The Chicken Littles of the Democrat party continue to ring the bell of false alarms about the current state of healthcare in this contry, while ignoring a spiraling out of control deficit that has been run up by the very entitlements they are in the process of trying to create more of. And if one doesn't believe that desperation, fiscal or otherwise, taints the mind and impedes its ability of rational thought, then they need to take a closer look at the goings-on in Venezula.
Yes, the country that has a leader which has declared our current president farther to left than he, is busy sending out smoke signals in an attempt to mask the very problems caused by socialism when given full reign of a country's social, political, and economic sectors. What Americans should be truly wary of are the type of smoke he is sending up, which is that of war.
United States collaboration with the country of Colombia has been, for many years, based on the incessant and wasteful war against Colombian drug cartels and their manufacturing and transportation of those products to these shores. These wars, when successful, only drive the prices of these illicit substances up, creating an incentive for more poor farmers and peasants to get into the process of growing the cocoa leaves necessary for cocaine manufacture. It is a wasteful battle, but only a minor factor in the overall picture of regional instability.
The United States maintains a military presence in the country to battle these cartels, while investing billions in the Colombian government annually to prop it up against the internal conflicts that threaten to bring one of the few democracies in the area to its knees. Ignorng the fact that ending the insipid war on drugs would disband the cartels due to plummeting drug profits, the two governments recently signed a military cooperation pact that will both extend and increase the presence of American military personnel in the country. As such, the ever paranoid and antagonistic Venezuelan dictator has used the pact to his advantage.
Struggling against extreme water and utility shortages at home, Chavez is using the US/Colombian cooperation pact to frighten the people of Venezuela that an American invasion is imminent, all in the hopes of distracting them from their lack of access to basic resources. Says Elsa Cardosa, a professor of international relations at the Central University of Venezuela, "Chavez's heated rhetoric is aimed at turning the public's attention away from pressing domestic problems ranging from rampant crime to electricity and water rationing."
What a surprise, yet another socialist experiment that fails to create the utopia that is promised, and resorts to the desperate exhaultations of war to distract the public from domestic issues. The fact of the matter is that water and other utility shortages in the country are not the ultimate result of a drought in the region brought about by El Nino, but a case study in the issues that pop up continually in areas afflicted by the disease of socialism.
MSNBC recently reported on the plight of Naisi Obando and her children to obtain water. Says the report, "They join the crowd at the water truck when it rumbles up a dusty road in their shantytown. They bring barrels to be filled with a gushing stream from the truck, and use garden hoses to siphon the water from the barrels down deep stairs to their home. 'We really suffer a lot to get water here,' Obando says."
The report goes on to state that the poor sections around Venezuela's capital lack regular access to water because of inadequate investment in infrastructure. This is not the cause of some incomprehensible phenomeon, but a very predictable depletion of government coffers when high tax rates fuel the departure of private businesses and the loss of millions of jobs, leaving numerous entitlements with no mechanism to be paid for by an unemployed public.
Political infighting has also delayed the building of necessary utility services where budgetary concerns have not. Some municipal governments are controlled by anti-Chavez forces, causing funding to be held from those governmets for utility projects. When the money is dispersed, it is deemed politically expedient by local officials to hold the money to cause continued unrest amongst the public against an unpopular dictator. The report concludes that, "In the meantime, trucks bring free water every two weeks courtesy of the mayor's office. 'We are always fighting for the pipe,' says Doris Marcano, a single mother who poured buckets full into a barrel," as she prayed for rain.
A thriving economy is a necessary component of social planners being able to fund the plans they create. Yet socialist leeches are adept at creating their power through class warfare and envy, which expediently leads to the destruction of the tax base they are so dependent upon to fund their agendas. And they are apparently not above banging the drums of war to hide their fiscal shortcomings, seeking to bury them under a sense of nationalism. Or, in the case of Venezuela, at the expense of shorting their people of the basic necessities of life.
Just how many lessons of socialist failures do we need to completely rebuff the ever onward advance of that ideology in this country, especially under the current administration?
As the calendar quickly closes in on the one year mark for the Obama administration, consternation has replaced euphoria as the descriptive phrase for the president. The “Hope and Change” that had been so promised by then candidate Barack Obama—along with a transparency never before seen in Washington—has not materialized. The economy is still in shambles, unemployment continues its climb beyond 10%, and the federal deficit continues its journey into the stratosphere quicker than Wile E. Coyote with an ACME rocket strapped to his ass.
Which leads one to wonder why socialists, liberals, and communists continue to try socialism and communism when all the lessons of history teach us that wherever one of those aforementioned governments is permitted to take root, therein lies a story of the social planners failing to meet the material needs of its population without calling on its capitalist neighbors.
The teachings of Karl Marx, compounded by the absolute hilarity of Keynesian economic theory, are a disease which the American public should be constantly inoculated against. Yet, liberals on this very board and members of the MSM will stoop to any level necessary to portray how much better life is in some foreign land as a means to support socialist policy expansion in this country, all the while ignoring the fact that the standard of living in this country has, for the most part, exceeded the living standard enjoyed by any other citizen base for the whole entirety of life of the oldest poster amongst us.
The liberals amongst us have caught the disease of failed common sense on the grounds of a either having a failed understanding of the history that built this country, or a blatant willingness to ignore the fact that the biggest problem faced by the poor in America is obesity. Hell of a problem to have when the poorest amongst us eat too much.
Change will not successfully take place amongst the middle or upper aged members of this population. Their beliefs are too entrenched in either fantasy or stubbornness to take the truth and process it to a point to realize they have been duped by a political system and media establishment that would rather expand their own power than see the population at large benefit from a thriving economy. Therefore, a major push should be made to revitalize the educational sector.
The unions should be broken and tenure should be eliminated. The students in America do not benefit from teacher’s who feel they have the right to stop the education of our children in its tracks because they aren’t making enough money to satisfy their overextended purchasing lifestyle. Any person who enters into the education field in college has every opportunity to discover the pay that awaits them in any US school district with a five second Google search. The children should not pay the price because Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t bother to take the time to see the meager existence that awaited them as a teacher.
Likewise, it should not be the rule that teachers are doomed to a meager lifestyle because they wish to impart knowledge and wisdom to our children. Equal, across the board salaries should be done away with in favor of independent, private auditing agencies that come into the classroom and evaluate teachers on a fully disclosed, handed out at the beginning of the year criteria. These evaluations are then passed on to the school board with the legally binding requirement that the recommendations of the private commission are followed in either giving the teacher a raise or reprimanding them for not successfully executing a job that is tantamount to the future success of this country. Teachers who consistently receive good to superior ratings should be rewarded with salaries consumerate with, at least, a middle class lifestyle.
