Budgetary Magic: Funding of Obamacare

From reading and listening to all the learned pundits it seems remarkable that no one has really ever tried to show in some concrete way how the 111 Congress and the Obama Administration were able to say with a straight face that they passed ObamaCare and balanced the budget all at the same time.  Remember they wanted to give 43 million people health insurance and not increase the federal deficit...  the problem was how to pay for it.

Here is how they were able to do it:

• Make the drug companies reduce the prices of their drugs by $80 billion (coercision?)
• Take $500 million from Medicare and Indian health service (deception?)
• Force 300 million buy health insurance for $900 million (constitutional?) (tax)
• Increase payroll taxes
• Force 50 states to use Medicaid to subsidize the future regional health pools (constitutional?)
• Regulate the insurance industry to force them to reduce costs 
• Force the insurance industry to accept more people

The CBO was able to certify that the budget would not be busted because ObamaCare was going to push all the costs to the states and citizens of this country which meant the cost to the federal government would not result in a deficit..  The only thing that the federal government will now pay is the cost of regulating the insurance industry and the enforcement efforts by the IRS.

The consequences of this White House and Congressional shell game was to shift the cost burden onto the shoulders of the citizens and the states.  They did not reduce costs -  they just rearranged the cost pools until the burden was off Uncle Sam.  We will either pay for this legislation through payroll taxes, income taxes, or being forcibly required to pay for federally mandated health insurance's coverage which the consumer will have no choice except to write the check.  The federal government will dictate everything - the cost of insurance, what will be covered by insurance policies, etc.

Eventually the insurance industry will no longer exist; we will be left with only the federal government selling us our insurance policies.  I am not looking forward to the day that we have to stand in line to buy insurance policies like we have to purchase car tags.

Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness

Memorial Day cookout will cost you 29% more this year thanks to inflation | Mail Online

Memorial Day cookout will cost you 29% more this year thanks to inflation | Mail Online

Who besides Democrats, Obama, and Pelosi do we have to thank for the high prices this Memorial Day?

Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness

When Humans, Machines Merge - TIME

Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge - TIME

Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

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How the Happy Meal ban explains San Francisco - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly

How the Happy Meal ban explains San Francisco - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly: "In August 2010, San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar decided that city intervention was needed to help him raise his daughter.

As Mar later told reporters, he was shocked to discover a trove of toys from McDonald's Happy Meals stashed in her room. Mar was the one taking his daughter to McDonald's and buying the food — but he said that the 'pester power' of a preteen was simply too much for him to withstand on his own. So he proposed that the city ban restaurants from including toys with meals of more than 600 calories that lack agreed-upon amounts of fruits and vegetables.

Mar's 'Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance' subsequently passed in November by an 8-3 vote in the Board of Supervisors — a veto-proof majority. Barring legal action, the Happy Meal as we know it will be verboten in San Francisco come Dec. 1. Eric Mar's daughter has been saved.

Both conservative blowhard Bill O'Reilly and left-leaning comedian Lewis Black — and many, many people in-between — were left to wonder 'What the hell?' in the wake of San Francisco's ban. It's not the first time. In recent years, San Francisco government has passed numerous laws to make us healthier, greener, and — in the city's eyes — all-around better people. Whether we like it or not. This includes banning the sale of cigarettes in drugstores, and, later, supermarkets; banning plastic bags in large chain stores; banning bottled water in City Hall, and the sale of soft drinks on government property; banning the declawing of cats; making composting mandatory; and forbidding city departments from doing business with companies that were involved in the (pre–Civil War) slave trade, yet haven't publicly atoned.

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John Kerry Invokes Giffords’ Shooting to Push For “Clean Energy” Legislation…

Weasel Zippers » Blog Archive » John Kerry (D-Lurch) Invokes Giffords’ Shooting to Push For “Clean Energy” Legislation…: "Congresswoman ‘s Gabrielle Giffords’ (D-Ariz.) shooting in Tucson, Ariz., last weekend has brought up several questions about the partisan nature of our current political climate. But today Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a speech at the left-leaning policy think tank Center for American Progress that working in a bipartisan manner on infrastructure and clean energy could help overcome the “divisive political rhetoric” in the wake of the Tucson tragedy.

