nancy pelosi

Obama Health-Care Plan Would Take Away 5 Important Freedoms, CNN Says; Obama Would Also Raise Taxes, End Affordable Plans, and Break Promises

by Hans Bader on July 27, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Global Warming, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: 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.”

As CNN notes, “the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage — including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money — but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can’t have.” “If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company’s Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests — you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills” that Congressional leaders have drafted to implement Obama’s plan.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to rush the health-care bill through Congress before most people can even figure out what’s in the bill. That’s how she pushed through Congress the $800 billion stimulus package, which contained hidden provisions that ended welfare reform, and which is now projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” (The stimulus package was supposed to deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, as well as subsidizing welfare and waste.)

The bill may be rewritten at the last moment to provide more giveaways to special interests, like the huge cap-and-trade energy tax that Pelosi recently strong-armed through the House. (As Obama once noted, his version of that tax would make people’s electric bills “skyrocket.”) The energy tax was pushed through before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

These tax increases are part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obamacare would also apparently restrict resources for end-of-life care for the elderly, and mandate wasteful end-of-life counseling for the elderly (such as lecturing them about the right to hasten their own death by refusing nutrition).

Earlier, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave an honest but “devastating assessment” of the incredibly high cost of the health-care plans backed by Obama, which would cost well over a trillion dollars, to cover just a fraction of the uninsured.

Obama is angry about that truthful conclusion, as well as the CBO’s finding that his wasteful stimulus package will actually reduce the size of the economy “in the long run.” (Obama had claimed that only his stimulus package could save America from “disaster” and “irreversible decline“).

So Obama recently invited CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, a “Democratic appointee,” to the White House to pressure him to reduce his cost estimates.

It is doubtful that Obamacare would live up to any of Obama’s claims. His other legislation hasn’t. His stimulus package has been a fiasco, as much of the public now realizes: just 25% say it has helped the economy.

And his cap-and-trade energy tax, if passed by the Senate, would cost the economy trillions, while doing little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol subsidies, which harm the environment, destroy forests, and cause world hunger. Meanwhile, Obama has undermined nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by wastefully blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent creating it.

Torture Prosecutions for Thee, But Not for Me

by Hans Bader on April 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Bush Administration officials prosecuted for facilitating torture. Fair enough. But if they get prosecuted, she should get prosecuted, too. She knew of the torture and knowingly funded the very programs that engaged in it. She only objected to it after Bush’s poll ratings went down.

Andrew Sullivan, who detests the Bush Administration, observes that “The Speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told of the program. She did nothing to stop it.” Indeed, said the CIA’s Porter Goss, “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough” to extract confessions.

Similarly, lawyer John Hinderaker notes that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.), who wants to investigate the Bush Administration, “enthusiastically endorsed waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques back in the days” following 9/11.

Liberals like Pelosi can’t logically object to being held responsible for “aiding and abetting” torture by knowingly funding it, without engaging in hypocrisy. After all, they support punishment based on very broad theories of “aiding and abetting.” For example, liberals support the massive, and worthless, $400 billion Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuits against American companies that did business in South Africa, under the theory that merely by selling products in South Africa, the companies thereby “aided and abetted” South Africa’s apartheid regime — never mind that South Africa’s current, democratically-elected, black-majority government is utterly opposed to these lawsuits, and that the companies now being sued complied with a set of human-rights principles known as the “Sullivan Principles” while operating in South Africa.

Torture produced lots of false information that wasted the CIA’s time and money, and produced bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced travelers. But the creepy Dick Cheney is still defending torture, making claims that are as illogical as his ridiculous claim (now echoed by the Obama Administration, which is running up record deficits in violation of Obama’s disingenuous “net spending cut” pledge) that “deficits don’t matter.”

Obama has been vague about the possibility of torture prosecutions. He seemed open to them on Tuesday, but not on Thursday “when it became apparent that any investigation would . . . include Congressional Democrats who signed off on the interrogations.”

While Andrew Sullivan is to be commended for not deliberately overlooking liberal complicity in the Bush Administration’s torture (the way most bloggers advocating torture prosecutions have), he has been less consistent in his attempts to defend the policies of the Obama Administration, such as his attacks on the tea-party anti-tax protesters.

