One Nation Under God

Par for the course

2011-11-15T14:51:00.006-06:00

I listened, along with the rest of the nation, in shock and horror as the news about events at Penn State University unfolded in the news. At every level, from the janitor, to the trainers, to the coaching staff, and all the way to the top levels, including the athletic director and president of a large, state university, faced with the choice between interceding on behalf of children who were being molested or covering it up to avoid upsetting the apple cart, people opted to protect themselves and their situation rather than protect the vulnerable and innocent children.

We were all shocked, disappointed, and maybe even disillusioned to discover that leaders in positions of trust and responsibility were so callous. How could a trainer walk out of the locker room, allowing the rape of a child to continue uninterrupted? There is not a jury in the country who would have convicted that trainer if he had smashed the skull of the rapist then and there. How, then, could he wait until the next day to mention it to anyone? How could agree to close ranks and not report the rape to the police, allowing untold other victims to endure the same violation? How could the coach and athletic director allow these things to continue for years?

Our culture would not accept that, right? We would rise up in outrage and demand justice, wouldn't we?

The verdict is in, years ago. The answer is no, we would turn a blind eye on such an abdication of responsibility if it allowed us to continue our lives undisturbed.

Ten years ago, Life Dynamics investigated the way Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation comply with the laws requiring them to report cases when they are made aware that a child is being sexually exploited by an adult. In more than 90% of the cases, these organizations, using tax dollars, chose to turn a blind eye to the plight of the victim, collect the $400 fee for the abortion, and allow the exploitation to continue. In many cases they actually facilitated the exploitation.

I would encourage you to read the report in the link above. I'm not going into all of the details here. But in short, Life Dynamics investigators called hundreds of abortion clinics operated by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, the two largest abortion providers in the country, posing as a 13-year-old girl who believes that she might be pregnant by her 22-year-old boyfriend. In all 50 states, such a relationship is illegal, and health care providers are required by law to report such criminal abuse to law enforcement or child protective agency. In more than 90% of the cases, abortion providers indicated that they were willing to hide the crime and protect the criminal by performing an abortion without notifying the child's parents. In many cases they advised the child to lie about her age or the age of her boyfriend, to give a false address so that her parents could not be notified, or even to cross state lines to evade laws requiring judicial approval in such cases. In more than 90% of cases, they agreed to provide contraceptives to the child, facilitating the continued exploitation of a child by an adult. In many cases they agreed to allow the adult boyfriend to pick up the contraceptives.

Can someone tell me how this is different from the coaching staff at Penn State who allowed a vile child molester to continue raping and exploiting children? The main difference is that Penn State is not a key constituency of the Democrat Party. When this report was released, where was the outrage in the media? Where was the angry outcry from the public? Where was the self-righteous indignation from the same talking heads who have been all over the Penn State case from the beginning? Why didn't heads roll at Planned Parenthood? Where were the investigations, arrests, and prosecutions? Did you even hear about the report? As a society, we closed our eyes, plugged our ears, turned away, and went back to sleep.

Sad to say, the failure to protect victims at Penn State was not the exception . It was par for the course. We need to do better. As Tim Henderson says, the key is to love people and go beyond the minimum required by law. This is a function of families and churches and neighbors and communities, not of government. Indeed, Penn State and Planned Parenthood are both government supported organizations, and looking to the source of the problem for the solution is an exercise in futility. The solution is found only in God's transforming work in the hearts of individuals through faith in Jesus Christ.

Questions for Warren Buffett

2011-10-24T12:30:00.002-05:00

Do you remember when reporters used to ask tough, probing questions in an effort to get to the bottom of the issue of the day, rather than simply regurgitating the talking points they are fed? Today, however, the media unquestioningly repeats the President’s mantra as established fact, never bothering to raise the glaring questions to the source of those claims, Warren Buffet.

There are so many questions which need to be asked about Buffett’s claim that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.

Mr. Buffet, who exactly is your secretary and what percentage of her income does she pay in Federal income taxes? What would her tax bill be if she hired your team of accountants and tax attorneys to fight the IRS on her behalf? How is your secretary’s income tax equivalent to your capital gains taxes paid on growth of money you have already paid income taxes on?

Mr. Buffett, if you believe that you should pay more in taxes, why did you spend the last decade fighting to avoid paying a billion dollars in back taxes?

Mr. Buffett, exactly how much do you feel you should pay in taxes, and why have you not voluntarily contributed that amount to the Federal Treasury? They do accept donations.

More important than probing into the untruthfulness and hypocrisy of Warren Buffett’s claim is a query into the flawed philosophical assumptions behind it.

Mr. Buffett, does a nation become more prosperous because of bigger government or more private sector investment?

Mr. Buffett, who is responsible for creating more jobs, you or your secretary? Who is responsible for creating more wealth, you or your secretary? Can you name one poor person who has brought prosperity to more people than you have? Can you name one government entitlement program which has produced more innovation, more goods and services increasing the mean standard of living more than you have by your investments in American corporations?

Mr. Buffett, your claim that the rich should pay higher taxes is being used by the President to support raising taxes to pay for his stimulus bill. Does the economy benefit more from you investing your money in growing, profitable businesses or from the government taking your money and distributing it to failing companies such as Solyndra? Do the companies you invest your own money in create more jobs than Solyndra? Which are the better criteria to determine which companies will most effectively use the money they receive to create jobs and boost the economy: a solid business model producing profitability and growth potential, or political cronyism?

Mr. Buffett, if the government confiscated all of your wealth and distributed it equally to every American citizen, giving every American roughly $127, how many jobs would we create with our $127?

Mr. Buffett, you are famous for earning a consistently high return on investment. What is the return on investment of the Federal Government?

Mr. Buffett, if the government confiscated 100% of your income from last year, would the deficit be reduced by even one one-hundredth of a percent?

Mr. Buffett, you have pledged to give 99 percent of your wealth to charity. Why do you think that money confiscated from you by the government will do more good for mankind than if you gave it to a charity of your choice?

Mr. Buffett, in a free market economy where buying and selling transactions are voluntary, the only way to make a profit is to produce goods or services which are worth more to the buyer than the price for which you sell them. Thus earning a higher income indicates that you have produced more value for more people than someone who did not earn as much. Why should producing more value be punished by higher taxes?

Mr. Buffett, did you invest your money in Solyndra? Why not? If you determined that Solyndra was not a good investment, why would you want the government to take your money and give it to Solyndra?

Mr. Buffett, the President's first stimulus bill spent nearly a trillion dollars and cost $412,500 per job created, and two years later, unemployment is higher than it was before the stimulus. Would you invest in a company which produced that kind of return on investment?