After all, what are the rewards we have reaped so far for the system we have in place? The answer: achievement levels on standardized testing, the only true method of measuring a teacher’s success in imparting knowledge to their students, have either flat lined or decreased in nearly every parish in the state.
In fact, nearly 8 in 10 students statewide scored no better than "Basic Understanding" on each of the four major categories for which they were tested. "Basic Understanding" is not what most of us would assume it means; that being the equivalent of a C average on a report card. According to the achievement level chart that accompanies these standardized tests, the student has an understanding level of "Mastery" when they get a minimum of 3.5 questions out of 5 correct. Multiply this by 20 to get a 100 question test, and you see that a student has to get no more than 70 of those 100 questions right to be a master of that subject content.
A 70 out of a 100 on any test I would have ever taken growing up was the minimum score I could have gotten to have obtained a D. Yet a basic understanding only requires getting 3 out of 5 questions right. Again doing some simple arithmetic and multiplying those figures by 20 and you see that a "Basic Understanding" is achieved by getting 60 out of 100 questions correct. That's an F on the standard grading scale most every school in this nation uses.
Do teacher’s unions really intend to go before the taxpayers and say that, even though 80% of the students in the state have, at best, a "Basic Understanding" in the subjects of English, Math, Science, and Social Studies, the teachers they represent deserve a pay raise on top of the already 65% in pay raises they have received in the past ten years?
We spend more on education in this country than we do for national defense, and yet the federal government cannot explain to the American people why, despite $9200 a year in per pupil expenditures, we cannot achieve better than an average 33% dropout rate for this nation’s high schools. Standards have become so lackadaisical that those in the education sector feel it better for the emotional stability of the student’s they teach to socially promote them rather than ensure they have obtained the knowledge necessary to succeed at the next level.
I think we are fair in our assessment that results are the quintessential requirement for a pay raise. If the achievement levels do not go up, then why should teacher pay? To give in to the demands of these unions and confess that giving these teachers a raise will in some way magically cure the ills that have plagued our education system for decades, would be to continue down the road of churning out students that are incapable of holding a job that pays more than the minimum wage. Or, worse yet, when they go to apply for that minimum wage job, will they even be able to read the application?
Amidst the calls that healthcare costs in the United States are skyrocketing, the politicians are brandishing their rhetoric and polishing their spin tactics in an attempt to once again peddle to the American people a plan to bring medical care out of the private sector and place it firmly in the care of Uncle Sam. Indeed, those who wish to cite statistics and exorbitant numbers can claim, correctly, that medical care in this country costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 16% of GDP. Being the wealthiest (and most indebted) nation on Earth means this number is significant.
But political honesty ceases once that number has been presented to the public. The argument quickly ensues that doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are making egregious profits at the expense of hard working middle and low income families that struggle to purchase their prescriptions on payday. This type of thinking is both lazy and dangerous considering the morality that permeates government alongside of the ability of government to run anything as efficient as the private sector.
Public expenditures are part of the problem. Excessive public spending has had the same effect on the adult population in this country that the politicians themselves claim violent movies, music, and video games have had on our children: it creates apathy in regards to egregious spending. Multi-trillion dollar budgets and nearly as large stimulus plans over the past couple years have numbed the common sense that would lead otherwise logical people to question the tactics practiced that cause Americans share of public debt to exceed $500,000 per household. Government has likewise done its part to make sure that their excessive spending is not researched anymore than what is reported on the nightly news by maintaining substandard educational levels that make further analysis of such dizzying numbers difficult, if not incomprehensible.
Not including any type of universal healthcare coverage in current federal expenditures, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “estimates that in the next two years, the federal government will record its largest budget deficits as a share of GDP since shortly after World War II. As a result of those deficits, federal debt held by the public will soar from 41% of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2008 to 60% at the end of fiscal year 2010.”
In other words, the bureaucrats lambast a system that eats up 16% of GDP while, at the same time, figuring out a way to spend an extra 19% of GDP in two years time.
The fact remains that the states in the Union that have already enacted state mandates for universal coverage are already facing bankruptcy if they do not find a way to trim or reduce costs. Chief among these is Massachusetts, which could have easily argued it had the best healthcare in the nation until high taxes and spend happy bureaucrats started threatening to deplete the state of its best medical minds through reduced payments to state hospital systems.
Or take the case of Barbara Wagner. Ms. Wagner, a resident of Springfield, Oregon, receives her healthcare coverage from the state run Oregon Health Plan. Unfortunately for Ms. Wagner, she, like many in this nation annually, was stricken with cancer. Now, the article does not go into detail of what type of cancer Ms. Wagner has or the prognosis for her recovery, but the article does state that, “Her doctor offered hope in the new chemotherapy drug Tarceva, but the Oregon Health Plan sent her a letter telling her the cancer treatment was not approved. Instead, the letter said, the plan would pay for comfort care, including ‘physician aid in dying,’ better known as assisted suicide.”
Officials speaking on behalf of the state insurance program claim that Ms. Wagner is making an “unfortunate interpretation” of the letter which she received. However, Dr. Sam Saha, the chairman of the state commission that sets policy for the Oregon Health Plan, stated that the cost of the treatment for Ms. Wagner must be considered when factoring in the limited dollars for the state insurance program that must be spread out over a large population. Indeed, says Dr. Saha, “If we invest thousands and thousands of dollars in one person’s days to weeks, we are taking away those dollars from someone.”
An examination of the Oregon Health Plan shows the real discrepancies that come into play when government gets hold of the decision making process on something as important as someone’s medical care. In the case of cancer treatment, the plan will not cover chemotherapy if the purpose of such therapy is only to prolong the life of the patient.
Out of all the information presented in regards to Ms. Wagner’s case, perhaps the most important is this. The costs for chemotherapy drugs such as Traceva are $4000 a month. The costs for drugs assisting in the suicide of people such as Ms. Wagner are less than $100. It may not be the only assumption that can be made from the facts in the article, but it is a fair assumption, to be sure, to say that the state made the conscious decision it would be more economical to end Ms. Wagner’s life than to allow her to finish what days the good Lord intended for her to have left.
The fact that healthcare costs are skyrocketing at an astonishing rate are a common sense observation, but the rhetoric calling for healthcare reform because of these costs completely ignores several key facts that need to be included in any projections of why these costs are what they are.
First among them is that the rate at which new technologies enter into the medical field is astonishing. However, that does not mean they are costs without benefit. According to the Wall Street Journal, “In a 2001 study, David Cutler (an Obama adviser) and Mark McClellan (a Bush adviser) found that the benefits of lower infant mortality and better treatment of heart attacks ‘have been sufficiently great that they alone are about equal to the entire cost increase for medical care over time.’”
