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Public support for the U.S. health-care overhaul fell to its lowest level in a Kaiser Family Foundation survey after the Oct. 1 debut of government-run insurance marketplaces greeted consumers with breakdowns on websites, higher prices and potentially broken promises.
About 33 percent of Americans surveyed in the past week said they had a favorable opinion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from 38 percent a month earlier, the lowest level since the law was signed in March 2010, the Menlo Park, California-based nonprofit research group, said today.It's one thing to talk about Benghazi, the NSA spying, the IRS scandal, and reams of stories about government workers wasting money (like the GSA taking trips to Vegas.) But the Obamacare rollout is in the public's face. It's not something that is annoying but doesn't affect them, it affects the holy shit out of them. It's draining the wallets and those it hasn't affected yet are beginning to realize that it will very soon.
Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.
“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”
In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because of the change to their health insurance.So I really want to be a fly on the wall when they interviewed for their next job.
Sebelius, wearing green, walked through the front doors of North Shore Hospital near Miami Shores where she shook hands with hospital staff and members of the Epilepsy Foundation who are staffing the Obamacare Navigation center housed off the hospital’s lobby. There she met with the team helping South Floridians to sign-up on line or on paper.
“So she is being helpful,” asked the secretary to a couple sitting at one table of a navigator. “Absolutely,” they responded.
At a second table, the secretary met Carmen Salero who was trying to sign up online. As the secretary and Salero made small talk, CBS4′s Brian Andrews noticed the site crash on the lap top in front of them.
“The screen says I’m sorry but the system is temporarily down,” Andrews pointed out. “Uh oh,” responded the secretary. “That happens every day,” said Salerno, “it must mean a lot of people are on there trying to get coverage.”Yeah. That's what it means. Crap code and poorly thought out design had nothing to do with it. Enjoy the reaction. The press report makes it sound like Sebelius is soldiering on in the face of problems like a real trooper. Never mind that she CREATED THE GODDAMN PROBLEMS.
Improved fuel efficiency is one of the easiest and practical solutions society can implement to combat climate change, but its unintended consequences are large: potholes and shaky bridges all across the U.S. map. That's because more efficient cars mean yield barren fuel-tax coffers, which traditionally have funded bridge and road infrastructure.Because climate change is real and unintended consequences of taxes and regulations are just all made up in your mind and stuff. Imagine all these damn drivers having the temerity to actually use the roads and bridges for.. driving! The nerve. The roads and bridges would be in pristine condition if we'd just stop using them.
The federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn't budged in two decades, and that hasn't helped those coffers, either; indexed for inflation, it would be at about 30 cents per gallon today. The effect is that such infrastructure has nearly 40 percent less funding than in 1993.Because we are spending the money we get in very wisely. We never waste in the government.
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| What taxes get spent in Vegas, stay in Vegas. Until they go back to Washington |
"Dealing with climate change is not a top priority of Oregon's transportation planners," said Steve Woolpert, professor of politics at Saint Mary's College of California.
Some view the VMT as a means of addressing an unfairness in the system as people opt for more fuel-efficient vehicles—for example, that Prius drivers end up paying less for road infrastructure than their gas-guzzling counterparts. Woolpert thinks that's a wrongheaded argument. "(VMT) will weaken incentives for buying fuel-efficient vehicles. … It is unfortunate that Oregon is pursuing a VMT rather than a comprehensive response to climate change."Maybe because the climate change is laughable. If all these climate change people really were that worried about it, maybe they wouldn't be buying up all this coastal property that will be underwater in a few years because of polar ice melt or whatever.
"The high cost of coastal homes in New York and Los Angeles is on its own a market signal that the alleged threat of global warming is well overdone. Even worse for those who buy into the theory of global warming that says a planetary crack-up is inevitable absent a substantial human response, is that Malibu, Manhattan and the Hamptons are filled with the very people who, when asked if they believe in the global warming theory, would most likely say yes. Ok, so Ted Danson owns in Martha's Vineyard, noted environmental activist Laurie David does too, and then Al Gore is known to have purchased a coastal palazzo in Montecito, CA. What this tells us is that even global warming's most famous advocates don't believe very deeply in their own activism. To believe the warmists we're sitting idle as Rome supposedly burns, but as evidenced by the popularity of coastal property among warmists and non-warmists alike, the market says the 'science' predicting catastrophe is utter nonsense."
