Internet Scofflaw

President Obama says “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

Oh? How much is enough, precisely? Last year, Barack Obama earned $5,623,690, according to his tax return. Is $5.6 million per year enough? Apparently not. If a smaller amount were “enough” you would expect that he would have given away the excess. He did not. In fact, he gave less than 6% of his income to charity.

So whatever the “enough money” point is, I guess it’s higher than $5.6 million per year.

POSTSCRIPT: Let me add a more serious response: Of course there are diminishing marginal returns to earning more money, but what point is enough is an individual decision. Does Obama have any appreciation for the concept of an individual decision?

Moreover, does Obama not understand that people trying to make money is what drives the economy? When people decide they’ve made enough, they stop growing the economy and creating jobs. That’s bad, remember?

(Via Instapundit.) (The title is borrowed from Scott Johnson’s excellent rejoinder.)

Last week I noted the report from the Medicare Actuary, which said that Obamacare will cost much more than predicted. Here’s some more of the report’s interesting conclusions:

• 14 million people will lose or drop their employer-sponsored health care. This is greater than the number who will gain it. (Page 7.)
• Of the 34 million people who will become insured for the first time, more than half will obtain that coverage through Medicaid. (Medicaid reimbursements are so low that many doctors don’t take it.) (Page 6.)
• 12% of insured workers will be in “high-cost” plans and subject to the excise tax in 2019, and the percentage will increase “rapidly” after that. Consequently, the excise tax provision is likely to be modified. (Pages 12-13.)
• The excise tax on “high-cost” plans is the main provision that will tend to reduce costs. (If it actually happens.) The effect of most of the provisions to control health care costs will be “small” or “negligible”, or cannot be estimated. (Pages 12-13.)
• The funding for high-risk pools will be exhausted within 1 to 3 years. Consequently, unless additional funding is provided, that program will probably end before other coverage kicks in. (Page 15.)

In order to carry out the reconciliation shuffle, Democrats had to abandon their ambitions of putting overt price controls into their health care nationalization bill. That’s fortunate, because price controls are a complete disaster in Massachusetts. Naturally, Democrats are now working to bring Massachusetts’s woes to the rest of the country.

POSTSCRIPT: The additional irony is that the bill did contain price controls that will push up rates for most customers.

Barack Obama, July 2004:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America–there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America–there’s the United States of America.

Barack Obama, April 2010:

This year, the stakes are higher than ever. It will be up to each of you to make sure that young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.

UPDATE: The Medicare Actuary says there is no truth to this report. (Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: The Spectator is standing by its story, sort of, saying that although the actual report had not been delivered, the data underlying it had. I have no idea whether or not that’s true, but in any case it’s not what they said originally. This gives the media an excuse (if they needed one) not to pursue the story, so I think this story will go away quickly. (Via Instapundit.)

Whether or not the Spectator is right now, there’s a lesson here: details matter. If you work for the MSM, you can afford to get the details wrong at first. If you’re on the outside, you have to get them right.

ORIGINAL POST:

Last week I noted that the Democrats had hurried through a vote on the health care nationalization bill before the Medicare Actuary could complete his report, which ultimately found that the bill would raise costs, not lower them. Now a far more serious allegation has been made, that the Democrats actually had the report and covered it up:

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”

The analysis, performed by Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a “nonpolitical” office, set off alarm bells when submitted. “We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff,” says the HHS staffer, “and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary’s office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report.”

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote — the review by the secretary’s office reportedly took less than three days — and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.

If these allegations are substantiated, this is a huge scandal. Will the press investigate?

(Via Instapundit.)

Ed Morrissey:

The importation of toys with lead paint from China two years ago prompted Congress to pass the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), requiring extensive independent testing of all products sold — or resold — for children. The new regulations threatened to put small manufacturers and thrift shops out of business, thanks to the onerous burden of test costs. But what about the big manufacturer that actually put 2 million contaminated products on shelves? Mattel gets a waiver from testing requirements — again.

The legislation passed in response to Mattel’s misconduct is driving Mattel’s competition out of business but exempting Mattel itself. This is an outrage, but it’s also typical. Big business pretends that it opposes new regulation, but usually it secretly loves regulation because it forces smaller competition out of business.

Think about this as Democrats say they are going to punish Wall Street. The big firms are crying all the way to the bank, so to speak.