If not, why would you want to pay more taxes for the wasteful Federal Government to squander?

Occupy a job!

2011-10-22T23:21:00.004-05:00

How does the 1% get to be the 1%? Does being the top 1% make them evil and greedy? Does it mean that they owe a debt to society? Do they need to "give back" some of what they have "taken?"

In a free market, most of us are not born into the 1%, but we all have the opportunity to use our minds, to work hard, to learn, grow, and innovate, and become part of the 1%. I find that to be a very noble goal. In a free market, all transactions are voluntary trades. A voluntary trade is, by definition, win-win. Both parties are trading for something they value more than what they are giving up. When I buy something, I am choosing one product out of millions of options, and one seller out of many, and I am freely choosing to trade my money, representing the product of my labor, for that product. That means I believe that the product is worth more to me than the work I put into earning that money. If someone is in the top 1% of income, it means that he has produced more value than the 99%. He doesn't need to "give back to society". The act of honestly earning money benefits society more than it benefits you.

Liberals get all wound up over how much corporate executives earn. What is important to remember is that all of the transactions up and down the chain which lead to that executive's pay are voluntary. If the board of directors think that they are getting their money's worth, what is that to me? It is their money, not mine.

But the fact is we have not had a free market economy for a very long time. Everything changes when the government subverts the free market. Some people are a part of the 1% because they play the system and benefit from government tampering rather than earning their way by trading value for value. Bailouts, stimulus, corporate welfare, Halliburton, Freddie Mack, Fannie Mae, Government Motors, Solyndra, etc. People call it "crony capitalism", but that is an oxymoron. Cronyism is not capitalism at all. In capitalism, decisions are based on economic self-interest. Cronyism means that decisions are based on political pull. If the government mandates that everyone must buy a certain product, then the seller no longer has to trade value for value. When government bails out a failed bank, every taxpayer becomes a stakeholder in that company. If they pay their CEO a huge bonus, we have reason to be upset about that. When government gives huge amounts of money to special interests, that is not wealth created by the recipient.

Occupy Wall Street would be right to object to people who get rich off of government corruption, but their demands indicate that ending government redistribution of wealth is not their objective. They are not demanding that top-down command and control economics stop. Instead they are demanding their piece of the pie. They want in on the action. They are going cap in hand looking for some more of the largesse to come their way.

As part of the 53% of American's who pay Federal income taxes, I object to Occupy Wall Street claiming to speak for me, with their mantra of "We are the 99%". Perhaps if they were to Occupy a Job they would get further.

Justice

2011-05-02T16:37:00.006-05:00

Osama bin Laden, the terrorist responsible for the murder of thousands of American civilians, was killed yesterday in a raid by an American special forces team.

There is plenty of credit to go around. Osama's death was the result of years of effort by countless people.

First of all, the President gets credit. Barack Obama appears to have been involved in overseeing the details of the execution of the raid, from the time when the CIA obtained intelligence reports that Osama may be in that compound, up until the operation was completed. Without Obama's actions, Osama would be alive today.

I've already heard some people asking why Obama ordered Osama to be killed and his body dumped into the sea. Is he really dead? If he is not, he'll be on al Jazeera in June holding the front page of the New York Times with the headline "Obama says Osama Killed". Obama knows that this would be the result, so he can't claim credit if OBL is still alive. And we are far better off with OBL dead rather than captured, with Obama's base demanding that he face civilian trial in America, where a judge is likely to throw the case out for some technicality. And he is better off dumped in the ocean where no nut jobs of any variety can make a monument out of his grave. In all, I think that Obama handled the case very well.

But to an even greater extent, the American military gets credit. The exceptional men and women of our armed services have been working for years to bring bin Laden to justice, putting themselves at risk, dodging bullets, stepping over IEDs, spending months and years apart from their family to serve their nation so ably. To each one of you, thank you. We have not forgotten that last month, Obama was going to stop paying you to make sure that we continue subsidizing abortion.

Several specific individuals in the military deserve special recognition.

Team 6, the Navy Seals special operations team which actually went into the Bin Laden compound and killed this evil man showed amazing skill and preparation by carrying out their mission with such precision and effectiveness. I salute you.

The men and women working at Gitmo also deserve our gratitude. They have been much maligned, but without the intelligence they extracted from the heads of the terrorists in American custody, this victory could not have been won. Liberals want to take credit for catching Bin Laden, but without waterboarding, it would not have happened. Senator Dick Durbin said that the "enhanced interrogation" which Obama ended on his second day in office was responsible for producing the lead which led the CIA to discover the courier who led them to the OBL compound. And they did it at Gitmo, the detention center which Obama ordered to be closed down as his first executive order. Thank you Gitmo.

Next, the CIA and military intelligence officers deserve credit. The breakthrough which made it possible to bring justice to OBL was essentially accomplished by intelligence gathering. Our intelligence agents are among the best in the world, and they did their job tirelessly and with excellence.

Just as Osama would be alive without the actions of President Obama, he would be alive today without the actions of President Bush. For seven years after 9/11 Bush laid the groundwork for yesterday's raid, establishing a military presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and implementing the policies which Obama continued and which ultimately resulted in Osama's death. No one has called this "Bush's War" today. The Obama administration who have blamed their own dismal failures on Bush for two solid years didn't give a bit of credit to Bush for his part in accomplishing this mission. If Bush had shown the same level of resolve and leadership which Obama has demonstrated in Libya, Osama would never be brought to justice. Not by Obama. Not by anyone.

In the end, it was an American bullet fired from an American firearm by an American soldier who sent an evil terrorist to bow his knee before Jesus. All of those things are detested by liberals, but without them, Osama bin Laden would still be living high in northern Pakistan, and Obama would be watching his approval ratings drop as Americans face higher unemployment, soaring gas prices, record deficits, and ever-increasing government interference in their lives.

Afikoman

2011-04-21T11:39:00.004-05:00

Last night our family celebrated the Passover Seder Dinner, the dinner Jesus ate with his disciples just before he was arrested and crucified. The Passover is a remembrance of God delivering His people from slavery in Egypt in the time of Moses, and a look forward to God's plan of redemption for the World.

God brought ten plagues on Egypt, each one demonstrating His power over the Egyptian pantheon of gods. He showed the god of the Nile to be powerless by turning the Nile to blood. He mocked the Egyptian frog god by bringing hoards of frogs to cover everything. Pharaoh's magicians claimed that they also could conjure frogs, but they were powerless to do what was really needed, which was to make the frogs go away. God revealed the impotence of the gods of cattle, livestock, and grain by wiping out the herds and crops of the Egyptians. Egypt's supreme god, Ra, the sun god was shown to be worthless when God brought darkness on the entire land.