The Obama administration plans to delay the start of next year's ObamaCare enrollment period, a move pitched as a way to give consumers and insurance companies more time to study their options -- but which also conveniently pushes the second round of enrollment past the 2014 midterm elections.
A Department of Health and Human Services official confirmed the change to Fox News. The decision does not affect those trying to enroll this year, despite the myriad problems with the launch of the law and HealthCare.gov. Rather, it affects those who will sign up late next year for 2015 coverage.
The administration will allow consumers to start signing up on Nov. 15, 2014, as opposed to Oct. 15. Enrollment will last until Jan. 15, 2015, instead of Dec. 7.Seriously, we're trying to help. And besides, it's our law, we can do what we want with it. If we want to change it midstream without going through buzzkills like congress, we'll do it.
"All we ever heard about Obamacare is that it would lower our deductibles and premiums," said Jennifer Slafter, 40 of Mabel, Minn. "That's just not what's happened."
Slafter and her husband, Steve, are scrambling to find affordable care for themselves and their two children. The exchange's Blue Cross Blue Shield plan was $1,087 a month with a $6,000 deductible, while a Medica plan was $877 a month with a $12,700 deductible. Both are steeper than their current plan.
"Everything got higher," said Slafter, who is still waiting to hear whether they qualify for a premium subsidy. But even if they do, she said she'd still find it very tough to meet the deductibles.Those of you who are surprised, raise your hands. Those of you who supported Obama, raise your hands.
It is a determination made by the company’s auditor using both quantitative and qualitative factors which results in a dollar value threshold. This dollar value, if achieved or surpassed by inaccurate transactions, would result in the company’s financial statements to be “materially misstated.” There is no standard set across all companies that must be met. In an SEC accounting bulletin, auditors were directed to not determine materiality solely on a quantifiable basis. Rather, the determination was to be considered with other factors. The auditor then makes a determination whether there is a “substantial likelihood” that a “reasonable person” would consider the information important.When you put language in a law like "reasonable" and "likelihood" then the law is subject to all kinds of interpretation. What's worse, much of this is in the hands of the SEC whose auditors may have different definitions of "reasonable." Especially if they are democrat hacks who happen to be auditing a Koch Brothers company, for instance. What is the standard? None is given.
Complying with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 is very time consuming. On a quarterly basis, employees are required to meet with their auditors and go over their internal control policies and procedures. Auditors use this opportunity to determine if there are proper controls in place to ensure that only employees who are allowed to perform duties to carry them out. The reasoning behind this test is to ensure fraudulent or incorrect transactions can be reasonably prevented from being processed. In addition, auditors look for evidence of oversight or review by superiors to ensure transactions are not be performed unilaterally without review by one or more parties. They use their findings to submit a report regarding the “effectiveness” of the company’s internal controls. Effectiveness, as defined by the SEC with respect of internal controls, is the ability to prevent even one material accounting error from occurring.
Although this thorough practice ensures a periodic review, it forces too much time and resources to be allocated to ensure auditor compliance. Quarterly tests of internal controls divert employee time and attention away from business practices and to administrative tasks. It is inevitable that these tasks will eventually be detrimental to the company’s “bottom line.”Like it or not, the bottom line for any company is to make money. You think the small mom and pop shop down the street is doing it for free? Is the oh-so-social conscious actor doing his craft for free? Or donating all his millions, except for what he needs to live on, to charity? Yeah probably not. People want things and a nice life. There's no crime in that. These paternalistic regulations force people and companies to waste energy to prevent something that they are not doing in the first place: fraud. Well again, we already have fraud laws and they didn't prevent Enron. They did however make sure the guilty were punished when it went down.
When looking back upon the first ten years of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, one can only conclude that it has placed an undue burden our public companies and stifled our economic growth. The Act’s costs have greatly outweighed its benefits and thus needs reformed. Its effects have been perhaps more pronounced by the current financial crisis and the slow economic recovery. It is my opinion that lawmakers felt the pressure to punish corporate Americans when they should have focused their attention on trying to reduce information asymmetry. Sarbanes-Oxley was written and passed within one month in 2002. With the empirical evidence we have now in its first decade of existence, it is time to go back and reform Sarbanes-Oxley and ease some of the burdens it has placed on companies which fall under its punitive purview.Companies are not the enemy, they provide jobs, goods, and services we all enjoy. Hurting them hurts only ourselves. Punishing companies who have done no wrong in the first place is where I think government constantly is crossing the line. We are supposed to be free to pursue our happiness but big daddy government makes it harder and harder. Just try to create a company out of your garage these days. Most likely you'll need a myriad of permits before you've even sold your first widget. And if you have that much capital to start, why not just retire?
