Why ObamaCare will fail ...

Krauthammer on how the ballooning deficit will affect Obama’s agenda:

I think Obama is misreading the mood of the country.

Look, he was a genius last year at reading the mood of the country. That's how he got elected—hope and change and newness and novelty, and all that. And he understood that the American people are willing to spend trillions as a way to undo a recession or to get out of unemployment.

But they are not willing to risk the budget and future high interest rates and perhaps a collapse of the currency on radical social experiments like health care or cap-and-trade and energy.

So he got it [deficit spending] on stimulus. He got everything he wanted on stimulus. He got almost $1 trillion dollars, and the problem is it has had no results.

So it has hurt him in two ways: (a) it has increased the deficit to the point where he would be adding on to it with health care and cap-and-trade. And secondly, it proves he is not infallible, which, to a lot of Democrats, has come as a shock. And they are now in quiet recovery.

And I think that's really going to hurt him. It's going to make the health care agenda and the energy agenda extremely hard to pass.

Paying for Health Care by Destroying the Economy [Veronique de Rugy]

That' pretty much the plan laid out by House Democratic leaders. In order to pay for the $1 trillion health-care plan, they won't be cutting spending (it's probably too 1990s for today's lawmakers) but they will be imposing new taxes — surtaxes in fact — and fees and penalties. Finally, America will become like its European counterparts, a place where it's painful to work hard and be rewarded for it.

Read this New York Times article about how the plan will be paid for and cry. A sample:
Starting in 2011, a family making $500,000 would have to pay $1,500 in additional income tax to help subsidize coverage for the uninsured. A family making $1 million would have to pay $9,000.

Employers who do not provide health insurance to workers would generally have to pay a fee or penalty to the government. The fee would be equal to 8 percent of wages for an employer with an annual payroll of more than $400,000.

Mais bien sur! In a high-unemployment environment, let's raise the cost of employing people.

And:

The surtax would apply to any adjusted gross income exceeding $280,000 a year for an individual and $350,000 for a couple filing a joint return. The tax rates would range from 1 percent to 5.4 percent.

Who wants to bet that the number of people filing a joint return will collapse? Moi! (I have to practice my French, since that's where we are heading.)

The Deep Dishonesty of ObamaCare [Anthony Dick]

Lurking just beneath the surface of the Democrats’ rosy health-care-reform talk is the question of cost. Obama campaigned on the (disingenuous) line that he could deliver an enormous expansion of government services without significantly raising taxes, and his party continues to push the fantasy that the bill for their enormous spending projects will never come due.

But the simple truth is that ObamaCare, like the Democratic fiscal agenda in general, will require significant and painful tax hikes across a broad base of the American population. The question is how long Democrats can get away with pretending this isn’t so.

There is evidence that people are starting to catch on, as in this Washington Post editorial today (pointed out to me by a press release from Heritage):

[T]here is no case to be made for the House Democratic majority’s proposal to fund health-care legislation through an ad hoc income tax surcharge for top-earning households. . . . There is simply no way to close the gap by taxing a handful of high earners. . . . Pretending that “the rich” alone can fund government, let alone the kind of activist government that the president and Congress envision, is bad policy any way you look at it.

How Much Are You Willing to Pay for Health-Care Reform? [Veronique de Rugy]

Well, it does really matter. The real question is: How much will you have to pay in taxes, whether you want it or not? The House of Representatives' health-care bill includes an income surtax that would range from 1% to 5.4% on incomes over $350,000. The Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl and Curtis Duey did the math for us:

As calculated by the Tax Foundation, when factoring in the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, average state and local income taxes, Medicare taxes, and the new surtax, the average top marginal income tax rate in the U.S. would be 52 percent!

The top rate in the U.S. would then be higher than countries like France, Canada, Italy, Spain and Germany. Only 3 countries in the 30-member OECD, an association of the most economically developed countries in the world, would have a higher rate. Taxpayers in the 6 highest taxed U.S. states would pay higher rates than every country in the OECD except Denmark. Taxpayers in every state, even the 9 that do not levy a state income tax, would face a higher top marginal rate than taxpayers in 21 out of the 30 OECD countries.

