Internet Scofflaw

According to a new CNN poll, the Democratic health care “reform” bill is down 20 points: 58% oppose it versus just 38% that support it. When asked what Congress should do, the strong winner was to start over (48%).  To pass the Democratic bill was well behind at 30%. Another 21% said Congress should stop work entirely.

The results are even more striking when you note that CNN polled adults in general, not likely voters or even registered voters. One has to guess that likely voters would put the Democrats even further behind.

(Via Hot Air.)

According to a new Franklin & Marshall poll, Pat Toomey leads Arlen Specter by 14 points (45-31), and leads Joe Sestak by 22 points (41-19). In the Democratic primary, Specter leads Sestak by 17 points (30-13), but both are running well behind Other/don’t know (57%).

(Via Hot Air.)

President Obama’s budget reportedly will cut all funds for human space flight. Once the last space shuttle is retired, we will rely on Russia to get into space, not just for a few years (as previously planned) but for the forseeable future.

This is madness. The United States will have access to space only through the cooperation of one of its adversaries? I’m sure the Russians are delighted by the idea.

CBO director Doug Elmendorf explains what ought to be obvious, but somehow is not — at least to our lawmakers:

Fiscal policy is on an unsustainable path to an extent that cannot be solved by minor tinkering. The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the budget is to be placed on a sustainable course.

(Emphasis mine.) He includes some charts that show, not only how bad our fiscal situation is, but how much worse it is than the official numbers. Here’s the deficit, comparing the official numbers that the CBO is required to produce with a more realistic projection:

And the debt:

Alas minor tinkering is all our government is offering.

Ladder training.

Fat lot of good the president’s proposed spending freeze will do us now. We’ve already blown the budget with the stimulus boondoggle. A spending freeze just locks in the current spending level. We need to cut spending back, not just to pre-stimulus levels, but to pre-Bush levels.

The $15 billion that the president’s spending freeze would save isn’t even a tithe of a tithe of our annual deficit. (And that’s assuming it happens, which isn’t bloody likely.) We need real cuts, such as those in President Bush’s proposed 2009 budget. If we had adopted Bush’s budget instead of Obama’s, today’s deficit would be $750 billion smaller.

Of course, it’s amusing to go back and watch video of Obama ridiculing John McCain’s call for a spending freeze, but it’s also sad. Even back then, a spending freeze wasn’t enough. Obama, however, said it was too much, claiming we need a scalpel, not a hatchet. (As if you can fix our budget problems by cutting out tiny little bits. Sheesh.) Forget the scalpel and the hatchet. What we needed then was a chain saw. What we need now is a wrecking ball.

UPDATE: I should also have mentioned that hardly any of the budget would be subject to the spending freeze anyway. Here’s a good graphic:

(Via the Corner.)

President Obama is promising nervous democrats that his personal popularity will save the party from big losses this fall:

The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Clarified that the quote of the president is indirect.

A few days I quoted a thoughtful analysis by Ramesh Ponnuru of the problem of pre-existing conditions. He pointed out that one cannot merely require that health insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions at no extra cost, because people would simply delay buying insurance until they got sick. To deal with that problem, you must require everyone to buy health insurance, and that sets in motion a whole chain of necessary government interventions that result in something akin to Obamacare.

Ponnuru is right, of course, but on further reflection, the problem is worse than he suggests. Even the individual mandate doesn’t address the wait-until-you’re-sick problem. Here’s the thing: When you get sick, the individual mandate may require you to have insurance already, but it doesn’t stop you from switching to a better insurance plan. The new plan can’t reject you because of the pre-existing condition, nor can it charge you more.

It’s not hard to see what happens. Whenever people get sick, they switch to better plans, and then switch back to cheaper plans when they get well. Consequently, good plans will serve a disproportionate number of sick people and lose money, while bad plans serve healthy people and make money. Obviously, this provides a strong disincentive to provide high-quality care. Pretty soon, all plans will become equally bad.

So requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions destroys the quality of care, even with an individual mandate. What happens next? Presumably a government takeover. (This might well have been the plan all along.)

Paul Krugman in 2002:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Well, Krugman got his housing bubble, and we all know how it worked out. Perhaps we should think twice before heeding this guy’s advice in the future.

(Via the Corner.)

Charles Krauthammer:

It’s the best week I’ve had since spring break in medical school. I don’t even remember it.

Air America is no more:

Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air. . .

It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million. . .

Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington [D.C.] area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.

