the reason the settlers were so lazy even in the face of their hunger was because they were being asked to work for the common good. For the first seven years after arriving, the settlers had no ownership of the fruits of their labor.

Everything the settlers produced went into a shared storage area and they were all allocated equal amounts to feed their families, no matter how hard they worked or how much they personally produced. There was simply no incentive to work hard — the laziest person got as much to eat as the hardest working person.

Thomas Dale changed all of this by introducing private property to the settlers of the Virginia Company.

•••

Dale allotted each man three acres of land, and anything grown on that land was his to keep, trade or sale as he wished. It was also declared that no man would be forced to work on communal efforts, such as building churches or clearing roads, for more than one month per year — and never during planting or harvest season.

After Dale implemented this system of private property to take the place of communal farming and equal distribution, the colony flourished. By the time he left Virginia three years later, the colony had grown by hundreds of people and the settlers were well-fed and in good spirits.

The system of private property rights Dale created in Virginia gave settlers the incentive to work hard and be frugal. It also allowed settlers to trade the food they grew or hunted to people willing to develop new crafts and vocations. As a result, and with a good deal of experimentation and innovation, some settlers were able to specialize in trades such as blacksmithing, milling, carpentry and tanning.

By introducing private property rights and a sense of personal responsibility to the Virginia Company, Thomas Dale didn’t just save the lives of a few hundred settlers four centuries ago. He managed to inject this continent with the principles of private property, free enterprise and individual liberty — that have served as both the foundation for, and the guiding force of, the United States.

Because of Thomas Dale, and the advancements and innovations that resulted from his simple idea 400 years ago, we all live in a richer, safer, healthier, more peaceful and better world. For that, we should all be truly thankful.

Tags:
November 27th, 2013 at 10:58 am
Obamacare, IRS Named Turkeys of the Year

In celebration of Thanksgiving, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance named its annual “Turkeys of the Year.” The awards are presented in recognition of federal programs and agencies that have proven to be real turkeys for taxpayers, gobbling up tax dollars and giving hard working Americans the bird.

Among this year’s “Turkeys of the Year” are the IRS, Obamacare and the Export-Import Bank. Check out the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s short video to see just why these three boondoggles were so deserving of the shameful award.

November 27th, 2013 at 10:51 am
Store Owner Responds to Police Harassment by Recording Cops

Alex Saleh recenty joined the growing number of American business owner to install a surveillance system. What makes the Miami Gardens, Fla., convenience store owner different is that he didn’t get the cameras to keep an eye on shoplifters or cash register robbers, he got them to film area police.

After years of watching cops harass his customers and employees, Saleh had enough.

One of his employees was stopped and questioned by police officers 258 times over a four-year period. The employee was arrested for trespassing 62 times – just for being at the place where he worked!

In all, even though the convenience store had never been robbed, Saleh was forced to install 15 surveillance cameras.

CNET reports that “[t]he videos make for numbing viewing. In one, a store employee takes out the trash, only to be arrested for trespassing. Others appear to show searches without warrants and police stopping customers without any obvious reason.”

November 21st, 2013 at 12:01 pm
Google’s Green Hypocrisy Pollutes the Environment, Costs Taxpayers

Google likes to promote itself as a green, environmentally conscious company. After all, the company stays busy lobbying for carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes, encouraging government to shutter coal plants and building solar farms. In reality, however, as I point out in a piece featured today on The Blaze, Google is far from green.

The company’s executives control a fleet of private jets that they use to gallivant to vacation spots around the globe – burning an average of 100,000 gallons of fuel every month. The supposedly environmentally conscious company’s jets have emitted more than 100 million pounds of carbon dioxide over the last four years alone.

What’s worse is that you are helping to fund Google’s green hypocrisy. Google, thanks in part to its hefty campaign donations and cozy relationships with federal lawmakers and the Obama Administration, gets to park its jets in a taxpayer-funded NASA hangar and purchase its jet fuel at below-market prices from NASA and the Department of Defense. Google officials spent an estimated $29 million on jet fuel at the facility, roughly $10 million less than what they would have paid on the open market.