Hold on to your wallet, everyone. It is, of course, a myth that only the rich will be taxed. Besides, as Cato Instistitute Dan Mitchell reminds us here, when the government takes aims at the rich, it's often the middle class that gets hit in the crossfire.


House Members Being Hammered Over Waxman-Markey [Iain Murray]

I'm hearing that the popular reaction to the passage of the Waxman-Markey electricity tax bill in the House has blown House members away. The public outrage is really hurting those who voted for it, and that's why the bill has been "parked" (as the Blair government used to say) in the Senate. Very good sign. We need that sort of public pressure to defeat this monstrosity, and similarly for the health-care plans. If these two overreaches go down, Obama's political capital will be spent. How often has a president become a lame duck by his own actions within a year of taking office?

The President’s Reckless and False Health-Care Claim [James C. Capretta]

It’s now a clear pattern. When the president senses his position is vulnerable to a factual criticism, he asserts emphatically that the opposite is true — without ever providing evidence to back up his claim.

Here’s the latest example. According to Politico, President Obama told skeptical Blue Dog Democrats last evening that they should support the health-care bill emerging in the House because it would produce savings beyond the ten-year budget window.

Oh really. Says who?

The context here is crucial. It’s already abundantly clear that the federal government cannot afford its existing health-care commitments. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently projected that Medicare and Medicaid costs will nearly double in twenty-five years, from 5.3 percent of GDP today to 10.0 percent in 2035 (this assumes continuation of current policy with regard to physician fee updates). The Medicare Trustees projected in May that the program’s 75-year unfunded liability has reached $36 trillion.

Moreover, the federal government is projected to run massive budget deficits for the foreseeable future. In 2009, the government has already run up a deficit of $1 trillion through June, and it could reach $2 trillion before it’s over at the end of September. CBO expects the Obama budget plan would increase the government’s debt by $11 trillion from the end of 2008 to the end of 2019. Running up government debt at that kind of pace would put the nation’s economy at considerable risk, to put it mildly. At some point, lenders would demand higher returns for their lending, pushing interest rates up and choking off growth, or the Fed would partially monetize the debt with even easier money and rapid inflation.

It is in this context that Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are trying to rush health-care bills to their respective floors for consideration before the August congressional break.

The centerpieces of the bills are the creation of a new, massive entitlement to health insurance subsidization and a large expansion in Medicaid eligibility. The House bill, unveiled today and available here, would add $1.2 trillion in federal costs over a decade with just these two expansions, according to CBO. And the trend is even more alarming. Between 2018 and 2019, federal costs for the new entitlement and the enlargement of Medicaid would increase by a combined 8.9 percent.

That shouldn’t be surprising though, because that’s basically the rate at which Medicare and Medicaid have been growing for more than four decades. And there’s nothing in the House or Senate health-care bills which would lead one to assume a new health entitlement program will grow at a more moderate pace in the future than the ones already on the books have done in the past. CBO has said repeatedly that slowing the pace of rising costs will require a fundamental restructuring of financial incentives, for consumers and suppliers of medical services. Nothing currently on the table in Congress comes close to meeting that test.

That was essentially the message CBO delivered to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee last week. In response to a question from Sen. Judd Gregg, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said a bill which simply expanded coverage without fundamental reform “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path” (Elmendorf’s testimony can be seen here, with his response to Senator Gregg at the 1 hour, 38 minute mark).

Moreover, it seems that President Obama’s own budget director agrees with CBO. Last week, Peter Orszag delivered a letter to House leaders saying their bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to slow the pace of rising costs. But even that didn’t stop the president from saying otherwise in his desperate attempt to round up votes.

