illegal aliens

Fixing America’s Immigration Black Market

by Ryan Young on April 27, 2010 · 1 comment

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Regulation

One of the problems with current immigration laws is that they raise the price of immigrating legally. Basic economics tells us that when something costs more, people consume less of it.

That’s why so many of America’s immigrants are turning to dangerous but cheap immigration black markets to enter the country. This is a problem with an obvious solution. In today’s American Spectator, Alex Nowrasteh and I make the case that lowering the cost of legal immigration through liberalization will reduce the amount of illegal immigration, and shrink cruel black markets.

Basic economics wins again.

Alex Nowrasteh on National ID and Immigration Policy

by Ryan Lynch on March 17, 2010

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsgjxZ7psx0 285 234]

Fact-Checking Obama’s Health-Care Speech: Many False Claims

by Hans Bader on September 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

In his health-care speech last night, President Obama promised the world, but didn’t explain how he would pay for it. It was all sizzle, no substance. Even media that often cheerlead for Obama found his claims hard to swallow.

Obama claimed that his proposals won’t add “one dime to the deficit now or in the future.” But as the Associated Press noted, his proposals “would drive up the deficit by billions of dollars.” The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama and hasn’t endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, noted that under the House version of Obamacare, “the expanded coverage would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit.”

Obama claims that “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.” But that’s not true of the House and Senate versions of Obama’s plan. The Associated Press noted that “the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.”

Obama also claims to not want to cut Medicare benefits. However, the Associate Press says that “Obama and congressional Democrats want to pay for their health care plans in part by reducing Medicare payments to providers by more than $500 billion over 10 years. The cuts would largely hit hospitals and Medicare Advantage, the part of the Medicare program operated through private insurance companies. . . . many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That’s particularly true for the 25 percent of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.”

Obama also claims that he can keep the cost of his health care plan down to a mere $900 billion, in part by “requiring insurance companies to cover preventive care,” which he claims “saves money.” The Associated Press rejects this claim: “Studies have shown that much preventive care — particularly tests like the ones Obama mentions — actually costs money instead of saving it. That’s because detecting acute diseases . . . in their early stages involves testing many people who would never end up developing the disease. The costs of a large number of tests, even if they’re relatively cheap, will outweigh the costs of caring for the minority of people who would have ended up getting sick without the testing. The Congressional Budget Office wrote in August: ‘The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.’”

The Heritage Foundation debunked 10 false claims made by Obama in his speech.

Reason Magazine, most of whose writers preferred Obama over McCain in 2008, has a commentary entitled “Obama’s Lies Matter, Too“:

“The lies last night began in Obama’s opening paragraph. ‘When I spoke here last winter,’ he began, ‘credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.’ In fact, Obama spoke on Feb. 24, at least six weeks after credit markets began to thaw . . .

“It’s never encouraging when a politician who desperately needs to convince skeptical Americans of his fiscal sobriety starts off by slurring his words. As you might then infer, Obama was just warming up. ‘Insurance companies,’ the president announced, ‘will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies,’ in part because such prevention ‘saves money.’ Looks like someone forgot to tell the Congressional Budget Office, or other non-White House sources that have analyzed the cost-benefit of prevention.

“Again and again last night, the president’s numbers didn’t add up. ‘There may be those—particularly the young and healthy—who still want to take the risk and go without coverage,’ he warned, in a passage defending compulsory insurance. ‘The problem is, such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money. If there are affordable options and people still don’t sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for those people’s expensive emergency room visits.’ No, it means that, on balance, the healthy young don’t pay for the unhealthy old. The whole point of forcing vigorous youth to buy insurance is using their cash and good actuarials to bring down the costs of covering the less fortunate.

“Such fudges reveal a politician who, for whatever reason, feels like he can’t be honest about the real-world costs of expanding health care. “Add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years,” he said, trying hard to sound like those numbers weren’t pulled out of Joe Biden’s pants, and won’t be dwarfed by actual costs within a year or two.  ‘We’ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system–a system that is currently full of waste and abuse,’  he said, making him at least the eighth consecutive president to vaguely promise cutting Medicare ‘waste’ (a promise, it should be added, that could theoretically be fulfilled without drastically overhauling the health care system). Any government-run ‘public option,’ he claimed, somehow “won’t be” subsidized by taxpayers, but instead would ‘be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.’

And in a critical, tic-riddled passage that many of even his most ardent supporters probably don’t believe, Obama said: ‘Here’s what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits–either now or in the future. Period.’ In case you couldn’t quite read his lips, the president repeated the line for emphasis. Then: ‘And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.’