(Via Hot Air.)

GM is paying off its bailout debt using other bailout funds. Evidence of progress at GM this is not.

UPDATE: The new definition of chutzpah: paying off 10% of your debt and then authoring an op-ed entitled “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full”.

Six months later, Steny Hoyer (the House Democratic leader) admits it was wrong to call people protesting health care nationalization “un-American“:

“That was not a good phrase, not a good use of language, it was not correct,” Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, said. . . Mr. Hoyer said he made a mistake in reading the op-ed too quickly and approving it.

Nancy Pelosi did not join him in retracting the smear.

(Via Big Government.)

Surprise, surprise. The Medicare Actuary says that health care nationalization will cost more than projected:

President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law is getting a mixed verdict in the first comprehensive look by neutral experts: More Americans will be covered, but costs are also going up. . .

But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years. That increase could get bigger, since Medicare cuts in the law may be unrealistic and unsustainable, the report warned. . .

In addition to flagging provider cuts as potentially unsustainable, the report projected that reductions in payments to private Medicare Advantage plans would trigger an exodus from the popular alternative. Enrollment would plummet by about 50 percent. Seniors leaving the private plans would still have health insurance under traditional Medicare, but many might face higher out-of-pocket costs. In another flashing yellow light, the report warned that a new voluntary long-term care insurance program created under the law faces “a very serious risk” of insolvency.

So the new law drives health care costs up, even if you assume Medicare reimbursements will be cut, which of course they won’t be. The full report is here. No wonder Democrats wouldn’t wait for the report before passing the bill.

BONUS: Kathleen Sebelius admits that she has no idea what the bill’s high-risk pools will cost.

POSTSCRIPT: The report did say that the bill would extend health coverage to 34 million more people, but as people will discover, coverage is not necessarily the same thing as access. At a talk I attended yesterday, Allan Meltzer pointed out that the bill does nothing to expand the supply of health care. Primary-care physicians are already underpaid, and the bill assumes their pay will be cut further. Thus, expanding coverage merely moves the long lines for treatment out of the emergency room and into the physician’s office where all of us can enjoy them.

UPDATE: In fact, most of the newly insured would be in Medicaid, which many doctors won’t accept because the reimbursement rates are so low.

We’ve long heard that most of the so-called victims of the mortgage crisis are people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, which tends to make us unsympathetic to such “victims”. It turns out that narrative isn’t true; most of the “victims” are even less sympathetic than that:

One of Alan Greenspan’s lesser-known contributions to the annals of the credit crisis was a pair of studies he co-authored for the Fed, sizing up exactly how much Americans borrowed against their home equity in the bubble and what it was they were spending their newfound (phantom) wealth on. Greenspan estimated that four-fifths of the trifold increase in American households’ mortgage debt between 1990 and 2006 resulted from “discretionary extraction of home equity.” Only one-fifth resulted from the purchase of new homes. In 2005 alone, U.S. homeowners extracted a half-trillion-plus dollars from their real estate via home-equity loans and cash-out refinances. Some $263 billion of the proceeds went to consumer spending and to pay off other debts.

Only a fifth of the explosion in mortgage debt was actually people buying houses! Four-fifths was people extracting money from their houses, and about half of that went to consumer spending and other debts.

(Via Will Collier.)

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that 3 million low- and middle-income taxpayers will be forced to pay the penalty for failure to obtain health insurance. The report finds that 3 million taxpayers earning up to 5 times the poverty line will be paying an average of $633 in penalties. (Five times the poverty line is $54k for an individual, and $110k for a family of four.) Worse, 400 thousand who are actually below the poverty line will be paying an average of $500 in penalties. That’s right, 400 thousand taxpayers in poverty will still be uninsured, and will also have to pay penalties.

All of those are people to whom President Obama pledged he would not raise their taxes. An additional 900 thousand people over 5 times the poverty line will be paying the penalty, but the CBO report does not break that total up further. A few of those people are earning over the $250k threshold (about 23 times the poverty line for an individual, or 11 times for a family of four) at which Obama said tax increases would begin.

The CBO estimate indicates that 45% of the penalty collections will be from low- and middle-income taxpayers under 5 times the poverty line.