While the Obamacare website still remains broken, three 20-year-old programmers have shown the government how it should be done.
Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser developed a site in matter of days - and it does things the expensive and faltering healthcare.gov can't do.
From a San Francisco office the men have built HealthSherpa.com, which presents the Affordable Health Care Act data in a much simpler way to the government website.This is what I've been railing about for the past forever. You don't need to spend $290 million to create a website that does what Obamacare is supposed to do. You don't need 10% of that. Google, Microsoft, Ebay... none of them drop 290 million on code for one iteration of their web site.
The House on Friday approved a bill to let insurance companies sell health plans that had previously been canceled due to ObamaCare regulations, a day after President Obama moved unilaterally to fix the problem.
The bill passed 261-157. Thirty-nine Democrats crossed over to support the GOP-backed legislation.
The bill would go a step further than the plan Obama announced on Thursday, by allowing insurance companies to sell the old plans to customers who previously had them, as well as new customers, for another year. Obama's plan would only apply to those customers enrolled in the plans before the cancellation notices went out.Christ, Obama tries to change the law illegally, a big win to the GOP who can claim how Obama is the dictator we took him for. Instead they make their own legislation to give him a way out but also to fix the most visible disaster of the ACA, thereby pulling it off the radar of most of the American people and ensuring this thing will go on and on and on.....
The paper, authored by Col. Denise F. Williams, identified characteristics of toxic leadership to include incompetence, malfunctioning, maladjusted, sense of inadequacy, malcontent, egotism, arrogance, selfish values, avarice and greed.
The Army Times recently cited “toxic leadership” in reference to cases of misconduct and abuse of authority by military leaders, which have “proliferated across the services in recent years.”
In one case, which it called bizarre, a Navy commander was fired after subordinates complained that he poked them in “appallingly inappropriate places with his flashlight.”
One reader retorted: “I would never make it in this kinder, gentler Army. I wonder what happened to mission first. We won our war and a war hasn’t been won since. The only thing toxic in my day was gas.”
Boykin has told WND that the rate of dismissals has approached 200 in the past five years and that officers were dismissed on suspicion of disloyalty or suspected disagreement with the Obama administration on policy or force-structure issues.
He added that a number of officers have been relieved of duty for no given reason.
“Morale is at an unprecedented low,” Boykin said.
“Officers want to train for war but are not allowed to” because of other distractions such as allowing openly homosexual personnel in the military, the integration of women into the infantry and rules of engagement that favor “political correctness over our ability to fight to win.”
The sentiment was echoed by a Coast Guard Reserve member who told WND he will be retiring soon.
“I spend most of my ‘drills’ doing online training on things like ‘diversity’ and ‘preventing sexual harassment’ these days,” he said. “It’s becoming a joke. This country is in trouble.”The military has one job: to kill people and break things, and it has to do it better than the other side. If the fecal matter hits the oscillating air mover, all the political correctness in the world is worth spit.
The Boeing Co. was the beneficiary of a deal to end all deals this past weekend, when the Washington Legislature voted to extend $8.7 billion in tax breaks to the aircraft manufacturer stretching out 27 years until 2040. Gov. Jay Inslee signed the tax breaks into law Monday at the Museum of Flight.
“This is the biggest tax subsidy in U.S. history,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit which tracks so called “Megadeals” in which states offer sweeteners to major corporations.
“Nothing is near this deal: The fact it took place in days is breathtaking,” LeRoy added. “This deal happens in the state that already has the most regressive tax code in the nation.”Bastard GOP governors giving tax breaks to big business again. Wait, the governor's a dem? It's Washington state? Pretty much run by dems? Um...
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| You're so functional. Amazing. |
"Any time you do a huge policy change like healthcare, there's going to be all sorts of problems and glitches that need to be worked out," Bass told me Tuesday from Washington, where she said there were new calls for allowing people to keep the policies they have, as President Obama had repeatedly promised they'd be able to do.
President Clinton has urged such a move, and Feinstein's office backed the idea Tuesday. She noted in a statement that her office had received 30,832 contacts from Californians, "many of whom are very distressed by cancellations of their insurance policies and who are facing increased out-of-pocket expenses."
"The Affordable Care Act is a good law, but it's not perfect," the Feinstein statement said.
