Note: this is not a bleg. Just a little link love for the good guys.
For those who are unaware what or if the U.S. is doing to help Pakistan: This remarkable bolas de acero charity, Team Rubicon, is in country in Pakistan. They are saving lives by distributing simple, easy to make, rehydration fluids. They are partnering with locals–a dicey proposition in the Paki hinterlands–and keeping on the move every day or so, to stay ahead of the Taliban.
Over the past few days TR has treated over 2,500 patients in various parts of southern Punjab, an area devastated by the floods and resulting water-borne disease. We treated patients for heat stroke, malaria, multi-drug resistant TB, scabies, boils, diarrhea, and severe dehydration. We were able to reach remote villages because we developed a local partner who facilitated our entry, security, and other logistical needs. Dr. Eduardo Dolhun noted that many of his colleagues wanted to travel to Pakistan but were just too scared to commit. Given the barriers to entry, including fear, I think we’ve proved that developing a trusted local partner – in conjunction with local security forces – is a safe way to bring medical relief to the 20 million plus Pakistani people who have lost their homes due to the flooding crisis. God knows they need it.
Browse their blog. Caution, contains wrenching video clips of dehydrated infants.
In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.
Mr Obama said he would not renew the ten-year reduction for families making more than $250,000 (£160,000) a year and individuals making more than $200,000. He however favoured extending them for middle class Americans. [...]
Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said: “This economy is not hurting people that make $800,000 a year, it’s hurting families that are making $40,000 a year.”
Mr Obama, speaking in Cleveland, Ohio, part of the depressed industrial heartland, said: “We are ready to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less. For any income over this amount, the tax rates would go back to what they were under President Clinton. This isn’t to punish folks who are better off.
“With all the other budgetary pressures we have – with all the Republicans’ talk about wanting to shrink the deficit – they would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 to folks who are already millionaires.”
The president has decided to stick to a long-held promise to recoup money from the wealthiest taxpayers, who from January, 2011, will be subjected to rates of 39 per cent, up from the 35 per cent they have paid in recent years.
The White House said it was persuaded by evidence that wealthy taxpayers put the money gained from lower rates into savings, rather than stimulating the economy.
While Obama and gang can’t explain where over $800 BILLION in “stimulus” funds have gone, Obama wants to punish families and small businesses for the audicity of trying to save for an uncertain future.
Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats’ efforts to trumpet their signature achievement before the midterm elections.
Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.
These and other insurers say Congress’s landmark refashioning of U.S. health coverage, which passed in March after a brutal fight, is causing them to pass on more costs to consumers than Democrats predicted.
The rate increases largely apply to policies for individuals and small businesses and don’t include people covered by a big employer or Medicare.
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Being an individual is passe. Join the collective, and all will be well!
About 9% of Americans buy coverage through the individual market, according to the Census Bureau, and roughly one-fifth of people who get coverage through their employer work at companies with 50 or fewer employees, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. People in both groups are likely to feel the effects of the proposed increases, even as they see new benefits under the law, such as the elimination of lifetime and certain annual coverage caps.
Many carriers also are seeking additional rate increases that they say they need to cover rising medical costs. As a result, some consumers could face total premium increases of more than 20%.
[...]
The rate increases are a dose of troubling news for Democrats just weeks before an election in which they are at risk of losing their majority in the House and possibly the Senate.
In addition to pledging that the law would restrain increases in Americans’ insurance premiums, Democrats front-loaded the legislation with early provisions they hoped would boost public support. Those include letting children stay on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26, eliminating co-payments for preventive care and barring insurers from denying policies to children with pre-existing conditions, plus the elimination of the coverage caps.
Weeks before the election, insurance companies began telling state regulators it is those very provisions that are forcing them to increase their rates.
[...]
The White House says insurers are using the law as an excuse to raise rates and predicts that state regulators will block some of the large increases.
“I would have real deep concerns that the kinds of rate increases that you’re quoting… are justified,” said Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House’s top health official. She said that for insurers, raising rates was “already their modus operandi before the bill” passed. “We believe consumers will see through this,” she said.
[...]
The industry contends its increases are justified. “Anytime you add a benefit, there are increased costs,” said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying group.
[...]
Democrats had hoped to sell the bill in the fall elections. But in recent weeks, some Democrats who voted for the bill have shied away from advertising that fact, while the handful of House Democrats who cast “no” votes see it as a potential boost to their re-election bids.