Passover focuses on the final plague, when God told each Hebrew family to kill a perfect, spotless lamb and spread it's blood on the doorposts of their houses. They were given detailed instructions of what to eat that night, and how to eat it. They ate unleavened bread because they did not have time to wait for the bread to rise, and they ate with their shoes on, robe on, and walking stick ready, expecting to leave in a great hurry. That night, God struck down the first-born son in every Egyptian house, but when he came to a house with the lamb's blood on the door, he passed over that house. Thus the name, Passover.

Why was the blood on the doorposts necessary? God certainly knew who the Hebrews were. They lived in one particular part of town, and the Egyptians lived in another. So the idea that it was for God's information doesn't hold up. Killing the lamb and putting its blood on the doorposts does not make a lot of sense. There was no practical reason for it. God commanded it as an act of faith, requiring that the people place their trust in God to deliver them.

While this observance was filled with rich meaning regarding what God has done in the past, it also pointed forward to what God would do in the future. The blood of Jesus, the perfect, sinless lamb would be shed to free God's people from slavery to sin through faith.

Hundreds of years before Jesus birth, Isaiah made the connection between the Messiah and the Passover lamb in Isaiah 53:

He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
(Isaiah 53:7)

This section is a lengthy Messianic prophecy, in which Isaiah refers to the coming Messiah as "The Servant". A few verses earlier he described Jesus death:

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
(Isaiah 53:5)

John the Baptist identified Jesus as the Passover lamb, saying "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)

There are many interesting components of the Seder meal. Before the meal is observed, all yeast must be removed from the house. Throughout the Bible, yeast is used to represent sin, because the smallest amount of yeast can affect an entire loaf of bread. There is a ritual washing of hands before the meal, representing a spiritual cleansing. Four cups of wine represent something different. The cup about which Jesus said "This is my blood shed for you" was the cup of Redemption, which was proceeded by praying "I will redeem you with a demonstration of my power". Each part of the meal has significance. Bitter herbs dipped in salt water represent the bitterness of slavery and the tears cried while in bondage. This applies equally well to physical slavery in Egypt or spiritual slavery to sin. I strongly encourage you to attend a Seder dinner next year. We went to one at Christ Chapel in Fort Worth presented by a Messianic Jew, David Teitelbaum, but I am sure that there are many others.

I find it remarkable that centuries before Jesus birth, God laid out his plan of redemption in both prophesy and in the Jewish holidays and temple rituals, and then he brought it about exactly as he said that he would. It gives us confidence to know that when Jesus says he will return to defeat Satan, judge the earth, and take his own to live eternally in his presence, it is certainly going to happen. You can count on it.

I will leave you with one thing I learned last night which was completely new to me. One part of the Seder dinner tradition which emerged in the first century involves placing three pieces of matzo, or unleavened bread, in a bag. At a certain point in the Seder, the middle matzo is removed from the bag, broken in half, and wrapped in a linen cloth. It is then hidden, and later in the meal, the children find it and remove it from the wrapping. This piece of unleavened bread is call the afikoman, which comes from a Greek word meaning "I have come". In Judaism, the number three is usually associated with the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But what is the significance of breaking Isaac in half, wrapping him up, and finding him later? In Christianity, the number three is often associated with the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The middle piece of matzo would then be the Son, or Jesus. When Jesus broken the bread and said "This is my body given for you" he identified himself as the one who the Seder points to. Like that bread, he was broken, wrapped in a burial cloth, and hidden for three days. But as the bread suggests, the story was not over. He arose from the dead and lives today as Savior and Lord, the only way for a person to be made right with God. As Isaiah said:

After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
(Isaiah 53:11-12)

An open letter to Speaker John Boehner

2011-04-18T15:11:00.006-05:00

Representative Boehner,

Last November American taxpayers sent a strong message at the ballot box. We stated in no uncertain terms that the reckless spending and massive deficits of the past two years are unacceptable and that a dramatic change in direction is needed. As a result of this tidal wave, you were swept into the position of Speaker of the House. We expect you to make something of this opportunity, or to step aside and let someone else seize the opportunity.

There were three key points where Republicans had significant leverage to convince the unwilling Democrats to adopt a new direction of fiscal sanity. The first was the establishment of a budget for the remainder of the 2011 year. The Democrats sidestepped their duty to pass a budget, meaning that only with the approval of the new Republican majority in the House could government operations continue. This allowed you to set the conditions. But long before the situation came to a head, you stated that you would not allow the government to shut down. You essentially gave up your position of strength. Is it any surprise that instead of the $100 billion in cuts you promised in the campaign, you settled for $38 billion? What is even more disappointing is that the $38 billion are not real cuts, and the deal you brokered only reduces actual spending by less than one billion dollars. That is not even one percent of what you promised. That is unacceptable.

Your excuses are even less acceptable. You said that the House of Representatives is "One half of one third of the government." However, the House is where every single dollar of spending authorization originates. If anything is funded by the Federal Government, it is because Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to authorize it. In this budget deal, either you played us or you got played. I'd really like to know which it was.

The next leverage point is the debt ceiling. Within a very few months we will reach the level of indebtedness which Congress has authorized. Democrat fearmongering about the dire consequences of not raising the debt ceiling have already begun, with the intention of intimidating Republicans into backing down from their demands for effective spending controls to be in place before they authorize more debt. If reaching the debt ceiling would truly be such a great calamity, Democrats should be highly motivated to implement those spending controls. Unfortunately, you are already on record as having caved once, so they will expect you to do it again. If that is your intention, please step down now and allow someone with a spine to take your place.

On the other hand, if you are ready to do what you were sent by your boss to do, an excellent way to go about this would be to attach an increase in the debt ceiling to the Ryan budget. Pass it and make it clear that the Senate and President must either approve the whole thing or figure out how to get by without any new borrowing. However you decide to do it, spending cuts measured in billions are not adequate. It will require trillions to even put a dent in the debt crisis.

Please decide quickly. If you waste this opportunity, there may not be another.

Sincerely,

Your Boss

What it means to you

2011-04-04T10:50:00.002-05:00

Representative Paul Ryan made news over the weekend by saying that they are going to propose a budget which cuts $4 trillion over the next ten years.

The is the first proposal which actually makes a significant dent in the nation's out of control debt crisis. Let's take a look at what has been proposed up until now. I find that dealing with the numbers involved in Federal budgets causes people's eyes to glaze over. It is hard to get a perspective on what the numbers actually mean, so I'm going to use per capita figures to help you to understand what the national debt means to you.

