Intolerable.

Dr. Feulner of Heritage lays it out as well as I possibly could:

Unconstitutional.
Against the clear will of the people.
Intolerable.


This must not stand.


Additionally:

• Obamacare Isn’t Inevitable


• Happy Warriors Still


• Our Mission: Repeal It.

The Extended Case Against the Healthcare Bill

The Heritage Foundation notes: "there is no bill but the Senate bill" and that "a review of just how terrible it really is, is in order".

Their case against:

New Middle-Class Taxes: Throughout his campaign, President Barack Obama promised he would not raise taxes on American households making less than $250,000. The Senate bill shatters that promise. For starters, just look at the reason Trumka went to the White House yesterday: the excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans. This tax would overwhelmingly hit middle-class taxpayers. Taxes on prescription drugs, wheel chairs and other medical devices would also be passed on to all consumers, hitting the lower- and middle- classes the hardest.

Increased Health Care Costs: The Senate bill manifestly does nothing to bend the health care cost curve downward. According to the latest CBO report, the Senate bill would actually increase health care spending by $210 billion over the next 10 years. This follows a previous report from the President’s own Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) showing the Senate bill would result in $234 billion in additional health care spending over 10 years.

Increased Health Insurance Premiums: The President initially promised that Americans would see a $2,500 annual reduction in their family health care costs. But under the Senate bill, premiums would go up for millions of Americans. In fact, according to the CBO, estimated premiums in the individual market would be 10–13 percent higher by 2016 than they would be under current law.

Increased Deficits: Despite claiming to be comprehensive health care reform, the Senate bill does not address the fact that Medicare’s current price-fixing doctor reimbursement scheme is set to reduce doctor payments by 21% this year. That simply is not going to happen. Congress will pass that fix separately. If that cost were included, Obamacare is already $200 billion in the red. Now throw in the fact that the Senate bill is paid for with another $463 billion in Medicare cuts to health care providers. CMS says if these cuts occur, one-fifth of all health care providers will face bankruptcy. That simply is not going to happen. Just like the doctor reimbursement cuts have never happened, the Obamacare Medicare cuts will never happen. So in reality, Obamacare will add almost $700 billion to our national deficit in the next ten years alone.

Increases Unemployment and Puts Millions of Americans on Welfare: According to The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA), a dynamic analysis of the tax hikes and deficits created by the Senate bill shows that an average 690,000 jobs per year would be lost if it became law. In addition, over half of all Americans who would gain health insurance through the bill (18 million out of 33 million) would do so by being placed on Medicaid, which is a welfare program.

Higher taxes, higher health care costs, higher health insurance premiums, higher deficits, more unemployment and more Americans on welfare. That is America’s future should the Senate Obamacare bill become law.

Quick Hits:

• According to the Treasury Department, the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion over the 421 days since President Obama took office.


• If the House does pass the Senate bill, dozens of conservative lawmakers and candidates have signed a pledge to back an effort to repeal the measure.


• Yesterday Mark Levin posted the complaint his Landmark Legal Foundation will file in federal court if the House uses the Slaughter Rule to pass the Senate bill.


• Over half of the Americans who gain health insurance through the Senate bill will not be able to get their drugs from Washington state Walgreens, since they announced yesterday that as of April 16th they will not accept any new Medicaid patients.


• According to Gallup, Americans firmly prioritize the economy over the environment and fewer than half of Democrats now believe environmental protection is the more important goal.

No, It's Not.

That's my answer to this Cato ad, anyway:



And, FWIW, both CATO (here: http://healthcare.cato.org/) and the Heritage Foundation (here: http://fixhealthcarepolicy.com/) are excellent references for policy solutions, from a conservative perspective, that really could have a positive impact on health care "reform".

One of the things that drives me crazy is when liberals ignorantly blather on about how "conservatives don't have any solutions to these problems". Yeah, we do. And those two sites feature some of the best solutions.

Also, Heritage's header graphic neatly summarizes the differences in approaches between individual-empowering conservatives and government-growing liberals:

Stimulus Link Roundup

Things worth reading about the Stimulus that I didn't manage to work into my last post.


What's In The Bill
- Michael Grabell, ProPublica: The Stimulus Plan: Where the Money Would Go
- Karen Yourish & Laura Stanton, The Washington Post: Taking Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package


How We Got In This Mess In the First Place
- John B. Taylor, The Wall Street Journal: How Government Created the Financial Crisis; Research shows the failure to rescue Lehman did not trigger the fall panic.
- Scott S. Powell, Barrons: The Culprit Is All of Us; The government's meddling got us into this mess.
- Julia Finch, The Guardian: Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown ...


Why It Won't Work
- Stephen Dinan, Washington Times: CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul
- Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator: It Still Won't Work
- Mario Rizzo, ThinkMarkets: The Macroeconomic Knowledge Problem
- Russell Roberts, Cafe Hayek: Corrupt
- The Daily Beast Big Fat Story: Six New Stimulus Woes


What's Hiding In the Bill
- Betsy McCaughey, Bloomberg: Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan
- James C. Capretta, NRO's The Corner: The House’s Hidden Employer Mandate


What Should We Be Doing Instead?
- Alex Adrianson, Heritage InsiderOnline Blog: The Case for Free Market Solutions to the Economic Crisis
- Russell Roberts, NPR: Economists Offer 2 Takes On Obama Stimulus Plan
- Russell Roberts, Cafe Hayek: Inconceivable.


And, finally, the Wisdom of Hayek:

The theory [...] which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.

- Friedrich August von Hayek, in hisNobel Prize Lecture. (h/t Don Boudreaux)

Fairness Doctrine

Bringing back the "Fairness Doctrine" seems to be getting mainstream attention, which I find surprising and perhaps (if this leads to popular support) unfortunate.