Court filings in Rod Blagojevich’s corruption case that were improperly redacted show that President Obama and others in the White House lied repeatedly about their contacts with the corrupt ex-governor.

Obama said on December 9, 2008:

I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.

But that same day Jake Tapper noted that on November 23, 2008, David Axelrod had said:

I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them.

That led to a hasty denial from the transition team:

An Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, took back David Axelrod’s remark last month that Barack Obama and Rod Blagojevich had spoken recently.

“What the president-elect said today is correct, David Axelrod misspoke,” the aide said.

And Axelrod issued a semi-retraction:

I was mistaken when I told an interviewer last month that the President-elect has spoken directly to Governor Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy. They did not then or at any time discuss the subject.

Obama’s initial statement, his staff’s denial, and Axelrod’s retraction are now shown to be lies by court filings obtained by Chicago’s NBC affiliate. Those filings were supposed to be heavily redacted to obscure all the juicy revelations, but the redaction was done improperly. NBC summarizes those revelations:

1. Obama may have lied about conversations with convicted fraudster Tony Rezko.
2. Obama may have overtly recommended Valerie Jarret for his Senate seat.
3. A supporter of President Obama may have offered quid pro quo on a Jarrett senate appointment.
4. Obama maintained a list of good Senate candidates.
5. Rahm Emanuel allegedly floated Cheryl Jackson’s name for the Senate seat.
6. Obama had a secret phone call with Blagojevich.

I find it amazing that Obama ever tried to maintain that he had not talked to Blagojevich about the seat. I find it even more amazing that he tried to maintain he had not talked to Blagojevich at all. Of course he talked to Blagojevich, and of course he talked to him about the seat. It’s inconceivable that he wouldn’t. But I guess he thought that the proof could be kept under wraps, and without proof the matter would go away. It worked until now.

Is it a big deal that the president and his staff lied repeatedly about his contacts with Blagojevich? One would think so. Selling a US Senate seat is a big scandal, even for Chicago, and Obama has placed himself into it. Will it be treated as such? Probably not.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama says:

A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.

Oh, surely not. Everyone knows that’s the job of government.

Two weeks ago it was discovered that Congress accidentally stripped itself of its health insurance as part of the health care nationalization bill. The Congressional Research Service noted that the Congressional health plan would be shut down immediately, but the new exchanges (though which Congress is to acquire its health care) won’t be created for years.

But, as anyone would predict, the government has decided to set aside the law. (After all, why should Congress be bound by its own laws?) Here is the entire announcement:

In response to your inquiries, this is to advise you that the Office of Personnel Management has concluded that Section 1312(d)(3)(D) of the Affordable Care Act, Public Law No. 111-148, is not effective until the state exchanges referenced in section 1312(d)(3)(D)become operational. The provision accordingly has no current effect upon the eligibility of Members of Congress or their staffs to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Members and their staffs are eligible to continue to participate fully in the FEHBP. Accordingly, the responsible employing offices within Congress should continue to process the enrollments of Members and their staffs in FEHBP plans.

You’ll note that the announcement contains not one word of legal argument in support of its conclusion, saying merely that “the Office of Personnel Management has concluded”.

This outrage is expected, but it’s an outrage nonetheless.

Someone ought to sue. Sure, it would be petty, but it’s important that the people who passed this bill without reading it face the consequences of their malfeasance.

(Via the Corner.)

POSTSCRIPT: As long as we are tossing the law aside, I wish the Office of Personnel Management could issue an announcement that would let the rest of us keep our health insurance too.

Forget about winning the time slot. Keith Olbermann isn’t even the most popular host of his own program.

President Bush was bad. President Obama is really, really bad:

(Via Paul Ryan.)

After the Democrats passed their health care nationalization bill in the face of strong public opposition, they tried to put a brave face on the public outrage, arguing that the public would like the bill once they came to understand it. Democrats, we were told, would be delighted to campaign on the issue.

That has turned out to be pure spin. The White House is now treating the issue like the millstone it is, and wants to talk about anything but:

Three months ago, at a private meeting of nervous House Democratic lawmakers, President Obama promised to put the full weight of his office behind the marketing of the health-care bill once it became law.

“We’ve spent so much time talking about the House bill versus the Senate bill that we haven’t been able to talk about how great the bill is overall. Once we have a final bill, we can really talk about how it’s going to help Americans,” Obama said at the time.

