Story Of Obama

Obamacare: The Road to Repeal Starts in the States
by Michael F. Cannon

States that have refused to implement the Obama health law have already blocked $80 billion of its new deficit spending. If more states follow suit, they can block the other $1.6 trillion and force Congress to repeal the law.

The law relies on states to implement two of its most essential pieces: health-insurance "exchanges" and a vast expansion of Medicaid. Exchanges are government agencies through which the law channels $800 billion to private health-insurance companies.

The Medicaid expansion adds another $900 billion to the federal debt, with private insurers again taking a slice. States are under no obligation either to implement either. Responsible state officials will say no to both.

It is a myth that creating an exchange gives states more control over their insurance markets. Yes, the law directs the federal government to create one in states that do not. But every exchange must be approved by federal bureaucrats, empowering them to impose whatever oppressive rules on "state-run" exchanges they would impose through a federal exchange.

In contrast, by refusing to create an exchange states can block the law's debt-financed subsidies to private insurance companies and avoid new taxes on their employers and consumers.

The law imposes a $2,000 per-worker tax on employers, but only in states that create an exchange. (If Virginia creates one, there will be a giant sucking sound as employers flee to Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina and Florida, which have said they will not.) States creating exchanges will have to increase taxes another $10 million to $100 million per year to cover their operating costs.

The Supreme Court further empowered states when it overturned the law's Medicaid mandate. That mandate required states to expand their Medicaid rolls dramatically on pain of losing all federal Medicaid funds, which comprise 12 percent of state revenues. Twenty-six states challenged that mandate as unconstitutionally coercive.

They won. The court held the federal government cannot withhold existing Medicaid grants from states that fail to expand their programs. States may now refuse to expand their programs without fear.

And they should. My Cato Institute colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale estimates this expansion would cost Florida, Kansas, Illinois and Texas roughly $20 billion each in its first 10 years. New Jersey and New York would pay $35 billion and $53 billion, respectively. So you know we're not cooking the books, Gokhale projects California would save money.

But not for long. President Obama is already trying to shift even more Medicaid costs to the states. It's called "predatory federalism": Washington uses a low introductory rate as bait, then once states are hooked it changes the terms. In the end, even California will take it on the chin.

This is money states don't have. Nor can Washington, with its trillion-dollar deficits, afford the $900 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimates this Medicaid expansion would cost the federal government.

In total, state officials can block $1.6 trillion of deficit spending simply by sitting on their hands. According to CBO estimates, the handful of states that have already refused to expand Medicaid are saving taxpayers $80 billion.

Blocking these provisions will expose the full costs of the law, instead of allowing the federal government to shift those costs to taxpayers. The resulting backlash will push members of Congress to switch their votes and support repeal, just as two House Democrats did during the latest repeal vote. A critical mass of states could literally force Congress to repeal the Obama health law.

Opposition to these individual provisions, like opposition to the Obama health law, is bipartisan.

Among the governors refusing to create an exchange is New Hampshire's Democratic Gov. John Lynch, who signed a law forbidding one. Montana's Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer is among the dozen or more governors who are balking at the Medicaid expansion. Not that it takes a governor — a solid bloc of state legislators, or even just one committee chairman, is enough.

The Obama health law is weaker, and the path to repeal is clearer, than it has ever been.

 

Government-Sponsored Poverty
by Jeffrey Tucker

Growing up in the Cold War, we tended to look at Russia as a nightmare slave society that was utterly and completely foreign to anything Americans knew or could possibly know, absent some kind of invasion.

If I were to summarize the American propaganda message of the time it would be this: We are free, they are not, and that’s why we are rich and they are poor. And, man, did they look poor to our eyes. I could never understand it: How the heck does a once-great people put up with a government that is so obviously and apparently driving the whole population down, year after year?

Well, welcome to 2012 America. Have a look at the extremely scary Federal Reserve report, the Survey of Consumer Finance. If you have the stomach for it, read it yourself. The bean counters have put together the most broad and deep look at the finances of the median family. It turns out that the median American family is financially falling off a cliff, despite (or because of!) the trillions spent trying to prevent this from happening.