The federal government’s budget is already knee-deep in debt, largely because politicians have promised that better days ahead will make all budgetary problems go away. They haven’t, and the current president is making the situation much worse. The last thing any member of Congress should do is simply take the president’s word for it that the health-care bills under consideration will ultimately “bend the cost-curve.” If he really believes that — because no one else really does — he should provide some hard evidence to back up his claim. And that’s not a theoretical possibility. He could ask his independent projection experts — not his political appointees — to provide directly to Congress and the public, without review by anyone else, their best estimates of what these bills would do to the long-term (25- or 50-year) budget outlook. Those estimates would be taken much more seriously than unsubstantiated assertions which run against commonsense and all evidence.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTNmZjk4M2M0NTMzNjI0ZjNiMWZkMDFkY2YyOWFmMDM=

St. Louis Boos for Obama - quite audible - at MLB All-Star game

More cheers yes; but lots of booing. Not that any TV announcer would mention it.

Andy McCarthy noticed this also, along w/ Obama's one-hop first pitch.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzFmMjkyZGM4MzllNjczYTc1MDRmNDNhNDdkYWJmMWY=

well worth a read ...

Sotomayor -- SCOTUS hearings update

An Unpublished Summary Order Can't Be Defended in Ricci [Andy McCarthy]

Judge Sotomayor continues to try to defend the manner in which her panel buried the Ricci case by unpublished summary order. She claims that she was operating under clear precedent — but there wasn't clear precedent, and her peremptory order didn't cite any. But let's give her that one. Sotomayor has issued scores of opinions on legal issues in which the outcome was clear, controlled by obvious precedent — that didn't stop her from writing an opinion.

Now consider this. The Ricci case was widely deemed to be the most important discrimination case to come before the Second Circuit in years — perhaps decades. As Judge Cabranes pointed out in his dissent from the full Second Circuit's decision not to rehear the case, Ricci featured "unusually lengthy briefs from the parties, amicus briefs, an 1,800-page record, and an hour of oral argument, all well beyond the norm" (most arguments before the Second Circuit are about ten minutes per side).

You can argue the result in Ricci. You can't defend burying the case without a published, reasoned decision.


What Is 'Settled' Law? [Andy McCarthy]

Judge Sotomayor answering Senator Hatch [almost a quote]: All decisions of the Supreme Court I consider "settled law" to the extent that the doctrine of stare decisis (respect for precedent) applies.

In other words, all law is settled . . . except when it isn't.


Say What, Sonia? [Andy McCarthy]

Judge Sotomayor testifying this morning: "Most of my cases if not all of them explain why the law requires what it does."

Judge Jose Cabranes describing the opinion of Judge Sotomayor and the rest of the panel in the New Haven firefighter case: the panel gave peremptory treatment to:

significant constitutional and statutory claims of first impression . . . in an opinion that lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal. Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case, and a casual reader of the opinion could be excused for wondering whether a learning disability played at least as much a role in this case as the alleged racial discrimination. . . . This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.
When Senator Sessions was grilling Judge Sotomayor on why her panel gave such shoddy treatment to such an important case, the judge kept saying they relied on a "thoughtful 72-page opinion" from the district judge. What she didn't mention was that before her panel attepted to bury the case in an unpublished ruling, the district judge dug the grave by attempting make certain that no one got to see how "thoughtful" the 72-page opinion was — it, too, was unpublished.

This was not an effort to "explain why the law requires what it does"; it was an effort to make the law go away.

Unemployment ... Obama Admin furiously spins jobs failures

To wit:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzkyYTlmNDk5NzljNjhlY2I1MTQyOGNmN2M1MWRjNmQ=

Deaths by Numbers [Veronique de Rugy]

Christina Romer, Obama's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, appeared on CNBC to explain the loss of so many jobs in spite of the stimulus. Here is what she said:

From a CNBC transcript:

MARIA BARTIROMO [Host]: When the stimulus was first announced, the President said that he expected that in the coming years the administration, based on the policies on economic revival could save or create 3.5 million jobs. At this point does the administration know how many jobs have been created or saved?