Read the entire story here.

November 20th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Food Police Will Soon Hit Businesses with Pointless Regulations

A. Barton Hinkle, a Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and Reason magazine contributor, wrote a fascinating and chilling column this week about the Food and Drug Administration expensive and burdensome new menu labeling scheme.

The regulations will “dictate the disclosure of calorie counts for foods sold in restaurants, grocery stores, delis, bakeries, coffee shops, and even gas stations,” according to Hinkle. And those businesses will pay a hefty price to comply with the policy. The federal government figures the rules will “cost more than $1 billion and require more than 14.5 million hours of labor to meet.”

The calorie posting regulations, which are expected to go into effect any day, have been debated for three years. Why? Because it’s confusing as hell to try to figure out how to force business owners to post the calorie count for custom made food orders.

Hinkle writes:

Consider, for example, pizza: The legislative director for Domino’s says ‘there are 34 million pizza combinations. We’ve done the math.’ Listing the calorie content for each possible variation would require a very large sign indeed.

Yet only one Domino’s customer out of 10 visits a Domino’s location. The rest order over the phone or online. So shouldn’t posting the caloric content on the company website suffice? It should, but it will not: The FDA’s proposed standards require actual signs, at every location.

While the regulations are bad news for big companies like Domino’s, at least they can make the calculations once and send those numbers to every location in their chain. It’s the small mom and pop pizza and sub shops, diners and other restaurants that face the worst burden. After all, small businesses don’t have the technology, money or time available to figure out the number of calories contained in a sandwich or a stew with hundreds of possible ingredient combinations.

The goal of these ridiculous federal calorie count regulations (which are actually a tax on businesses’ time and money) is, of course, to encourage people to consume fewer calories.

But menu labelling fails to reduce calorie intake. “Putting calorie labels on menus really has little or no effect on people’s ordering behavior at all,” according to Julie Downs of Carnegie Mellon who co-authored a study published last week in the American Journal of Public Health. “No matter how much calorie information is on the menu list, people still choose the food they like, not what’s supposed to be healthier.”

So, to recap, the government will soon hand down regulations that will be impossible to fully meet, will cost businesses considerable amounts of time and money, and will do nothing at all to benefit Americans.

Perfect. Just what this country needs.

November 20th, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Big Government Comes to Little Kids’ Lunch Boxes

Kristen Bartkiw thought she provided her two children with wholesome, filling meals when she sent them to daycare with lunch boxes filled with roast beef, potatoes, carrots, oranges and milk. The government, however, didn’t agree.

Bartkiw, who lives in rural Manitoba, Canada, was fined $10 for providing her kids with a lunch that was not a “balanced meal according to the Canadian Food Guide.”  Parents packing their children’s lunches are required to include “one milk, one meat, one grain and two fruits/vegitables.” The lunches Bartkiw packed for her children lacked the appropriate grain component.

Under the outrageous Canadian food guidelines, daycare workers were forced to supplement Bartkiw’s children’s lunch with a grain – in this case Ritz Crackers – to comply with the federal regs.

The daycare that was required to fine Bartkiw and force feed her kids a fistful of crackers finally grew so tired of serving as the food police for the Canadian government, that it stopped allowing parents to pack lunches for their children. The childcare provider is now saddled with the extra hassle and expense of cooking a hot lunch for every child in the facility.

It’s one thing to encourage child care workers to keep an eye out for instances in which children are not receiving adequate food or proper care. It’s another thing entirely for the government to command childcare workers to fine and harass loving parents for not packing the exact lunch that bureaucrats want children to have.

November 15th, 2013 at 1:06 pm
President Obama Excited to Kill More People

On the White House’s official Twitter page, President Obama bragged that under his administration, “We set new fuel standards that will double the distance our cars and trucks go on a gallon of gas.”

Ignore for a moment that the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency slapped the burdensome regulations on car makers 15 months ago, so the Tweet is obviously a pathetic diversionary tactic to shift the public’s attention away from the recent Obamacare debacle that has further tarnished Obama’s presidency.