In February, the Federal Government added $223 billion to the national debt. The population of America is roughly 307 million, so for that one month alone, every man, woman, and child in America owes $726.38. You will be taxed for the rest of your life to pay interest on that $726.38. Your kids will be taxed for the rest of their lives to pay the interest on their $726.38, and as an added bonus, when you die or retire, they will have to pay interest on your $726.38 as well. If you are married, it is quite likely that the $1,452.76 debt piled onto you and your spouse by your government was more than your house payment. This year, the debt for every man, woman, and child will be increased by $5,211. A family of four could buy a very nice new car for that sum.

Going back to a macro scale, the debt is growing close to a tipping point. When the national debt exceeds GDP, a fatal debt spiral can be induced. At that point, interest on the debt can grow faster than the economy grows, meaning that even if we suddenly stop deficit spending altogether, the debt will grow out of control until the Treasury is forced to default on the debt. As of last month, the National Debt was 97% of America's GDP, and we are adding to the debt at an alarming rate, so this is a very real an imminent threat.

Politicians have been proposing cuts to the budget to address the crisis.

Last year BO suggested cutting $100 million from the budget. This would reduce each person's addition to the debt by 32 cents. Instead of going $5,211 further into debt, you would only go $5,210.68 further into debt. Quite an accomplishment, huh? He counts on people thinking that $100 million is a lot of money. If it was in your piggy bank it would be a lot, but the Federal Government spends $100 million in less than 15 minutes.

More recently, House Republicans have been negotiating with BO and the Democrats over spending cuts. The Democrats wanted a Continuing Resolution which reduces spending by $6 billion. That is $19.54 per person, reducing the debt placed on you this year from $5211 to $5191. While $19.54 is better than 32 cents, it is still not enough to avoid a debt spiral.

The Republicans didn't do much better. Their big alternative is a CR which reduces spending by $61 billion. That is $198.70 per person, reducing your new debt to $5012. Again, that is better than the alternative, but not nearly enough.

The problem with all of these proposals is that they only consider discretionary spending, which only accounts for 19% of the budget. To get back to a sustainable budget, it is essential to reform the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That is where Ryan is different from the crowd. Politically it could be costly, as any attempt to touch these entitlements is demagogued as draconian and heartless. But how much worse would it be to allow the economy to collapse and those programs to disappear altogether as America defaults on its debts and becomes unable to meet its obligations or borrow money at any cost?

Ryan's proposal represents an annual cut of $1,302 per person. That is finally enough to be on the scale needed to make a difference. I'm not sure that the political will exists yet to make such a bold cut, and I do expect that there will be a lot of work to get the proposal into an agreeable form, but I am heartened to see someone honestly saying what will be necessary to avoid America following Greece. America's fall would be much more devastating because unlike Greece, there is no one strong enough to prop America up.

Coming to a head

2011-03-31T13:03:00.006-05:00

Last year, facing massive losses in the midterm election, Democrats in Congress faced a dilemma, a true no-win situation. Congress is responsible for passing an annual budget which funds the operation of the government. These Democrats faced an even more painful thrashing in the polls if they passed a budget which did not deal with the massive budget deficit and the exploding debt which it is causing. This thrashing would come from a segment of the population I will refer to as the fiscally sane, primarily made up of the 51% of the population who pay taxes. On the other hand, if Congress took the steps necessary to reign in spending and curb the deficit, they would incur the wrath of their base, the statist left who rely on ever-larger and more intrusive government for their power and livelihood.

Faced with these options, the Democrats did the courageous thing: nothing. They opted to not take a stand at all, and to not pass a budget, an unprecedented negligence of duty. That is why the United States Government is operating without a budget today, a state of affairs so foolhardy that you wouldn't ever run your own household that way.

What is the result? In February, the Federal Government ran a deficit of $223 billion, the largest monthly deficit ever, for any country, for anything on earth. In fact, the deficit for February was larger than the deficit for the entire year of 2007. The Government continues to operate based on "Continuing Resolutions" which essentially provide funding at the current level for a few more weeks at a time.

Each time, with the threat of a government shutdown looming, Republicans in the House negotiated for slightly bigger spending cuts, while Democrats fight for the status quo. The result has been very little change, with nearly insignificant cuts to spending which still leave us with trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

The groundswell of voters who threw out the old Democrat power structure last November didn't want a minor correction in the way government fiscal policy was approached, resulting in us going bankrupt slightly more slowly. The election was a clear mandate for a course reversal back to sound fiscal principles of lower spending, smaller government, lower taxes, and an environment which creates jobs and produces wealth through the power of the private sector flourishing in a free market.

Cutting discretionary spending is a good starting point, but even if discretionary spending was cut to zero, we would still face a massive and unsustainable deficit of nearly a trillion dollars. Therefore, reforming entitlements is necessary. Left alone, Social Security and Medicare will die. To save them, they must be reformed and rescoped, as part of a comprehensive change in the way government manages money.

The opportunity to make that happen is approaching, and it is vital that our representatives do not miss it. Just as it took some political guts for Governor Scott Walker to stand up to the union thugs in Wisconsin, it will take real will power to not cave in under the pressure which is sure to come, but if there was anything behind the campaign rhetoric, now is the time to show us by taking action.

Currently the government's debt limit stands at $14.29 trillion. We will reach that limit in just a few months, and Congress will either have to raise the limit once again, start printing money in massive amounts, or cut spending by more than 30% across the board. Given the options, any politician would be inclined to once again take the courageous course and sink our kids further into debt.

In 2006 when Senator BO voted against raising the debt limit to $8.965 trillion he said that, "Raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure." Now that he is leading and he is the one asking to take America closer to insolvency, he wishes that we would forget those words. But what else could we call BO's plunge into debt with no plan to ever get out of it, and nothing but proposals for more spending? It is a failure of leadership of a magnitude never seen before, as evidenced by the fact that BO's own projections show that he intends to increase the national debt in eight years by more than all of the Presidents before him, combined, in the 226 years of American history.