Another factor that weighs heavily on current price increases is that the current system of insuring customers provides an incentive for overconsumption of medical services. The average American paid more than half of their medical expenses in 1965; but since that time, spending for medical services as a percentage of GDP has increased sevenfold, but direct costs to consumers has not even doubled. Even though these costs are passed on to the taxpayer through lost wages as employers have more out-of-pocket expenses and public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid lead to increased taxes, the costs remain hidden and continue to drive increased consumption of medical care which drive up prices. Simple economics states that decreasing demand through higher prices will actually mean lower prices for services when people truly find they need them.
Also ignored in the debate over healthcare costs are the various forms of insurance that doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical equipment manufacturers are required to carry if they wish to ensure their business survival. As of 2002, neurologists faced average annual premiums in excess of $100,000 a year for their malpractice insurance while a third of hospitals in the US faced 100% increases in the costs of theirs.
In 1994, the GAO estimated that malpractice premiums accounted for $14 billion dollars worth of total medical expenditures. I have yet to find the current figure for 15 years later.
The Medicare/Medicaid practice of fixing prices for services increases the incentive of companies to cast their lost profits off on the private sector, ensuring the higher prices for private pay customers that lead to the emotional calls of universal healthcare to bring costs down. But these measures do not bring costs down; they only mask the true cost of medical care and destroy the incentives for people to study to become doctors or companies to innovate in the forms of new medications and machines to prolong the lives of the public at large.
It is time for the people to educate themselves on the reasons why healthcare costs have risen as they have, and to be honest by saying their out-of-pocket healthcare costs should have risen more than they have over the past 45 years. It is also time for politicians to practice a healthy dose of honesty about the ways in which federal and state government have manipulated the social systems affecting these prices—including price fixing under state health plans and through lack of regulating the frivolous lawsuits (or the threat of such lawsuits) that drive costs up. A failure to do either will find us all being a Ms. Barbara Wagner from Springfield, Oregon—where the government finds it cheaper to let us die, so they can reduce the financial burden to the taxpayer’s wallet.
Election cycles, just as the candidates participating in them, often feel like yesterdays political failures thrown into the historical microwave and merely reheated, with candidates promising the same entitlement expansion that has been proposed since before many of us walked this Earth, only with a different rhetorical spin against a backdrop of changing social conditions.
Beginning in 1913, federal politicians realized a long held dream when the income tax became law with the 16th amendment to the Constitution. The fight to enact such a tax began in 1861 when Congress passed a bill seeking to fund the Union campaign during the Civil War that imposed a 3% income tax on anyone earning between $600 and $10,000 per year (equivalent to an income tax on those earning, in today's dollars, between $10,000 and $166,000 a year). Prior to this time, the federal government subsisted on taxes mostly on imports and the sale of a few domestic goods. Counted amongst these handful of domestic goods were sugar, tobacco, alcohol, and carriages. It was a meager existence for the federal government, which was the intention of those establishing this new experiment in government.
In point of fact, to have a successful republic established in America, it was the desire of those who drafted the Constitution to have 95% of governance occur at the local/state level, with the remainder defaulting to federal government for times of war, establishing of a postal service and a means of providing travel from one part of the country to the next in the form of wagon routes, trains and--as technology speeded the development of more efficient and swifter methods of transportation-- highways and roads. In this manner, with such a limited scope of federal power, local politicians could be held more accountable to the citizens of their district, impeding their ability to stray too far from the desires of their constituents. The years, however, have not been kind to the voters in this country.
By 1872, the people had grown tired of the Civil War income tax enacted by the federal government to such an extent that the income tax was repealed. But, as in most circumstances, once the political elite in Washington had acquired a taste of the power that came with increased control of the people's money, their search to find a method to reacquire that power led to the introduction of no fewer than 68 bills to enact another federal income tax from 1873 to 1912.
The majority of power no longer resides at a local level, instead having been transferred to Washington with the birth of the income tax in 1913. Recent events have only increased the appetite of the federal establishment for your money, and these events bear a striking resemblance to events that have occurred before.
In 1893, the Reading Railroad--that of Monopoly fame--fell into receivership. Along with the economic demise of the railroad, many businesses (including banks) dependent upon the rail company and it's customers also went under, prompting the federal government to desire to step in and quell the "Economic Collapse of 1893." [Auto industry, TARP and bank bailouts anyone?] To fund the bailout, the income tax was proposed once again in 1894 under the very deceptive title of, "An Act to Reduce Taxation, Provide Revenue for the Government and for other purposes.". Conveniently, members of Congress would not be required to pay the tax. Coincidentally, members of today's Congress will not be required to join in on whatever health program they enact for the "greater good" of the American people. This in and of itself should tell you everything about the legislation when the very people writing and putting it into place do not trust it enough to themselves join in.
President Cleveland, deeming the new income tax law to be unconstitutional, allowed it to go into effect without his signature. As such, the law was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States and ruled unconstitutional since it was a direct tax on the people and, thus, not permitted by the Constitution. Upset, but not deterred, proponents of an income tax--much like the proponents of universal healthcare--bided their time until the day they could forge their rhetorical fight against personal wealth with the precision necessary to see a permanent tax on the books.
Democrats subsequently included an income tax in their 1896 and 1908 political platforms, with the promise being that only those making over $250,000 in today's dollars, and only at a tax rate of 1% of their income, would see any tax whatsoever. Those making over $6 million in today's dollars would see an income tax of 7%. The explicit promise by politicians to impose such a tax ensured that 99% of Americans would never see a dime in income taxes levied against them. Needless to say, this, as with promises of Social Security I catalogued on another blog post, has not been met with any measure of truth.
The fact of the matter is that as of this moment, 47% of Americans do not pay income taxes, with the day rapidly approaching where politicians will need to campaign solely on the promise of entitlement expansion to corner a majority of the voting bock in their districts. Those left to suffer the burden of income taxes have seen rates skyrocket above the promised thresholds of 1 and 7 percent, with increased taxes to fund the new wave of entitlement expansion looming ever present on the horizon.
Americans making far less than a quarter million dollars a year are paying taxes, and the class warfare of the early 1900s reared its ugly head again throughout the prior campaign season and thus far in the present term of the current administration. A family earning $63000 annually, with neither parent working for an employer offering health insurance, would see an increase of $7400 a year in taxes from the Baucus health bill in the form of premiums for health insurance, and this does not include co-pays for visits to the doctor, hospitals and the purchase of medicines. A family earning more than $91000 would see their tax liability increase a minimum of $11000 annually under the same program.