Let’s focus instead on the reality that stricter fuel standards kill thousands of people a year.

Since the simplest way to improve a vehicle’s mileage is to reduce its weight, fuel efficiency standards turn cars into “small, underpowered death traps,” according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.

While Obama’s ridiculous miles per gallon regulations won’t fully take effect for another dozen years, previous fuel standard policies are responsible for many of the deaths we see today.

In 1999, USA Today calculated that the reduction in the size and weight of passenger vehicles necessitated by fuel efficiency standards had resulted in more than 46,000 deaths. There have been thousands more Americans killed unnecessarily in the years since that report.

Highway deaths have been spiking recently. There was a 5.3% increase in deaths on America’s roads last year alone. That’s not surprising since, in 2011, another significant increase in minimum miles per gallon for passenger cars was put in place. As drivers upgrade to newer car models, they are unwittingly putting themselves in lighter, more dangerous cars.

Judging by the White House’s tweet, it’s apparent that the President is proud to force Americans into even smaller, lighter cars. He seems disturbingly at ease with the thousands of American deaths his decision will cause.

November 12th, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Colorado Obamacare Website Implies Young People Are Drunken Irresponsible Whores

Congratulations, Coloradans! You now have the dumbest, most offensive pro-Obamacare website in the United States.

ProgressNow Colorado, a wacky progressive advocacy outfit, and Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, an organization hell-bent on shoving socialist-style healthcare down the throats of Americans, have combined to propagandize Obamacare through a website called DoYouGotInsurance.com.

That’s right. “Do you got insurance.”

As in, “Dan, does you be cray cray? Is you really gonna jump outta your ride when you be drivin’ on the Interstate? Do you got insurance?”

It was already apparent that the loons behind the site lack a comprehension of basic math by the fact that they believe government-run health insurance is a reasonable idea. They were kind enough to dispel us of any notion that they paid attention in third grade English when they bastardized the language in the name of their website.

If the name and purpose of the website aren’t bad enough, the site patronizes the same young adults it is aimed at attracting to Obamacare. It features more than 20 condescending ads that portray young people as sexually promiscuous, ramen noodle devouring, careless yahoos who do keg stands and pound shots of alcohol. Several of the ads even feature a lifesize cardboard cutout of hunky actor Ryan Gosling (apparently without his consent) to promote taxpayer-subsidized birth control. (According to the dopes behind the website, young women lose all willpower and turn into sluts when a hot guy is around,)

If you want to see the offensive ads, click here.

Tags:
November 12th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
The AP Condemns Government Ethanol Policy

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

November 11th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
The Dark Side of the Atlanta Braves New Stadium

In one of the most outrageous examples of corporate welfare in recent memory, the owners of Atlanta Braves announced today that they are moving the team from its home at Turner Field in downtown Atlanta to a new stadium in suburban Cobb County.

Why would the Braves move from a convenient, fan-friendly stadium that’s only 17 years old to the traffic gridlock hell at the interchange of interstates I-75 and I-285? Because Cobb County officials bribed the team’s owners with $450 million of taxpayers’ money, that’s why.

That means failing business owners, struggling single mothers, the unemployed and families fighting to make ends meet will be forced to pick up most of the tab for the cost of a new state-of-the-art baseball stadium so the team’s owners don’t have to.

Of course, if the Braves owners wanted to write a check to finance the entire cost of the new stadium, they could. But why would they do that when they can just dupe taxpayers into paying for most of the stadium?

The Braves are owned by John C. Malone and Liberty Media, who also own QVC, Evite, ProFlowers and Overture Films, as well as holding large interests in Expedia, Barnes and Noble, Live Nation and SiriusXM, among other companies.

In other words, the last people who need a handout from hard working taxpayers are getting one, thanks to the dopes who run Cobb County.