Of course, it required various frauds for Air America to survive as long as it did.

(Via the Corner.)

There’s a lot of talk about the Senate rules right now. Without their 60-vote supermajority, Democrats want to use reconciliation to pass a health care bill. The problem is that under Senate rules reconciliation can be used for budget items only. That means no individual mandate, no requirement that insurers ignore pre-existing conditions, etc. Any bill that comes through reconciliation will be a ghost of what the Democrats want.  (Keith Hennessey looks at the possibilities here.)

Or will it? What all this analysis ignores is the fact that the Democrats can change the rules any time they want. Yes, it’s true that it takes a 2/3 supermajority to change the rules officially, but the majority has a sleazier tactic at its disposal: it can simply ignore them.

Here’s how it works. The chair rules that the Byrd rule (that’s the rule governing reconciliation) doesn’t apply to the health care bill. This is clearly false, but it doesn’t matter. A ruling from the chair is sustained by a simple majority. Done. (There’s a bit of parliamentary maneuvering that is required, but in the end it takes a majority.)

In fact, they needn’t be so narrow about it. They can simply rule that cutting off debate requires only 51 votes. This is what Republicans proposed to do in 2005 in regards to judicial nominations. It is also what the Democrats did in 1975 to lower the majority required to end a filibuster from 67 to 60 votes. (At the time, Democrats had 62 votes.)

In short, although it takes 67 votes to change the rules, it only takes 51 votes to break them. The Democrats can pass health care reform if they choose. There would certainly be public outrage if they did (not just over the bill, but over the flagrant disregard of the Senate’s rules), but Democrats might decide it’s worth it.

A new PPP poll shows that Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are each tied with President Obama in a hypothetical matchup. Huckabee has an insignificant lead over Obama; Romney trails insignificantly. The only Republican that Obama would clearly beat in the poll is Sarah Palin.

(Via Hot Air.)

Wow:

Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was lifted by strong support from union households, in a sign of trouble for President Barack Obama and Democrats who are counting on union support in the 2010 midterm elections.

A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday’s voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley. The poll conducted by Hart Research Associates surveyed 810 voters.

Some of this has to be the unique appeal of Scott Brown and the unique unappeal of Martha Coakley, but that can’t be all of it. If the Democrats have moved left of the unions, we truly are due for a correction.

From Talking Points Memo, the premier non-idiotic leftist blog:

A new Gallup poll finds:

In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, the majority of Americans (55%) favor Congress’ putting the brakes on its current healthcare reform efforts and considering alternatives that can obtain more Republican support. Four in 10 Americans (39%) would rather have House and Senate Democrats continue to try to pass the bill currently being negotiated in conference committee.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Rasmussen finds a similar result, but an even sharper 61/30 margin. Come on, Dems. Throw in the towel.

(Via Hot Air.)

President Obama Blocks ‘Tax Cheats’ From Government Work. Obviously he’s not talking about his cabinet.

Ramesh Ponnuru has a good analysis of the problem of pre-existing conditions:

The political paradox of pre-existing conditions is that the ban is popular but can’t be accomplished in a popular way. The ban requires all kinds of other government interventions to sustain it. For example, you have to force everyone to buy insurance: Otherwise people would wait until they got sick and buy policies knowing that the insurance companies could not turn them down or charge them extra. You have to define what insurance policies have to cover, or else that mandate can be evaded. You have to offer subsidies for people who can’t afford the insurance policies that you’ve just made more expensive. Pretty soon you’ve got Obamacare.

It seems to me that the problem of pre-existing conditions arises from a pecularity of health insurance. If you get into a car accident just before your insurance expires, the insurance is still on the hook for the cost. Shouldn’t health insurance work the same way? If you have a problem before you switch insurance, shouldn’t your old insurer cover it?

I’ve never read anyone else suggest this, so maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t see how.

UPDATE: Further thoughts here.

As I predicted, Nancy Pelosi has concluded she cannot get the Senate health bill through the House. The two-bill scheme (pass the Senate bill and promise another bill to fix it) doesn’t look feasible either. We’ll see if the Democrats decide to “go nuclear”.

Yuval Levin makes an excellent point:

It is a mark of the degree of political malpractice the Democrats have been guilty of over the past year, of the degree of their overreach and recklessness, that being left with 59 senators—a huge majority by any measure, and the same majority they had when Obama was inaugurated a year ago—is now somehow enough to make it seem as though they are powerless and is likely to kill the core (and almost the entirety) of their domestic agenda, and leave them rudderless and reeling.

