“Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation,” notes the Daily Caller. “The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,” and “the Joint Committee on Taxation directed the Congressional Budget Office to ignore family members when determining whether employees actually pay more than 9.5 percent of their household income on insurance” and thus qualify for government subsidies.
This is just the latest of many ways that Obamacare has been discovered to cost more than predicted. Earlier, the CBO hiked its estimate of Obamacare’s costs by $115 billion, showing that the health care law would not, in fact, cut the deficit as promised. Later, it became apparent that the cost estimate for Obamacare had been artificially reduced through double-counting of revenues.
Then, it became apparent that the cost of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion provisions had been radically underestimated. It turned out that its Medicaid expansion provisions, in addition to covering many poor or near-poor people, could also add up to five million early retirees to state Medicaid rolls. That financial risk was overlooked in the Medicaid actuary’s earlier estimate. As he conceded in January 2011, that “estimated increase in Medicaid enrollment is based on an assumption that Social Security benefits would continue to be included in the definition of income for determining Medicaid eligibility. If a strict application of the modified adjusted gross income definition is instead applied, as may be intended by the Act, then an additional 5 million or more Social Security early retirees would be potentially eligible for Medicaid coverage.” More recently, he said the stricter standard was “expected” to apply under the 2010 healthcare law, causing “significantly higher” Medicaid costs for states. See True Cost of PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act): Effects on the Budget and Jobs (March 30 testimony to Congress).
Obamacare is also harmful to the economy, medical innovation, and the healthcare system. Earlier, I discussed some of the bad effects of Obamacare on patients, employers, consumers, and the insurance market. I filed an amicus brief on behalf of state legislators explaining why Obamacare is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment and exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.
Rioters and looters have run loose in London over the last three nights. During the day, civilized folk have tried to clean up after them. In a heartening display of spontaneous order, many people are organizing group cleanup efforts using Twitter. Following hashtags like #londoncleanup and #riotcleanup lets people know where they’re needed the most. Facebook groups are serving the same purpose.
Health and safety regulators are trying to stop this spontaneous show of goodwill. The Telegraph reports:
[O]fficers told the volunteers that the decision had been made for the clean-up to be done by the council.
Asked why, an officer said: “Health and safety mainly. There’s lots of broken glass around.”
Many storefronts have broken windows, you see. Broken glass can be dangerous. Better to leave the cleanup to professionals. Someone could get hurt.
This is a different broken window fallacy than the kind one usually sees.
No matter what the outcome of today’s recall election, nothing substantive will change in Wisconsin. Even if organized labor were to sweep all six recall elections of Republican state senators, the unions would still not have the votes in the Assembly to pass any legislation. They will not be able to restore the government union’s lavish benefits, which were brought down to Earth this spring. And even if they were somehow able to muster legislation through both the Senate and the Republican-controlled Assembly, they still will not have enough votes to overturn a veto by Governor Scott Walker.
According to the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a Wisconsin think tank, Big Labor and its allies have funneled over $14 million into the recall effort.
The Washington Post reports that much of the money (on both sides) comes from groups outside of Wisconsin.
Outside groups — led by national unions on the Democratic side and limited government groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth on the Republican side — have shoveled more than $25 million into the recall effort, with both sides spending about the same amount. The candidates, meanwhile, have raised more than $5 million.
The staggering dollar amounts being showered on the eight recall campaigns — which after a July 19 election and Tuesday’s six contests will conclude with two elections on Aug. 16 — are shattering state records. In 2010, when the 99-member assembly and half the 33-member state Senate was up for election, outside organizations spent $3.75 million in Wisconsin — 15 percent of this year’s total.
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by Hans Bader on August 9, 2011 · 6 comments
in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, International, Legal, Politics as Usual, Property Rights, Regulation, Sanctimony, Trade, Zeitgeist
People are going hungry, pulling their children out of school due to poverty, and joining criminal gangs to make ends meet in the poorest region of the Congo, the world’s second-poorest country. 
Residents of this African nation attribute this economic devastation to what they call “the Obama Law” — provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law backed by Obama that have created a virtual embargo on minerals produced in the Congo’s desperately-poor mining towns. As David Aronson notes in The New York Times,
The “Loi Obama” or Obama Law — as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act of 2010 has become known in the region — includes an obscure provision that requires public companies to indicate what measures they are taking to ensure that minerals in their supply chain don’t benefit warlords in conflict-ravaged Congo. . . the Dodd-Frank law has had unintended and devastating consequences, as I saw firsthand on a trip to eastern Congo this summer. The law has brought about a de facto embargo on the minerals mined in the region, including tin, tungsten and the tantalum that is essential for making cellphones.
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Congress and the White House have typically been reluctant to repeal any laws or regulations, regardless of which party is in power. The solution? Change the institutional rules of the game to give them an incentive to repeal laws. CEI Research Associate Jacque Otto and I expound on that idea in The American Spectator.
One reform would be a Repeal Amendment to the Constitution. That would give states a veto power over federal laws if two thirds of them vote for repeal. Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett has already drafted some language:
Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.
We have other ideas:
Short of that, the House and Senate could establish repeal committees. These committees would be unable to pass laws and regulations, only to repeal them. Its members would be ineligible to sit on other committees. The only accomplishments they would be able to tout to voters would be how much they lighten Washington’s heavy hand.