If that ‘one dime’ formulation sounds familiar, that’s because Obama made—then almost immediately broke—the same promise regarding taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000 a year. Surely the no-new-deficits pledge is headed for the campaign dustbin faster even then that ‘net spending cut‘ we’ll never see.”

Martin Feldstein, an economic advisor to Obama, criticized “ObamaCare’s Crippling Deficits” in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, noting that “the higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards.”

Feldstein earlier called into question Obama’s claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs. “ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says Feldstein. Feldstein also noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

Fact-checkers previously concluded that Obama is lying about health-care. A CNN Money commentary notes that ObamaCare will take away 5 freedoms.

Obama claimed his proposals would not give coverage to illegal aliens. While the New York Times claims that this is technically true, others, like the Congressional Research Service, Slate’s Mickey Kaus (a Democrat), and the Washington Examiner, have said that it likely would give coverage to illegal aliens.

While illegal aliens are exempt from Obama’s individual mandate — which would impose penalties on American citizens who do not obtain health insurance coverage — and they are theoretically not entitled to government-subsidized coverage under the House version of ObamaCare, in practice, there would little to stop them from obtaining such coverage, since Democrats blocked any effective enforcement mechanism for excluding illegal aliens, by voting down the safeguards advocated by Congressman Dean Heller (R-Nevada).

Yet, as the New York Times concedes, “illegal immigrants would seem to be exempt from the proposed requirement that all but the lowest-income Americans obtain health insurance. So they would not be forced to buy insurance.”

Thus, while illegal immigrants are exempt from ObamaCare’s fines and penalties, there is nothing to stop them from joining up if they want to.

This could lead to the worst of both worlds: young, healthy illegal aliens avoiding buying health insurance, while older, sickly illegal aliens get government-sponsored health insurance, so that the government winds up insuring only the most expensive and costly illegals, at taxpayer expense.

ObamaCare has other dubious provisions, like its racial preferences and set-asides, which earlier drew criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Obama Keeps Lying About His Health-Care Plan, Even After Being Caught by Fact-Checkers

by Hans Bader on August 27, 2009

in Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

You just can’t trust President Obama’s claims about his health-care plan. He keeps on lying even after he is caught lying and his lies have become obvious.

The Congressional Research Service and the Washington Examiner say that illegal aliens WILL be covered by ObamaCare — contrary to what Obama claims.

Factcheck.org and the Associated Press’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar earlier reported that abortions would be covered by ObamaCare — contrary to what Obama claims.

Fact-checkers have repeatedly caught Obama lying about health-care.

But when Obama denied that his health-care plan would cover abortions or illegal aliens, an Associated Press reporter suddenly decided that he must be right, just because he said so. The AP’s Philip Elliott declared that claims that ObamaCare would cover abortion or illegal aliens must be “untrue” because Obama, the nation’s “Fact-Checker-in-Chief,” said so. Never mind that his own colleague Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar had earlier concluded, after reading the bill, that it would in fact cover abortions. If Obama says something, it must be true!

(The AP reporter’s strange logic reminds me of the mystifying and illogical claim by Associated Press reporter Douglass K. Daniel in 2008 that it was a racist, “deliberate attempt to smear Obama” for people to criticize Obama’s links to Bill Ayers, an unrepentant former Weather Underground terrorist and self-described communist who sat on a Chicago foundation board along with Obama that “poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.” But Ayers is white, and criticism of Obama’s association with Ayers thus had no conceivable racial “tinge,” as Daniel claimed).

Whether ObamaCare covers abortions or illegal aliens is certainly not my biggest concern about the health-care bill. I’m much more concerned about its immense cost, waste, and potential rationing, and its taking away important health-care freedoms.

But Obama’s lying about them still concerns me, because if I can’t trust the President on straightforward issues like abortion or illegal aliens, why should I trust him – and the Associated Press – to accurately inform me about more complicated (but important) economic issues raised by the bill? The bill is more than 1000 pages long, but some of its supporters, like Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit) have ridiculed the idea of even reading it. The sheer length and messiness of the bill leads Allan Sloan, who wants universal coverage, to oppose it in today’s Washington Post on the grounds it is “certain to contain enough ambiguities, contradictions and just plain mistakes to ensure years of lucrative employment for countless lawyers” and “lobbyists.”

Obama has also broken many campaign promises, such as his pledge to adopt a “net spending cut,” which he has violated by proposing record budgets funded by over nine trillion dollars in deficits. This year’s budget deficit has already reached $1.3 trillion, part-way through the year, and will grow further as a result of Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package.