They are of course not in fact powerless at all. But they have adopted an agenda that only a supermajority could pass. . . They have made it impossible for themselves to change course without a massive loss of face and of political capital. But however costly, that change will now need to come.

Scott Brown wins. Health care “reform” is dealt a huge blow.

If Scott Brown wins today (86% on Intrade), the Democrats have indicated that they will try to pass the Senate bill in the House.

That will be hard. In November, the House passed the Democratic bill by a razor-thin 220-215 margin. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and this morning Joseph Cao (R-LA) have vowed to oppose the Senate bill due to its funding of abortion. That leaves the vote at 218-217, if no other votes change.

Can the House Democrats get every single vote that they had for their own bill to vote for the Senate bill as well? Here’s what has to happen: Every single member of the pro-life Democrat coalition other than Stupak himself caves. Not a single progressive follows through on their threat to vote against a bill without a public option. (Okay, that sounds pretty likely.) Not a single vote is swayed by union opposition to the “Cadillac tax”.  And, not a single blue dog gets scared straight by the spectacle of a Republican winning the Massachusetts Senate race despite appearances by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

It could happen, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Scott Brown has won a moral victory already, but I’m starting to believe he could carry off an actual win. Several last minute polls give him a measurable lead: Politico/InsiderAdvantage +9,  ARG +7, PPP +5, Suffolk +4, among others. Only the Daily Kos poll and the “leaked” Coakley internal poll fail to give Brown the lead. Stuart Rothenberg calls it “lean takeover”. And Brown is trading at 77 on Intrade.

It’s amazing to watch.

Martha Coakley seems to think “he’s a Yankee fan” is a generic insult she can use on anyone.  Against Rudy Giuliani it works. Against Curt Schilling, the legendary Red Sox pitcher, not so much.

It can be dangerous to wade into a topic you know nothing about. It’s doubly dangerous when the topic is sports, where so many ordinary people are knowledgeable, and care much more than they should.

I’d sure like to believe this poll:

A new poll taken Thursday evening for Pajamas Media by CrossTarget – an Alexandria VA survey research firm – shows Scott Brown, a Republican, leading Martha Coakley, a Democrat, by 15.4% in Tuesday’s special election for the open Massachusetts US Senate seat. The poll of 946 likely voters was conducted by telephone using interactive voice technology (IVR) and has a margin of error of +/- 3.19%.

(Via Instapundit.)

This poll is as close as you can get to a controlled experiment in politics:

New polling released yesterday and today by Public Policy Polling (D) provides some solid, empirical evidence that a vote against the health care bill may be the better bet for swing-seat Democrats. Or at least, that seems to be the message for freshman Rep. Larry Kissell (D-NC), who voted against the bill.

The new polls show that Kissell easily leads several potential Republican opponents, by margins of 14-18 points. He also leads a potential Democratic primary challenger, 2002 nominee Chris Kouri, by 49%-15%. But a close look at the polls shows just how people think he voted on the bill — and how this could be affecting their decisions about him.

It turns out that a 44% plurality of the likely general election electorate falsely believe that Kissell voted for the bill, with only 29% giving the correct answer that he voted against it, and 28% are unsure. . . I asked PPP for some customized cross-tabs — which reveal that among people who think he voted for it the race is very close, with a landslide lead among the folks who think he voted against it.

This is very revealing. It shows two results for the exact same guy: If he voted for the bill, he’s tied. If he voted against the bill, he wins by a landslide.

The big sticking point between the House and Senate health care bills, we’re told, is the “Cadillac tax” on (supposedly) too-expensive health care plans. The House didn’t have such a tax, because it was strongly opposed by labor unions that have such plans.

Negotiators have reportedly come to an agreement, which seems obvious in retrospect. They are simply going to exempt unions from paying the tax. Problem solved! (More precisely, unions don’t have to pay the tax until 2018, but we can expect that date to be extended in perpetuity.)

It’s so blatantly corrupt I can’t even believe it. The Democrats are going to have to face a backlash over this, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

Martha Coakley says that if you’re a devout catholic, you shouldn’t work in the emergency room:

Q: Right, if you are a Catholic, and believe what the Pope teaches that any form of birth control is a sin . . . ah you don’t want to do that.

Martha Coakley: No we have a separation of church and state Ken. Let’s be clear.

Q: In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom.

Martha Coakley: The law says that people are allowed to have that. You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.