The $250,000 lie has been and will continue to be around for a long time.
The withholding system under the current tax structure has successfully robbed unobservant Americans of any understadning of the current taxes they pay the government annually, convincing many that they actually get money back from the government every April instead of understanding that portion of their confiscated earnings were merely an interest free loan to the government for the better part of a year.
Prior to World War II, Americans paid their tax bill at the end of the year by submitting a personally written check to Uncle Sam. This severely limited the ability of spend thrift politicians to increase the tax rates without being subject to a firestorm of anger from their prospective employers every election year. So, in order to reduce the awareness of the voters to their tax burden, Congress searched for any and all methods of getting taxes into the withholding system, and out of the hands of Americans and their checkbooks. Their opportunity came with the advent of the Second World War.
Congress, with the help of Donald Duck (see video below), appealed to American’s patriotism everywhere under the punch line you will hear in the video, “Your country needs ‘Taxes to defeat the Axis’.”
The effectiveness of the Disney propaganda film cannot be stressed enough. The millions upon millions of people who made their weekly or bi-weekly pilgrimage to the movie theaters were treated to the newsreels about how the soldiers were fighting to maintain freedom and spread democracy throughout the world. It was the job of Americans, the government funded propaganda stated, to provide a constant revenue stream to the government to “buy guns, ships, and planes.” The withholding tax has been with us ever since.
The social planners and politicians in Washington are constantly scheming up new ways to convince Americans that more of their money is necessary to cure some social affliction that, outside of the power of government, would otherwise not go away. They will not admit that there will always be some form of social ill plaguing this country, and no amount of confiscation of wages from the taxpayer can fund them out of existence.
This blog post is the first of two. The next one will catalogue the methods necessary to fix the problems created by a 60,000 page tax code that no one can understand, much less fully comply with. You are all unintentional criminals, and far be it from any of us to think that some politicians won’t think of a way to prosecute your violation of the tax code to ensure that the money keeps flowing to Washington, and politicians can keep buying votes.
Well, I didn't have as much time as I had planned on having to spend on this blog, but just to let you know, I think I will go ahead with the financial history project sometime after October 10th. I think I got a little too ambitious about what I was going to write on here, but that's okay; I'll just narrow things down a bit and give a sparser outline of my take on big events in the history of financial banking crises as they unfolded since ancient times.
Anyway, recently I just perused through two very interesting books. The first of which was "The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm," by Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr. The second of which is "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," by Amity Shlaes.
I'll just convey a short timeline of what went wrong for each particular crisis, and then list the "seven elements" of a financial crisis given by Bruner and Carr at the bottom of the post.
With respect to the great Knickerbocker Panic of 1907, the initial trigger appears to have been the San Francisco fire in April 1906, which caused gold to flow out West from NYC, London, and other places around the world. British insurance firms, in particular, were forced to liquidate a lot of their assets (much of it being in American equities listed in NYC), since they had underwritten fire insurance for SF that many could not make payments on.
There was also plenty of demagoguery from the primary leftists in the America of that era, which were the Progressives in the GOP led by Teddy Roosevelt. Standard Oil and U.S. Steel were being attacked in the courts, Sinclair Lewis was railing against meat packers, and the Hepburn Act of 1906 allowed TR to set maximum shipping rates for railroad companies, whose stock went into sharp decline as a result. But after a "sharp break" in the market on March 13, 1907, the U.S. Treasury was able to deposit enough gold in national banks to calm the crisis down.
That is, until the Bank of England imposed a prohibition on finance bills from the U.S. which were used by Americans to help finance agricultural harvest-time credit in the fall by reducing currency exchange volatility. The BOE decision led to sudden outflows of gold from NYC to London in the summer, leading to another money market panic in July.
All of this left the financial system in a perilous state of affairs, when the Heinze brothers made their fatefully horrible decision to try to execute a short squeeze on the bears who had borrowed stock in United Copper, only to find out that there were far fewer people to actually squeeze than they had thought. In October of 1907, United Copper collapsed, the Heinzes couldn't make their payments, the Gross & Kleeberg brokerage house went under as a result, and NYC clearing houses had to scramble to come up with a rescue.
It seemed to work at first, but didn't carry the day, as a classic run on Knickerbocker Trust occurred on October 22. This was very similar to what happened to Lehman Bros. in September 2007, and what Gordon Brown allowed to happen to Iceland's banks as well. People thought that they could safely quarantine the problem to a bank that they did not think highly of, only to learn that the panic fire spread faster than they had imagined it would. About $350 million had been withdrawn from banks by American depositers as a result of the panic, and an unduly severe recession occurred in 1908 as a result. It was only Morgan's special intervention at his personal library on November 2 that kept the situation from going into an even worse spiral.
***
The situation with Hoover and Mellon and the Great Depression was a little different. Hoover, like Roosevelt before him, also belonged to the Progressive wing of the Republican Party. He had spent the entire decade of the 1920s finding ways to artificially raise farm prices and incentivize overproduction in agriculture. His initial response to the normal correction of the stock market in 1929 was to bully American businesses into raising wages and spending more capital. Ironically, this just caused corporate profits, and thus American equity to drop even more precipitously in succeeding years, thus making the deflationary spiral and unemployment problem even worse.
His response in 1930 was to sign the absurd Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which killed exports and raised import price. All the talk was on budget discipline, restricting immigration, not paying too much to veterans, and allowing the Bank of the United States (which catered mostly to immigrants) to fail.
In 1930 and 1931, Mellon did the worst thing imaginable, raising interest rates and curtailing bank credit to banks with a high percentage of agricultural mortgages, in order to continue to pursue a strong dollar policy. The obvious result of his "liquidationist" approach was disaster. The more banks went under, the worst the problem became for those that remained. Contagion spread.
In 1932, Hoover made the idiocy of his term as President complete when he got Congress to pass a huge tax increase through the Revenue Act of 1932. Is it any wonder that blacks and ordinary Americans in the North switched their allegiance to FDR and the newly leftist-socialist Democratic Party in droves?
A simple, conservative policy pursued by FDR in his initial days of President, of weakening the U.S. dollar and declaring a bank holiday to sort out what was left to be saved, did the trick in terms of finding a bottom to the madness of the Hoover Administration, resulting in spectactular rates of real GDP growth in the following years. Unfortunately, this growth was used as a political talking point by FDR to reach unprecedented levels of tyranny and socialism in U.S. government, most specifically, with the National Industrial Recovery Act, and with the Wagner Act (which officially sanctified union power into federal law), not to mention the oppressive regulation and taxes that came in the form of the SEC, Social Security, and payroll taxes.