But since April 1, the subject has hardly escaped his lips publicly, and it looks like the entire month of April might go by without a presidential event focused on health care.

The White House announced Tuesday that his next swing through Main Street America — a trip to Iowa, Missouri and Illinois next week — will focus on jobs and the economy as Obama meets with small-business owners and farmers.

There was no mention of health care in the announcement.

(Via Hot Air.)

Ridiculous. Who ever heard of a parasite saying thank you?

(Via Power Line.)

Bill Clinton’s op-ed last weekend did accomplish one thing. I had begun to look back wistfully at the Clinton administration as a time when a Democratic president was generally competent. His op-ed reminds me why I despised him so much at the time.

The purpose of Clinton’s piece is to try to stigmatize opposition to the government, and in so doing, marginalize the Tea Party movement in which that opposition is concentrated. In the piece, he compares the Tea Party movement to the Oklahoma City bombers. Naturally, he writes it very carefully, never actually accusing anyone in particular of violence. But the message is clear: those people are dangerous. Some of them are going to resort to violence, and then all of them are culpable for “demonizing the government.”

This sort of guilt-by-tenuous-association usually starts after the violence takes place. That was Bill Clinton’s modus operandi after the Oklahoma City bombing when he spent years exploiting it to demagogue the right. But now Clinton knows that the likelihood of actual violence is very low. (In fact, virtually all the actual violence is being directed at Tea Partiers by the left, union thugs mostly.)

So now Clinton’s indulges in some pre-emptive guilt-by-tenuous-association. There is no actual violence being perpetrated by Tea Partiers, but they’re guilty all the same:

We should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws. . .

As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

A few years ago, the left went apoplectic about Ari Fleischer’s remark after 9-11 that Americans should “watch what they say”. (In fact, the remark was taken out of context and referred to one politician’s statement that anyone wearing “a diaper on his head” should be investigated.) Now we have Bill Clinton saying the same thing, and this time it’s fully in context.

POSTSCRIPT: Mark Tapscott adds:

Clinton’s argument that criticism of government by peaceful citizens participating in Tea Party demonstrations leads to domestic terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing really is nothing new. Monarchs and others in government have been using that line to silence their critics for hundreds of years.

(Via Instapundit.)

Initial unemployment claims fell steadily throughout most of 2009, but since November 2009 there’s been no discernible trend:

(Click on the graph if the quotes are hard to read.)

It also seems to be surprisingly hard to say what the “break-even” point is for new unemployment claims. My google search found that everyone uses a different number, but recently numbers in the vicinity of 400k-425k seem to be the most common.

(Via Hot Air.)

On the verge of a bipartisan deal on financial reform, Democrats scuttled the talks, deciding they would rather have an election issue than a bipartisan deal.

Fine, I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked the bipartisan deal anyway.

According to Rasmussen, 42% would vote for Barack Obama, 41% for Ron Paul. Wow.

That’s particularly striking when you consider that Paul would lose much of the right. I don’t think I could bring myself to vote for either.

(Via Power Line.)

Forget about guns, Swiss Army knives are illegal in Britain:

A disabled caravanner who kept a penknife in his glove compartment to use on picnics has blasted the authorities after being dragged through court for possessing an offensive weapon. Rodney Knowles, 61, walks with the aid of a stick and had used the Swiss Army knife to cut up fruit on picnics with his wife. Knowles yesterday admitted possessing an offensive weapon at Torquay Magistrates Court. He was given a conditional discharge.

It wasn’t even on his person. Police found it in his car’s glove compartment along with other tools.

(Via the Corner.)

Politico reports:

Congress is poised to miss its April 15 deadline for finishing next year’s budget without even considering a draft in either chamber.

Unlike citizens’ tax-filing deadline, Congress’s mid-April benchmark is nonbinding. And members seem to be in no rush to get the process going.

Indeed, some Democratic insiders suspect that leaders will skip the budget process altogether this year — a way to avoid the political unpleasantness of voting on spending, deficits and taxes in an election year — or simply go through a few of the motions, without any real effort to complete the work. . .

Congress has failed to adopt a final budget four times in the past 35 years. . . If the House does not pass a first version of the budget resolution, it will be the first time since the implementation of the 1974 Budget Act, which governs the modern congressional budgeting process.