No, not by a longshot, beginning with the federal website debacle and highlighted by Obama's now-laughable promises of a smooth transition. But Bass worries that the problems will further embolden critics who were determined from the beginning to do a grave dance on healthcare reform.Uh-huh. You and I have very different definitions of "good."
When I was an undergraduate studying economics under Professor Arthur Smithies of Harvard, he asked me one day what policy I favored on a particular issue of the time. Since I had strong feelings on the issue, I proceeded to answer with enthusiasm, explaining what beneficial consequences I expected from the policy I advocated.
"And then what will happen?" he asked.
The question caught me off guard. However, as I thought about it, it was became clear the situation I described would lead to another economic consequence, which I then began to consider and spell out.
"And what will happen after that?" Professor Smithies asked.
As I analyzed how the further economic reactions to the policy would unfold, I began to realize that these reactions would lead to consequences much less desirable than those at the first stage, and I began to waver somewhat.
“And then what will happen?” Smithies persisted.
By now I was beginning to see that the economic reverberations of the policy I advocated were likely to be pretty disastrous — and, in fact, much worse than the initial situation that it was designed to improve.
Simple as this little exercise may sound, it goes further than most economic discussions about policies on a wide range of issues. Most thinking stops at stage one.Sowell's anecdote is an exercise few go through these days. I thought of this after my last article regarding Ron Johnson's new bill to let people keep their doctor's. Given the state of things as they are "right now," any legislation or choices we make have to be considered for their long term consequences because of what is already in place, not as we'd like to them to be.
Johnson’s bill — and similar legislation introduced in the House by Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.) — is threatening to reopen the wounds of the government shutdown that had GOP lawmakers openly feuding a few weeks ago. Republicans once again find themselves at loggerheads over exactly how to strike at the president’s health-care law.
The House and Senate bills differ, with Upton’s legislation taking a broader swipe at the law. It would allow all plans that existed on the individual market on January 1, 2013, to stay in effect through 2014, but also would go a step further, giving everybody — not just those who had the plans previously — the opportunity to purchase them. The Johnson bill, by contrast, would merely allow individuals to keep, in perpetuity, plans they had at any point between the enactment of Obamacare and December 31, 2013.Seems pretty straightforward. So of course it's a big mess.
Johnson, however, will in all likelihood face opposition from members of his own party. Though 40 Senate Republicans have lined up to co-sponsor the bill, two are conspicuously absent: shutdown architects Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. (Nevada’s Dean Heller and Alabama’s Richard Shelby are the other holdouts.) A Lee spokesman says the senator “hasn't figured out” whether he will support the Johnson bill yet.
Supporters of the defund movement argue that the law will collapse under its own weight. The ACA “is falling apart, and it needs to fall apart totally and completely at the feet of the Democrats,” says a senior Republican Senate aide. “The Republicans tried everything in their power to stop Obamacare, including the defund effort, and now we are seeing exactly why the Republicans tried. We shouldn't do anything to go down with the ship with the Democrats.”Indeed. It will collapse, the question is how many will it take with it? How many people will be without heath insurance and have to deal with mounting health bills or worse, get subjected to the death panels that will inevitably come into play? Is this a sacrifice we are willing to make for the long term goal of getting rid of this? If so, then this bill won't get rid of Obamacare any faster.
Only 41% of Americans viewed Mr. Obama in a positive light in a late October Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, with 45% holding a negative impression of him. That marked Mr. Obama’s all-time low as president—and the first time more people saw him negatively than positively.
A more fluid measure of Mr. Obama’s standing—the public’s assessment of his performance as president—is now also sliding. Only 42% in the late-October poll approved of the job he is doing, a low in Journal/NBC surveys, with 51% disapproving.
A survey released last week by the Pew Research Center found the president’s approval rating at 41%, down 10 points since May. Pew’s pollsters compared Mr. Obama’s fortunes to the slide that former President George W. Bush saw. At a comparable point in Mr. Bush’s second term—after Hurricane Katrina had hit—Mr. Bush’s job approval stood at 36%.
The family of a 3-year-old killed in a northern Missouri house fire is outraged after police used a stun gun on the boy's stepfather as he tried to run back in and save the child.
Riley Jeffrey Rieser Miller died early Oct. 31 in the Mississippi River town of Louisiana. A city police officer fired his stun gun at Ryan Miller, 31, as he tried to re-enter his burning home, according to a city official. The house was destroyed.