“In the weeks and months ahead, the real issue we need to confront isn’t just what role divisive political rhetoric may have played on Saturday — but it’s the violence divisive, overly simplistic dialogue does to our democracy every day,” Kerry said

“The frustrating reality is that our American political system is increasingly paralyzed and Balkanized into a patchwork of narrow interests that have driven the larger ‘national good’ far from the national dialogue altogether,” he said.

He added that while building and investing in America has always been a bi-partisan issue, currently “partisan paralysis” has kept us from rebuilding the infrastructure investment made through the years from politicians on both sides of the line.

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White House Plans to Push Global Warming Policy, GOP Vows Fight - FoxNews.com

White House Plans to Push Global Warming Policy, GOP Vows Fight - FoxNews.com: "HONOLULU, Hawaii -- After failing to get climate-change legislation through Congress, the Obama administration plans on pushing through its environmental policies through other means, and Republicans are ready to put up a fight.

On Jan. 2, new carbon emissions limits will be put forward as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares regulations that would force companies to get permits to release greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Critics say the new rules are a backdoor effort to enact the president's agenda on global warming without the support of Congress, and would hurt the economy and put jobs in jeopardy by forcing companies to pay for expensive new equipment.

'They are job killers. Regulations, period -- any kind of regulation is a weight on economy. It requires people to comply with the law, which takes work hours and time, which reduces the profitability of firms. Therefore, they grow more slowly and you create less jobs,' said environmental scientist Ken Green of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

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Obama's mystery proposal to regulate the Internet | Washington Examiner

Obama's mystery proposal to regulate the Internet | Washington Examiner: "If President Obama wants his executive branch to resemble the opaque, power-hungry political machinations in Chicago, he seems to be succeeding in the area of Internet regulation. Last April, a federal court told the Federal Communications Commission that it has no business regulating the Internet. Unfortunately, judicial rejection of the commission's first swing at the 'net neutrality' ball -- the idea the FCC must regulate the Internet to insure everybody has equal access -- didn't deter Obama's FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, from taking another whack. He's bringing a new set of proposed net neutrality regulations to the five-member panel Tuesday. Unfortunately, nobody knows any details of the new proposal because Genachowski has kept them secret until the last possible minute even as he rushed them forward for a vote. How ironic that the Internet, the great and empowering liberator of information that 'wants to be free,' is being chopped up behind closed doors by an unelected panel. Note, too, that this is being considered by the FCC on the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year.

In their net neutrality quest, Genachowski and two of his fellow Democratic appointees are working to expand government power into an area where the commission has no jurisdiction, under the guise of solving a problem that does not exist. Meredith Baker, a Republican FCC appointee, summarized the situation well: 'We have two branches of government -- Congress and the courts -- expressing grave concerns with our agency becoming increasingly unmoored from our statutory authority. By seeking to regulate the Internet now, we exceed the authority Congress has given us and justify those concerns.' Incoming House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., has called on the FCC to 'cease and desist.'

This exercise in government opacity and overreach is already damaging the economy. As major telecommunications and Internet service companies prepare to roll out new fourth generation (4G) wireless service for millions of customers, these unelected bureaucratic commissars are recklessly creating doubt about the future value and profitability of those companies' investments. They are also discouraging future investments that need to be made for the Internet to continue its phenomenal growth.

Federal courts will almost certainly strike down anything the FCC adopts Tuesday, just as they did earlier this year. Congress will also have its chance to undo Genachowski's handiwork through the Congressional Review Act. But why should we have to go this far to rein in a government agency supposedly run by people who took an oath to 'support and defend' our Constitution? Is Obama unable to make his own appointees obey the law? Either way, the new Congress should hold Obama accountable for what the FCC is now doing in his name.

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Robert M. McDowell: The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom - WSJ.com

Robert M. McDowell: The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom - WSJ.com: "By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

For years, proponents of so-called 'net neutrality' have been calling for strong regulation of broadband 'on-ramps' to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.



Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.

Analysts and broadband companies of all sizes have told the FCC that new rules are likely to have the perverse effect of inhibiting capital investment, deterring innovation, raising operating costs, and ultimately increasing consumer prices. Others maintain that the new rules will kill jobs. By moving forward with Internet rules anyway, the FCC is not living up to its promise of being 'data driven' in its pursuit of mandates—i.e., listening to the needs of the market.

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Economics 101

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Obama Made ‘Big Mistake’ on Climate Bill, Turner Says - Bloomberg

Obama Made ‘Big Mistake’ on Climate Bill, Turner Says - Bloomberg: "U.S. President Barack Obama made a “big mistake” in pushing health-care legislation before climate change, billionaire Ted Turner said today.