Again, we see that pursuing strong dollar policies in times of financial panic is sheer madness, and has disastrous results. When reality hits and people realize that a currency has long been overvalued, the last thing you want to do is try to prop that illusory value up. Better to provide additional monetary cushions to soften the blow, a lesson known at least as far back ago as in the times of the 1st century Roman emperor Tiberius.
***
In any case, here are the aforementioned "seven elements" of a financial crisis, as discussed by Bruner & Carr:
#1. System-Like Architecture (They seem to mean here a hidden dependence of many elements of a larger system on other elements, obscured from outside viewers by the arcane and complex contracts involved by which one part of the system depends on other parts in ways that few people realize, since they only see the surface result as a system appearing to work smoothly on the outside.)
#2. Buoyant Growth
#3. Inadequate Safety Buffers
#4. Adverse Leadership
#5. Real Economic Shock
#6. Behavioral Aberrations
#7. Failure of Collective Action
I think that #'s 1, 2, & 3, are the most fundamental here, and a lot of the others are merely incendental to specific cases in only some cases, although with #5, you could bend this to your own definition to be as fundamental as the first 3. As a game theory type of thinker, I think the elements #4 & #6 really don't tell you much of anything of any real importance, and I also think that #7 is more of a matter of measuring the effectiveness of a response, rather than describing the actual problem itself.
Every election cycle brings prospective politicians promising the world to the electorate that stands between them and the office they wish to hold. The latest political montage of Washington officials have perhaps the largest laundry list of false promises this country has ever seen, if only because they stand poised to enact more socialist legislation on the citizens of this country than any administration in this country’s long and marvelous history. And if all encompassing statements such as “Socialism has never worked anywhere in the world in which it has been tried” aren’t really effective at peaking the attention of the American public, then perhaps a few specific examples of current events might make your ears burn a bit more than that broad generalization.
Against the backdrop of a political ideology held by the present administration that says you should never let a crisis pass without enacting legislation that you would otherwise not be able to ramrod through Congress, it would be beneficial to note the recent financial troubles this country’s media establishments are having and perhaps compare them to something that has recently happened in Argentina.
On May 27th of this year, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said that she would forgive the tax debts of five private media companies within her country. Now, lest you think this was done out of the goodness of her heart, it would be worthwhile to note that this deal has been struck on a barter system of sorts. Mrs. Fernandez made this promise with the understanding that she would be compensated with advertising space that painted her administration in a favorable light. The kicker to all of this being that the ad space would not be utilized until after the 28th of June, just in time to start disseminating the propaganda before mid-term elections.
One need not be a Rhodes Scholar to see the dangerous lines being crossed here. How free can the media truly be when it is dependent on the bailout funds or powers of debt forgiveness of the federal government to stay solvent? Is it really hard to believe that, under a system of government subsidized media, an unbiased dissemination of information pertaining to the actions of the government might never reach the American people if the industry entrusted to distribute that information stands to lose the cash flow that keeps it in business if it publishes information detrimental to those in power?
Recent calls for the revival of the Fairness Doctrine—a political practice in which the government forces radio stations to have an equal counterbalance of opposing viewpoints to their current programming—by such political officials as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) should concern the American people that their elected officials do not truly value the sanctity of a free press.
After all, what are the true dangers of failing to have a free press? Well, we need not look too much farther than a recent story in The Economist about a Ms. Deng Yujiao, a pedicurist from the central Chinese mountain town of Yesanguan. Ms. Deng, 21, was accused of stabbing a local bureaucrat to death on May 10th after the bureaucrat, who asked Ms. Deng to perform “special services” upon him, became enraged upon her refusal and attempted to take those services from Ms. Deng without her willing participation.
The charges against Ms. Deng have since been downgraded to the use of “excessive defensive force,” but only because the Chinese people caught them in time to keep Ms. Deng from being executed for the murder of a government official. Indeed, The Economist observes that, “In Yesanguan the knee-jerk response of the local government was to try to keep reporters away from Ms. Deng. Some Chinese journalists complain of being beaten. Officials whisked Ms. Deng off to a mental asylum, saying that antidepressant pills found in her bag showed she was psychologically unstable. But the public response, and that of more liberal-minded Chinese newspapers, prompted a change of attitude.”
The Economist goes on to note that, “The toning down of the charges is a big concession. In China police rarely change their minds and defendants are scarcely ever found innocent.” Indeed this is a victory if a woman who was forced to use deadly force to defend herself against a violent crime is set free, but the fact that this story was not spread to the Chinese people by way of print, radio, or television news outlets is both tragic and noteworthy. The Chinese people only found out about this story thanks to Internet blogs and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
But even these sources of information are not outside of the reach of the Chinese government’s leaden tactics against personal freedoms. The recent 20 year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre led the government to block access to those blogs and social networking sites that they deemed to be detrimental to the cohesive behavior of the Chinese public. Without access to these sites, the story of Ms. Deng might never have gotten out and her death would have been certain.
Everywhere in the world that socialist governments are allowed to firmly take root, the various forms of media that threaten to advertise the shortcomings of its socialist policies are threatened with their very existence. Whether through government takeover of the private firms or through threats of jail time for those writing the stories, a free media threatens the very existence of a public policy that speeds the decline of a population’s living standard. Without true information there is no way for an electorate to make informed decisions as to whether or not the policies enacted by those they voted for are meant to be in the best interest of the people, or in the best interest of the politician.
It may not be the design of the current administration to assume control of the news that the American people are able to consume, but based upon recent and past history, it would be wise of the American people to ensure that their news stays free of the political sphere of influence. Failure to do so will result in the measuring of success not in massive public demonstrations against failing political policies, but in being able to get the charges of murder against a woman forced to defend herself against rape reduced to a misdemeanor. It may be a victory, but in such a system, sights are lost on that which is most important. That being a government which so empowers a bureaucrat into thinking he could get away with rape should not be allowed to operate in the first place.
When the Declaration of Independence was written by men who were inspired by forces beyond that which the average American finds their self inspired today, they planted seeds within that document with the intent being the springing forth of fruit bearing the future successes and triumphs of this country. Upon one of those seeds was inscribed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Sadly, as the sands of history have slowly drifted past, the pursuit of happiness seems to have much less to do with the achievements of the individual and everything to do with being a dispensation of government.
The transparency so promised by the current administration during the previous campaign season has only been seen in the form of rushing through massive spending programs and legislation. Americans are left questioning such tactics while being told doing so impedes the progress of improving man’s relation to man that the current administration is busy redefining, despite the fact that doing so will cost more money than all the future earnings of every generation that we can see on the horizon.