The short summary:

Two decades of seeming prosperity have been entirely wiped out since 2008, putting the net worth of the households at the same level it was in the early 1990s.
The housing crash is the main cause of the wreckage, but the actual income of the median family has fallen by 7.7% since 2007. The report compiles data from 2010 and would probably be worse in this respect if it included data from today.
Nearly all measurable increases in what the government calls economic growth actually come from consumers depleting what resources they have and not saving much, if any, income at all.
Meanwhile, 75% of households report that they are still holding an unchanged level of debt. Those households paying less in debt finance are doing so because they are deferring student loan payments and refinancing houses at subsidized rates.
It’s actually difficult to come up with a metaphor to fully capture the grim reality here. We could fall back on the farmer that is eating the seed corn held for next year’s planting. Or perhaps we could imagine a household that is feeding the fireplace with shingles from the roof. In short, this is not a sustainable pattern of family finance, and it is currently driving American wealth straight down.

To the extent we are not entirely aware of this, there can only be two reasons. First, the proliferation of debt finance is providing a temporary illusion. Second, the technological revolution came just in time to vastly increase the efficiency of just about everything industry and households do, thereby enabling more blood to be extracted from the economic turnip than anyone ever thought possible.

Take away those two factors and the true impoverishment of the American family would be undeniably obvious and produce a political reality that would be more revolutionary than anything we’ve seen in any existing lifetime.

We are surviving, and even somewhat thriving, despite the fact that we are getting ever poorer. This is an interesting economic paradox. The tools that we work with today — cloud computing, instantaneous communication, the time cost of operations reduced from years to minutes — have saved us from something that might have made the Great Depression seem miniscule by comparison.

Technology is so wonderful that it can actually serve as a kind of mask for underlying decline. Imagine a fisherman at a lake that has a systematically declining population of fish. He had been using a cane pole to fish, but one day, someone invents a digital fish finder and gives him a boat. This vastly expands his daily catch. It feels like prosperity, and it’s true that his time is much better spent, but the underlying reality is still there. Eventually, the fish population will die out.

Another feature of the world since 2008 is that government and the central bank has pulled every conceivable lever to prevent what has happened from happening. It has not only failed to accomplish that end. It has actually forestalled the necessary liquidation that would have created a clear path forward for the rebuilding of prosperity. All of the interventions have stopped the readjustment process, squandered trillions of dollars and cultivated a regulatory thicket that chokes the life out of all but the hardiest — or most politically connected — of capitalistic enterprises.

Imagine an alternative scenario: The bust of 2008 was permitted to happen. Bad banks and financial institutions were allowed to go bankrupt. No sector was saved. Housing prices plummeted. Fannie and Freddie took their lumps. Government slashed spending. The entire economy was deleveraged.

The effects would have been shocking, but temporary. Workers would have shifted from failed sectors to newly profitable ones. Consumers would have pulled back and had every incentive to save as never before. The poor could have afforded homes. Actually, homes would have become marketable as never before. The new savings would have funded investment, and the rebuilding of prosperity would have been massively aided by the great technological revolution.

Alas, this is not the reality we face. Instead, we are experiencing right now something very similar to what has always vexed, not just the Soviet Union, but every society burdened by a catastrophically large and intrusive government. We are getting poorer. And we are putting up with it. For now.

 

The Choice Before Voters

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1cTd6KeDYBU?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Obama Guts Bipartisan Welfare Reform

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0F4LtTlktm0?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Gf_TjkvcWZY?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Fortunately, that's a lie.

 

You wish.

Here's what these guys are running on, their core constituency:

 

But, Better Days Are Coming:

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gt_d9WKMKZc?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Obama's big gamble on Bill Clinton
by Newt Gingrich

The announcement that former President Bill Clinton had been personally asked by President Obama to place his name in nomination at the Democratic Convention struck me as potentially a major mistake.

Bill Clinton is one of the most effective and aggressive speakers in the Democratic Party.

His attacks on Republicans will be witty, memorable, and effective for the moment.