Failing to adopt a budget resolution is probably bad for sound budgeting, but there’s a small silver lining. Without a budget resolution, Democrats can’t use reconciliation to ram their next insane scheme through the Senate.

(Via the Corner.)

You think that the budget deficit increased from $459 billion in 2008 to $1,414 billion in 2009? Think again. The budget numbers you see bandied about on the news are computed the basis of cash, not accrued, so they don’t take into account liabilities that are incurred today but won’t be spent until later.

The Financial Report of the United States Government reports the accrued numbers, and they are really grim. Including entitlements, the net position of the US Government was -$50.153 trillion in 2007, -$53.174 trillion in 2008, -$57.334 trillion in 2009. So the real deficit was $3,021 billion in 2008 and $4,160 billion in 2009.

In terms of GDP, the net position was -356% in 2007, -368% in 2008, and -402% in 2009. The deficits were 21% in 2008 and 29% in 2009. Another way of looking at it is the difference in percentages, which tells us how much our debt worsened in relation to our ability to pay: 12% from 2007 to 2008, and a whopping 34% from 2008 to 2009.

Unfortunately, none of that is the bad news. The bad news is that this all assumes current policy (e.g., no fixes to Medicare reimbursements or AMT), which absolutely isn’t going to happen. The worse news is that this doesn’t include Obamacare, so the 2010 report will be even worse.

(Via Instapundit.)

Henry Waxman (D-CA) is cancelling the tongue-lashing for CEOs that adhere to generally accepted accounting principles:

A House Energy and Commerce Committee spokeswoman tells me that Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has indeed cancelled the April 21 subcommittee hearing in which CEOs were to testify about Obamacare. So far, the only indication of this change appears on the committee’s website is on the Republican minority ranking member’s site. In fact, the hearing still appears on Waxman’s committee calendar for that day. . .

The CEOs, required by law to be honest about earnings projections, re-stated their bottom lines in reaction to Obamacare’s passage, earning the ire of Waxman and other Democrats.

Hearings on this matter would likely have proved an embarrassment to the Democrats and helped drag out discussion of Obamacare’s unexpected ill effects.

It’s a pity; I was looking forward to the heaings. They would have been a serious embarrassment for Democrats, since the CEOs were doing precisely what is required of them by law. As Megan McArdle explained at the time:

Accounting basics: when a company experiences what accountants call “a material adverse impact” on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact–”to take the charge against earnings”–as soon as it knows that the change is reasonably likely to occur.

This makes good accounting sense. The asset on the balance sheet is now less valuable, so you should record a charge. Otherwise, you’d be misleading investors.

The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama:

Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.

I’m guessing he had his teleprompter off for that one.

(Via Instapundit.)

The UK’s National Health Service will allow Muslim doctors and nurses to opt out of hygiene rules:

Female staff who follow the Islamic faith will be allowed to cover their arms to preserve their modesty despite earlier guidance that all staff should be “bare below the elbow”.

The Department of Health has also relaxed rules prohibiting jewellery so that Sikh members of staff can wear bangles linked with their faith, providing they are pushed up the arm while the medic treats a patient.

The Mail on Sunday reported the change had been made after female Muslims objected to being required to expose their arm below the elbow under guidance introduced by Alan Johnson when he was health secretary in 2007.

The rules were drawn up to reduce the number of patients who were falling ill, and even dying, from superbugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile.

When government runs medicine, proper medical practice is just one consideration, and not even the primary one. That’s our future.

(Via Power Line.)

Providing proof-positive that Congress didn’t read the health care bill before it passed it, it turns out that Congress accidentally stripped itself of its health insurance. Members of Congress and some of their staff are required to participate in the exchanges, but, as written, they lose their current insurance now and the exchanges won’t exist for years.

This is the first thing about the bill that I like.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: The NYT writes:

The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?

Obviously not.

If Democrats thought that opposition to health care nationalization would go away once the bill was passed, they are to be disappointed. According to a new Rasmussen poll, opposition to the health care travesty continues to harden. Today, 58% support repealing the bill, against just 38% who oppose repeal. On the day of the vote, the numbers were 54/41.

Supporters of repeal also have the advantage of fervor: 50% strongly support repeal, against just 32% who strongly oppose it.