The most recent headline that got me to thinking about how much the “pursuit of happiness” has become the “right to happiness” was an article written by Time magazine entitled, “Dems Look to Make Health Care a Right.” In the article, written by a Ms. Erica Werner, she goes through the basics of the House Democratic plan to raise taxes on those making over $280,000 a year and fines on employers of up to 8% for failing to provide healthcare insurance to their employees. Yet another article by the same magazine entitled, “The 400 richest Americans and their terrible tax burden” laments that, despite the tax rates on the rich, they often pay a much smaller percentage of their earnings into the tax collection plate due to their ability to hide income.
No one is arguing that the rich are more skilled at hiding earnings from Uncle Sam than your average middle-class American. The problem is that liberals ignore the fact that their tax hikes don’t impact the rich as the economic engine to power progressive social programs they promise them to be. The true result is that these tax hikes wind up hitting those who can least afford to pay that tax—the middle class.
Assuming that the poor pay zero taxes toward the social programs they have become accustomed to receiving and the rich truly are the job creators, which they are, to be sure, then a tax upon the rich only impacts those farther down the economic ladder in a trickle-down effect. For instance:
--The rich create the jobs. When taxes are raised they stop hiring workers or cut wages. The bottom line for the wealthy in these situations is cushioned at the expense of those seeking employment.
--Wealthy is an overstated term that gives the impression we are talking about millionaires many times over. While this is true in some circumstances, approximately 80% of the jobs in this country are creations of small business; and few of them are millionaires to the extent that tax increases do not weigh heavily upon all future financial decisions they are forced to make due to government confiscation of earnings.
--The wealthy are the very ones that provide the funding through investments, bank deposits and venture capital that enable those with job creating ideas to put their ideas into the marketplace. A decrease in any of those three, and fewer businesses are being created and fewer people are being employed.
--The truly rich are able to hire the best tax attorneys and CPAs known to man to help them hide their money in tax sheltered investments that decrease their tax liability. When the money intended for social programs promised by state and federal politicians does not materialize due to these practices of hiding money, politicians are forced to increase the taxes of the middle class, who are unable to hide their money in the same fashion.
It is fair to compare the dependency created by government with its entitlements and social programs that a drug dealer creates with the product he distributes on a street corner when citizens of this country are afraid to seek out employment, receive promotions, or better themselves through further education because doing so threatens to reduce the monthly payments they receive from the government. When government should be scaling back the ease with which one can qualify to get on the government dole, the Obama administration—as part of the stimulus package passed earlier this year—is busy expanding the program through increased payments to states when they expand their welfare rolls.
A set standard of living in this country is no more of a right than that living a long life is a guarantee. Both are earned through discipline—whether through a strict diet and exercise or financial prudence—and a continued pursuit of the self-worth that has defined Americans ever since there have been Americans. It was not the intention of the Founding Fathers to have people look to Uncle Sam to keep a roof over their head and food in their stomach, and it should not be the goal of a politician to do so today.
How does it help a man to do for him that which he should and could do for himself? One cannot say that giving a homeless person on side of the road the money in your pocket is any more beneficial to him than filing his stomach for a time before hunger pangs strike him again. Pulling the man off of the road and engraining within him skills that allow him to provide for his own care is the only way to improve society, and these steps are not measured in sweeping acts of legislation that require $800 billion dollars of taxpayer money.
A major scaling back of government is necessary if the way of life we as Americans have come to enjoy and prosper from since the day many of us were born is to be preserved. To continue down the path this administration and Congress are taking us on is to tell our children, “Forego your dreams, because to be sensitive to everyone’s living standard today, we were willing to doom you to a level of poverty never before seen on these shores.”
We will preserve for ourselves and future generations the greatest country ever known to man, or we will doom future generations to the darkness of low standards of living and Big Brother dominating every facet of their lives. To allow this to happen through the complacency of saying, “There is nothing I can do, so I’ll just do nothing” is as shameful of an act as to be the politician in Washington spending the income of future generations. It is time to stand up and let Washington know there is a price we will not pay, there is a line beyond which they must not advance in attempting to better the lives of strangers at the expense of our children.
The ink is barely dry on the stories about Bernard Madoff’s imprisonment of several lifetimes for his role in creating and operating an investment scheme that robbed Americans of millions in their hard earned savings. However, Mr. Madoff is not even close to being the operator of the largest ponzi scheme this country has ever seen, yet the operators of this even larger fraudulent system are hardly held in contempt in the same fashion as Mr. Madoff.
In November 1936, the United States Government implemented Social Security under the premise of providing financial security for Americans in their old age. As the original information pamphlet for the program explains: starting in 1936, employee and employer would contribute 1¢ to a government savings account for each dollar of earnings, with contributions increasing a half cent every three years until a maximum contribution rate of 3¢ on every dollar earned was reached in the year 1949. This final contribution rate is accompanied with a flat out guarantee that your annual contributions would never exceed $3000 and that your money would go into a fund where it would earn 3% interest annually, with returns to you at retirement always exceeding what you paid into the system.
Needless to say, none of these promises have been kept.
Your rate of contribution has long exceeded 3¢ on every dollar, and the money which the government returns to you upon retirement is not more than you paid in. Social Security taxes are not held in a fund for your later years, nor are they currently earning interest in your name. The reality is that present taxes for the program are going directly to those currently receiving benefits, and they are insufficient to do even that.
A person aged 30, working at an average salary of $45,000 a year and making a 7% contribution to their own retirement account (the amount abrogated by the federal government for Social Security), would equal the money waiting for them under the current Social Security program, and this does not factor in any return on their money from any source whatsoever. Anyone making over $45,000 annually and saving a minimum of 7% would far exceed any amount of money waiting on them from Social Security, and this does not include any return on that money from increased value in stock portfolios or mutual funds.
In 1977, the year in which I was born, actuarial estimates placed the Social Security program at $17 trillion dollars in the hole. Reforms to the program to fix this massive deficit have been non-existent and, as of this moment, Social Security—based upon its obligations for the next 75 years versus its projected tax inflows—is $47 trillion dollars in debt.
Worker-to-beneficiary ratios have declined from 16.5:1 in 1950 to 3.1:1 today. Within twenty years this ratio will have declined even further with only two workers paying into the system for every one person receiving benefits. Under a fictional Q&A session of pre-supposing that a male aged 26 in 2009 counts on Social Security for a significant portion of his income upon retirement, what portion of that benefit can he expect to receive? The Administration’s website replies:
“Unless changes are made, when you reach age 54 in 2037, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 24 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you live to be 100 years old in 2083, your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 26 percent from today’s scheduled levels.”