“We would have an energy climate change bill in the United States if President Obama had made that his top priority and brought that to the American people and Congress first rather than the health-care bill,” Turner, founder of Time Warner Inc.’s CNN, said today at a conference in Cancun, Mexico. “But he didn’t, and I think it was a big mistake.”

Obama, who campaigned on a promise to fight climate change, made the economy, health care, energy and education his top priorities after taking office. Health-care legislation was signed into law earlier this year after contentious debate while a “cap-and-trade” bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions stalled in the Senate. Obama now says he doubts such a measure can win passage until 2013 at the earliest.

“The climate bill is much more important than health care because the climate situation is about life and death whereas the health-care bill was much more limited,” Turner, 72, said.

A bill creating a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions and establish a market in pollution allowances passed the House of Representatives last year. The Senate dropped the measure earlier this year amid claims that an emissions-trading system would boost energy prices and hurt the economy.

Skepticism Rises

U.S. skepticism about whether humans are causing climate change has increased, polls show. Congressional elections in November will bring into office in January almost four dozen new lawmakers who question global warming, according to ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group allied with Democrats.

Turner, who also spoke in Cancun yesterday, said more needs to be done to raise public awareness of the threat.

“We have to convince the majority of people in the world that we are right and get them motivated,” he said. “That’s a big job, but hopefully we can do it.”

Turned noted humans only began burning the fossil fuels linked to climate change about 200 years ago. “Now we are being asked to completely change our energy system in a quick period of time,” he said. “It’s hard for us. It’s something we really have to do if we want to survive.”

Climate Summit

Turner spoke this weekend at the World Climate Summit, a conference focused on how businesses can help combat climate change. The gathering is timed to coincide with United Nations- led climate change treaty talks in Cancun.

Negotiators from about 190 countries are debating the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and terms for a new accord that includes all major polluters. The U.S., the second-biggest greenhouse-gas emitter after China, is the only industrialized nation not bound by the Kyoto treaty.

Japan, Russia and Canada have refused to sign up for a second round of emissions reductions once the current ones written into Kyoto expire in 2012.

Emerging economies, such as China, India and Brazil, are pushing for the developed countries to agree on a new commitment period. Discord over Kyoto threatens to take attention away from talks for a new global climate agreement that includes the U.S., UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said yesterday.

The Obama administration is limited in what it can commit to in the talks because the U.S. doesn’t have a national law capping emissions by a certain percentage. Obama’s lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, says the U.S. will stick to its pledge of cutting greenhouse gases about 17 percent by 2020.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to start regulating carbon from power plants and oil refiners starting in January.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kim Chipman in Washington at kchipman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net.

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WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord | Environment | The Guardian

WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord | Environment | The Guardian: "Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial 'Copenhagen accord', the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.

Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries' negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental 'treaty circumvention' and deals between nations.

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Be Afraid - Be Very Afraid

EDITORIAL: Wave goodbye to Internet freedom - Washington Times: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to add the Internet to its portfolio of regulated industries. The agency's chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced Wednesday that he circulated draft rules he says will 'preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet.' No statement could better reflect the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of Obama administration policies.

With a straight face, Mr. Genachowski suggested that government red tape will increase the 'freedom' of online services that have flourished because bureaucratic busybodies have been blocked from tinkering with the Web. Ordinarily, it would be appropriate at this point to supply an example from the proposed regulations illustrating the problem. Mr. Genachowski's draft document has over 550 footnotes and is stamped 'non-public, for internal use only' to ensure nobody outside the agency sees it until the rules are approved in a scheduled Dec. 21 vote. So much for 'openness.'

The issue of 'net neutrality' is nothing new, but the increasing popularity of online movie streaming services like Netflix have highlighted an area of potential concern. When someone watches a film over the Internet, especially in high definition, the maximum available capacity of the user's connection is used. Think, for example, of the problems that would arise at the water works if everyone decided to turn on their faucets and take a shower simultaneously. Internet providers are beginning to see the same strain on their networks.

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Economy Cartoons - US News and World Report

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What will be Barack Obama's ACHIEVEMENTS in 2011?

China, Russia quit dollar:

What will be Barack Obama's ACHIEVEMENTS in 2011?

