Freedom Line Blog

It’s a well known fact that Majority Leader Harry Reid is scrambling to find the 60 votes necessary to move his government-run health care bill to the Senate floor.  Indeed, Reid is doing everything in his power to “encourage” the three or four Democrats supposedly on the fence to vote “yea” tomorrow night on the motion to proceed on the legislation.

And when we say everything, we mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reports:

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.” 

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.” 

I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing [what] could be written with a single world:  Louisiana.

The price tag for this provision?  Karl writes, “According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.”

Read the full story, complete with the actual bill language, here.

New York Times – A Tilt Away from Social Issues
Charles Krauthammer – A Travesty in New York
The Hill – GAO Finds Flaws in Stimulus Data
Washington Examiner – Google-Funded Net Neutrality
Politico – GOP Governors Eye Big 2010 Gains
National Review Online – The Health Care Vote
Roll Call – Report Shows Most Bills Subject to Cloture Pass

Federal Debt: $12.013 trillion

Apologies for the misleading headline.  According to recent reports by climatologists, it’s actually been several years since the globe we call Earth ceased warming.  Although many global warming alarmists are at a loss to explain how a supposedly constant increase in global temperature could stop without warning (and just before a conference to fund its decrease), that doesn’t mean the cause for the sudden cessation is unknown.  In fact, the real head scratcher here is how the mainstream media missed the obvious reason for winning the war on climate change.

Since at least 1970, Ed Begley, Jr. has waged a one man war for the environment.  That year he bought his first electric car and celebrated the first Earth Day.  As detailed in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Begley is SERIOUS about his eco-responsibilities.  He cooks food in a solar oven that “sits in the yard and gets up to about 375 degrees on a sunny day.”  When he dies he wants to put his 205 pounds of organic matter to good use.  “I want to be buried with a cardboard box and a sheet and put in the earth.”  After all, we come from the earth, and return to the earth, right?

But life for an eco-warrior and global warming stopper isn’t just about capping your cooking temperatures and trading in your coffin.  There are hassles too.  According to Begley, the worst thing about being green is “when you don’t have a recycling bin nearby and you have to carry garbage around in your car to get it home.”  That would be the two bedroom, one and a half bath home he shares with his wife and daughter.  It’s also the one he’s plowed steady sums of money into adding a bevy of cutting-edge technologies to reduce his carbon footprint.

So while the climatologists scramble to fix their computer models and the diplomats try to convince each other that spending for a warmer day is still needed (if not necessary), remember the man who through eco-mortification and carbon penance became the green hued saint that saved the planet.  (Until it starts warming again…)

An opportunity cost is a term used in economics to identify the next-best-option you didn’t choose. For example, if a person has $20 and buys a book instead of a CD, the opportunity cost is the foregone CD. Of course, in order to have an opportunity cost, you need an opportunity to choose. One of the arguments against enhancing an already heavy tax burden on high-end earners is that many of them will move to other, less oppressive countries. If regulations of Wall Street pile up too high, the best and brightest will go to London or Hong Kong. In that scenario, the opportunity cost would be choosing not to live in America.

But where economists see rational behavior enabled by choices, Democrats usually see greed propelled by self-interest. Thus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is making it clear she intends to increase the costs of financial transactions by eliminating a financier’s opportunities to live and work in less taxed locales. How? By mandating a global tax that would remove any incentive for highly skilled workers to relocate overseas.

Any tax imposed on financial transactions would have to take effect internationally to prevent Wall Street jobs and related business moving overseas, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

“It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule,” Pelosi said at a news conference. “We couldn’t do it alone, we’d have to do it as an international initiative.”

True, bringing all financial transactions under a universal system of regulation would take care of the “problem” of people trying to avoid confiscatory taxation. On the other hand, it also decreases the likelihood that highly motivated people will be able to create wealth through the financial system. Once again, with one notable exception, the modern Democratic Party is about as anti-choice as a collection of policy makers can be.

This time, the Senate has scheduled a midnight vote on health care, when the nation will once again be engaging in less destructive activities, like watching college football.

According to Senate sources, the actual vote on cloture will take place around 8:00 this Saturday night.  If the cloture motion garners 60 votes, then it will only take 51 Senators to pass the final version, and all indications are that Democrats have at least 55 votes to pass the health care bill.

The Senate will actually begin its Saturday session in the morning, so citizens have all day to lobby against the largest government takeover of health care in history.

You can call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote “No” on the Senate’s health care bill.  Don’t let moderates off of the hook.   A vote for cloture is a vote for final passage of the bill.