November 11th, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Shady Environmental Extremist May Have Succeeded in Buying the Virginia Governor’s Race

Last month, I wrote a piece exposing the shady dealings of sleazy environmental activist and billionaire Tom Steyer. If you haven’t been following Steyer’s shenanigans, he has poured millions into a media campaign and a PAC in hopes of preventing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

While Steyer claims his efforts are rooted in his environmentalism, it turns out his opposition to Keystone are entirely economically motivated. As I pointed out, Steyer stands to make millions of dollars because of his investment in the TransMountain pipeline. Without Keystone in the way TransMountain would have a monopoly in transporting oil from Alberta to refineries and shipping terminals in the U.S. and Canada.

Politico released an article today outlining Steyer’s role in the recently concluded Virginia governor’s race between scandal-plagued Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe and Republican Ken Cuccinelli. Steyer poured $8 million of his personal fortune into McAuliffe’s campaign, perhaps making the difference in a race decided by just 3 percentage points.

Steyer’s campaign “investment” appears to be just another in his continuing effort to fill the top rungs of government in Washington and beyond with environmental loons and lawmakers who will offer tax breaks and other deals that benefit his investments.

November 11th, 2013 at 4:09 pm
Study Shows Louisiana Municipal Broadband a Boondoggle

A government-owned broadband scheme in Lafayette, Louisiana, is more than $160 million in debt and is losing $45,000 a day, according to Lafayette’s independent auditor. The city’s broadband business is struggling to compete with cable, telephone, wireless and satellite service providers in terms of price, performance and service options, according to a study by the Reason Foundation.

Of course, none of this should come as a shock to anyone who understands basic economic principles or the value of competition.

The government simply lacks the incentive to provide quality service or spend money wisely. After all, if a government-owned/socialist-style enterprise fails, investors don’t lose money, taxpayers lose money. As a result, time and time again, when the government enters an arena already filled by successful private companies, it’s just a matter of time until the government’s offering goes belly up and taxpayers are left paying the bill.

October 31st, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Your Tax Dollars Fund Bus Art and a Video of a Man Yelling into a Woman’s Vagina

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts announced it was giving away almost $4 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash to artists, museum, theaters and other arts organizations it deemed particularly deserving.

One of the groups that snagged a federal handout was Freewaves, a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates media art using video, the Internet and mobile devices. The NEA gave Freewaves $25,000 to make two-minute art videos to play on buses in L.A. County. The unfortunate bus riders are subjected to ridiculous clips such as “Streaming (Tautological Transmissions),” which shows a loop of a ping pong ball floating in a stream and “Can You See Me,” a video of a girl’s blinking eye.

It’s hard to imagine that taxpayers are getting any value at all out of paying to screen videos such as these on public transportation.

Regrettably, the taxpayer-funded handouts to Freewaves didn’t stop with the NEA’s $25,000 grant. The California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Pasadena Art Alliance all gave Freewaves lumps of cash recently – and all four of those organizations are partially funded by federal tax dollars.

When it’s not assaulting the senses of L.A. bus riders, Freewaves uses tax dollars to feature controversial videos such as “Between,” which is currently on the home page of the group’s website. The clip, which would offend many of the taxpayers who helped to subsidize its creation, shows blurry close-ups of various body parts over a bed of muffled talking and electronic whirs, until it concludes with a man yelling repeatedly into a nude woman’s vagina.

The NEA is a communist-style program that allows government to dictate what constitutes art, as well as what art is worthy of funding, then rips money from the pockets of Americans to fund the art preferred by a few well-placed bureaucrats.

Despite the best efforts of many limited government lawmakers to defund the scheme, the NEA still devours $154.5 million in taxpayers’ money annually.

Rather than having the government take our tax dollars to support the art lawmakers and bureaucrats like, why not just let us keep our money to support the art we personally value? The reality is that if the federal government announced tomorrow that it would no longer fund the NEA, Individuals, foundations and charitable organizations would step up to support art – and more styles and kinds of arts would emerge as a result.

Even without the NEA, Freewaves would still be funded if the organization could find enough donors willing to support its unique brand of “art” in the marketplace.

October 31st, 2013 at 1:21 pm
37% of Americans Believe Zombies Could Run U.S. Better Than Congress

How scary is Congress? According to a survey released by Rasmussen, 37% of American adults believe zombies would do a better job running the country than our federal lawmakers.

The Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey revealed that another 26% of Americans can’t decide if zombies or D.C. policymakers would be worse for America.

In total, 63% of the 1,000 Americans polled believed that zombies would govern at least as well as President Obama and the members of Congress.

The Halloween-inspired poll also found that “only six percent of all Americans anticipate a zombie apocalypse,” but “Among those who expect an apocalypse, 74% say they are at ‘least somewhat prepared’, with 53% who are ‘very prepared’.”

Tags:
October 30th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Silicon Valley May Do Better Without America

Balaji S. Srinivasan, a computer scientist and co-founder of the genomics company Counsyl who also serves as a Stanford University lecturer, made waves earlier this month when he told an audience of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that they should secede from the United States. Wisely, Srinivasan didn’t call for Silicon Valley braniacs to attempt to form an independent state. He did, however, encourage his audience to look for ways to work around, or beyond, America’s suffocating government.

His speech became a rallying cry for innovators frustrated at America’s tax laws, regulatory burdens and other bureaucratic barriers to creativity. Since  Srinivasan essentially called for the creation of physical and virtual libertarian cities, his speech crossed over from Silicon Valley’s tech crowd into websites and email lists consumed by those of us who champion individual freedom and free market economic policies.

Because of government policies and social factors, the U.S. has become obsolete according to Srinivasan.

The logical conclusion of Srinivasan’s philosophy are free states and free cities, or perhaps seasteading. But Srinivasan recommends a number of more viable options in the near term.  The New York Times points out that it’s already possible utilize technology to opt-out of government oversight, intervention and taxation by “spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns.”

Srinivasan’s speech should be a wake-up call to entrepreneurs, innovators and employers hampered by government interference. The speech should be taken even more seriously by the federal government.  Technology has created opportunities for clever individuals to live outside of government, and the more damage taxes and regulations cause to individuals and businesses, the more taxpayers and job creators will choose to avoid the government.

October 29th, 2013 at 4:38 pm
GOP Attacks Obamacare in Awesome/Outrageously Dated New Ads

The Republican National Committee has launched a humorous and biting four-part commercial series to “expose the deep flaws of Obamacare.”

In keeping with its long tradition of being on the cutting edge, the clips parody Apple’s 7-year-old “Get a Mac” ad campaign. (Apparently the GOP couldn’t figure out a way to look even more out-of-touch by criticizing Obamacare by spoofing “Where’s the beef?,” or by dusting off Spuds MacKenzie or Max Headroom to make the point.)

In the RNC’s commercials, two guys representing “The Private Sector” and “Obamacare” square off much in the same way Justin Long and John Hodgman did as Mac and PC back in the good old days when Obamacare was just a bewildering scheme floating in the vacant expanse between Barack Obama’s goofy ears.

The first commercial, “Down” will air during tonight’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.

The ads will appear primarily in the Washington, D.C. market. If you’re fortunate enough not to live in the greater Baltimore-Washington Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, have no fear. The videos are available online here, here, here and here.

Hopefully the ads will help spread distrust of Obamacare and represent another step in building the critical mass necessary to eliminate the program.

There is a bit of irony that the RNC is spending millions on ads trying to overturn – or, at least, overhaul – Obamacare when, if the organization had done its job in years past, Obamacare would’ve never been created in the first place.

October 24th, 2013 at 10:59 am
Taxpayers Get More Tricks Than Treats at Halloween

Last Halloween, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance released a publication listing some of the frightening ways government spends money to subsidize pumpkin growers, pumpkin tossing competitions, corn mazes and other fall festivities.

Among the finds:

  • Federal taxpayers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to underwrite pumpkin growers and subsidize the cost of federal pumpkin crop insurance programs .
  • An agritourism grant scheme in Tennessee forces state taxpayers to fund handouts to pumpkin patches, hayrides and haunted houses.
  • Each October, taxpayers in Aurora, Colo., shell out over $100,000 to bankroll “Punkin’ Chunkin’ Colorado,” an event where competitors use homemade machines to launch pumpkins hundreds of feet through the air.

