Resonance

Via NRO and Memeorandum.

The Job Killer

Caterpillar is warning that the current health care “reform” will cost that company $100 million in the first year alone:

The Peoria-based company said these provisions would increase its insurance costs by at least 20 percent, or more than $100 million, just in the first year of the health-care overhaul program.

“We can ill-afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors,” said the letter signed by Gregory Folley, vice president and chief human resources officer of Caterpillar. “We are disappointed that efforts at reform have not addressed the cost concerns we’ve raised throughout the year.”

Business executives have long complained that the options offered for covering 32 million uninsured Americans would result in higher insurance costs for those employers that already provide coverage. Opponents have stepped up their attacks in recent days as the House moves closer toward a vote on the Senate version of the health-care legislation.

A letter Thursday to President Barack Obama and members of Congress signed by more than 130 economists predicted the legislation would discourage companies from hiring more workers and would cause reduced hours and wages for those already employed.

The left wing media is cheering for all it is worth right now, desperately trying to drag the rotting husk of this monstrous abomination of a “reform” across the finish line. In their frenzy they do not appear to be smart enough to realize that their jobs are on the line, too. When companies have to cut costs, they will cut both employees and a lot of other costs.

Like advertising. The lifeblood of the media.

So the fallout from this horrible, un-American bill will not just cause those good-paying factory jobs to go away.

It will cost the cheerleaders, too. They are too stupid to realize that their skin is in the game, too.

Talking Points Versus Reality

Ramesh Ponnuru over at NRO throws cold water on the latest round of lies the Wizard of 0 and his mendacious munchkins are throwing around:

Talking point: The bill will give tens of millions of Americans the same insurance choices as members of Congress.

Reality: Members of Congress are in a much less regulated system.

Talking point: The CBO says that the bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next two decades.

Reality: CBO says that projections into the second decade are meaningless, and that even its first-decade projections include savings that it was ordered to assume will take place.

Talking point: Under the bill, small businesses will not have to choose between “hiring and health care.”

Reality: You might find yourself unable to get either a job or insurance from a small business because of this bill’s mandates.

On that last point, I would only offer that I believe that we will be hit by economic reality if ObamaCare passes. Jobs will become extremely hard to find as the economy nosedives. Small businesses will be crushed by these new rules and the tax hikes that are coming are going to stifle any growth for years to come.

America is being sacrificed on the alter Obama has built to himself.

I believe also that the Democrats have wildly underestimated the consequences of what they are trying to pass. They think they can “sell” it after they pass it. But America is being sold a bill of goods – and Americans have long memories.

This Way To The Slaughterhouse

I’ve mentioned before that Louise Slaughter was once my representative in Congress. She got the job without my vote, I can assure you. Now you see why:

But Mrs. Pelosi & Co. fear they lack the votes in the House to pass an identical Senate bill, even with the promise of these reconciliation fixes. House Members hate the thought of going on record voting for the Cornhusker kickback and other special-interest bribes that were added to get this mess through the Senate, as well as the new tax on high-cost insurance plans that Big Labor hates.

So at the Speaker’s command, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter, who chairs the House Rules Committee, may insert what’s known as a “self-executing rule,” also known as a “hereby rule.” Under this amazing procedural ruse, the House would then vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass, the self-executing rule would say that the Senate bill is presumptively approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Whether the Democrats are smart enough to see this at this point or not, a move like this will be setting up a complete electoral slaughter for that party in November. This is going to be rightfully seen as cheating the system of government we live under. I think it may also set up a very likely scenario where the Supreme Court can nullify the entire bill since it never passed the House at all.

Louise was never all that bright, this may be her dimmest move yet.

Why Jump Over The Cliff?