But Congress does not have to cave in to BO's pressure to allow his unchecked spending frenzy to continue. The House of Representatives is where all Legislation begins, and the Republican majority there can attach any conditions they desire to a bill increasing the debt limit. They have the power to ensure that Washington fundamentally changes the way they manage money, so that it will be responsible and sustainable. Here are a few suggestions:

Defund Obama's $105 billion slush fund intended to pay for implementation of the bureaucracy to support Obamacare.
Repeal Obamacare, a massive new entitlement which has already failed to deliver its most basic promises of reducing costs and being deficit-neutral.
Reform Social Security and Medicare. These entitlement programs account for many trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities which, if left as they exist today, will result in financial collapse and and inability to pay anything in the future.
Make the Bush tax cuts permanent. The looming tax increase scheduled for 2013 is hanging over the head of every business considering whether to hire new employees and grow the business. Job creation will not resume until that tax increase is canceled.
Create a statutory cap on the debt-to-GDP ratio, with aggressive benchmarks to meet each year until the ratio is brought down to a sustainable level of somewhere around 0.5.

There will, without a doubt, be much wailing, gnashing of teeth, demagoguery, whining, and name calling from the big-government statists in response to these actions. Victims of the "draconian" cuts will be trotted out for us to pity. As with Obamacare, most of their sob stories will be entirely fictional. All will be based on the tenant that capable and productive people owe a living to incapable and unproductive looters. None will face the reality that, as painful as facing fiscal reality may be in the short term, it is far better than paying the price for doing nothing, resulting in a debt spiral and economic meltdown which will make events in Greece look like nothing. When America's debt goes into default, who will bail us out? The European Union? China? The UAW, GM, or Fannie Mae?

Representative Marco Rubio has pledged to vote against raising the debt ceiling until real steps are taken to deal with the long-term fiscal situation. Let him know that the voters support him and will stand by him when the statists attack his principled stand.

Let your Representative know that we expect real and significant action to restore fiscal sanity to the budget process, and we expect them to demand it before they agree to one more dollar of debt.

An ordinary guy in a radically apathetic world

2011-03-11T16:07:00.004-06:00

The perfectly able-bodied man hung a handicapped sign from his rear-view mirror and pulled into the handicapped parking spot. He turned around to the three of us sitting in the back seat and chuckled, "It's one of the perks of being a doctor."

We got out of the car and proceed on a guided tour through the abortion clinic, led by the abortionist himself. This hero of women and liberals who used his authority as a doctor to park in handicapped parking places took us around to the back door. I watched over his shoulder as he punched in the code to open the door, making a mental note of the code: 6-9-6-9. So clever.

He showed us the rooms where they perform the "procedures". He explained that if the Rescuers blocked the front door, they could bring patients in and out through the back. He gave instructions for how we would help to counteract the coming Operation Rescue intervention. He picked out one man to join the Rescuers and wait until the news cameras were on him. Then the abortionist would walk past and the man would hit him, making sure it was captured on camera. He reassured the man that he would make sure he did not get into trouble. The rest of us would surround patients and escort them into the clinic for their abortion.

I'm not sure how I avoided vomiting, but I carefully recorded and noted every detail of the layout and the plans, and then headed back to the Operation Rescue headquarters to report.

The following Saturday, two Rescuers let themselves into the back door of the clinic and handcuffed themselves to the tables where the abortions were performed. When clinic workers found them there as they prepared for that days slate of abortions, they put bags over their heads and beat them senselessly with a golf club.

Later that day I visited them in the hospital. My friend was hardly recognizable. His eyes were swollen shut, his jaw broken, his face and body purple, with dozens of stitches in various parts of his body. He could barely speak, but I heard him ask me "Did they kill any babies there today?" I told him that they did not. He gathered his strength and proclaimed loudly, "God is good."

Islamic terrorists proclaim "Allah Akbar" before they commit horrific acts of murder in the name of Allah. Christians declare God's goodness as they offer themselves sacrificially to save the lives of innocent and defenseless people.

On another occasion, I went with a dozen people to the home of an abortionist, an hour before he was due at the clinic. He lived on the end of a long road with few houses, the driveway to his huge mansion guarded by a heavy iron gate. We stood outside the gate with picket signs. Not long after we got there, he pulled out of the garage and drove to the gate. The gate swung open, but he turned around and went back to the garage, too cowardly to even drive past us. We waited for a while, and then headed out. As we drove away we passed five or six police cars headed towards his house. That day he was more than an hour late to perform his job killing babies.

The following Saturday at 3am I put on black clothing, took a heavy chain and a padlock, parked a quarter of a mile from his house, and chained his gate closed. He missed work altogether that day, the busiest day of the week for most abortion clinics. There's no telling how many lives were saved.

We picketed another abortionist around the clock, wherever he went. We picketed outside the restaurant as he ate lunch, outside his office when he worked, at his Church when he was there, outside the Boy Scout headquarters where his wife worked, and on the sidewalk in front of his house when he was home. After eleven weeks he agreed to stop performing abortions. Previously he killed twenty or thirty babies a week, in addition to his legitimate work as an OB doctor delivering babies.

I watched friends handcuffed and taken to jail for the crime of placing themselves between innocent babies and the doctors who would kill them for $300. I saw people arrested for kneeling to pray on a public sidewalk. I never saw a Rescuer act violently towards anyone. Over and over I saw violence directed at us. We sat by the hundreds, shoulder to shoulder, creating a wall of protection around the entrance of the clinic, and the violence they tried to hide inside was demonstrated outside as they dragged us away so that they could grind more babies up and throw them down the garbage disposal.

Come and take it!

2011-03-09T12:08:00.005-06:00

This week Texas celebrates the 175th anniversary of it's independence from Mexico. The story of the Alamo is certainly compelling, as a handful of men took a stand against tyranny and fought for freedom against all odds, defying the much larger army of Santa Anna. Legendary figures such as James Bowie, Davie Crockett, and William Travis fought to the death for something they believed in.

At the center of the conflict was the action taken by Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who replaced Mexico's Constitution with a new document, The Seven Laws, which disolved Congress and established him as the military-backed dictator. Santa Anna, fearing that the Texans were too independent, moved to solidify his control by disarming the outer colonies.

The conflict came to a head when Santa Anna attempted to take a small bronze cannon which the Texas militia had at Gonzales. Texans met the Mexican army at Gonzales with a flag defiantly daring the Mexicans to "Come and take it".

The Mexicans went home without the cannon, but returned with a much larger army, resulting in the battle of the Alamo, and ultimately in Texas victory at San Jacinto.

It occurs to me that we could use some of that spirit of defiance to tyranny in America today. When politicians and government bureaucrats chip away at our basic freedoms, instead of giving it up willingly and complacently going back to sleep, it is time to tell them to "Come and take it." They govern by the consent of the people. They work for us. We should not fear them, they should fear us.

They want to strip away our Second Amendment rights, just as Santa Anna came to confiscate the Texans cannon. Come and take it!