The stimulus package is projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. That didn’t stop Obama from falsely claiming that only the stimulus package would prevent “disaster” and “irreversible decline.” (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

The Obama Administration claimed its stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment actually rose rapidly after its passage. The stimulus package destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized welfare and waste. The stimulus also ended ended welfare reform, giving states new incentives to expand welfare rolls.

ObamaCare is full of special-interest giveaways and constitutionally-dubious provisions like racial preferences and set-asides, which has led to ObamaCare being criticized by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs. “ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says Obama adviser Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

Letting Illegal Immigrants Sink Health-Care “Reform”

by Hans Bader on August 24, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

Mickey Kaus, who voted for Obama and wants universal health-care, wonders why Obama is damaging his credibility and endangering his health-care reform proposals by lying about whether ObamaCare will cover illegal aliens.  He chides Congressional Democrats for trying “to sneak de facto health care for illegals through while showily saying the opposite,” and Obama for offering “carefully-crafted phrases designed to offer false assurance” that illegals will not be covered.

Kaus notes “that illegal immigrants will too get health insurance under the current Democratic proposals. They’re technically not eligible, maybe–but their eligibility probably won’t be verified. And Dems have rejected amendments to require verification. (Illegal immigrants aren’t technically eligible for jobs either, but they get them.) . . .The President has gone on radio twice in recent days to assure voters that the bill wasn’t ‘designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants’ . . . When it turns out that these are carefully-crafted phrases designed to offer false assurance about what would actually happen, what will people believe about Obama’s other assurances? As with the ‘death panel’ rebuttals that have failed to calm seniors’ ‘not entirely irrational’ fears of rationing, it’s almost worse to offer sweeping denials that are only 90% accurate than not to offer them at all. . .Liberals went through a similar, politically devastating, process with welfare. Year after year, decade after decade, they would assure Americans that welfare recipients were actually required to work. See, it says so right in the legislation! There’s a ‘work requirement’! The voters never believed this, and took it out on Democrats at the polls. Eventually it became common knowledge, even among the well-informed, that the ‘work requirements’ were riddled with loopholes. Only with Clinton’s 1996 reform did the Democrats put a tourniquet on this wound. Now they’re opening another one.”

(Of course, as Kaus earlier noted, Obama’s stimulus package largely repealed the 1996 welfare reform law, giving states’ new incentives to expand welfare rolls and welfare-dependency).

Many other scholars, commentators, lawyers, and journalists have concluded that the President is lying when he says that ObamaCare will not cover illegal aliens (although they will be exempt from its fines and penalties).

If illegal aliens do sink ObamaCare, it will be no loss, since his health-care proposals are so bad that they are even worse than the status quo.

As I explained earlier, Obama’s health-care proposals won’t give us a national health-care system that works as well as in European countries like France or Switzerland. And ObamaCare will cost more than any other health-care system in the world, while adding more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.

ObamaCare is full of special-interest giveaways and constitutionally-dubious provisions like racial preferences and set-asides, which has led to ObamaCare being criticized by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (ObamaCare also contains lots of waste and subsidies for politically-correct things like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia).

Obama’s credibility is further undermined by his long line of broken promises, such as his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke through budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

(Countries that refused to adopt stimulus packages modeled on Obama’s costly $800 billion stimulus package have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worse in the recession. The stimulus package was a costly failure that substituted welfare for productive investment).

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says one of Obama’s own advisers, Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care. Obama often contradicts himself. In the very same speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health-care.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

As a CNN commentary earlier noted, Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” including the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Yes, ObamaCare Will Likely Cover Illegal Immigrants

by Hans Bader on August 20, 2009 · 3 comments

in Healthcare, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Media fact-checkers have caught Obama telling several falsehoods about his health-care proposals. But they have let him get away with other false claims, such as his claim that ObamaCare would not cover illegal immigrants. As John Rosenberg, an expert on discrimination law, explains, the health-care legislation backed by Obama would indeed likely cover illegal immigrants.

While a House health-care bill backed by Obama purports to exclude exclude illegal immigrants from receiving certain taxpayer-funded subsidies, it effectively includes them, since it blocks any way of determining whether or not recipients of government health insurance are in the country legally. This is because leftist lawmakers deliberately blocked Republican attempts to require verification that recipients of federally-subsidized health insurance are citizens or in the country legally.

One of the “Blue Dog” Democrats who voted for the bill in committee now admits that it does cover illegal immigrants.