The Orange County Register:

The argument is made that not passing a bill will create an aura of failure around the administration and the Democrats, hurting them much more than passing a bill with a bare majority in the face of public opinion. I would think that for moderate and conservative Democrats in districts taken by either Bush or McCain, the calculus is different. Those members, who are probably the key to assembling a majority, are probably thinking that they’re in some trouble either way considering the general anti-Democrat mood, but that helping to make sure no bill is passed will earn them more credit in their home districts than standing idly by while it passes, no matter how they themselves vote.

I think that’s right. They can follow their leaders off the cliff or they can slam on the brakes and maybe save themselves and their party in the long run.

I strongly suspect that the Democrats and Obama have badly – really badly – miscalculated the hit they are going to take this year and in the coming years. When people fully understand that they have been forced to pay for insurance from a private insurer – essentially being indentured by Democrat fiat to that private insurer – the backlash will be biblical.

When they also figure out that their health care is much less than what they surrendered for the “reform” the backlash will be apocalyptic.

The promise of laser-like focus on jobs was a lie – so is ObamaCare.

Going over the cliff on this one will be very, very bad for the Democrats.

Shorter Gibbs

When House Democrats vote for the Senate bill, there will be no reconciliation. If Reid even tries to pass one, the attempt will be as lame as everything Harry tries. So House Democrats will be jumping off a cliff – for nothing.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.

“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”

Obama will sign the House Democrat’s suicide bill and the rest of the “deals” will be immediately forgotten. At best, there will be a very short, very half-hearted attempt by hapless Harry to get anything through.

And the voters will pay back tenfold come November.

There will be no safe seats.

It has already failed, all the Democrats can do now is compound the damage.

The Psychotic Mathematics Of ObamaCare

It doesn’t add up – unless you count adding to the deficit and the deranged spending. Then it adds up real, real fast:

So how much must the government borrow to pay for reform? That’s the true measure of future deficits. Let’s start with the CBO’s “deficit reduction” estimate of $118 billion.

First, we’ll subtract the Doc Fix of $371 billion, which Obama does not pay for and must be borrowed. That wipes out all of the theoretical decline in the deficit and leaves a shortfall of $253 billion.

Then we’ll subtract the tax revenues that are owed for entitlements, and therefore excluded from paying for the bill: $70 billion from the CLASS Act, $52 billion for Social Security, and $113 billion for Medicare. That subtotal: $235 billion.

So the full amount that must be borrowed by 2019 is $488 billion. (That’s 39% of the total cost, composed of the $875 billion official estimate plus the Doc Fix of $371 billion, for a total of $1.25 trillion.) Add in interest, which is excluded from the official CBO cost, and the total amount approaches $600 billion. So the U.S. will need to borrow an additional $600 billion to pay for a new medical system — one that won’t be up and running until 2014.

In other words, Obama and his minions are telling lies. Flat lies. This is a road to bankruptcy for the nation. Please go over and read the entire piece, it is important. Spread the word about the accounting gimmicks and outright fraud that is being spread by the Wizard’s supporters.

This fraud will enrich unions, swell the bureaucracy and short-change Americans. The bill will drive up costs, reduce coverage and impose a lavishly paid and wildly over-benefited bureaucrat between you and your doctor. It will damage us beyond belief.

The damage will be immediate and lasting.

America is being sacrificed on the alter of Obama’s ego.

Start making calls, folks. Make sure your Representative knows that you will be very, very unhappy with a yes vote and will volunteer for and donate to any candidate who votes no – or who runs to replace the yes voter.

Say it with a smile and mean every word.

Leftist Hack: “Criticism Of Democrats Or Obama = Journalistic Malpractice”

And tools like this wonder why they are routinely dismissed by the American people:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.

Catch the shell game? The real complaint has nothing to do with “fairness” or imaginary journalistic “objectivity.” What this fool actually misses is the “good old days” of Democratic party hegemony over the media, itself a deformity of the American political spirit born of the emergence of the Democratic New Deal coalition and its consolidation during the Second World War. It was an era that allowed a self appointed elite to define what was allowable, which they labelled “fair” and/or “objective,” and what wasn’t, which they called “unfair” and “biased.” The real goal, of course, was to marginalize ideas the elite didn’t like. Thus you had the New York Times hide the crimes of Stalin from its readers because, somehow, the truth was deemed to be “unfair” and “biased.”