Indications are that at least two Democrats are hesitant to support the legislation but it is up to taxpayers across the country to keep the pressure on moderate Senators.

Gee, if only poor Barack Obama could have known that actually being President would prove this difficult when he rattled off easy promise after promise as a candidate.  Back then, it was quite fun to throw rhetorical rocks and thunder commitments from behind his teleprompter with his trademark raised chin.  But he wants us to know that the reality of living in the White House is just so…  hard.

The particular occasion for Obama’s lamentation was his admission that he won’t be able to fulfill his promise of closing Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center by January 2010 after all.  In an interview with Fox News’s Major Garrett (which is iteself another monumental capitulation to hard reality), Obama said that he is “not disappointed” that he can’t make good on his written closure order, because doing so is “just technically hard.”

Well, gosh, President Obama.  Who knew that closing Guantanamo, balancing the budget, winning the war in Afghanistan, persuading Iran and North Korea to forego their nuclear ambitions and achieving Middle East peace would be so tough?  It all looked so easy when someone else was in charge.

The recently passed House health care bill contains a plethora of tax hikes that would make any nanny-state liberal smile with appreciation.

Perhaps the biggest tax hike, in terms of revenue generation, is the new surtax on “high-income” earners.  However, even most Democrats realize that any new tax on income (amounts over $500,000 and $1 million) must be indexed for inflation to avoid hitting middle-class taxpayers.

If not, taxpayers could experience “bracket creep” similar to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), the inception of which was meant to target literally a few dozen millionaires, but could soon affect over 30 million taxpayers.  If income thresholds don’t change, in the year 2060 a $500,000 annual income won’t be rich but taxpayers will still have to pay both the AMT and the health care surtax.

For example, without changes, the CBO now estimates that “three-quarters of households would pay the AMT.”  The math for the potential surtax is just as frightening.

BlackBook Legal’s Sam Greenberg does the math on the new health care surtax and it’s not pretty.  Eventually, the 5.4% surtax could end up hitting millions of households.  Even if wages grow at the same rate as inflation (unlikely unless the economy continues to stagnate), the surtax will end up hitting at least 5 times as many households as was intended by House leaders.  Greenberg concludes, “A non-inflation linked tax is a convenient way to pass future tax hikes without any legislative action.”

This is just another unintended consequence of federal tax policy.  For those who remain confident that the surtax will eventually be indexed to avoid middle-class taxpayers, just look at the AMT.  Of course, when tax time arrives, you won’t have to look for it; the AMT will find you.

Late last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released the newest iteration of health care “reform.”  Seeking to outdo Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990 page bill, Reid’s version measures in at 2,074 pages, longer than War and Peace.  You can read and search through the full version here.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation have released cost estimates of the bill.  Don’t let Senate Democrats fool you, however.  The actual cost of the bill is not $849 billion, mainly because federal subsidies don’t even kick in until 2014.

When fully implemented, the actual cost of Harry Reid’s bill is over $2.5 trillion, from 2014 to 2023.

If you like tax increases, you’ll love the new bill.  It contains over $500 billion in new taxes.  The bill taxes health insurance, Botox, Health Savings Accounts, drug devices, and some employers and employees.  No one escapes Uncle Sam’s scalpel in Harry Reid’s version of “reform.”  Click here for a full list of tax hikes.

More analysis later.

Now they’ve finally blown it.  After getting away, so far, with screwing over just about everyone in the country, with hardly a peep, the Senate version of “healthcare reform” has now inappropriately groped a constituency that no sane male-dominated body dare touch:  real housewives of America.

That’s right, ladies.  Politico.com reports, before you’ve even had your coffee this morning, that the botox tax is back.  Five percent on all elective cosmetics surgery.  It is needed “to make the numbers work,” a Democratic Senate aide told Politico.

All we can do is warn Senators of the following:  Ladies who attend those Tea Parties that scare you so badly wear sensible shoes.  Real housewives wear four-inch stilettos, and they ain’t just for pretty.

Here’s an exercise:  ask a liberal to identify a single commentator from the left who rivals such conservative commentators as George Will or Charles Krauthammer.  Their usual answer?  The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Jr.  This is very revealing, because it appears that Dionne has difficulty counting, let alone rivaling his conservative counterparts in intellectual stature.

In his column today, Dionne attempts to excoriate Senate Republicans for their obstructionism, including their alleged tendency to filibuster.  In one passage, he states that, “the extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent.”

No, Mr. Dionne, the Democrats are doing a splendid job of that themselves.  But regardless, this commentary raises a larger question:  can Dionne even count?  After all, does he not realize that the Republicans don’t even possess the number of members sufficient to filibuster?