ROMER: You know, it’s very hard to say exactly because you don’t know what the baseline is. Because you don’t know what the economy would have done without it.
If you weren't convinced already that political appointees are often willing to say whatever it takes to make the president look less bad, read what follows.

First, Jeff Emanuel over at Red State reminds us that:

Romer is coauthor of the report that established the baseline numbers and formula for calculating jobs supposedly “created or saved” by the stimulus. It was her report that initially made the claim that the “stimulus” would “create or save” 3.5 to 4 million jobs. Further, she and her council released a report just this week — “Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow” — that Mr. Obama claimed in his radio address last weekend “confirms that our plan will likely save or create three to four million jobs.”

Second, as reported by HotAirPundit.com:
Unemployment before the 2004 election was 5.5%Unemployment before the 2006 election hit 4.4%Bush's unemployment rate average for 8 years was 5.2%.

Watch Romer's interview here.

Obama & Holder - Justice Perverted; National Security Compromised

Justice, Obama/Holder Style [Andy McCarthy]

Binyam Mohammed: jihadist plotting mass-murders against American cities — released outright.

Laith Qazali: abduction/murder of 5 U.S. soldiers in Karbala — released outright.

Irbil 5: Iranian IRGC operatives (i.e., the same guys who murdered 19 of our air force at Khobar Towers in '96) coordinating Iraqi terrorist operations that have killed HUNDREDS of U.S. forces in Iraq since 2003 — released outright.

New Black Panther Party operatives on videotape intimidating anti-Obama voters — charges dropped after DOJ had already won the case.
CIA Interrogators who obtained information that saved countless American lives — under investigation.

Bush officials who deliberated over national-security policies that prevented another 9/11 (many of which the Holder/Obama DOJ have defended in court and, however inadvertently, in Congress) — under investigation.


"Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located." [Andy McCarthy]

Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush's post-9/11 national security tactics.

The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress's 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

I'll have more to say about the report this week, but it also contains some other interesting facts that the folks who drop these reports late on summer Fridays would rather you didn't linger over. For example:

* Alberto Gonzales did not attempt to mislead Congress in 2007 when he testified that the controversy that erupted at the Justice Department in 2004 was not over what was popularly known as the "terrorist surveillance program" (i.e., the NSA's warrantless surveillance program to intercept suspected terrorist communications that crossed U.S. borders — the effort the Left smeared as "domestic spying"). In fact, as Gonzales told the Senate judiciary Committee, the controversy was about other intelligence activities.

* When congressional Democrats rolled their eyes, suggested that Gonzales was lying, and groused that a special prosecutor should be appointed, they well knew he wasn't lying — but they also knew he couldn't discuss the intellligence activities at the center of the controversy because those activities were (and remain) highly classified. That is, they knowingly badgered the Attorney General of the United States at a hearing in a calculated effort to make him look dishonest and to intimate something they knew to be untrue: namely, that the dispute at DOJ arose because senior officials believed warrantless surveillance was illegal.

* Before Gonzales and President Bush's then chief-of-staff, Andy Card, went to see Attorney General Ashcroft in the hospital (where he was being treated for pancreatitis), President Bush directed his administration to meet with top congressional Democrats and Republicans (Senate leaders Frist and Daschle, Speaker Hastert and House minority leader Pelosi, Roberts and Rockefeller from Senate Intel, and Goss and Harman from House Intel) to alert them that Ashcroft's deputy, Jim Comey, had refused to sign off on intelligence activities that Ashcroft had previously approved. Advised of the problem, the Gang of Eight did not agree to a quick legislative fix but, according to Gonzales's contemporaneous notes, agreed that the intelligence activities should continue. (Three years later, after Gonzales's testimony, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Daschle claimed that they hadn't agreed.)

* Only after this meeting with the bipartisan congressional leaders, and with the prior 45-day authorization for all the program's activities about to expire, did Gonzales and Card go to the hospital to visit the ailing Ashcroft — at the direction of President Bush.