They want to take our autonomy in how we get medical care. Come and take it!

They want to take our property rights, imposing ever higher taxes to fund wealth transfer programs they have no authority to conduct. Come and take it!

They want to mortgage our future, burying our kids in debt which will consume most of what they produce in their entire lives. Come and take it!

They want to use our money to nationalize industries and bail out failed businesses. Come and take it!

They want to tax energy, bar the use of our own resources, and regulate the gas we exhale, stifling the economy, destroying jobs, and increasing our dependence on countries hostile to America? Come and take it!

It is time to say "No more!" You can have America when you "Come and take it". 2012 is coming and we will remember.

Death Panels

2011-03-02T13:11:00.003-06:00

During the Obamacare debate, Sarah Palin was lambasted by statists for suggesting that BO's bill would result in rationing of care by government bureaucrats who would sit in their Washington DC offices and decide who would live and who would die based on their actuarial tables and cost/benefit formulas. She called them "Death Panels".

Turns out she was right.

In December the FDA rescinded the approval of Avastin for the treatment of breast cancer.

Avastin is a miracle drug that currently represents the last, best hope for women with metastatic breast cancer. Each year 17,500 women are treated with Avastin, a late-stage breast cancer drug that restricts blood flow to tumors, slowing their growth, shrinking them, sometimes even eliminating them. The drug typically extends a patient's life for a few months, but in some cases they live for years. Both the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance strongly support use of Avastin and have been publicly urging the FDA not to revoke its approval. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a nonprofit alliance of oncologists that produces treatment standards recognized in more than 100 countries, still supports the drug as a breast cancer treatment.

In making recommendations, the FDA's Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee is supposed to consider only clinical evidence of the drug's safety and effectiveness. However, ODAC member University of Nebraska oncologist Jean Grem stated that the drug's hefty price tag was a factor in their decision. Revoking Avastin's approval would reduce the cost of government-funded health care by nearly half a billion dollars, but it would also make the lifesaving treatment unavailable to patients with private insurance. The decision to rescind Avastin's approval is currently being appealed, and hopefully will be overturned. However, the fact that the FDA wields the power to deny the public access to a treatment because of government budgetary considerations remains problematic.

The government drug-rationing that begins with Avastin isn't going to stop with Avastin. Dr. Donald Berwick, the Obama administration's recess appointee heading up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has said that "it's not a question of whether or not we will ration health care," but "whether we will ration with our eyes open."

As I argued during the Obamacare debate, rationing of care will have a devastating impact on innovation of new treatments. This case illustrates how that will happen. Genentech, a division of Roche Pharmaceuticals, spent $2.3 billion in research and development to produce Avastin. If the FDA can refuse to allow a new treatment because of government rationing rather than clinical effectiveness, companies will simply stop investing the huge sums of money necessary to develop new lifesaving treatments.

When government takes control of your health care, your life is in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats who you can't fire, and they will make decisions which you can not appeal, decisions which can greatly impact your life, decisions which may mean death for you or a family member or loved one, decisions which should rightfully be made by you and your doctor, not by the Federal Government.

The General Welfare clause

2011-03-01T14:41:00.005-06:00

If you are a liberal, there are only three phrases in the Constitution that you are aware of:

Provide for the general Welfare
Separation of Church and State
Right to privacy

You are undeterred by the fact that only one of these phrases actually occurs in the Constitution, and you have never actually bothered to read the entire sentence containing that phrase, in spite of your eagerness to use that phrase to justify nearly all of your legislative agenda.

Congress uses the "Welfare" clause to claim the authority for just about anything they want to do, from punishing people who don't buy a certain product to regulating the gas you exhale.

The "Welfare" clause is found in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the powers of Congress:

The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

Liberals who quote this never quote the entire sentence, or even bother to mention "the common defense" which they find to be yucky icky. Nor do they acknowledge the meaning of the word "General" which requires that their actions benefit everyone, not pay off one person at the expense of another. They can't be bothered to consider the context of the language which indicates that the phrase does not give them the authority to do anything they want so long as they claim that it is for the general welfare. James Madison said it like this: “With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

The drafters of the Constitution discussed the actual meaning of the welfare clause at great length, and clarified exactly what it means and what it does not mean. Thomas Jefferson made the case that the clause specifies reasons for which Congress may collect taxes (or as one reader pointed out, borrow money, which is just a tax to be collected in the future), and does not grant Congress any other authority for sweeping forays into people's lives for our own good.

"To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, "to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare." For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union.They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please... Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on National Bank, 1791. ME 3:147-148

Jefferson made the argument that the "Welfare" clause did not give Congress the authority to do anything, so long as it was claimed to be "for the general welfare" because such an interpretation would render the following enumeration of powers meaningless. Why should the Constitution list out in great detail the specific actions which Congress is authorized to take if all of those actions and more are authorized by the welfare clause?

"Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money." --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1817. ME 15:133

Jefferson had good reason to be concerned, as politicians, eager to expand their own power, have indeed used this clause to claim the authority to impose all sorts of laws which have nothing to do with laying taxes, and even when they are writing tax laws, those laws are rarely uniform, but instead are written to grant special status to the author's supporters and constituents. You can read through the sixteen enumerated powers granted to Congress, but you won't find anything permitting them to do much of what they do today. There is nothing permitting them to redistribute wealth from those who produce it to those who don't. Congress has no authority to mandate that citizens buy medical insurance or to punish those who don't comply. Congress has no business telling you what kind of light bulb to use or what kind of toilet to have in your bathroom. Neither do they have the power to dictate to banks who they must lend money to, bail out failed companies, attempt to control or stimulate the economy, or nationalize industries. Most of the intrusive busybody laws passed by Congress are based on a blatant misapplication of the welfare clause.

"Aided by a little sophistry on the words "general welfare," [the federal branch claim] a right to do not only the acts to effect that which are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think or pretend will be for the general welfare." --Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1825. ME 16:147

“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” – James Madison, 1792

And finally, from a letter Jefferson wrote to George Washington:

"If it were assumed that the general government has a right to exercise all powers which may be for the 'general welfare,' that would include all the legitimate powers of government, since no government has a legitimate right to do what is not for the welfare of the governed." --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1792. ME 8:397

Is Government dependable?

2011-02-21T09:32:00.005-06:00

Every year the Social Security Administration sends me a statement with my estimated Social Security retirement benefits. If I feel like being depressed, I do some analysis on those numbers.

A few years ago I computed the effective rate of return for money I pay into Social Security. You can find the results here. At that point, my money entrusted to the "Social Security Trust Fund" produced the equivalent of a 1% annual rate of return over my lifetime. By comparison, a diversified investment portfolio should be expected to return eight or ten percent over the long term.