Now that health care nationalization has been passed, the left can drop the pretense that rationing is unthinkable. The New York Times opines:

How can we learn to say no?

The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates. . .

From an economic perspective, health reform will fail if we can’t sometimes push back against the try-anything instinct. The new agencies will be hounded by accusations of rationing, and Medicare’s long-term budget deficit will grow.

So figuring out how we can say no may be the single toughest and most important task facing the people who will be in charge of carrying out reform. “Being able to say no,” Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford says, “is the heart of the issue.”

(Via Instapundit.)

Health reform will fail if we can’t sometimes ration care? Now they tell us.

The Hill reports:

The federal stimulus act has performed “exactly” as the Obama administration expected it to, Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer said Sunday. . .

“I think it has done exactly what we would say it would do,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Really? Let’s take a look at Romer’s own prediction that she made on behalf of the incoming administration in January 2009 as part of the effort to sell the stimulus boondoggle:

This handy chart (from Innocent Bystanders) overlays the Obama administration’s prediction (dark blue) with actual numbers (red) and the administration’s current prediction (green). The administration’s worst-case scenario, if their stimulus were not enacted, is shown in light blue. Romer herself (with Jared Bernstein) prepared everything in blue, and the green is based on her House testimony (with Geithner and Orszag) last month.

Clearly, the stimulus did not perform as we were told. Unemployment immediately soared well above the no-stimulus curve — to say nothing of the curve we were promised — and shows no sign of getting back down to either curve in the near future. That light blue curve is looking pretty good now.

So if Romer says that the stimulus performed exactly as the administration expected, we have to ask: Is she lying now, or was she lying then? It’s one or the other.

(Via Instapundit.)

Of course, Barone’s first rule applies, but still, it’s striking. And that’s without even looking at the health care process.

(Via Innocent Bystanders.)

The Economist quips:

Politicians use the tax code to encourage things they like, such as driving hybrid cars, and to discourage things they don’t like, such as work.

I read that the final health care nationalization bill passed last month abandoned overt price controls. I sure hope that’s true, because in Massachusetts, price controls are doing what they always do, creating shortages:

This week it became impossible in Massachusetts for small businesses and individuals to buy health-care coverage after Governor Deval Patrick imposed price controls on premiums. . .

The Massachusetts small-group market that serves about 800,000 residents shut down after Mr. Patrick kicked off his re-election campaign by presumptively rejecting about 90% of the premium increases the state’s insurers had asked regulators to approve. Health costs have run off the rails since former GOP Governor Mitt Romney and Beacon Hill passed universal coverage in 2006, and Mr. Patrick now claims price controls are the sensible response to this ostensibly industry greed. . . Until the matter is resolved, the insurers have simply stopped selling new policies.

Massachusetts is countering by trying to coerce insurance companies to sell coverage at a loss:

A court decision is expected by Monday, but state officials have demanded that the insurers—under the threat of fines and other regulatory punishments—resume offering quotes by today and to revert to year-old base premiums.

Got that? Massachusetts’s price controls have made it so that its insurers would prefer to stop doing business. Now the state is trying to force them to continue doing business against their will. The Soviets tried the same thing, and they had to build walls to keep people from leaving.

This is a cheap shot, but I’m going to indulge it anyway. Compare and contrast:

(Cue to 0:45 on President Bush’s first pitch if you’re impatient.)

I was going to forgo this, but for this interview:

The interesting thing about this interview isn’t that President Obama can’t name any White Sox players, despite the White Sox supposedly being his favorite team. (Okay, he’s only posing as a baseball fan, but who cares.) The interesting thing is how he reacts to the question. He instinctively falls back on his stock and trade: class warfare. He praises the White Sox as “real blue-collar baseball” as opposed to the Cub fans “up at Wrigley sipping wine.”

(Via Instapundit.)

POSTSCRIPT: Obama’s take on this is particularly phony since he represents the Democratic Party’s wine track, and was only able to take up the blue-collar banner after he defeated Hillary Clinton.

Our legislated, regulated lives.

Don’t worry about how it works, she says:

“It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest,” said Pelosi. “All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on.”

This exemplifies the Democratic Party’s disdain towards the American people as well as anything I’ve seen.

POSTSCRIPT: Probably she doesn’t know how the bill works herself.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Refrigerators aren’t all that complicated, actually.