In other words, for every one dollar you pay into the Social Security system right now, you can expect, at best, 75 cents worth of your money returned to you at the time you become benefit eligible.
The intentions of those who founded Social Security under the guise of establishing a retirement plan for Americans at a time when doing so was by far the exception rather than the rule were noble, but they have been led astray by subsequent generations of politicians who have increased entitlements with no mechanism for funding such promises. Those who wish to reform the system are accused of wishing to cast the elderly into poverty by speech spinsters who practice deception merely to achieve their own political gain.
Social Security is no longer necessary to ensure the financial security of generations of Americans who are able and willing to practice the financial prudence to care for themselves outside of the guise of government, and they should be permitted to opt of the program if they so choose. Social Security’s only form of existence should be in an optional forum in direct competition with the private sector, but it should not be an obligatory system that says to younger generations of Americans they must pay for the care of older generations, with no expectation of receiving this later benefit themselves.
The cost projections for enacted legislative Congressional acts are factored using arbitrary five and ten year windows, with no analysis given to the long-term outlook of such programs. This gives the President and Congressional members every incentive to spend money today, because the costs are not truly seen until many years down the road when people’s minds have ebbed as to the direct cause of such a long running outcome.
Ironically, according to The Heritage Foundation, “the private sector is required by law to disclose future obligations, such as pension and retiree health care plans, and to make annual payments to satisfy them.” Perhaps it is long past time to, at the very least, force government to oblige by the same rules that it requires private businesses to oblige by and ensure that all acts of government have acquired or provided for the necessary funding of its programs before such programs are allowed to go into effect.
Even more to the point, perhaps it is time for Social Security to go the way of many of the elements of the 1930s—relegated to the history books as a part of our past that proved to be a growing pain to a brighter and more prosperous future.
When this country was founded by those giants amongst men who, for the first time in recorded history, deemed that the power of the government is derived from the consent of the governed, there was increasing debate amongst them as to the legitimacy and value of having political parties. There were arguments that parties, split on political lines, were detrimental in that once a party picked a side on an issue, the followers of that party would back the issue whether they actually agreed with it or not, so as to identify with the beliefs of their party’s leaders. Conversely, they also viewed parties as a good thing to ensure a sort of check and balance against any one view dominating the country’s politic.
Indeed, the issue still remains today when one seeks to identify with one party or the other. The tendency is for me to label myself a Republican, but I differ from that party on such fundamental issues of morality such as the legality of prostitution and gay marriage that any conservative Republican would ban me from the party. But I diverge from the beliefs of Democrats on so many more grounds—taxes, the growth of government, global warming, universal healthcare—that I can’t label myself as a Democrat either.
And so it goes with any political party that, once I look into the issues, I can never agree with most of that party’s platform. And in this plight I doubt I am alone.
So we come to the issue that prompted this commentary, and the subsequent reasoning for the above three paragraphs. Regardless of the their good intentions, their harboring back to a day and time they believed to be more innocent and pure (even though the good old days weren’t, as Billy Joel once put it, always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems), Republicans and the religious movements in this country are practicing discrimination everyday when they preach against the evils of gay marriage.
We are told that permitting two men or two women to enter into the bond of matrimony under federal or state sanctioning would be a perversion of that sacred union that the good Lord intended to be between only one man and one woman. Pundits of political goings-on like Cal Thomas (with whom I agree on a great many things) bash churches who seek to permit their brothers and sisters of different sexual orientation from having their love recognized before the Lord. One would think that respecting the decision of the heads of these churches would be tantamount to the support of free will; yet the right, for all of their love of liberty and freedom, often are not the beacon bearers when the standard turns to issues of morality. The right, believing they have a mission granted by the Holy Father in Heaven, seeks enforce morality through legislation in regards to what people may do to their own bodies, whether that is hiring a prostitute or consuming illicit substances (and, no, aborting a child does not fall under this umbrella—the child’s body is not the property of the mother).
Sites like NoGayMarriage.com provide a top ten list of the reasons that gay marriages should be fought at all costs. The list, which is a summary of all the arguments used by those opposed to the marriage that challenges their preconceived notions of “normal,” seeks to impose the idea amongst the public that permitting gay marriage would lead to the complete and total breakdown of the societal structures in which we live.
First on this list is the warning that the permission of gay marriage in this country would be destructive to the family lives of children in that they would be raised increasingly in single-parent homes. As stated by NoGayMarriage.com, “A recent article in the Weekly Standard described how the advent of legally sanctioned gay unions in Scandinavian countries has already destroyed the institution of marriage, where half of today's children are born out of wedlock…It will be a world where little boys and girls are shuffled from pillar to post in an ever-changing pattern of living arrangements-where huge numbers of them will be raised in foster-care homes or living on the street (as millions do in other countries all over the world today). Imagine an environment where nothing is stable and where people think primarily about themselves and their own self-preservation.”
So we are to believe that gay marriage is the single-most important factor in determining whether or not a child will grow up in a home without both parents present. But, according to data from the 2000 US Census, 50% of the first births to women aged 15-29 are born to single mothers who will not be married or have yet to be married[i]. We have a divorce rate in this country that hovers around the 50% mark, yet the right in this country wants us to believe that, despite evidence to the contrary, gay unions will drive these percentages up in the 60 and 70% range.
Media campaigns against gays would have you believe that they are promiscuous and abhor commitment in relationships, yet infidelity amongst married couples has never been higher than it is right now. In fact, according to infidelityfacts.com[ii], nearly 6 in 10 married men and women admit to cheating on their spouse at some point during the relationship. Yet the general public is meant to fear infidelity amongst homosexual couples as the precursor to the destruction of basic family values.
Those seeking to keep gay unions from the sanctity of the church will quote all manner of scripture as justification of their discrimination. Scripture passages such as Paul’s writing in Romans 1 (v. 29-31, NIV), “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”
It would be wise for those toting their bibles around and quoting scripture as the crux of their argument against gay marriage to remember that slave masters did the very same thing when justifying their reasons for holding onto slaves prior to the Civil War.
Conservatives argue that the diversification of their platform is not the answer to re-electing a politician the caliber of Ronald Reagan. Rather, they argue, a more effective communication of conservative policies will accomplish this goal. Perhaps they are right, but I fail to see how quoting scripture to limit homosexuals from being able to express their love before the Lord is anything other than the continued discrimination of a segment of the American population that only wishes to express their love for their significant other before God.