Sullivan erroneously attacked the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s” — even though the protests focused on the bailouts as well as the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in the long run.

But after it became clear that many of the protesters had opposed the costly bailouts over the past year, including the Wall Street and auto bailouts during the Bush Administration, Sullivan switched gears to defend that wasteful spending, which even many original supporters of the bailouts now regret (and which even Treasury Secretary Geithner, an architect of the bailouts, admits have had “mixed” results). Sullivan now attacks the tea party protesters because they OPPOSED the bank bailout last year pushed through by the Bush Administration.

To Sullivan, criticism of Obama’s wasteful spending seems suspect regardless of whether the critic supported or opposed Bush’s fiscal policies.

Sullivan, the self-described “fiscal conservative” and believer in “limited government,” now supports Obama’s massive $800 billion stimulus package, sneering at people who “think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus” — seemingly oblivious to the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that Obama’s pork-filled stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run by exploding the national debt.

Andrew Sullivan, not the tea party protests, was once a cheerleader for one of the most costly items on George Bush’s agenda: the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Sullivan bashes Bush for invading Iraq. But Sullivan long advocated invading Iraq before Bush did so, at times even chiding Bush for his perceived slowness to act against Saddam Hussein. Ironically, he now trumpets the idea of prosecuting Bush Administration officials. He cites the Administration’s use of torture, which I have also repeatedly criticized; but one of those Sullivan wants prosecuted, Doug Feith, staunchly opposed the use of torture. Feith’s real sin was to espouse the same cause Sullivan once did with such zest: the perfectly lawful, although extremely costly, invasion of Iraq.

Sullivan may variously claim to be conservative or libertarian in an effort to lend weight to his endorsement of big-spending liberal politicians like John Kerry and Barack Obama, but it would be more accurate to describe him, as Forbes magazine did, as a liberal journalist.

Torture Caused Bogus Orange Alerts

by Hans Bader on March 29, 2009 · 2 comments

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Many of those bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced and alarmed travelers since 9/11 had an unsavory source: torture. The Bush Administration, with the tacit support of Congressional leaders of both political parties, tortured terrorists and other detainees into confessing imaginary plots. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), who recently called for an investigation of the Bush Administration, herself knew of the torture for years, having received over 30 intelligence briefings, and Congress knowingly funded the precise programs that practiced torture).

“When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader . . .The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions. . .Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.” And it turns out that “Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.”

All of this waste of money and resources could have been avoided simply by following our country’s obligation, under treaties like the Convention Against Torture, not to subject detainees to torture or inhuman treatment. (By torture, I do not mean long-term confinement. I repeatedly criticized the Bush Administration’s use of torture. But interning enemy combatants at places like Guantanamo — where little if any of the torture occurred — violates no international obligations. The ceaseless romanticizing of the Guantanamo detainees, many of whom are dangerous terrorists who need to be kept confined to prevent future attacks, is downright annoying.)

The federal government has also messed up airline security. The federal Transportation Security Administration fails to catch fake bombs three times as often as private security companies, and 2.5 times as often as the private companies the TSA replaced after 9/11.

ADDENDUM, March 30: As readers have noted, the most recent Washington Post article I linked to in this blog post has a headline that inaccurately suggests that no plots were foiled as a result of information obtained under torture — even though, buried deep in the article, is the authors’ tacit concession to the contrary, in stating that no “significant plots” were uncovered as a result of that information. The article does, however, indicate that more useful information was obtained from Zubaida before the use of torture than after its use — and that the use of torture produced a large amount of false information and false alarms (as the title of this blog post indicates) that wasted valuable time and money. Thus, on balance, it still undermines the case for using torture, although somewhat less than the Post’s headline suggests.

Fed Cuts Rates, Punishing Thrift, and Impoverishing Savers

by Hans Bader on December 16, 2008 · 4 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

The Federal Reserve has just cut the federal funds rate for loans to banks to an unprecedentedly low rate — ranging from 0.0% to 0.25% — well below its prior 1 percent rate.  After taking inflation into account, the Fed is literally giving money away.  The Fed’s low interest rates since 2001 helped spawn the current financial crisis and the mortgage bubble, greatly weakening the value of the U.S. dollar and reducing capital investment in the U.S.