(Via Instapundit.)

A reader asked me to comment on this story, on how some historians are apparently upset over the new history curriculum mandated for the state of Texas by the Texas board of education. I’ve not been following the story. My sole exposure to the controversy was a completely pointless argument about whether Friedrich Hayek’s work was important enough to merit inclusion in the economics curriculum. (Answer: I’m not sure that you need to be studying particular economists at all. But if you are, Hayek is obviously one of the giants, if only for his work on price signals. Liberals don’t like him because his work argues against central planning.) In regards to history I’ve read nothing, but I can make a few quick comments.

First, the very fact that there is a controversy argues against centralized control of education. If curriculum choices are made locally, schools can decide for themselves what to teach. If a particular school makes a bad choice, it’s no big deal because its influence is limited. Unfortunately, some big states (notably California and Texas, and no doubt some others) centralize curriculum decisions for their entire state. That’s a horrible idea, and this illustrates why.

Second, the story is not very helpful in explaining what the board is doing that historians disagree with. The story contains not a single quotation of any historian making a specific objection. Instead, the story relies on vague, unsourced, indirect quotes (“historians say. . .”). That sort of weaselly writing is first cousin to the standard ploy for editorializing in a news story (“critics say. . .”).

Third, as to the substance, the article only mentions a few specific points and I have to guess what the controversy is:

• The curriculum plays down the importance of Thomas Jefferson. If true, that’s pretty stupid. The debate between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians was very important in the early years of the republic. Even though Hamilton ultimately won the debate, I don’t see how you can tell the story without Jefferson. Plus, Jefferson was president for two terms. But I’m trusting the Post’s description here. If, on the other hand, the curriculum merely says that Hamilton’s vision won out over Jefferson’s, it’s no more than the truth.
• The curriculum questions the separation of church and state. This is too vague to respond to. Certainly there was no such separation in most of the states, and whether it was intended to exist in its modern form even at the federal level isn’t clear. I could easily see this being good or bad, depending on what it actually says.
• The curriculum says the government was infiltrated by communists during the Cold War. This is no more than the truth. If anything, the curriculum makes a mistake by relying on just the Venona decrypts. Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks (hand-copied from the KGB’s files) are even more conclusive. On the other hand, if the curriculum tries to use that fact to rehabilitate McCarthy, I disagree with that. I’m not aware of any evidence that McCarthy’s witch-hunt did any good at all to balance the harm it did, and even if it did, the ends do not justify the means.
• The curriculum says Reagan should get more attention. Duh.
• The curriculum does not include hip-hop. I really don’t care. Call me a philistine, but I don’t see why trends in music should be part of the mandatory history curriculum in the first place.
• The curriculum places Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address alongside Lincoln’s. What do you expect from a southern state? Actually, it might be interesting to contrast the views of north and south this way. (Or perhaps not. I’ve never read Davis’s address so I can’t say.) Anyway, it seems possibly defensible. It’s not as though they’re putting something alongside the Gettysburg Address.

In short, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Texas board of education is doing something stupid here, but I’m not going to take the Washington Post’s word for it. In any case, get rid of central control over schooling and the whole controversy disappears.

Another narrative debunked:

The country’s chief tax collector pushed back Monday against assertions that working for the Internal Revenue Service has become more dangerous as a result of growing anti-government sentiment and the recent passage of President Obama’s health care plan.

“No, the risk has not increased,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said. “There has been a lot of stuff in the press about increased threats, which is actually inaccurate.”

Fears that IRS employees could be targets soared after a Feb. 18 incident in which a disgruntled Texas software engineer flew a small plane into the side of an IRS facility in Austin. One longtime agency employee was killed in the attack.

Some liberal groups and bloggers also have raised fears that anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric employed on talk radio and by protesters within the “tea party” movement could incite violence against IRS agents.

I think that part of what’s going on is projection. When certain leftist groups get as angry as we are now, they do resort to violence, as witnessed by “anti-war” and anti-globalization riots.

(Via Instapundit.)

The problem with mandating coverage of pre-existing conditions is that it encourages people to sign up for “insurance” just when they need expensive treatment. And, as the Boston Globe reports, the problem is no longer hypothetical:

Thousands of consumers are gaming Massachusetts’ 2006 health insurance law by buying insurance when they need to cover pricey medical care, such as fertility treatments and knee surgery, and then swiftly dropping coverage, a practice that insurance executives say is driving up costs for other people and small businesses.