My appeal to Stalinism is purposeful, because what dishonest hacks like this really want would be modelled more by the old Soviet Pravda than anything else. Only one elite approved view would be allowed.

This truly moronic and perverse view of journalism largely explains why we no longer have a newspaper culture in this country while places like the UK still does. One knows in Britain that you can read papers with differing editorial views. Going to London is always fun for an American because one can buy three or four different papers that provide a riot of contrasting styles, information, ideological visions, and perspectives. In the United States our papers are nothing of the sort. The are bland, homogenized, and, frankly, a mockery of our free speech protections. Why have a First Amendment when all the papers say the same damn thing?

Television news, because it was born at the moment of Democratic hegemony, had always suffered from the same stultifying ideological conformity that dominated the “New York Times” model of newspapers. The rise of Fox News, which offers a different perspective from the old liberal model, presented American viewers with something of the color and diversity we can see in English newspapers, and, for this reason, the reactionary old guard hate it. They long for the days when they acted as the sole arbiter of what the American people could learn about the social and political world. Just think of the hubris involved in the motto of the Times. “All The News That’s Fit to Print” isn’t a promise of public service, it’s a symbol of the repression of democracy by a benighted elite who view themselves in almost Nitzschean terms. They are the overmen who create the values the rest of us inferiors must live by, and as such they put themselves above questioning or criticism. People like Howell Raines, former editor of the Times and the author of the drivel linked to and quoted above, have no respect for honest differences or real diversity of opinion, and when it comes to the tenets of democratic society they are truly amoral beasts.

Cross-posted at The Iconic Midwest

Wrong Bill, Wrong Time

You really, really have to go over and read the entire column by Shikha Dalmia over at Forbes. No, really, you do.

A very, very brief excerpt from a must-read:

In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.

Please go read it.

Here’s the thing that I am seeing right now. The media continues to perform CPR on the Democrat’s plots to pass this monstrosity. Every day there are stories of how close they are to a deal, how great everything is going. How confident they are.

But the House has still not voted.

If Pelosi had the votes, this would already be passed.

If the House Democrats – the non-suicidal ones – had any trust in the Senate Democrats ability to pass a reconciliation, this would be done.

And a lot – a real lot – of Democrats would be gainfully unemployed come November. And the Democrat brand will be crippled if not utterly destroyed.

And Obama would be a lame duck with no other role left than to be the one who sets his successor up for untangling Obama’s wreckage and becoming a truly great president. This is more than Obama’s Waterloo. This is Obama’s political Little Bighorn.

Garryowen, Democrats. You can commit political suicide by following this narcissist over the cliff and into the valley, thereby wrecking your party and your personal political futures or you can recognize that this bill is a disaster and save yourselves – and your nation – from utter ruin.

He is not the one and this is not the bill.

Pickett’s Charge Redux

Dick Morris:

And now the House Democrats line up at the instruction of their blind commanders for a final charge into glory as they battle to foist a health care system on a country that neither wants it nor can afford it. The charge may or may not reach its objective. But one thing is certain: The carnage among those who vote for health care will remind Civil War buffs of Pickett’s Charge on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

As a French general who witnessed the spectacle said, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (It is magnificent, but it’s not war.) The sight of so many Democrats throwing away their political careers may be arresting, but it is not politics.

Frankly, I don’t believe the Senate Democrats will pass a “fix” under reconciliation. Any House Deocrat who trusts the Senate – or the Wizard of 0 – to even try, much less succeed in doing so – is not playing with a full deck. And there will be a lot of House Democrats looking for work after November if they do pass this horror. Many, many more than if they do not pass it. There will be no safe seats.

Americans don’t want this and America can damn sure not afford the monstrosity that is ObamaCare.