This year I compared a dollar paid into Social Security to a dollar invested in my 401(k). In both cases I started with a dollar paid in 1994, when I was fresh out of college. The dollar in my 401(k) has had a rough ride, with some big gains and stomach-wrenching drops. Today it has grown to $3.93.

If I went to the government and asked about my dollar, they couldn't give it to me, or even tell me how much it is worth. They don't have it any more. They spent it in 1994. All they have is a Treasury Bill indicating that the government owes itself $1 plus interest. To understand how this works, get a piece of paper and write "I owe myself $1 million." Then sign it. Congratulations! You are a millionaire! At the effective rate of 1% my dollar would be worth $1.21.

Assuming typical results for both the 401(k) and Social Security, if I retire at age 65, the dollar in my 401(k) will have grown to $54.34. The dollar I paid into Social Security will produce $1.52 in benefits for me. The 401(k) investment will be worth 35 times more than the Social Security benefit.

"But wait," you might say, "The 401(k) is invested in stocks and those are risky. Social Security is safe, there is no market risk. It is sure to be there for you." A big hole was shot in that argument by the report issued by the Congressional Budget Office which states that Social Security will operate at a deficit until the money runs out entirely in 2037.

How can this be? In 1984 Congress overhauled Social Security, increasing the payroll tax and putting the surplus into the "Social Security Trust Fund" where it would be available to cover the surge in benefit payments caused by the baby boomers retiring. We were assured that Social Security would be solvent until 2060.

But putting Congress in charge of safeguarding a pool of trillions of dollars was clearly not a good idea. You know the fox and the hen house. Congress, which depends on spending more and taxing less in order to secure their re-election, spent the money. Bernie Madoff was small time by comparison. With interest, the Social Security Trust Fund should be worth $2.6 trillion today. This should anger you. That was not their money to spend, it was your money, entrusted for safekeeping, promised to be there for you when you retire. Roosevelt called it "A sacred trust".

Millions of Americans depended on the government for a secure retirement. For more than half of America's retired people, Social Security provides the majority of their income. According to the recent report, in the near future, benefits will have to be cut, payroll taxes will be increased, and still the Treasury will have to borrow or print more money to meet its obligations.

Even the measly 1% return will not be there for me when I retire.

People who depended on government for their retirement are learning that government is not dependable to deliver on its promises. Now, who wants to sign up to depend on government for health care? Have they earned that level of trust?

Let's hear it for Scott Walker

2011-02-17T12:47:00.004-06:00

When you look behind the financial disasters of our time, the odds are pretty good that you will find either a labor union or a government bureaucracy distorting the free market. Often you will find both, as in the case of the American automobile industry which is collapsing under the double burden of unsustainable union wages and benefits, and government regulations and taxation which make it next to impossible to compete in a global marketplace.

While the Federal Government madly spends money it doesn't have, taxing, borrowing, and printing money at an alarming rate, states who don't have the same luxury are going bankrupt under the strain of mounting unfunded Federal mandates, from sources including Medicare, the EPA, and Department of Education.

While the Obama recession has been hard on the private sector, it has been very good to government employees. As of last summer, the average civilian government employee was compensated $123,049. The rest of us poor schmucks working in the private sector where we have to be productive and produce a product that consumers are willing to pay for, earn an average of $61,051. Since Obama took office, government is the only sector where employment is actually rising. Today the government employs 2.4% more people than it did in January 2009. Private sector employment is down 4.4%.

Unions exist for the purpose of extracting above-market wages for their members. If they did not accomplish this, there would be no reason for anyone to join the union and pay dues. In the private sector, unionization eventually forces a business into bankruptcy. The business must pay above-market costs for labor, but can still only charge market prices for their product, making it impossible to remain competitive and profitable in the marketplace. In the government sector where agencies can simply force citizens to pay higher taxes and are not required to compete for revenue or market share, unions can simply grow unchecked. In the past 50 years, unionization in the private sector has dropped from 33.9% to 6.9%. Meanwhile, unionization has tripled among government employees, going from 9.8% to 36.2%. The case for higher taxes gets much harder to argue when faced with the reality that those taxes are going to pay busybody bureaucrats who make more than you do.

Enter Wisconsin's new Governor, Scott Walker, who recently introduced a bill to deunionize Wisconsin's government agencies. The outcry from government employees in Madison would make you think you're in Cairo Egypt. It is a necessary step for any state which wishes to remain solvent. It is also a gutsy move from a new Governor who is bucking the conventional wisdom that you get reelected by providing an ever-increasing stream of government largess to your constituents. Politicians want the masses eating out of their hand because that way they are always needed. Independent, self-sufficient citizens can throw their elected officials under the bus if they get out of line, but those who depend on the government for their food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and their very life will put up with much more abuse. Obama's central strategy involves paying off unions for their support by directing huge amounts of taxpayer's money their way in the form of stimulus, bailouts, and government contracts.

Governor Walker is certain to take some political hits for his stand. There will be weeping and gnashing of teach from government employees who are really put upon to be forced to work for market wages like the rest of us. Undoubtedly, the media will delight in showing us pictures of public servants huddled in alleyways due to the exploitation allowed by deunionization. And of course we can expect Democrats to stir the pot in future election cycles, asking us to pity the poor victims of the state's unfair employment practices. But remember that for every person carrying a sign calling the Governor "Hitler" there are fifty people who are actually going to work and being productive, and they love what Walker is doing. It is exactly what they voted for in November. Elections have consequences.

At the heart of the issue is the question of the government's purpose for existence. Do we have a government to provide cushy jobs for a large percentage of the population from which they can never be fired no matter how poorly they perform, with guaranteed raises, guaranteed benefits, and guaranteed pensions for the rest of their life, funded by an ever-increasing tax burden on the rest of society? Or does government exist to protect the fundamental liberties and rights of its citizens and create a fair and free environment for individuals to excel, innovate, and achieve greatness based on their own merit?

Hats off to you, Governor Walker. You have no idea how much heat you will take for daring to kill the sacred cow of the left. But if you stand strong we will see that you were right in the end.

What is a Christian?