The latest episode of the CNN "Special Programming" Podcast is about "Reviving the Fairness Doctrine." It begins:

Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) (Guest): The people of this country should have the opportunity to hear all points of view.

Announcer: Reviving the Fairness Doctrine.

Maurice Hinchey: You're jeopardizing the basic principles of the Constitution.

Announcer: A CNN Podcast.

Dick Uliano (Host): Here's an issue that may soon move from back to front burner in Washington. A bid to rein in one-sided talk radio.

I guess we know where CNN stands.

Granted, there is a Constitutional issue here. But it's not at all what Hinchey's trying to claim. It's called the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. You know, the very reasons the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine back in 1987 -- from Wikipedia:

In August 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in its Syracuse Peace Council decision. The FCC stated, "the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... (and) actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists", and suggested that, due to the many media voices in the marketplace at the time, the doctrine was perceived to be unconstitutional.

QandO has excellent commentary on this going back to as early as January:

• The False Assumption Underlying the Fairness Doctrine (January 17, 2007)


• Why I don’t buy the liberal argument about Talk Radio (June 26, 2007)


• Gearing up to pass the Fairness Doctrine (June 27, 2007)

Additionally, the Heritage Foundation's analysis from October 29, 1993 continues to be spot-on.

For those interested in a less intellectual evaluation of the issue, just give this your consideration:

Immigration and an Entitlement Society

I'd like you to give me $33 per month for the rest of your life, please. Outrageous request? Please read on...


A week and a half ago, had you asked if I was in favor of "comprehensive immigration reform" I would have told you "yes". However, the more I read about the Immigration Bill, the less and less I like it; and the more I consider the non-enforcement parts of "comprehensive immigration reform," the less and less I like them.

To start, I think we can all agree that the current system "is broken." As I consider the current system though, I'm not particularly convinced that it's broken because of lack of legislation. Illegal immigration is, in fact, already illegal today without any new legislation.

What is broken is the enforcement side.

Now, granted, rounding up and mass deporting 12 million individuals would be both drastically expensive and nearly impossible. I'll also grant that deporting about 4% of our workforce (assuming 12 million illegal immigrants and a US population of 300 million, about one in twenty five persons in the United States are illegal immigrants) would be economically catastrophic.

But, I don't accept that allowing those 12 million individuals to stay here indefinitely is a valid solution either. They broke the law, that needs to be accounted for.

The bill now being debated does try to account for that with a $5,000 fine. In that regard, that "penalty" prevents the bill from being "amnesty" (in the strict sense of the word), but it hardly seems like a punishment, and such a measly "punishment" hardly seems like it would deter future illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

One thing that this bill does do is put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. Ironically, this at the same time we are concerned about the growing costs of Social Security and Medicare ... and we want to add 12 million beneficiaries to those programs?

Looking more broadly than just Social Security and Medicare, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation ran some numbers. Using data from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, he figured out that about half of these twelve million lack a high school education. And looking at the typical immigrant high school drop out in the U.S., he found that they generally pay about $10,000 in a taxes per year, but receive $30,000 in government benefits. That's a net loss of $20,000 per year per individual. Ouch.

If you expand that across that apparently 6 million illegal immigrants that lack a high school education, and assume they all became citizens, you arrive at $120,000,000,000.00 a year. Let's spread that over 300 million individuals. We arrive at $400 each. Are you interested in giving the government $400 more per year? Neither am I. I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do for $33/month (including philanthropic things!) other than giving it to the government because we have an influx of individuals taking three times more in government benefits than what they pay in taxes.

The bottom line of immigration, I think, is that we need to change the incentives. Illegal immigrants cross the border illegally because it's worth their while to do so. The economic opportunities outweigh the risks. Since your average American citizen is becoming more and more educated, we have areas in our economy that would (and do) benefit from unskilled laborers. Why not reform (simplify) the immigration process and make our allowance of how many legal immigrants we accept per year large enough to let in a sufficient number that the desire to come illegally is drastically reduced?

At the same time, if you add enforcement at the hiring level, requiring employers to check the status of their workers, and giving them the tools they need to do so, illegal immigrants that come won't be able to find work and will leave.

Paths to citizenship that will cost the American tax payers $120,000,000,000.00 a year are not the way to go though. And, as I whole I think this bill does much more harm than good ... John Boehner was right.

BTW, if you are looking for in depth details and analysis of this bill, allow me to recommend:

• Hugh Hewitt: The Immigration Analysis Consolidated (Bumped and Updated)
  
• The Truth Laid Bear: The "Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007"

Update: I think I got that $5,000 figure wrong... Quoting from a recent Heritage Foundation publication, "Rewarding Illegal Aliens: Senate Bill Undermines The Rule of Law":

The most controversial component of the Senate's Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 is Title VI, euphemistically entitled "Nonimmigrants in the United States Previously in Unlawful Status." It would create a new "Z" visa exclusively for illegal aliens. This title would change the status of those who are here illegally to legal, essentially granting amnesty to those "previously in unlawful status."

...

The price of a Z visa is $3,000 for individuals—only slightly more than the going rate to hire a coyote to smuggle a person across the border. A family of five could purchase visas for the bargain price of $5,000—some $20,000 short of the net cost that household is likely to impose on local, state, and federal government each year

The publication actually goes into detail on ten controversial (outrageous?) provisions of Title VI. It concludes:

What becomes unmistakably clear from the details of the Senate's bill is that it is not a "compromise" in any meaningful sense. Indeed, the sweeping amnesty provisions of Title VI cripple law enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

Well put.