Lori Miller said she witnessed two officers use their stun guns on her son a total of three times, twice after Ryan Miller had been handcuffed. The final time, he was in a police squad car, she said.
"It was police brutality," said Miller, adding that she was also threatened with arrest. "We're still trying to mourn."This story gets to me on so many levels. The son was in the process of being adopted and I have two adopted children myself so it hit home. But that was just on a personal level.
Politicians love to play Santa Claus by handing out favors to voters, while depicting insurance companies as Scrooge when they raise insurance premiums to cover the costs of government mandates.
The Bluegrass State’s successful Obamacare rollout has become a favorite retort to the embarrassment of a hobbled federal website. “Look at Kentucky. Gov. Steve Beshear, who's a Democrat -- he is like a man possessed with helping more people get coverage,” Obama said in a recent speech. “He thinks it's the right thing to do. Keep in mind I did not win in Kentucky. But there are a lot of uninsured people in Kentucky, and they're signing up.”
Beshear is using all the powers of his administration to sell Obamacare, marshaling millions of dollars for branding and market research, heartwarming television spots and eye-catching bus ads. A hired army of true believers have held meetings across the state, spreading the word and rebutting misconceptions.Millions spent on branding on market research, tv spots, and bus ads. Silly me, I thought it was all about paying for healthcare. Well I'm sure the taxpayer is glad the money is well spent. When the coverage panel starts denying care, I hope they say that they had to spend money on heartwarming ads.
Instead, during Kynect’s fourth week in operation, Stewart keeps up her exhausting tour, traveling to Floyd County and then on to Leslie, Madison and Jackson counties, with a quick stop through Louisville on her way up to Northern Kentucky and the Cincinnati suburbs. She drove roughly 1,000 miles that week and ate too many Zaxby's chicken strips.Well after you're on the exchanges, they'll stop that kinda foolish behavior. Leafy greens for you. Also, no more burning so much carbon.
Stewart expects more road work. Her November schedule looks just like her October schedule, which looked just like her September schedule. She says she is still getting the same volume of requests for presentations. At a recent session before a group of 30 students at a community college in Northern Kentucky, only one had enrolled. All the others, Stewart remembers, thought they weren't eligible.
At every one of her meetings, there are tiny epiphanies -- like the farmer who showed up in his work overalls convinced his rates were going to double, but walked away relieved that he actually qualified for Medicaid. It's enough, Stewart says, to keep her going.No no. Much better. Instead of his rates on the insurance he paid for skyrocketing, he gets to chuck it and live off of the taxpayer. This is what's qualified as success, this is what makes her life more satisfying: getting people who once took care of themselves to become wards of the state. This is success, people.
"It seems worth it as soon as you have that moment," she explains. "It seems worth it to come home at 11. It seems worth it to have to find random places to stay. It seems worth it when you have that moment where someone's life is going to change."Oh boy is it ever. Wait til he gets the same kind of service that rivals the DMV, the TSA, and the IRS. We all love those organizations, don't we?
The Beshear administration views the Affordable Care Act as potentially transformative for Kentucky, making the state healthier and more economically viable. A Beshear-commissioned study estimated the reforms would generate jobs and revenue. The governor is counting on progress to be steady. His administration has ballparked a goal of enrolling a third of the state's uninsured population within the first year.
To meet that goal, however, Stewart has found that the holdouts need face time with outreach workers like her. They need follow-up phone calls and visits. They need time to feel comfortable with the companies and the plans being offered, and they need reassurance from people they trust. They need Kynect to come to them.Does any of this sound creepy to you? The government sending out legions of people to call you incessantly, visit your house and make you become part of something you didn't want in the first place because you don't know how to take care of yourself in their opinion. So they send out people, hopefully not wearing brown shirts, to "educate" you. So they get you to trust them. Make you feel good. Wait til they actually need it though.
To help the hundreds of thousands of uninsured Kentuckians enroll in health care, the state has hired 622 “Kynectors,” advocates trained to work with residents directly. Many work part time. While $60 million has been spent on website construction and operations, according to state figures, $8.9 million has been budgeted for these workers. Many advocates, like Stewart, are not being paid by the state, but through nonprofits.60 million on a website? This is how we cut costs? Who's paying for this? Taxpayers. How is that going to help the economy? How is that considered cutting costs? We haven't paid one doctor yet and for the state of Kentucky, we've already blown 60 million. If people wanted insurance, they could get it but no longer because you've blown up the plans people wanted.
