Are you better off today than you were four years ago? If you happen to be someone who ever purchases…
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On Gas Prices, You're Not Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago

Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

If you happen to be someone who ever purchases gasoline, the answer is no on that front, as our friends at the Unleash Prosperity Hotline highlight.  The Biden/Harris administration and its cheerleaders frequently trumpet that inflation and prices for items like gasoline are down significantly from their recent highs, what they rarely bother to tell you is that they're still up significantly from when Biden and Harris took over:

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="794"] The Biden/Harris Effect[/caption]

 …[more]

October 14, 2024 • 06:35 PM

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211 ObamaCare Plan B: Contract with States to Save Subsidies

If the Supreme Court strikes down an unauthorized IRS rule that gives ObamaCare subsidies to ineligible citizens, the Obama administration thinks it has a way to save them. Last week the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a Virginia-based challenge to the mechanism that makes “The Affordable Care Act”…

212 Obamacare's 1095-A Nightmare

Tax season is stressful enough. But if you are like countless miserable Americans trapped in the Obamacare 1095-A abyss, it's hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health insurance exchange tax forms make the healthcare.gov website fiasco look…

213 CBO: ObamaCare Increases Deficit by $1.35 Trillion

Buried in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office is the latest admission that ObamaCare was sold on a foundation of lies.  Back in 2009, President Barack Obama told a joint session of Congress that “our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers.” “Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit…

214 Going Deeper on Krauthammer’s Plan to Repeal ObamaCare

After the Republican wave washed over Congress last week, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer had several pieces of advice for the new GOP majority. He advocated bold and continuous legislative actions that would put Democrats on the defensive. Those include measures with sizeable Democratic support such as authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline…

215 Playing Politics with ObamaCare’s 2015 Insurance Premiums

With the 2014 midterm elections now in the books, Americans will finally get information the Obama administration refused to reveal. For the last twenty years, it’s been standard practice in the health insurance industry to release insurance premium rates sixty days before they go into effect. Since policies begin January 1, insurance rates…

216 Medicare-for-All is Not the Solution for ObamaCare’s Problems

More than 7 million Americans have had almost a year to experience affordable health insurance under ObamaCare. Many want out. A recent New York Times piece explains the plight of Patricia Wanderlich, a 61 year-old resident of Chicago who suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011. She needs an annual brain scan to monitor whether the damage from the hemorrhage…

217 Sign Up for ObamaCare, Become a Union Member?

A federal lawsuit in Texas alleges that an ObamaCare contractor used taxpayer money to sign-up union members in addition to enrolling people in the controversial health insurance program. Cedric Anthony, the plaintiff, alleges that he was initially hired by Southern United Neighborhoods (SUN) to work as an ObamaCare navigator. Navigators are temporary…

218 New Fed Court Strikes Down Key ObamaCare Subsidy

This week, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that the IRS is violating the terms of ObamaCare by giving tax credits to people buying health plans through Healthcare.gov, the federally owned and operated insurance exchange. The decision by Ronald A. White, a federal district judge, opens up a new front in the fight to weaken the controversial health…

219 Report: Obama Admin Can’t Say How Much It Spends To Promote ObamaCare

A new Government Accountability Office report says the primary agency charged with ObamaCare’s implementation can’t verify how much it’s spending to promote the controversial health law. ObamaCare’s in-house marketing job is the responsibility of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO), an arm of…

220 When Medicaid Reform Isn’t

In last week’s column, I explained why not all decisions by Republican governors to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare deserve to be criticized. The difference is in the details. Most GOP governors who’ve said yes to expansion are doing nothing more than increasing the federal – and eventually their states’ – budget deficit…

221 How to Think About GOP Governors Who Expand Medicaid

With Republican governors in Pennsylvania and Tennessee recently agreeing to expand their states’ Medicaid programs under ObamaCare, some conservatives are worried that a wave of capitulation is washing over the GOP. “Is the Republican fight against Medicaid expansion over?” asks a Washington Examiner headline. The question was prompted…

222 IRS Is Struggling to Assess and Collect ObamaCare Taxes

As ObamaCare’s taxes go into effect, the Internal Revenue Service’s role in enforcing the controversial health care law is getting more attention. The reviews so far aren’t encouraging. In mid-August, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) published a report critical of the IRS’s failure to accurately…

223 New ObamaCare Alternative: REFORM and Replace?

When it comes to ObamaCare, should Republicans repeal or reform it? As a conservative, the answer depends on whether you think there is anything in the law worth saving. Because ObamaCare was passed on a party-line vote and seems like an effort to kick-start the march toward a single-payer, nationalized health care system, most Republicans favor…

224 ObamaCare Sparks Fight Among California's Central Planners

Federalism and the free market don't always go together, especially not in a Nanny-state like California. Evidence is mounting that continued centralized control over issues like education and the environment erode state and local power under the Constitution. This week comes news of a fight brewing between Covered California - the local ObamaCare…

225 Oregon’s Three ObamaCare Blunders that Wasted $305 Million

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars yet failing to enroll a single person on its ObamaCare health insurance website, Oregon’s top officials are considering whether to sue Oracle, the software giant and primary contractor. This isn’t where Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber and other ObamaCare supporters thought they’d…