“I think it’s a question of short term versus long term,” said North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, a Democrat up for re-election in 2012. “Thankfully we’re seeing people get more coverage and protections than they’ve ever had before. But until we see the medical-cost inflation affected, you’re likely to see rate increases as long as they are not excessive and in violation of the law.”
So, wait. You mean that providing free health care costs money?
But how can that be? I mean, it’s called free, isn’t it? And by merely asserting it is so — and getting enough people to share that assertion — it is so.
At least, that’s how I thought the contingency of truth touted by leftist epistemologies are supposed to work.
Someone should tell reality it has no right stepping in to muck up the works this way…
Previously the administration had calculated that the batch of changes taking effect this fall would raise premiums no more than 1% to 2%, on average.
Ground Zero Imam to citizens of New York: “Sure, I know you don’t want the mosque built on the site of jet wreckage. But we’re going forward anyway, because that’s the only way toward healing.”
No doubt it came as a shock to many of you that weatherizing windows couldn’t get a $14 trillion economy cooking again. But if an $800 billion infusion of government and union bailouts failed to spur any decent economic growth, then how is a new “piecemeal” $50 billion stimulus going to work out?
Media reports tell me this is more complex. The president has devised an exhilarating new plan that will not only “jump-start” job creation but also fund and rebuild the “crumbling” infrastructure of the United States in brand new ways.
Have you noticed that the infrastructure is always “crumbling” in news stories and presidential speeches — if less regularly in the real world. To many Democrats, “crumbling” means we’re not subsidizing smart grids and high-speed rail projects fast enough.
For those of you who drive, though, a recent Reason Foundation study measures the condition and cost-effectiveness of roads — including deficient bridges, urban traffic congestion, fatality rates, pavement condition, etc. — and finds that roads haven’t been in better shape at any time in the past 19 years.
Then again, free-market nihilists are always daydreaming about bridges collapsing on innocent Americans — if at all possible, poor and disabled Americans.
We should concede the highway system has been mismanaged by government and could always use more efficient funding. But creating a system wherein Washington dictates spending dollars is hardly a brilliant new plan. It’s the same plan this administration has for funding public schools, student loans, mortgages, health care insurance, and energy, among other knickknacks. Which is to say centrally and with progressive ethical strings tightly attached.
[...]
During Labor Day weekend, I caught a number of local Democratic candidates calling themselves tax cutters in ads. Yet, nearly all of the tax cuts Americans have seen the past year and a half advance some liberal moral or social good. The overriding goal of the stimuli and tax breaks — from the things we build to the jobs we save to the tax credits we get — is to pick economic winners, steer us in the right direction and wheedle citizens to be good boys and girls.
To offer comprehensive, amoral cuts would be to admit ideological defeat. To allow them to work would mean a long-term disaster for Obama and the type of Democrats who now inhabit Congress.
This president would never surrender to such indignity.
It’s good to be the King.
– that is, unless you’ve assumed the role of a latter day Louis XVI, and your wife is caught lounging around castles, muttering about the carping proles, “Qu’ils mangent de la arugula.”
At which point, it would have been a good idea to have studied your history a little more thoroughly.
How could someone seemingly get everything they touch wrong? You would think proposing tax cuts would be safe territory for our incumbent president, until you examine his actual proposed cuts.
President Obama is expected to announce a $200 billion two year tax cut for business to encourage them to move up their capital expenditures and stimulate the economy through their purchases — essentially applying the “cash for clunkers” car sales economic model to capital spending by business.
Some would ask what is wrong with a business tax cut that purports to stimulate the economy? It sounds almost Republican.
The answer is at least three fold.
1. This tax cut just like the grants and spending from the stimulus package, attempts to pick winners and losers favoring businesses with heavy capital expenditure outlays like the U.S. government-owned General Motors, or the UAW-owned Chrysler Corporation, over service-oriented businesses who will derive little if any benefit.
2. The two year nature of the tax cut will naturally push capital spending, which might occur in 2013 or beyond into 2011 and 2012, leaving a capital expenditure void in 2013, harming the economy over the long haul. We saw this exact effect with the cash for clunkers program, and more recently with the mortgage incentive program. When they ended, both car and home sales went off a cliff. Of course, the fact that the President faces reelection in 2012 and someone else is likely have to deal with the mess in 2013 has nothing to do with the length of the proposed cuts.