* Between the time the time the collection intelligence activities that came to be known as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was first authorized after the 9/11 attacks until the warrantless surveillance aspect of the program was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, the Bush administration briefed the bipartisan leadership of the congressional intelligence committees 17 times about the activities involved in the program.

In sum, congressional Democrats knew about the program and knew that the dissent of the Justice Department's senior leadership in 2004 was not about warrantless surveillance. They knew that if they postured that the dissent was about warrantless surveillance, Gonzales — not an adept communicator — would not be able to rebut them in a public hearing because the details of the dispute were classified. Congressional Democrats also knew that President Bush agreed to make changes in the program in March 2004 to assuage DOJ's concerns, and they knew that the program activities continued thereafter for a year-and-a-half (i.e., until the Times blew part of the program) without incident and with bipartisan congressional leadership continuing to be briefed.

The politicizing of the nation's security that went on here was shameful.

Obama's Lame Revisionist History for his sorry Economic plans ....

I mean, how stupid does he think we are ....

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzEwOWNiMWY4ZDMyOGIzMDQxNDI5YzdlNmFmZTUwMDg=

He defines Porkulus as being conceived simply to stop the economy's "free fall".

"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall."

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

Obama's Op-Ed, Annotated [Stephen Spruiell]

President Obama has an op-ed in the Washington Post today defending the stimulus package. Let's take a look under the hood:

Nearly six months ago, my administration took office amid the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. At the time, we were losing, on average, 700,000 jobs a month. And many feared that our financial system was on the verge of collapse.

Wait a minute. At a press conference a few weeks ago, when confronted with the disparity between his administration's projected unemployment figures under the stimulus (8 percent) and the real unemployment figures (9.7 percent), Obama said, “Keep in mind the stimulus package was the first thing we did... If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report that the economy had tanked.”

So Obama took office amid the most severe downturn since the Great Depression, at a time when the country was hemorrhaging jobs and the financial system was on the brink of collapse. He said as much a week before signing the stimulus into law. But don't blame him for overselling the impact the stimulus would have — his administration was totally blindsided by a sudden report that the economy had tanked!

The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages.

Let's examine that phrase, "swift and aggressive action." For Treasury Secretary, Obama rammed a tax cheat through the confirmation process by claiming he was the only man who could do the job. Secretary Geithner then proceeded to unveil a plan to save the banking system that inspired so little confidence, the Dow fell 300 points upon its announcement. Geithner's Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy troubled assets from banks has failed to launch, primarily because the Financial Accounting Standards Board loosened mark-to-market accounting rules, thus enabling banks to avoid write-downs on their toxic mortgage-backed securities. Now that banks can hold those assets without booking losses, they have little incentive to sell them at a discount to the P-PIP. With P-PIP looking increasingly like a dud, the adminitration's only real plan to deal with crippled banks is to cross its fingers and hope the economy grows fast enough to enable them to recover on their own.

Nor has Obama's Making Home Affordable plan been any great success, as Joe Nocera explained in Friday's NYT (best summed up by the phrase "drop in the bucket"). As NRO's editors pointed out when the plan was announced, "The relatively small group of in-deep but creditworthy homeowners who could be helped by Obama’s plan already are positioned to refinance at better rates, or to move from variable-rate loans to low-drama fixed-rate mortgages, without a $475 billion government intervention." That's $75 billion for the program and $400 billion to shore up Fannie and Freddie, the real beneficiaries of the deal.

On the other hand, Obama did move swiftly and aggressively to sign the Lilly Ledbetter act, exposing companies to spurious equal-pay lawsuits; to roll back Clinton-era welfare reforms; to use TARP funds to shield the UAW from the full fallout of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, and so on. Maybe that's what he meant.

We also passed the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history.

True, if by "sweeping" you mean "costly."

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall.

This is just a terrible metaphor. Can we decide whether the economy a sick patient or a free-falling object? And how does one give a free-falling object a "boost"?

Keep reading this post . . .