If they do, it won’t be Pickett’s Charge, though. It’ll be Little Bighorn. Better be calling your Representative, folks. Make sure they understand what will happen if they vote yes. Say it with a smile and mean it.

Rhymes With Pies

Matt Welch:

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

Welch is pointing out something here that bears repeating. The Wizard of0 does not tell the truth rather often. He is quite blatant about it. And it is why I predict that if the House Democrats pass the Senate bill, they will be surprised that reconciliation does not occur at all or does not even come close to the fixes they were promised to entice them to take the bait.

This man will not hesitate to double cross his allies.

The Chicago Way In Washington

Well, yeah.

“There’s a reason that this has all happened, frankly one that I had not realized,” Massa said on WKPQ radio on Sunday. “Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it’ll pass.”

This could, of course, backfire on the Democrats. Massa is set to be on Glenn Beck tomorrow. He is not going quietly.

I’m thinking that the Congressional swamp Pelosi famously promised to drain is now resembling a cesspool since the Democrats have taken charge.

Watery Brew

Glenn Reynolds:

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans — and, in particular, America’s political class — have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

It’s tempting to stress the disconnect here, and that disconnect is certainly huge. Unsurprisingly, the political class — which talks mostly to itself — thinks that it is far more popular, and legitimate, in the eyes of the country than is in fact the case. In this, as in so many things, America’s political class is out of touch with reality.

But forget the views of America — where, it seems likely, more people believe in alien abductions than in the legitimacy of our rulers — and look just at the more cheerful view of the political class.

Even among the rulers, only 63 percent — triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class — regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America’s founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.

I’m guessing that they are not only comfortable with it, they are in favor of it. How many times have you been told that the government is doing this or that for your own good?

Those words should provoke rage. It is not government’s place to dictate what is good for you.

Go read the whole piece. It’s worth your time.

We’re in a rather bad place right now as a nation. We have an utterly out of control government trying to become the dictators of your most personal decisions. We have maniacal spenders throwing money we do not have at problems we would rather they did not try to solve.

It promises to be a rough year, folks.

How To Destroy An Economy

The CBO looks at Obama’s budgets:

If President Obama’s 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country’s accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.

By 2020, the agency estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That’s up from 53% of GDP in 2009.

Frankly, it will be a lot worse. The rosy projections of revenue will not work out. Nor will the planned spending. The latter will be ever so much higher than predicted and the former will be much, much lower. Bank on it.

A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon you’re looking at real economic collapse.

Look at the interest alone, folks. Not only is this spending unsustainable, this spending is deranged. This is a recipe for a ruined economy.

And it is one man doing this with the assistance of the mad Democrats in control of Congress. How are they planning on fixing this mess?

Why they are spending even more.

Time to clean house. Come November, we have to fix this. Get these maniacs out, get some fiscal discipline. Or we are dooming ourselves and our offspring. For many generations.

Time to take it back, folks. Or we will all fall.

You Say It’s Better, U-6 Says Otherwise

Gee, only 36,000 jobs disappeared in America last month! Everything is coming up roses! We’re in the money! You’re out of the woods, America!

That’s the spin today.

Unfortunately, the U-6 tells a completely different story.

What’s the U-6, U ask? This:

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force

What is that number, U wonder? 16.8. Close to one out of five Americans is out of work or woefully underemployed – not by choice.

That number is up year over year since 2009 by 0.8. It is not as high as it has been recently, but it is still a very, very bad sign that things are not good – at all. It is also a clear indication that the spin is nonsense. Things are not getting better.

Hell, 36,000 jobs disappeared in the last month, folks. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that this is not  – in any way – good news. Saying we’re bleeding less jobs is not saying that we are adding jobs.

The U-6 says that the tourniquet is slipping. We are bleeding out, economically-speaking.

Well, unless you are a Federal employee, that is. Then you have lordly wages and lavish benefits.