Somebody send this man a calculator.

Watertown Daily Times – Hoffman Accuses Democrats of Fraud
Washington Post – Stupak as the Democratic Anti-Hero?
WSJ Editorial – The Phantom Jobs Stimulus
Politico – Senate Health Bill Weighs in at 2,074 pages

National Review Online – Criminalizing Health Care Freedom
USA Today – The $849 Billion Senate Health Care Bill
Karl Rove – The Permanent Campaign Continues
The Hill – Reid Looking for 60 Votes in Senate

Federal Debt: $12.008 trillion

Given enough time, President Obama will probably find occasion to apologize for that act of wanton American aggression at Lexington and Concord during a state visit to the United Kingdom.

For now, however, the President is contenting himself with paying penance for America’s 20th century “sins”. When Obama’s Asia trip took him to Japan over the weekend, former New York Times military correspondent Richard Halloran noted that the President hinted at a press conference that he may accept an invitation that no previous Commander-in-Chief has ever entertained — a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Per Halloran:

Many Japanese, particularly left-wing organizations, would most likely demand that the US apologize for dropping the bombs, which would stir up rancor in the US. That would call into question the judgment of President Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the bombs. In turn, that would put President Obama in a politically difficult position.

Among Americans, veterans of World War II, especially survivors of Japan’s surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, would be vigilant for any sign of remorse for an action that many believe ended World War II with Japan’s surrender, sparing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans poised to invade Japan.

And the veterans would be right.  Not only did Truman’s courageous decision prevent widespread American military deaths, it also likely prevented the millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties that would have resulted from the urban warfare that a ground invasion would have brought.  It also was almost certainly responsible for preventing the planned Japanese execution of Allied POWs  (a slaughter of 100,000 — or 2.5 times more than the initial death count from Nagasaki).

It’s bad enough that Obama would even entertain the notion of recoiling from the moral superiority of the Allied cause in World War II.  Even worse (if utterly predictable at this point) was his tortured use of Japan as a model for his dream of the world as a nuclear-free Fantasia:

“Indeed, Japan serves as an example to the world that true peace and power can be achieved by taking this path. For decades, Japan has enjoyed the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy, while rejecting nuclear arms development – and by any measure, this has increased Japan’s security, and enhanced its position.”

I wish there was a pithy one-liner to capture the stunning stupidity of that statement. Let’s just put it this way: Obama, his speechwriters, or both are historically illiterate.  Japan hasn’t ‘rejected’ nuclear arms development, so much as it has had the United States government preventing it from remilitarizing for nearly 65 years.  And were it not for the substantial American military presence and security guarantee enveloping the island nation, its nuclear neighbors in China and North Korea would have swallowed it years ago.

The lesson here is not about the benevolence of a nuclear-free world. It’s about the benevolence of American power. What are the odds we’d hear that message in presidential remarks at Hiroshima?

And now a word from Big Sister. With comprehensive climate change legislation tabled until next year and comprehensive health care reform on life support in the Senate, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the current immigration system is “unacceptable.” Translation? It’s time to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. (By the way, is there any issue area that doesn’t require a “comprehensive” solution? Whatever happened to incrementalism?)

Characteristically, the Obama Administration will not be advocating a fix that speaks to the fundamental issue in the debate. The primary criticism of the current system is that it attracts and rewards low-skilled workers living at the margins of mainstream American society. Compounding matters is the current system’s focus on “re-uniting” families; which over time has been expanded to mean any tangentially related family member overseas gets bumped to the front of the visa line.

Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute thinks this is a problem.

The more people who came and established residence here, the longer the so-called ‘family re-unification’ list of visa applicants grew as newcomers placed their own relatives on it. That put pressure on Congress to continually expand the family-visa category until it came to dominate our immigration system. It also sparked more illegal immigration because Congress could never enlarge the number of immigration slots fast enough to reduce wait lists for family members, which meant many people just came without permanent visas to join relatives and then hoped for the best.”

As Malanga advocates, a more far more sensible solution would be to follow the lead of countries like Australia, Ireland, and Canada who “tilted their policies towards focusing on those with skills and talents most likely to succeed in and contribute to a late 20th century developed economy.”

Instead, all indications are that Secretary Napolitano will claim that a year’s worth of border enforcement is not enough. She’ll then declare a need to “comprehensively” reform the system and the people who brought you nearly $2 trillion of stimulus and health reform will conjure up ways to sell amnesty as the only moral decision possible. Get ready for a spirited Spring congressional session!