The problem for Democrats is that while those who listen to Clinton's speech and cheer him will be excited, those who think about Clinton and Obama in the same thought will begin to realize how bad Obama really has been as President.

Republicans should take every opportunity to drive home the amazing contrast between Clinton's bipartisan achievements working with a Republican Congress and Obama's absolute inability to work across the aisle.

I am aware of the vast difference because I spent two years opposing the Clinton Presidency as the House Republican whip and four years negotiating with President Clinton as speaker.

The gaps in approach, style and achievement between Obama and Clinton are immense and all to Obama's discredit.

Bill Clinton announced in a State of the Union that "the era of big government is over." President Obama has been working for four years to build even bigger government.

Bill Clinton worked with a Republican Congress and Republican Governors to pass welfare reform. Clinton had campaigned on "ending welfare as we know it." Obama in one partisan step ordered his administration to destroy the work requirements and return to the dependency-fostering, taxpayer crushing, work avoiding welfare system of the past.

Bill Clinton as Governor of Arkansas had learned the executive has to negotiate and work with the legislative branch. Two and a half years of bipartisan struggle led to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. For the next four years there were balanced budgets and $405 billion in federal debt as paid off. Obama refuses to compromise and cooperate with the legislative branch and has run up the largest deficits in American history.

Compare their concrete achievements.

There is a 23,100,000 job gap between the economic growth of Clinton and a Republican Congress and the job destructive, class warfare policies of Obama's partisan radicalism.

With Clinton and a Republican Congress unemployment fell from 7.3 percent to 4.2 percent. Under Obama unemployment has been stuck at 8.2 percent (now moving up to 8.3percent this month). Obama has the worst job collapse in 75 years. Obama has had over 8 percent unemployment for 41 straight months. In fact under Obama unemployment went up from 7.8 percent to today's 8.3 percent.

President Obama's $5.2 trillion in deficits is a sharp contrast to Clinton's balanced budgets.

During the bipartisan period from 1995 to 1999, debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP dropped 23 percent. Under Obama, it rose from 40.5 percent in 2008 to an estimated 74 percent in 2012—an increase of more than 83 percent. And under President Obama, gross federal debt passed 100 percent of GDP for the first time since 1947.

When I was sworn in as speaker in January 1995, the Congressional Budget Office projected cumulative federal budget deficits of $2.7 trillion over the next decade. After four years of bipartisan rule, in 1999, the CBO projected a $2.3 trillion surplus – a turnaround of $5 trillion. Under Obama, the CBO this year estimated a ten-year cumulative deficit of $2.9 trillion.

The President's jobs failure has left 46 million Americans in poverty, the largest number in history.

Clinton's bipartisan cooperation on welfare reform and balanced budgets reduced the number of children in welfare by 25 percent and reduced the number of Americans in poverty by 17 percent.

Under Obama median household income has declined by $4300 while under Clinton it increased by $6200.

When you look at fact after fact about how much better Bill Clinton was than Barack Obama in clear, objective economic and governmental achievements, it will cause voters to spend Clinton's entire nominating speech considering the question, "Why is Obama such a failure?"

That is the high risk inherent in Obama asking Clinton to nominate him.

 

Non sequitor, the issue is the work requirement. (We already know we're in a recession and that social safety net programs are being heavily used.)

 

You miss the point: Obama is very lax in encouraging people to go back to work even at a lower pay, and many prefer to stay on public assistance for much longer. This causes them to lose some of their skills and subsequently makes them less desirable to employers, etc etc

Bottom line is that his policies and negative attitude towards work and innovation (instead of switching field or trying to open a small business of some kind, like the unemployed did for thousands of years, more and more people are getting used to receiving a government check every month) are fattening the numbers of the un/underemployed.

Couple that with Obama's very lax requirements wrt who's eligible for foodstamps etc - in Nevada you can even gamble with foodstamps - and those programs need more and more money to survive which we of course have to borrow. It's all interconnected, it's politically motivated and it's terrible for the country, especially those poor folks who find themselves trapped... the new slaves of the dem party.