Another option is to add an automatic sunset provision to all new regulations — meaning that they would expire after, say, five years unless specifically reauthorized by Congress. This kind of regulatory expiration date would ensure that only the truly necessary ones stay in the books.
Read the whole thing here.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down a massive 634 points after Obama gave an uninspiring address in response to the downgrading of America’s credit rating Friday by S&P. Although S&P had expressed concern about America’s mushrooming budget deficits, Obama had no solutions or new proposals. He simply “uttered some empty platitudes, offered no plan, (amazingly) called for more government spending, and continued his advocacy of class-warfare.” A Washington Post writer called the speech “horrifyingly bad” : “He was a half hour late. His head turned from side to side as if he were attending a tennis match. He practically never looked in the camera, as if he were averting our gaze. And those were the strong parts of President Obama’s disastrous speech. It was a bit like a slow-motion car crash. After a while, one stopped listening to the blather and simply watched the stock ticker go down and down. And down some more.” As another commentator noted, “While the president spoke, the markets continued to slide downward.” Indeed, the slide accelerated.
Obama’s failure to offer any plan to cut the deficit and restore America’s credit came shortly after China blasted the U.S. government’s “addiction to debts” and called on Washington to make substantial cuts to its “gigantic military expenditure” and its “bloated social welfare” programs.
The President’s supporters have sought to argue that it was the brinkmanship over the debt ceiling deal — not the rising deficits during the Obama Administration — that caused the downgrade. The New York Times‘ liberal editorial board once again called for even more deficit spending to try to stimulate the economy (never mind that economists found that the $800 billion stimulus package failed to create jobs).
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Tech:
Verizon now cracking down on jailbreak tethering:
“Verizon, like AT&T has now started blocking jailbroken phones from using un-sanctioned tethering apps. Verizon will now require users to be subscribed to a mobile tethering plan to be able to use tethering at all.”
Global Warming / Environment / Energy:
Audio: Al Gore screams about global-warming skeptics:
“Via Fox Nation. Four years ago, when he won the Nobel, 71 percent said they believed that carbon emissions were causing global warming. Four years later, after a crushing recession, Climategate, and an epic failure at Copenhagen, only 44 percent say they believe it. Meanwhile, 69 percent say it’s likely that global-warming scientists have falsified climate research. What you’re hearing here, in other words, is the voice of a man who’s very, very frustrated, not merely because the science is being questioned but because the dream of a global agreement to limit industrial growth isn’t a priority in a world frantic for economic growth of any sort, industrial or otherwise.”
Severe Solar Storms Could Disrupt Earth This Decade: NOAA:
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that focuses on the condition of the oceans and atmosphere, said a severe solar storm could cause global disruptions in GPS systems, power grids, satellite communications, and airline communications.”
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The government is looking into the possibility of bailing out underwater mortgage borrowers, including speculators and McMansion owners. It’s also seeking to extract many billions of dollars from the nation’s largest banks (like Bank of America, whose stock price has fallen from $15 last year to $6.50 today, leaving Americans’ 401(k) plans, which commonly invest in banks, that much smaller). A letter in The Wall Street Journal wonders how many people who fraudulently obtained “liar loans” will end up being enriched by the government’s actions:
The Departments of Justice and the Treasury are in the forefront of the effort to penalize the major mortgage loan servicers a gargantuan $25 billion for some paperwork glitches that resulted in virtually no unwarranted foreclosure proceedings (“Banks Spar Over Loan Settlement,” page one, July 27). Meanwhile they are giving a pass to the many thousands of borrowers who committed the federal felony of lying on their applications for federally insured mortgage loans. It would be interesting to find out how many homeowners, who could be prosecuted for defrauding the federal government on their mortgage applications if the government chose to lodge the charge, are expecting a handout from the proceeds of the “offense” of shoddy paperwork that caused so little actual damage.
In 2010, Administration allies proposed a trillion dollar bailout that would use taxpayer money to bail out certain borrowers (those whose loans are held by two government-controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Fortunately, that has yet to transpire.
Britain has a Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. It isn’t quite living up to its name, though. The group is pressing to ban fire extinguishers. They think it would prevent more accidents if residents fled burning buildings instead of fighting the flames themselves.
Many high-rise buildings are starting to take the Royal Society’s recommendation. Mike Edwards lives in one of those buildings. As he told Metro:
‘They are worried we will point them in the wrong direction or use the wrong extinguishers,’ he said. ‘But if you are trapped in a burning building, you will work out how to use one.’
So there you have it. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, the risk of spraying yourself with a fire extinguisher outweighs the risk of burning to death.
I had a letter to the editor in Friday’s Washington Post:
Richard Cohen fretted that Tea Party activists have “shrunk the government.” He need not worry. Federal spending has gone from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.8?trillion in 2011. Thirty percent spending growth in three years is hardly shrinkage. Even under the Boehner plan, federal spending will continue to increase every year for at least the next decade.
Meanwhile, federal agencies continue to finalize more than 3,500 new regulations per year. They repeal almost none, no matter how loud the Tea Party’s howls.
If anything, Tea Party activists have been devastatingly ineffective at shrinking government. Mr. Cohen can rest easy.
Ryan Young, Washington
The writer is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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