Now that Halloween is upon us again, the same wasteful programs – and many others – have come back to life like money-devouring zombies. We’d all be better off if we could bury these pork projects and silly subsidies once and for all.

Tags:
October 22nd, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Company Behind Failed Obamacare Website Wins Award for Steering People Away From Obamacare

Generation Opportunity, a national organization of young people focused on promoting liberty, presented the main contractor behind HealthCare.gov – the Obamacare website – with the first ever Youth Defender Award.

In a deliciously tongue-in-cheek press announcement released on Monday, Generation Opportunity noted that CGI Federal, the American subsidiary of the Canadian multinational CGI Group, has done “more than anyone to date to save young people from the increased costs and privacy invasions of Obamacare.”

Generation Opportunity continues:

“Sure, CGI is billing the government over 300% of their original contract, and taxpayers could be on the hook for $292 million dollars for the healthcare equivalent of Project ORCA. But no cost is too much to bear to help young people avoid this expensive and creepy law.

Generation Opportunity congratulates all the worthy candidates, including the runner-up, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who reminded young people on The Daily Show that they can get the same exemption from Obamacare as businesses by opting out and paying the penalty. After all, Sebelius had the foresight to hire CGI knowing they had a track record of protecting patients from government-run health care. The Canadian government had previously fired CGI’s parent company for failing to create a functioning website for Ontario’s medical registry.

Generation Opportunity developed the awesomely sardonic award in order to promote its OptOut.org website, which encourages young Americans to choose health insurance plans outside of the Obamacare exchanges.

The young folks at Generation Opportunity deserve an award themselves – for providing those of us who despise Obamacare with a big laugh.

October 21st, 2013 at 11:38 am
The Federal Government Bribes Mexican Male Prostitutes with Your Tax Dollars

If you bribe male prostitutes in Mexico City to wear condoms, will they remain free of sexually transmitted infections?

The federal government is using your tax dollars to find out.

Sadly, I’m not kidding.

Since 2011, the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health has squandered $398,213 on giveaways to Brown University to determine whether male prostitutes in Mexico are less likely to obtain a sexually transmitted infection if they receive a cash handout for remaining infection-free.

The study takes 300 male prostitutes in Mexico City, ages 18-25, and divides them into three groups. The first group receives a bonus of 500 pesos every six months if they test negative for sexually transmitted infections, the second group snags 200 pesos and the third group gets no incentive for testing clean (but it would seem that not having a sexually transmitted infection would be incentive enough).

All 300 prostitutes receive 170 pesos a year just for being in the study.

If the study finds that bribing male prostitutes in Mexico is effective at increasing condom usage and reducing sexually transmitted infections, then what? Will U.S. taxpayers be on the hook for regular incentive payments to all Mexican prostitutes?

At a time when the federal government is hiking taxes, raising its debt ceiling and drowning in ever-deepening debt, the last thing Washington needs to do is ship our money to Mexico City to give a cash reward to prostitutes for not catching Chlamydia or Gonorrhea. But that’s not stopping them.

Tags:
October 21st, 2013 at 10:59 am
Obamacare Takes Teachers From Special-Needs Students

A school district in Oconomowoc, Wis., recently celebrated the achievements of a new program for special-needs students. Unfortunately, the staff responsible for helping those special-needs students succeed are seeing their hours cut dramatically thanks to Obamacare.

Investor’s Business Daily reports the school district would face a $1.5 million hit due to the Affordable Care Act’s employer insurance requirements if it didn’t slash the work hours of the paraprofessional staff.

“Instead of one full-time paraprofessional working a full day; one part-time paraprofessional would work the morning half of the day, while a second part-time paraprofessional would work the afternoon portion of the day,” the district told parents.

More than 100 school districts across America have already cut support such as teacher aides, bus drivers and cafeteria workers to avoid massive Obamacare-related costs, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

We already knew that Obamacare harms the economy, reduces the quality of available healthcare and limits choice. Sadly, the scheme also interferes with the ability of school districts to provide a quality education to our children.