As columnist Jay Ambrose notes, “Democrats want to make it impossible to find out if an applicant for benefits is here illegally or not, despite specific wording in bills saying they don’t qualify. Republicans have tried on a number of occasions to include amendments requiring more than what Democrats want — just writing down a Social Security number that will never be checked — and the answer is, oh my, this is an invasion of privacy, or that mistakes could result. It’s an invasion of privacy to find out whether someone is or is not a citizen and therefore eligible for something taxpayers are providing? What blather. All of us have to produce IDs of one kind or another on a host of different occasions, from driver’s licenses, to passports, to birth certificates. As for mistakes, tell me one single interaction between the government and citizens in which mistakes are not possible. I am waiting. I am still waiting. ‘Saying that illegal immigrants cannot benefit while at the same time blocking verification is akin to passing a law that sets the legal drinking age at 21 years and then preventing bars from checking a patron’s identification,’ writes Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in an op-ed piece in The Washington Times, and it seems to me that about says it.”

Covering illegal aliens is problematic because they lack the same responsibilities as citizens. Illegal immigrants are exempt from the taxes and penalties contained in ObamaCare, even though they are effectively able to access its benefits due to the lack of eligibility verification safeguards. Illegal immigrants should not receive preference.

Yet the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed to have illegal immigrants benefit from ObamaCare.

The illegal-alien issue is certainly not the biggest health care issue. But it does shed light on the media’s willingness to gullibly accept many of Obama’s claims at face value. Some media fact-checkers have claimed that ObamaCare won’t cover illegal immigrants simply because Obama says so.

But Obama’s credibility is undermined by his long line of broken promises, such as his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke in a big way with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says one of Obama’s own advisers, Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

ObamaCare is penny-wise and pound-foolish, cutting reimbursement for crucial things like anesthesia to ridiculously low levels (and thus aggravating a shortage of anesthesiologists and doctors), even while increasing spending on wasteful frills.

Legal experts and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have questioned the constitutionality of major provisions of ObamaCare.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

As CNN earlier noted, Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” including the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Most other countries do not provide national health insurance for illegal immigrants.

Obama Backs Costly Health-Care Status Quo, and Limits on Choice and Competition

by Hans Bader on August 15, 2009 · 3 comments

in Healthcare, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Germany is a lot smaller than the U.S., but it has a lot more health insurers to choose from, and cheaper health-care costs. One reason might be more competition: in the U.S., you can’t buy individual health insurance from an out-of-state insurer, since an obsolete federal law lets states block purchases across state lines, taking away interstate-shopping rights that citizens would otherwise enjoy under the the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause. That leaves patients with fewer choices, higher prices, and less competition among insurers, who may control as much as 80 percent of the market in a particular state. In Germany and France, by contrast, you can buy from an insurer anywhere in the country.

The so-called health-care “reform” bills backed by Obama actually worsen this situation, by extending the reach of this anti-consumer restriction on competition beyond individual health-insurance policies to many employer-based health-insurance policies. They do this by gutting the preemption provisions of a federal law known as ERISA.

When John McCain proposed cutting the cost of health insurance by letting Americans shop for cheaper insurance across state lines — the way they can buy almost any other product across state lines — he was bashed by the Obama campaign and Joe Biden.

Washington Post columnists explain how ObamaCare would make the status quo even worse in many other ways as well, while exploding health-care costs. ObamaCare will cost far more than its predicted trillion-dollar price tag. Charles Krauthammer explains how the cost-savings Obama keeps talking about are mythical and non-existent.

Fact checkers say Obama is lying about health care.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. Obamacare will take away 5 important freedoms, notes a CNN commentary. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains costly racial preferences and affirmative action, subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but could access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

Obama is also reenforcing the corrupt political status quo that helped trigger the financial crisis and mortgage meltdown. He wants to create a new bureaucracy to increase the pressure on banks to make risky, low-income loans.

Civil Rights Commission Criticizes Obama Health-Care Plan’s Racially-Discriminatory Affirmative Action

by Hans Bader on August 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Healthcare, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says Obama’s health-care plan is racially discriminatory. The House health-care bill backed by Obama is filled with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” Taxpayers of all races will end up paying more because of these arbitrary racial preferences. The Civil Rights Commission has concluded that this racial discrimination is unjustified, and that it will neither “reduce health care disparities among racial and ethnic groups,” nor “improve health care in underserved areas.”

Earlier, I wrote about other provisions backed by Obama that would mandate affirmative action in health care to promote “cultural competence” — whatever that means — and fund left-wing community organizers. “ObamaCare” also contains preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but can access its benefits due to lack of eligibility verification safeguards. The safeguards were blocked by liberal lawmakers allied with Obama.