226 New ObamaCare Fissures Emerge, as Stunned Labor Unions Chafe at Higher Costs

Pop some popcorn, grab a cold one, sit back and enjoy this emerging spectacle.  Labor unions were among the strongest and earliest supporters of ObamaCare, and foolishly accepted Nancy Pelosi’s admonition to embrace the law before finding out what was in it.  Now they’re beginning to pay the price.  With increasing frequency…

227 Is Indiana Governor Mike Pence Falling into ObamaCare’s Medicaid Trap?

Indiana Republican Governor Mike Pence says his plan to use ObamaCare’s Medicaid dollars to expand his state’s health savings account program won’t create a new open-ended entitlement. Before considering Pence’s arguments, it’s important to understand how ObamaCare changes Medicaid. If states expand Medicaid eligibility…

228 How to Calculate Your ObamaCare HIT (Health Insurance Tax)

What’s so affordable about a health care law that imposes $100 billion in sales taxes on consumers? That’s the question being asked by small business owners as they prepare to start paying ObamaCare’s health insurance tax or HIT. HIT is a sales tax imposed on each policy sold in the fully covered insurance market. The tax is projected…

229 ObamaCare Exchanges Wasting Huge Sums of Taxpayer Money

With ObamaCare’s enrollment season officially over, evidence is emerging that billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent funding waste, fraud and abuse. American Commitment's Phil Kerpen over at The Federalist paints a financially gruesome picture of how much federal taxpayer money has been wasted by state-based ObamaCare exchanges since…

230 Sebelius’ Legacy is a More Politicized HHS

In the nearly two weeks since Kathleen Sebelius resigned as Secretary of Health of Human Services, many pundits have tried to sum up her legacy. Immediate focus has centered on the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance exchange website that failed spectacularly when it launched. The glitches were so bad and the repair job so long…

231 Obama’s Medicare Politics Show Ryan Is Right on Policy

In a surprise move, the Obama administration has reversed course on an ObamaCare-mandated cut to Medicare Advantage, replacing the long-feared cut with a slight increase in funding. Though motivated by political calculations, the episode confirms that the fundamentals for reforming health care support the policy changes sought by Paul Ryan. Monday…

232 Union: ObamaCare Will Kill Our Health Plan by 2017

With Democrats trying to pivot to income inequality before the 2014 midterms, a new labor union report says ObamaCare threatens to do tremendous harm to low-wage workers.  “Ironically, the [Obama] Administration’s own signature healthcare victory poses one of the most immediate challenges to redressing inequality,” warns UNITE…

233 Honest Medicare Reform Impossible So Long as President Refuses to Follow the Law

For all the heated political rhetoric and hard-hitting campaign ads, there is a little-discussed reality that should be remembered – Republicans and Democrats agree that Medicare needs reform. They also agree that the senior-focused entitlement system should reroute money toward elements that work and reduce funding for those that don’…

234 Obama’s War on Medicare

If the Obama administration is trying to kill half of Medicare, why aren’t liberals angry? No one who saw the infamous Democratic campaign ad showing a Paul Ryan lookalike throwing a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff missed the point – Republican reform efforts like Ryan’s would “change Medicare as we know it,” causing…

235 White House Mulling More ObamaCare Extensions Ahead of Midterms

Another federal election on the horizon begets more extra-legal ObamaCare extensions. In October of this year, the Obama administration’s last-minute decision to allow millions of people to keep their non-compliant individual health insurance policies will run out. That’s about a month before the 2014 midterm elections. Sensing an anti…

236 On ObamaCare, the President Gives Up

There are a number of ways to look at Monday’s announcement that the Treasury Department is going to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate — requiring firms to provide health insurance for their employees — until 2016 for companies with between 50 and 99 employees. You can consider it raw politics, a shameless exercise in taking…

237 CBO Report: ObamaCare Kills Jobs, Doesn’t Help the Uninsured

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously said “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” He can be forgiven the sentiment, because he uttered it in 1985, before the world knew of Barack Obama. What Cuomo meant is that candidates out on the stump are inevitably going to sell sweeping, romantic notions of what their time in office…

238 How ObamaCare’s Insurance Bailouts Add Up to Crony Capitalism

Looking back on the first four months of ObamaCare – an error-prone rollout for Healthcare.gov, adverse selection in state-run risk pools and a last-minute rule change by federal regulators to allow consumers to keep non-complying plans – it’s a wonder that the health insurance industry ever signed off on ObamaCare in the first place…

239 ObamaCare is Broken. Republicans Shouldn’t Fix It.

With the federal budget now officially a non-issue until 2015, 2014 – in particular the midterm elections that will animate it – is shaping up to be the year Republicans finally give voters an ObamaCare alternative. That is, unless Democrats succeed in convincing a minority of GOP members to help fix the broken health care law. The electoral…

240 ObamaCare Defender Fudges the Truth Even Further

If you still think no one can top President Barack Obama’s now infamously deceptive promise, “If you like your health insurance, doctor and hospital, you can keep them,” then you didn’t watch Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on Fox News Sunday last weekend. Emanuel, a Harvard-trained bioethicist and one of the architects…

 
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Notable Quote   
 
"For over three years, Biden-Harris had signaled Israel's enemies that the United States no longer acted like a close ally of the past.The administration lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible…[more]
 
 
— Victor Davis Hanson, Author, Columnist and Distinguished Fellow of the Center for American Greatness
 
Liberty Poll   

Many seasoned political observers say that both presidential candidates are making significant unforced errors, mostly in their personal remarks. Which one do you think is doing more damage to his/her own campaign?