This is exactly what we predicted would happen in Massachusetts, and exactly what will happen nationwide under health care nationalization. Note that Massachusetts has an individual mandate, such like the new national regime:

The problem is, it is less expensive for consumers — especially young and healthy people — to pay the monthly penalty of as much as $93 imposed under the state law for not having insurance, than to buy the coverage year-round. This is also the case under the federal health care overhaul legislation signed by the president, insurers say.

Massachusetts is “fixing” the problem in the standard liberal way, by further restricting people’s freedom:

Governor Deval Patrick recently filed legislation that state regulators believe will help fix the problem, by restricting insurance enrollment to twice a year for people who buy on the open market.

Massachusetts residents will now be able to buy insurance only when the government says they can. And when that has an unforeseen consequence, they’ll come up with something else to restrict people’s freedom further.

Moreover, it doesn’t even solve the problem. Limiting when people can sign up for insurance doesn’t keep people from dropping it when they want, and even if they did force people to stay in a plan for a full six months, the extra three months of premiums would be no more than a drop in the bucket compared to what the ne’er-do-wells cost.

(Via Best of the Web.)

A new Gallup poll finds the demographics of the Tea Party movement are very similar to the nation as a whole. Tea Party supporters are essentially identical to the nation in age, education, and employment. As compared to a typical adult, a Tea Party supporter is slightly less likely to be a minority (21% versus 26%), slightly less likely to be female (45% versus 55%), and slightly less likely to earn less than $30k/year (19% versus 25%).

The only areas in which the Tea Party movement differs greatly from the nation as a whole are political. A Tea Party supporter is slightly more likely to be an independent than the typical adult (43% versus 40%), but — unsurprisingly — is much more likely to be a Republican than a Democrat. Still, 8% identify as Democrats.

Bottom line, the narrative promoted by Democrats and parroted by the legacy media in which Tea Party supporters are a white-male fringe group is wholly untrue.

(Via Instapundit.)

According to Rasmussen, 48% say that the Tea Party movement is closer to their views than President Obama; 44% say Obama is closer. Among independents, the gap is wider: 50-38.

UPDATE: Oh my: four in ten tea partiers are Democrats or independents. (Via Instapundit.)

As long as we are requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions in the health insurance industry, I think we should do it for all forms of insurance. In particular, for power line insurance. To get my power service repaired, I would really much rather pay a few dollars than 10 grand. The power company can pass the cost on to the rest of its customers, right?

Emanuel Cleaver now admits that no one spit on him at the Tea Party rally against health care nationalization. In fact, he how claims that he never made the charge, which is a lie:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s office released the following statement:

For many of the members of the CBC, like John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver who worked in the civil rights movement, and for Mr. Frank who has struggled in the cause of equality, this is not the first time they have been spit on during turbulent times.

This afternoon, the Congressman was walking into the Capitol to vote, when one protester spat on him. The Congressman would like to thank the US Capitol Police officer who quickly escorted the others Members and him into the Capitol, and defused the tense situation with professionalism and care. After all the Members were safe, a full report was taken and the matter was handled by the US Capitol Police. The man who spat on the Congressman was arrested, but the Congressman has chosen not to press charges. He has left the matter with the Capitol Police.

Presumably Cleaver is backing off the charge since a video surfaced showing that it was false.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

There’s been some buzz about an analysis of the Democratic stimulus package, showing that the stimulus bill spends much more in Democratic districts than Republican districts. But this is old news. Last December I noted an econometric analysis that showed that a district’s propensity to elect Democrats was the only statistically significant predictor of stimulus spending. Economic variables such as unemployment had no impact at all.

UPDATE: I see now it’s actually the same study, updated with more recent data.

I was surprised to see President Obama support additional domestic oil drilling. I needn’t have. As it turns out, the stuff about new drilling is mere posturing. In truth, his proposal restricts domestic drilling. (More here and here.)

But, as far as I know, the Obama administration is still financing offshore oil exploration in Brazil.

UPDATE: Still more here.

A provision in the health care nationalization bill is forcing restaurants to reduce the size of their menus.