3. It effectively penalizes other businesses in their quest for capital as they are forced to pay what is likely to become the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. (Japan is currently in the process of lowering their corporate tax rate which would leave the U.S. with the highest rate.)
If this Administration wants to get the economy going, the answer is not directed tax cuts on expenses or research and development tax credits, but instead a lowered across the board tax rate, and maintaining the lower capital gains tax rates put in place under President Bush’s watch.
Instead, the Obama Administration cannot help their basic instinct to attempt to engage in top-down, command-and-control economic policy. For whatever reason, this Administration does not seem to comprehend Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which describes how the profit motive causes a series of decisions throughout the economy that results in natural winners and losers based upon the merit of their ideas, the value of their products and their drive to succeed.
Free enterprise works, but gaming the system in favor of some companies over others ultimately creates failure as the favored businesses become dependent upon taxpayer largesse rather than developing products that can compete and win in the marketplace.
[...]
[...] the more level the playing field, the less dependent our nation is on government “doing something” and that may not sit well with an Administration that honestly seems to believe that they are the masters of the universe.
Ultimately, this power hungry drive to control the economy and attempt to defy Adam Smith’s economic laws, show that even when announcing support for cutting taxes, Obama just doesn’t get it.
Or, more likely, he gets it just fine — and even this directed tax cut is nothing more than a vote buy scheme proposed by a king whose court feels put upon by the increasing ingratitude of the commoners.
I’ve long since stopped believing that mere incompetency by the progressives is what is destroying the economy: the sheer magnitude of the supposed incompetency exhibited by ObamaCo suggests that something more sinister is at work here, that — to paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, as he strove cryptically to direct Clarice Starling’s understanding of Buffalo Bill — this Administration’s random scattering of policy moves seems almost too desperately random, like the elaborations of a bad liar.
This is no different. Just as Obama thought of his intervention in the auto market as a political calculation, this move has less to do with helping the economy than it does with appearing to be helping, in order to win back over those Obama knows desperately want to believe in Hope and Change.
Will it work? With many, likely it will — especially if a feckless GOP leadership, following what is its now established game plan, does nothing but sit by and wait its turn at the trough.
It isn’t enough to defeat Obama and his quasi-Marxist agenda. Those Republicans who’ve learned that they can appear “conservative” simply by remaining to the right of the far left — all while enjoying their turn at the government spigot — need to be sent packing, too.
Otherwise, we’ll have exchanged calls for “social justice” with calls for “compassionate conservatism” that amount to little more than a variation on a theme.
The nation faces a nasty dual deficit problem: a painful jobs deficit in the near term and an unsustainable budget deficit over the medium and long term. This month, the Senate will be debating an issue with significant implications for both — what to do about the Bush-era tax cuts scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. [...]
Why does this combination make sense? The answer is that over the medium term, the tax cuts are simply not affordable.
Orszag, Obama’s ostensible Budget isn’t done yet. You people have the audicity to think the money you earn actually belongs to you and you can just, willy nilly, starve the government?
Additional revenue — in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 percent of the economy — will therefore be necessary to reduce the deficit to sustainable levels.
One possibility would be to establish a new source of revenue, perhaps through revenue-increasing tax reform, and possibly including a modest value-added tax (that is, a V.A.T. of 5 percent to 6 percent). This approach has many potential benefits, including the opportunity to improve our tax code by cutting back on loopholes and shifting toward a consumption-based tax system.
Isn’t that fun? The Government needs revenue — now is it a business producing a product you want to buy? Naw, you, dear taxpayer, are the producer of “revenue” and it is the Government that decides just how much it will allow you to keep. Orszag doesn’t use the word “loopholes” casually. It is to make you feel that someone is “cheating” at the expense of another. But what other “loopholes” would remain after the Bush taxcuts disappear and such things as the marriage penalty and slashed child credits are reinstated?
Oh … can you say “goodbye” to mortgage interest deductions? Bet you can!
Orszag may not be in the Obama admin anymore, but make no mistake that his narrow, anti-capitalist, anti-individual, Progressive views of property rights and wealth redistribution are rampant in the White House and Democrats.
"...I might not agree with most of Jeff's views, but I bet he'd be a better wing man than Atrios, Hesiod, Sawicky, Billmon, Drum, or Yglesias. While their politics are more agreeable to mine, I don't think they'd be much fun to hang out with. Jeff would be a riot. I never let something as trivial as political differences get in the way of having a good time"
