The health care “reform” bill drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adds new tax increases, and costs twice as much as its promised $849 billion price tag.

The tax increases (in billions) include:

1. 40% excise tax on health coverage in excess of $8,500 (individuals) / $23,000 (families). . .
2. Additional 0.5% Medicare (Hospital Insurance) tax on wages in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) – begins in 2013 – $54 B tax increase
3. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers…

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CEI’s champion of letter-writing, Alex Nowrasteh, has a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal today advocating removing the cap on H-1B visas to encourage more doctors to practice in the U.S.  As Alex points out:

In 2005, a paltry 7,218 medical and health-care professionals earned H-1B visas, while many were denied. A cap on the number of doctors and medical professionals entering the U.S. discourages health-care access and raises costs. The H-1B visa cap should be removed along with…

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The Wall Street Journal calls the House version of President Obama’s health care plan “the worst bill ever,” noting that it will lead to “epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting,” and other problems.

At the Atlantic, Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama, explains how ObamaCare will cost much more than promised — at least $150 billion more.  That’s true even if promised cuts to Medicare included in ObamaCare actually take place — but as McArdle notes, even…

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The small country of Honduras did not agree to return its authoritarian ex-president to power after all.  Press reports said it did, but The Wall Street Journal says it merely agreed to submit a request for his return to Honduras’s Congress and Supreme Court, which previously backed the ex-president’s removal, in exchange for an end to U.S. sanctions and U.S. recognition of upcoming election results.  Under continuing U.S. pressure, they may soon allow his return to office, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The…

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Here is a letter I sent recently to The Wall Street Journal:

September 22, 2009

Editor, The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

To the Editor:

Your article “Bad News for Broadband” (editorial, Sept. 22) hints at, but does not make, a key point: net neutrality proposals are driving a wedge between service providers like AT&T and content providers like Google.

Strange, is it not? Their interests are actually closely aligned. If AT&T upgrades its network, Google benefits from the increased bandwidth. If…

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While Obama ally ACORN attempts to gag whistleblowers who exposed its role in a recent scandal, the Obama administration is trying to gag critics of its health-care plan, which the Congressional Budget Office says could wipe out many Medicare Advantage programs relied on by the elderly.  (”The Obama Administration wants to seriously curtail or end Medicare Advantage.”)

It has issued a gag order to Humana, a health insurer that provides Medicare Advantage services, ordering it not to tell customers about how Obamacare could reduce the availability of…

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Much of the hullabaloo over President Obama’s health care speech to Congress last week focused on his endorsement of a “public option” — that is, a government-run, not merely government regulated health insurance plan for the non-elderly middle class.  Throughout the August congressional recess, it appeared as though the White House was ready to abandon the public option, since that was a major source of contention among congressional Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and a sizeable portion of the American public.  In…

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes back guest co-hosts William Yeatman and the Capital Research Center’s Jeremy Lott for Episode 57 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with Blue Dogs and health care legislation, cash for clunkers running on fumes, and AT&T’s response to an iPhone controversy. We continue on with the scandal that wouldn’t die and the architectural historian’s version of Olympic News.

SPECIAL BOOK FEATURE: Shattered Lives: One Hundred Victims of Government Health Care. This book documents stories from Canada, the…

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Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz has a great column in today’s paper on the anachronism that is antitrust law.  He writes:

“Markets were so much simpler in the 1890s, when Sen. John Sherman got almost unanimous support in Congress to go after the Standard Oil Co. of Ohio. The Sherman Act and later antitrust laws were supposed to protect consumer interests. That’s not so easy when regulators have to deal with industries as different as oil, with its cartels and…

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Best line this week — should be a slogan for health care debate: “If you like public housing, you will love public health care.”

Read the opinion piece “Parsing the health reform arguments” by George Newman in the Wall Street Journal today for concise rebuttals of oft-repeated claims about government health plan.

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In a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, CEI’s Fred Smith references Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith’s earlier op-ed to point out that radical egalitarianism policies have been one of the driving forces behind the housing bubble and the resultant financial crisis.  As Fred notes,

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith suggest one unexplored aspect of our financial crisis: the role of egalitarian policies. To see this, note their distinction between the impacts of the $10 trillion loss in the 2000 stock market…

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Today the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal takes a hard look at some of the negative economic consequences of touted cap-and-trade programs to reduce CO2 emissions and the possibility of carbon tariffs to protect U.S. businesses.  Not only would such programs cost “heavy-industry” jobs already suffering in the global recession but also could lead to trade wars as developing countries retaliate:

So in addition to all the other economic harm, a cap-and-trade tax will make foreign companies more competitive…

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We’re beginning to see the talent exodus from TARP-funded financial institutions.  Yesterday in an op-ed Jake DeSantis of AIG-Financial Products wrote his “resignation letter” saying why he was leaving AIG.  One major reason was the raging mob calling for the heads of those who received retention payments, now called bonuses, and the tepid defense that AIG’s $1-per-year chairman gave before Rep. Barney Frank’s rabid committee.

Today we learned from the Wall Street Journal that several top managers at Banque AIG in France…

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Major newspapers around the country including the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in the lame duck session. The Los Angeles Times said it bluntly, “It’s time to stop playing games with a trade pact whose economic and political benefits are good for both nations.”

Some reports of the meeting between the president-elect and President Bush said that the president had pushed for the trade agreement in exchange…

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The Wall Street Journal today has an insightful article by George Newman, “an economist and retired business executive.”

Newman brings up a new rationale for the steep drop in the stock market — that investors have already priced in a likely Obama victory.

The valuation of an individual stock reflects the collective expectation of investors about a company’s future profits, dividends and appreciation, and the same is true of the market as a whole. These profits, in turn, are greatly influenced by government…

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I’m not sure why Matthew Yglesias chose to adopt the unpleasant leftist tactic of beginning an argument with insult (”conservatives don’t know anything about anything”) in response to a recent Corner post of mine. Yglesias also engages in shifting the goalposts, because my “enthusiastic recommendation” of a Wall Street Journal leader column was not enthusiastic for the argument he chooses to highlight, but for its expose of the tactics Sen. Dodd and co are employing in the current debate.

Let’s leave all that…

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While conservatives are angry about a number of things at the moment, they should be at least as angry that the Congressional Democrats who helped stoke the mortgage crisis are getting away with blaming everyone else for it. Today, Senator Chris Dodd, the prime recipient of GSE lobbying funds and proud holder of a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide, is holding hearings where the witnesses will blame everyone but Dodd, Barney Frank and their cronies. Republicans asked to invite witnesses but…

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There are all sorts of people today who normally talk about free markets but who have got themselves into a tizzy over the failed bailout. We need to get one thing straight - the bailout was the wrong answer to the wrong question. To begin with, the plan was merely postponing the inevitable, as a letter in the Wall Street Journal pointed out this morning:

The lesson of past financial inflection points is that we must let the markets reallocate capital from…

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