• Finding and keeping qualified economic advisors
• Triangulation to the center of American politics
• Airport security (TSA)
• Federal Regulation of all human behavior $
• Setting world record for the number of appearances and interviews on television
• Historically high Frequent flier-miles on Air Force One $
• Afghanistan war
• American dollar devaluation $
• Unemployment $
• Iran 
• Iraq
• North Korea 
• Inflation and/or Deflation $
• Economic growth $
• rescue mission by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund $$$$$$
• Terrorism
• Prosecution of business "fat cats"
• Guantanamo Bay closing
• "Too big to fail" $
• Gays in the military
• Union Pensions unfunded liabilities $
• Stability of American Dollar ($)
• Federal deficit $
• Increase/decrease Federal debt $
• Increase/decrease Federal spending $
• Federal tax increase $
• Health Care quality $
• Consumer confidence
• Energy  independence
• Over-Regulation of American Business
• Balance of trade with China
• Prosecution of Terrorists
• Global governance
• Obesity
• Global warming
• Green jobs $
• Nationalization of American Business
• START treaty
• Winter Olympics for America
• Political bipartisanship
• Listening to the American People
• Upholding the Constitution of the United States
• More documentation of United States violations of Human Rights
• Explaining Obamacare more clearly and forcefully

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Bond Market Defies Fed - WSJ.com

Bond Market Defies Fed - WSJ.com: "Bucking the Federal Reserve's efforts to push interest rates lower, investors are selling off U.S. government debt, driving rates in many cases to their highest levels in more than three months.

The Fed's $600 billion program to buy Treasury bonds began late last week and is kicking into high gear this week, with the central bank buying up tens of billions of dollars of debt.

Bucking the Fed's efforts to push down interest rates, investors are selling off U.S. Treasurys, driving some rates to their highest levels in months. Michael Casey and Emma Moody discuss. Also, Jon Hilsenrath talks about Fed officials, including Janet Yellen and Bill Dudley, who say the stimulus plan is an attempt to boost U.S. growth, not weaken the dollar or raise inflation above 2%.

That should have driven prices up on those bonds and lowered their interest rates, or yields, which move opposite to the price. Instead, yields on almost every Treasury have been rising.

The trend is a potential problem for the economy and the Fed. Rates had fallen sharply for months in anticipation of a Fed buying program, and in a short time much of that effect has been lost, spelling an unwelcome rise in borrowing costs throughout the economy.

That could throw a wrench in what the Fed is trying to accomplish: to use low rates to encourage more borrowing and risk-taking by consumers, businesses and investors, thereby reviving growth.

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Pat Buchanan : Personal Finance : The Fed Trashes the Dollar - Townhall.com

Pat Buchanan : Personal Finance : The Fed Trashes the Dollar - Townhall.com:

"If it is the first responsibility of the Federal Reserve to protect the dollars that Americans earn and save, is it not dereliction of duty for the Fed to pursue a policy to bleed value from those dollars? For that is what Chairman Ben Bernanke is up to with his QE2, or 'quantitative easing.'

Translation: The Fed is committed to buy $600 billion in bonds from banks and pay for them by printing money that will then be deposited in those banks. The more dollars that flood into the economy, the less every one of them is worth.

Bernanke is not just risking inflation. He is inducing inflation.

He is reducing the value of the dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive and imports more expensive, so that we will consume fewer imports. He is trying to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit by treating the once universally respected dollar like the peso of a banana republic.

Sarah Palin has nailed cold what Bernanke is about:

'We shouldn't be playing around with inflation. It's not for nothing Reagan called it 'as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.'

'The Fed's pump-priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed's proposals 'clueless.' When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist.

'We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings.'

Egging Ben on is the Nobel-prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Fed policy is too timid, says Krugman.

When Bernanke said we are not 'going to try to raise inflation to a super-normal level,' he blew it, says Krugman, and 'there goes the best chance the Fed's plan might actually work.'

What the Fed should do, he says, is change expectations 'by leading people to believe that we will have somewhat above-normal inflation ... which would reduce the incentive to sit on cash.'

But 'sit on cash' is a definition of saving. Is saving bad? Once, Americans were taught that saving was a good thing.

Not to Krugman. He wants to panic the public into believing the money they have put into savings accounts and CDs will be rapidly eaten up by Fed-created inflation, so they will run out and spend that money now to get the economy moving again.

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