Wow. (Cue to 9:30 here for the audio.) Also, when asked if health care professionals should be able to refuse to perform abortions as conscientious objectors, she says no, referring to abortion as a service that is “required under the law and under Roe vs. Wade”. (Cue to 9:00.)

And with that, Coakley is officially an extremist.

Business Week is reporting an alarming development. The Obama administration is looking for ways to push investors into retirement annuities rather than other securities:

U.S. investors oppose federal initiatives that would force them to give up control over their 401(k) accounts, the Investment Company Institute said. Seven in 10 U.S. households object to the idea of the government requiring retirees to convert part of their savings into annuities guaranteeing a steady payment for life, according to an institute-funded report today. . .

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort. . .

Some lawmakers have questioned the public-policy value of the tax benefits for people investing in retirement accounts, the ICI said in a report today. . . Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, proposed legislation on Dec. 16 to require fund companies to do more to ensure 401(k) options are appropriate for workers. The Wisconsin Democrat cited reports that target- date funds designed for people retiring in 2010 invested in high-yield, high-risk corporate bonds.

If investors wanted annuities, we would have bought them. (Economists call this “revealed choice”.) Having the flexibility to do what we want is better than a fixed revenue stream. Plus, if we die before our retirement funds are fully spent (which is the plan), we want our family to inherit.

Anyway, who thinks that the administrations plan to boost annuities will consist just of public service announcements and the like? No, those guys simply don’t think that way. Whatever they do, it will be coercive. In their view, people must be forced to do (what they consider to be) the right thing. So we can look forward to some sort of penalty on 401k and IRAs that don’t invest enough in annuities.

That would be bad enough, but this guy thinks that qualifying annuities will be required to invest in treasuries. I’m afraid that sounds plausible, if not right away then a few years down the road. After all, the premise of this whole thing is that the private sector cannot be trusted. (And the government can? Sheesh.)

If the government requires you to “invest” in a government security, that’s no different than the confiscation of retirement savings that Argentina carried out a year ago. We already have a government annuity plan of dubious value called Social Security. Many don’t expect to see a single penny from it. We don’t want our real retirement savings, which we own, to be forced into a similar vehicle.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Here is more (from 2008):

Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.

(Via Instapundit.)

Jane Hamsher (of the leftist FireDogLake.com) writes in the Huffington Post about how the White House manufactured the appearance of academic support for its health care plans:

Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between [MIT economist] Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.

The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill such as the “Cadillac tax,” which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, and economists like Larry Mishel are raising serious questions about its validity, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.

Gruber began negotiating a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services in February of 2009, for which he was ultimately paid $392,600. The contract called for Gruber to use his statistical model for evaluating alternatives “derived from the President’s health reform proposal.” It was not a research grant, but rather a consulting contract to advise the White House Office of Health Reform, headed by Obama’s health care czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, to “develop proposals” for health care reform.

How did the feedback loop work? Well, take Gruber’s appearance before the Senate HELP Committee on November 2, 2009, for which he used his microsimulation model to make calculations about small business insurance coverage for his testimony. On the same day, Gruber released an analysis of the House health care bill, which he sent to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Ezra published an excerpt.

White House blogger Jesse Lee then promoted both Gruber’s Senate testimony and Ezra Klein’s article on the White House blog. “We thought it would all be a little more open and transparent if we went ahead and published what our focus will be for the day” he said, pointing to Gruber’s “objective analysis.” The “transparent” part apparently stopped when everyone got to Gruber’s contractual relationship to the White House, which nobody in the three-hit triangle bothered to disclose.

The White House commissioned Gruber’s work (not as a research grant, but as a consulting contract) and then passed it off as independent confirmation. Hamsher has much, much more on the scam, from which I’ll highlight just this bit:

On the 29th Nancy-Ann DeParle, head of the very White House Office of Health Reform that Gruber was hired to consult for, posted perhaps the most misleading column of all on the White House blog:

MIT Economist Confirms Senate Health Reform Bill Reduces Costs and Improves Coverage

She identified Gruber as an “MIT Economist who has been closely following the health insurance reform process” who had “issued a compelling new report.” There was no acknowledgment that her very own White House office had commissioned Gruber’s work.

$393k sounds like a pretty good price to buy “broad consensus” for its trillion-dollar scheme.

(Via Instapundit.)

Martha Coakley says there are no more terrorists in Afghanistan. I guess the suicide bomber a week ago was the very last one. And Democrats wonder why they’re not trusted on national security.

Scott Brown needs to have this in an ad tomorrow.