Carl Fox, 55, didn’t hesitate to open his Crazy Fox Saloon in Newport to Stewart. He’s had HIV for 28 years, is a 10-year cancer survivor, and was cured of hepatitis C by an experimental treatment. A degenerative disc disease sidelined Fox from steady work. Nine years ago, he could no longer afford health insurance and had to sell everything to qualify for Medicaid.
At the bar, he was given the title of honorary proprietor ("That's what my business card says") after selling the Crazy Fox to his husband. Whatever his title, Fox learned from his fight for health coverage. He made sure any bar employee who worked 20 hours or more a week got health insurance.
"All the sudden it hit me like a stone to the head, you lived in this fear, and yet your employees have no health insurance, nothing to fall back on," Fox recalls. "I saw the light."
With the new health care law, the light has brightened. So far, Fox has hosted three Kynect seminars at the Crazy Fox. He posted fliers near the box of free condoms. He listed the events on the bar's Facebook page. Stewart found out about the bar sessions when a mutual friend tagged her in a comment under the listing. She started answering questions in the comments, and then offered to help moderate the events.So in order to help this ONE guy, we had to destroy 15 million people's health care plans because just simply fixing medicaid to help these outliers isn't enough. We are blowing 60 million on a friggin website in Kentucky. 290 million for a federal website that doesn't work. Just those two pieces of waste alone is 350 million dollars. Couldn't we have gotten some of that to Carl Fox instead? I bet his health bills were a lot less than that. Do we want to revisit the 65-90 billion wasted every year?
With this in mind, one almost feels sympathetic toward the administration’s crack team of liars. By now, they must be realizing that they have been given an impossible mission: to argue simultaneously that 20 million people’s visiting a website is worthy of our awe and admiration and that 15 million living, breathing rebuttals to the president’s incessant “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” promise are but an insignificant rounding error.
Frank Bruni of the New York Times proclaimed last month that Colorado “is on the precipice of something big” if it passed a $950 million tax hike that was earmarked specifically to increase education spending, a popular item with independent and swing voters. Obama education secretary Arne Duncan said a win in Colorado would make the state “the educational model for every other state to follow.” Teacher unions spent $4 million promoting the measure, outspending opponents by at least ten-to-one.
But the model crashed on takeoff tonight. Coloradans didn't just defeat Amendment 66, they repudiated it by a vote of 66 percent to 34. With almost all the results in, the tax hike was only winning half the votes in liberal Denver and Boulder Counties.
In a report released last week, they found that the $2.85 billion, 2-month program essentially merely time-shifted the purchase of new vehicles forward a few months (H/T – Kevin Binversie). From the conclusion of the research paper:
The primary motivation for the CARS program was to provide temporary stimulus to counter the economic contraction that was occurring at that time, while also reducing fuel consumption and thus emissions. The evidence suggests that the program did indeed incentivize the sale of more fuel efficient vehicles by pulling sales forward from the near-term future. This resulted in a small and short-lived increase in production, GDP, and job creation. However, the implied cost per job created was much higher than alternative fiscal stimulus policies. Further, these small stimulus effects do not account for the depletion of the capital stock that resulted from the destruction of used vehicles….
The CARS program led to a slight improvement in fuel economy and some reduction in carbon emissions. The cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced from the program suggests that the program was not a cost-effective way to reduce emissions, although was more cost effective than some other environmental policies, such as the tax subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol.
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| I... aint got no body! Oh wait, yes I do. |
Led by UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, they have excavated two seven metre tall, full-size statures, estimated to weigh about 20 tonnes.
For anyone who has stood next to these huge, imposing heads, or marveled at how a primitive people moved them many kilometres from one side of the island to the other, it's a remarkable discovery.
Since 1990, the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) has been undertaking an archaeological survey on Easter Island, aiming to create a full and complete, island-wide inventory for each statue.
"It is vital to have a good record of the statues," said the EISP's director Jo Anne Van Tilburg.
Just as the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to tackle prayer at public meetings, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a church-state separatist group, filed a related lawsuit on Nov. 1 in San Luis Obispo Superior Court against the city of Pismo Beach, Calif. This atheist group is using the case to take aim at an unpaid city chaplain and the allegedly sectarian prayers he utters during city council meetings.
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“In virtually every city prayer, Jones pressures citizens and the council to live a Christian lifestyle in accordance with the bible, to vote for ‘righteous’ leaders and to make decisions that honor Jones’ particular god,” the press release proclaimed (read the legal complaint here).