The Fed’s rate cut will also have the effect of reducing already very low interest rates on savings accounts, costing savers money.   Not only is your bank interest rate less than the inflation rate, eroding the value of your savings, but to add insult to injury, you have to pay income tax on the insultingly-low interest, too.

The Fed’s action misdiagnoses the cause of the financial crisis.  Banks aren’t refusing to lend money because interest rates are too high — they’re refusing to lend because they are afraid they won’t be paid back.  The Fed’s irresponsible actions lend weight to such fears.

The Fed’s action, which is partly intended to prop up overextended borrowers by reducing their interest payments, sends the message that the government will protect such borrowers from the consequences of their own overspending and recklessness, regardless of the cost to others.

That same mentality is behind Obama’s campaign call for a freeze on foreclosures; the FDIC’s failed policy of reducing the mortgage payments of delinquent borrowers at failed banks; and calls by politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bail out defaulting mortgage borrowers.   Banks’ reluctance to lend money in such a political climate, and fear that they won’t be fully paid back, is understandable.

Bailout on Wheels Rolls Down Slippery Slope

by Iain Murray on November 10, 2008

in Bailout Watch

Ah, that slippery slope. All of a sudden, Nancy Pelosi has come to the conclusion that ensuring union retirees receive large amounts of taxpayers’ money is central to the country’s financial stability. And after all, it’s only $25 billion (or maybe $50 billion, still nowhere near $700 billion, or maybe $2 trillion). As my colleague Sam Kazman commented, even though multi-billion dollar bailouts may no longer be the rarity they once were, that does not entitle either the auto industry or the UAW to Cole Porter’s Anything Goes status. Moreover, as Professor Bainbridge points out, all of the problems facing the Big Three would be better solved by bankruptcy than bailout. Yet it seems that Bailout Mania has crossed the pond, with the unions in Britain demanding a $20 billion bailout for the virtually non-existant British auto industry.

In this sort of climate, we should remember a simple fact about the free market, eloquently expressed by none other than PJ O’Rourke in his must-read, if controversial, essay “We Blew It” in the latest Weekly Standard:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters—all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs—think so too.

Indeed. And subsidizing food bills won’t help either. Someone near and dear to me has similar thoughts at her new blog.

Cross-posted from The Corner.

Market down on bailout — Don’t compound damage with overregulation of ‘Main Street’

by John Berlau on October 3, 2008 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk

Today — five days after a courageous independent vote against Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for Wall Street — the U.S. House of Representatives disappointingly approved the same basic measure. Many of the bill’s other “sweeteners”, such as earmarks and a regressive increase in deposit insurance for upper income bank customers –will also cost taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars.

All this week I and my colleagues have pointed out ways this bailout could, in addition to being costly, be counterproductive for the economy. Wall Street may have been feeling this “buyers’ remorse” today as the Dow Jones Industrial Average pared back ealier gains to end the day down by 150 points. As Yahoo Finance noted, “financial stocks, which had traded sharply higher on the promise the bill would be passed, fell after the House vote on profit-taking and as the market focused on the tough road that still lies ahead for the U.S. economy.”

As I had noted previously, despite the scare tactics from Paulson to Pelosi of economic Armageddon if no bailout was passed, the volatility of the past few weeks was in siginifcant part due to fear about what goverment was going to do as well as fear of market conditions.

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LibertyWeek 8: Cheese for Dogs

by Cord Blomquist on September 16, 2008 · 1 comment

in Podcast

Check out me and Richard Morrison doing another episode of CEI’s weekly podcast, Liberty Week.  This week we cover:

  • The “meltdown” on Wall Street
  • Hurricane Ike
  • Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to offshore drilling
  • The War on Bottled Waterâ„¢
  • A breakthrough for Paralympic athletes

Also, this week we have Radu Burnete (our Romanian intern) joining us to consider how European Union rules have made short cucumbers, uncurved bananas and unpasteurized cheese crimes against the people.

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