Historically, affirmative action did not apply to health-care in general, only to employment, education, and government contracts, although Obama has advocated expanding it to health-care in his published writings. When critics of affirmative action passed state constitutional amendments banning racial preferences in California, Michigan, and Nebraska, they applied such bans only to “employment,” “education,” and “contracting,” because it never occurred to them that anyone would advocate affirmative action elsewhere. But Obama seems determined to go further than any other president in pushing affirmative action. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” he advocated race-based “affirmative action” in the form of “targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities between minorities and whites.”

Earlier, the Civil Rights Commission chided the Obama Administration for letting an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic official get away with racist voter intimidation against non-black voters in Philadelphia (even though they were caught on videotape wielding a nightstick and using racial epithets) and for backing a hate-crimes bill designed to allow people who have been found innocent of hate crimes in state court to be reprosecuted all over again in federal court.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. ObamaCare will take away 5 important freedoms, notes a CNN commentary. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

Deficit Rises $880 Billion to Record $1.3 Trillion, Due to Massive, Unprecedented Government Spending

by Hans Bader on August 8, 2009 · 9 comments

in Economy, Employment, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.

Ironically, Obama had campaigned on a promise, since broken, to make a “net spending cut” in federal spending.

The increase in the deficit is driven largely by reckless federal spending, even though federal tax revenue fell at the fastest rate since 1932 thanks to the recession.

The Obama Administration wants to pile on even more federal spending, including a health-care “reform” proposal predicted to cost at least $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). In reality, Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted, the way past health-care expansions always have.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains affirmative action and subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but may be able to access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

Bailouts for Liars, Illegal Aliens, and Undeserved Bonuses

by Hans Bader on March 15, 2009 · 3 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Labor, Legal, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

Insurance giant AIG, bailed out by taxpayers for $170 billion, is using taxpayer money to pay executives in the division that brought it to the brink of collapse millions of dollars in bonuses! (AIG may have hoped its donations to liberal politicians, such as $103,100 to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) in 2008 alone, would shield it from scrutiny).

The Senate voted down an amendment by Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that would have kept federal stimulus money from hiring illegal aliens, resulting in up to 300,000 jobs being filled by illegal aliens rather than citizens.

In an unrecorded voice vote, the House of Representatives voted down a proposed amendment to keep people who lied on their loan applications from receiving federal bailout money. The vote was unrecorded so that liberal lawmakers in conservative districts (who camouflage themselves as supposedly-conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats) could hide their vote from their constituents. The stimulus package funds groups like ACORN, which helped spawn the mortgage crisis by promoting “liar loans,” and which has an extensive history of financial fraud and vote fraud.

Federal spending commitments for bailouts now exceed $8 trillion, including a “stimulus” package that the Congressional Budget Office admits will actually shrink the economy “in the long run,” and that guts the 1996 welfare reform law (contradicting Obama’s claims in his 2008 campaign ads that he supported welfare reform — even though he had fought to undermine welfare reform while in the Illinois legislature).

Law professor Ronald Rotunda, co-author of a treatise on constitutional law, doubts the constitutionality of the stimulus package’s “bypass” provisions.

Meanwhile, healthy banks that sold shares to the federal government only under pressure from the Treasury Department (which argued that they should accept federal money so that unhealthy banks also taking federal money would not thereby be stigmatized as a result) are being harassed by liberal lawmakers like Barney Frank (D-Mass.) for spending much smaller sums than AIG on deserving managers and employees, and for failing to make risky mortgage loans to people with bad credit.

Money is pouring into the Washington, DC area, as up to 250,000 new bureaucrats will be hired as a result of the explosion in federal spending (Obama has pushed through more spending in his first 60 days in office than Bush spent on the entire Iraq War, and federal deficits are at unprecedented levels, something that not even the proposed massive tax increases will fix).

(By the way, Washington, D.C. now has the highest AIDS rate in America — a rate of more than 3%, higher even than most of Africa, qualifying as a “generalized and severe epidemic.” Congress has plenary power over the District, but neglects its most basic oversight functions, resulting in a thoroughly incompetent D.C. city government).

Meanwhile, the economy faces a “litigation tax” from an explosion in lawsuits, as a result of recent changes in employment law, trial-lawyer earmarks in the stimulus package (such as HIPAA lawsuits), and a proliferation of products liability lawsuits resulting from anticipated anti-preemption bills in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s newfound reluctance (perhaps in response to liberal victories in the 2008 election) to limit runaway lawsuits in state courts.