Dr. Sari Dworkin, a self-described “atheist Jew,” is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation who brought her concerns to the organization and said that the Christian nature of the prayers made her feel “offended, disenfranchised, and intimidated.”
While the atheist group is charging that egregious First Amendment violations have unfolded, Pismo Beach city attorney David Fleishman sees the situation a bit differently. He told The San Luis Obispo Tribune that cities are allowed to have chaplains so long as the religious leaders do not promote one religion.
“To my recollection, Dr. Jones has been very good about that through the years,” said Fleishman.I used to be pretty atheist in my youth. I still have misgivings about the whole thing. It isn't the philosophy that bothers me, I feel it's the best way to lead your life and create a free society. Judeo Christian ethic is what derived the idea that freedom is bestowed by God. I don't see what going to church and droning out the same chants every week does to enlighten a person. As a kid I was simply bored and never got much out of it. I finally took to atheism so I didn't have to get up on Sundays. A God who could see the beauty of a single proton to the enormity of the universe in the palm of his hand could really give a crap if I sat there in a pew saying "Amen" in my opinion. It's more important that I live my life properly and try to help others wherever I can.
In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, President Obama’s top economic aides were getting worried. Larry Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality.
Summers, Orszag and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode. On one side, members of the economic team and Obama health-care adviser Zeke Emanuel lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with expertise in business, insurance and technology. On the other, the president’s top health aides — who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail — argued that they could handle the job.
In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team — led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”We have political hay to make and people to control. We can't be burdened with your reality things being impossible and stuff. Well over 3.5 million are losing their insurance. Democrats are starting to wake up to that reality.
Marlys Dietrick, a 60-year-old artist from San Antonio, said she had high hopes that the new law would help many of her friends who are chefs, actors or photographers get insured. But she said they have been turned off by high premiums and deductibles and would rather pay the fine.
“I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better than this,” she said.
Her insurer, Humana, informed her that her plan was being canceled and that the rate for herself and her 21-year-old son for a plan compliant with the new law would rise from $300 to $705. On the federal Web site, she found a comparable plan for $623 a month. Because her annual income is about $80,000, she doesn’t qualify for subsidies.
In Kentucky, 280,000 people will lose policies that do not meet Obamacare’s minimum-coverage requirements. According to the Kentucky Department of Insurance, there will be 130,000 people losing individual policies and 150,000 more will lose their group policies.
In Alaska, the state’s largest insurer, Premera, has sent cancellation notices to 5,360 people, over half its individual policy holders.
In Alabama, roughly 90,000 people will need to find new policies, a figure which the Associated Press compiled by contacting the state’s major insurers—the state Department of Insurance said it didn’t have figures on the issue. Of that number, 87,000 were policy holders with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama.
The California Endowment has awarded a $500,000 grant to the Norman Lear Center, a public-policy organization at the University of Southern California that focuses on entertainment, to make sure that television producers and their staffs fully understand the new health-care-reform law, and can work in pro-Obamacare storylines. The Endowment, a private foundation that has spent millions promoting the president’s law, is hoping its efforts will nudge primetime audiences to enroll in the new health-care law, which they consider misunderstood. “We don’t believe the government alone can break through with those facts,” a California Endowment vice president said.
Vast swathes of policy are based on the correct presumption that people don't know what's best for them. Nothing new. http://t.co/RmKSaIPP3pPredictably, there was quite the backlash to this tweet, presumably for the arrogance behind it. Salon took up the cause of letting people know how stupid they are, a winning strategy if there ever was one.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 29, 2013
As Barro pointed out in subsequent tweets, this “don’t tell me what to do!”-style libertarianism, if taken seriously, would have some pretty radical implications. No public education, for one. No regulations on food or consumer goods, for another. Workplace safety? Forget it. Through the lens of this vulgar individualism, any kind of collective action — besides those undertaken by the military, of course — becomes an unbearable infringement on these conservatives’ “liberty,” or as Twitchy puts it, “freedom to choose.”
It's said that we learn from our mistakes.
The progressive take on things is that we don't know what's best for us and so we shouldn't be allowed to make our own decisions.
Hence, we're not allowed to make mistakes (as defined by them) and, therefore, not allowed to learn.
Not only do they consider us children, they actively fight against any possibility of us 'growing up' by blocking any chance of learning.