In March, 1983, Ronald Reagan spoke to the National Association of Evangelicals, invoking them to continue “transcending the moral evils of our past…There is no room for racism, anti-semitism, or other forms of racial and ethnic hatred in this country. I know that you've been horrified, as have I, by the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice. Use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst. The commandment given us is clear and simple: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’"
I would hope his words have echoed through the years and their true meaning be applied to all segments of America’s population. After all, they are human beings just like the rest of us.
Recently writing an op-ed in support of healthcare reform, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown and Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (both liberals) opined that a public health insurance plan would, "offer benefits that are as good as those available through private insurance plans -- or better." Yet, despite this gleaming endorsement of such an insurance plan, they contradicted themselves a few days later by voting against a two-page amendment in the Senate Health Committee that would have required all members of that committee to join any healthcare package enacted by Congress.
Seeking to add the roughly 46 million medically uninsured Americans to the rolls of the insured under a government plan, Congressional Democrats, at the urging of the president, have proposed a healthcare bill that could push the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans to 47%, while levying heavy fines against businesses that do not provide health insurance to their employees. Ignoring for the moment the simple economic concept that one dollar abrogated by the government is one dollar that is not available for the expansion of business and the creation of jobs, it is worthy to note what Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in defense of the Democratic plan; "The bottom line is that I think the president believes that the richest 1% of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years."
Creating dependency on the government through the creation of such government programs as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and now Universal Healthcare is an attempt by those pushing such legislation to create for themselves a permanent voting block amongst the American electorate. In doing so, they wage class warfare against the jobs creators and innovators in this country by portraying the wealthy as robber barons who create their wealth at the expense of the hard labor and low pay of the working class. This is pandering in the worst form to a growing segment of the population who would prefer wallow in their grief over their own self-inflicted socio-economic status rather than educate themselves to a point that makes it feasible to attain a job that will lift them from the lower ranks of the wealth ladder.
When Barack Obama spoke at his inaugural address about not defining government as one that is too big or too small, but one that seeks to ensure good jobs, benefits, and wages to the citizens of this country, he was laying out a plan to expand the role of the federal government in the role of our daily lives, seeking to continue the infantilization of those who have grown addicted to the government.
The truth is that the government medical plan, as has been currently offered up in the House in Congress, will not insure 47 million Americans, nor will it do so cheaper than a private insurance company would. Forbes recently published an article stating that most employer based insurance plans are already subsidized by the government in the form of these employer premiums being able to be written off at the end of the fiscal year. So states the article, "Because the government subsidizes a third party to pay for care, the patients, doctors and hospitals are together operating and patronizing an all-you-can-eat-buffet system of health care when they should be shopping a la carte for the best care at the best price." What a novel concept.
Perhaps an even better change would be to stop having Americans health insurance tied to their continued employment status with any one company. This way, employers could give the premiums for such insurance benefits directly to the employee and allow them to shop in the same fashion for their own policy that best suits the needs of their individual families. Instead, we are given a one size fits all government program that the CBO estimates will only ensure 12 million of the 46 million uninsured--and there is debate as to whether all covered will or will not be citizens of this country--over the next 10 years, with a price tag of $239 billion in that same time frame.
Democrats argue that projections as to the cost of such a program are nearly impossible to tabulate since all of the factors that will influence cost and savings under such a scheme can never all be accounted for. While this may be true, it does nothing to help their cause in proving that such a program will curb the costs of medical care in this country while providing insurance to all those who are currently doing without.
The mindset in Congress is not one that in concerned with crunching the numbers so as to provide cost savings to the American people; rather, it is one that seeks to impose legislation that, for years, Democrats have held as the Holy Grail of policy. Says Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, "Health care has been such an impossible dream for so many decades that a lot of today's Congress would overlook the deficit problems. I hear it all the time from colleagues in leadership: 'We always find enough money for defense. We'll find enough for health care'."
Finding the money would not be such an issue for Democrats if the budget was not rapidly spiraling out of control, and the president quickly in need of another excuse for the deficit explosion other than, "I inherited it." So, intent on "fixing" the problems the CBO points out in report after report about healthcare reform, the president invited CBO director Douglas Elmendorf to the White House for a meeting which has been equated to being, "somewhat akin as the owner of the team asking the umpires to come up to the owner's box."
No one can be sure what conversation took place in the secret confines of the Oval Office, but the White House sought to quickly quell the speculation by saying that there was nothing "untoward" about the meeting. That may be so, but it is curious that Elmendorf was called to the White House on Monday (July 20) and by the end of the same week, the CBO had produced new estimates concerning healthcare reform that give the Democrats some footing in the argument of spiraling costs.
Granted that no one blames Mr. Elmendorf for accepting the president's invitation to the White House--as Republican John Boehner has admitted--but it leaves one to question whether or not Mr. Elmendorf, himself a Democratic appointed figure, was influenced in any way by the meeting. Elmendorf claimed on the CBO's website that, "Of course, the setting of the conversation and the nature of the participants do not affect CBO's analysis of health reform legislation."
Well what is he going to say? "You know, after having a nice little sit down with ole Barack, I have had a change of heart and see the wonderful light that is universal healthcare?" No, but if all reports by the CBO prior to the meeting had been claiming that "In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount…And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs;" and now, after the meeting, CBO reports are stating that public insurance program premiums would only be 10% lower than that of private insurance companies (when private health research firms are projecting premiums to be 20% lower) and only 10 to 12 million people would sign up for the plan (when, again, private health research firms have estimated the numbers could easily go as high as 100 million people), it is acceptable to question that even if Mr. Elmendorf was not threatened with his job for his damaging projections to healthcare, he was at least significantly influenced by meeting with President Obama due to his admission of being excited over the meeting.
Now, it is here that I must admit it is not an odd thing for someone to meet the President of the United States and be excited in doing so, nor is it difficult to see why someone would cast off projections by a private health research firm as skewing the numbers against Universal Healthcare in favor of keeping such care in the hands of the private sector. However, public opinion of the president is trending down along with American's favorable opinion of his prized legislation. Americans are rightly concerned about the deficit and do not believe Democrats such as Chris Dodd when they say, "So we expect that not only are we going to pay for health care reform in a deficit-neutral way, but that it's also going to achieve big savings across the system--including in the private sector where the CBO never gives us any credit--but if hospitals and doctors are starting to operate in a smarter way, that's going to help you even if you're not involved in a government system."
Perhaps Congressional Democrats will be able to make hospitals and doctors practice more efficiently just as they have created a resounding success in America's classrooms. The fact of the matter is that if the Congressional health plan was so good, Congressional members would not be voting to keep themselves out of the plan like they did in the Senate Health Committee last week. And that, more than anything, should be enough to give every American pause when it comes to government healthcare.