It’s sad when American leaders must look to “Old Europe” for economic wisdom, but that’s where we stand with this Obama White House.

Speaking this week to media, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that the worldwide recession demands tax cuts, not higher taxes and redistribution, to jump-start economic growth.  Impressively, she’s standing firm even in the face of fierce opposition, saying, “the government has opted for growth.  I indeed face very critical treatment, as does the whole government, regarding the course that we have chosen.”  A spokesman for Merkel’s partner Free Democrats added, “this is the right path.  This will create jobs and this is the condition for healthy public finances.”  Meanwhile, Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi offer more government, higher taxes and more regulation to somehow “stimulate” America out of recession.

Hmmm…  Perhaps this recent trend of economic sense out of Germany helps explain why Obama was so reluctant to visit Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall this month?

With the Congressional Budget Office set to release its cost estimate of the Senate’s version of health care “reform” sometime this week, taxpayers continue to speculate over the whip count and the prospects for ObamaCare.

Congress.org has set up a virtual prediction market for the health care bill in the Senate.  Click here to make your predictions of ObamaCare’s future.  (Sorry, you can’t make any money off of your predictions.)

Let’s all hope that President Obama and leaders in Congress have a sudden change of heart and decide that more massive government won’t bring down health costs or reduce the federal deficit.

My prediction was 55-45 for final passage, but that doesn’t mean the bill will survive a filibuster attempt.

HT: Political Wire

The chorus of opposition to ObamaCare is growing louder among the ranks of medical academe.  Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, says ObamaCare would receive a “failing grade” at Harvard.

He wrote:

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

His conclusion:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.

The Hill – Republicans to Grill Holder on Gitmo
Politico – How to Pass a Health Bill Fast
Bob Barr – Rand Disciple Spreads Her Word
John Stossel – Worse than Taxes: The Spending

NY Times – Three Democrats Could Block Health Bill in Senate
Washington Post – The GOP Turnabout on Filibusters
WSJ Editorial – The $1.9 Trillion Gimmick
Reuters – California Deficit to Top $21 Billion

Federal Debt Tops $12 trillion

Since he was inaugurated last January, Barack Obama has broken almost all of the promises he earnestly made as a candidate, from pledges of bipartisanship to not raising taxes on anyone earning under $250,000.  Indeed, he even gave a preview to his future behavior when he jettisoned his pledge to abide by public campaign finance limits as soon as he secured the Democrats’ nomination.

But not all of Obama’s broken promises are bad.

Last November, he promised immediate action to impose climate change hysteria as official federal policy, saying, “now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all.  Delay is no longer an option.”

Well, maybe not.  This past weekend, Obama announced that there would be no international carbon cap-and-tax accord when world leaders meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next month.  That’s good news for strapped American taxpayers and businesses, but unwelcome news for sniveling Europeans, who are doing their left-wing Joe Wilson imitation by branding Obama a liar.

We would’ve preferred that Obama join Europeans in celebrating the Berlin Wall’s demise last week, but we can at least be thankful for the small blessing that he’s also offending the Euro global-warming alarmists.

Mike Flynn, editor of Big Government, explains how a few people with a camera brought down ACORN.

HT: reason.tv

Boy, those fictitious Stimulus jobs just keep piling up.

Yesterday, we highlighted an analysis done by David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway of The Washington Examiner, which points out that at least 75,343 jobs the Obama Administration claims have been “created or saved” by “Stimulus” funds are bogus.

Now, Jonathan Karl with ABC News reports that at least some of those jobs “saved or created” are in Congressional districts that don’t even exist.  Karl writes:

Here’s a stimulus success story:  In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though:  There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Officials with the Recovery Board, which was set up by the Obama Administration to track Stimulus spending, are chalking up the mistake to “human error.”  Fine… but such an error, together with the ever-increasing reports of fictitious Stimulus job numbers, begs the question:  How are the American people supposed to trust an Administration that claims to want to create jobs when it can’t even perform due diligence to provide an accurate count of the jobs that may or may not have been “created or saved?”

The answer:  We can’t and we shouldn’t.  Not because of the aforementioned errors and inflated Stimulus job numbers, but because the laws of economics say so.  As the editorial page of The Washington Times reminded readers last week, “Jobs created by government come at the expense of the jobs lost when government takes wealth from one part of the economy and moves it to another.”

Here’s a not-so-unique but tried-and-true idea to stimulate job growth:   How about the Administration abandon its tax-and-spend agenda and just get out of the way? 

Hey Mr. President, maybe it’s time to give FREEDOM a whirl?