2010-06-07T12:47:00.011-05:00

Recently I have heard a lot of people make statements about Christians which indicate that they don't understand what it means to be a Christian. I can't really blame them, because not being Christians, it is not their responsibility to inform themselves. In fact, I think that the Church has failed to get the message out in a clear and complete form, leaving people to deduce and surmise about what Christianity is all about. Most non-Christians see Christianity as just another flavor of organized religion, which provides a list of DOs and DON'Ts which people must follow to get in good with God. Based on what people see, that is not an entirely unreasonable conclusion, because a recent poll found that more Christians are concerned about social issues like abortion and homosexuality than they are about telling people that Jesus is the only way to be right with God. Many times Christians offer partial explanations which fall far short of providing a full explanation. When Christians do get down to the heart of the matter, they tend to switch into Church talk, seemingly unconcerned that the people who most desperately need to hear the Gospel don't understand the jargon about propitiation and ecclesiology and stuff like that. So I'm going to attempt to explain what it means to be a Christian, without being overly simplistic but still using language understandable by ordinary people.

Pluralism is the increasingly widespread view that any religious system is equally good, and whatever works for you is fine. Oprah expresses this view by saying that god is on top of the mountain, and there are many roads which lead to him, and it doesn't matter what road you choose to take. I may choose the road of Christianity, and that's fine for me. You may choose the road of Buddhism, that that is good for you. Someone else may meditate on the texture of their belly-button lint, and that's equally good. The problem with this fallacy is that any two religions you name have different and contradictory doctrines on central tenants of belief. Christians believe that Jesus is God. Jews and Muslims say that He is not. Similar examples can be found to demonstrate that each religion is mutually exclusive of the others. Thus they cannot all be true. The claim that all religions are equally valid is equivalent of saying that no religion is true, they are all fabrications, and you can pick any fiction you prefer. People who adhere to this outlook tend to pick and choose from various philosophies, world views, and religions, taking what they like and assembling a hodgepodge of myths which they find helpful, enlightening, inspirational, or emotionally gratifying. But I am not interested in an expedient delusion. I am satisfied only with truth, and the existence of truth requires that anything contradictory to truth is false. Therefore I reject pluralism and pursue truth, recognizing that truth is narrow and exclusive.

The Bible lays out God's plan for humankind and His involvement in history and in people's lives to draw people back to a relationship with Him. The perspective gained by looking at this "big picture" is essential in understanding where we are today.

First of all, it is important to understand God's purpose for us as people. To get a good picture of what God had in mind for us, we'll go back to the beginning when God created the earth, everything in it, and finally humans. We are unique because we are the only thing God created in His image, meaning that we are spiritual beings with a soul, and we can know God. God created us because He wanted to have a relationship with us. You can see what this looks like by examining the way God and humans interacted before Adam chose to rebel against God. Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden which God had created, and each evening they walked with God through the garden, talking, discussing, and enjoying each others' company. Adam and Eve saw no need for clothing, as they were at harmony with God and each other and had nothing to hide and no cause for shame. This perfect, intimate fellowship between God and man was what God had in mind when he created you. He desires to be with you and enjoy you.

However, people had other ideas. Led astray by Satan, Adam and Eve decided that they wanted to do things their own way. They believed Satan's lie that God was withholding something good from them when God told them not to eat from one particular tree. Satan told Eve that the fruit would cause her to be like God, so the temptation was about more than fruit, it was about her desire to exalt herself and claim a position of moral authority equal to God, the creator. In an act of deliberate rebellion against God, they ate the fruit and set humanity on a path away from God. The perfect fellowship with God was broken, and for the first time people felt shame. Worse yet, that act introduced death into the world, not by an action of God, but as a natural result of our own choice to ignore God's warning. Now instead of living forever in perfect relationship with God, we will die separated from God by our own rebellion. Every one of us makes the same choice as Adam when we decide to sin, or to go our own way instead of God's way. We like to think that we have the right to do things our own way, but that thinking denies God's authority to define right and wrong. Like Adam, we have the arrogant presumption to believe that we know better than God and that our way is better than His. So every one of us is separated from God both because we inherited that condition from Adam and because we chose it on our own.

While our rebellion was far from God's ideal for us, it certainly did not catch God by surprise. God already had a plan to restore our relationship with Him which we had broken by our sin. This was no small task. God is holy, which means that he cannot simply ignore our sin, and He is just, meaning that the penalty for sin must be paid. God knew that we were completely incapable of doing enough to meet His standards. Apart from God's intervention, justice demands that we die and spend eternity separated from God, and God would have been entirely in the right to allow that to happen. We couldn't blame God for our fate, because it was what we chose in direct defiance to His commands. Anyone who says "I don't believe in a God who sends people to hell" is basing their unbelief on a false premise. You send yourself to hell, while God offers an alternative. If you reject the alternative, that is not God's doing. The dire nature of our own condition could not be overstated: we stand before God guilty of numerous acts, each of which merits death, and a just God cannot simply ignore those transgressions -- the penalty must be paid.

God resolved this quandary in the most amazing manner. He Himself became a man, Jesus, and paid the penalty for our sins on our behalf. God offers that payment to us as a free gift. There is nothing we could ever do to begin to deserve it or to earn it. All we can do is receive it. The most clear statement of what God did for us is found in Ephesians 2:8-9: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast." God's plan for saving mankind is different from every man-made religious system because every religion is based on man earning favor with God by doing good deeds, while the truth is that we cannot earn God's approval, so God offers us forgiveness as a free gift. Paul says that we are saved by God's grace alone, not by works, and not even by faith. Faith is the means by which we receive God's saving grace, but the faith is not even our own, it is also a gift of God. God does it all, from beginning to end.

At the moment when God saves a person, He transforms that person from the inside out. Our old self which was dead and rotting under the power of sin is removed and God makes us into a new creation. We are freed from slavery to sin and set free to experience the fullness of life in Christ. We are no longer separated from God by our sin, but we are restored to the relationship and fellowship with God which we enjoyed in the Garden of Eden.

God says that in Christ we are righteous (Romans 3-4). To be very clear, this does not mean that we tried harder and worked more than other people and made ourselves right with God. This righteousness came from God just as His forgiveness was given to us. It is all grace. But the righteousness is also real. I have heard people say that when God looks at us, he wears "Son glasses" so that we look like Jesus. I have to give whoever came up with that some points for cleverness, but the illustration falls short because a believer's righteousness is not an illusion. When God says you are righteous, you really are righteous.

Being holy, righteous, set apart for God, and forgiven are all part of our new identity in Christ, and that can never change. However, we don't always act in accordance with that new identity. When a non-Christian sins, he is acting according to his nature, but when a Christian sins, he is acting contrary to his nature. He is still a forgiven child of God, but that sin can do all sorts of damage. Sin damages our fellowship with God and our witness to other people, and it keeps us from living the life God desires for us. God continues to work in the heart of a believer for the rest of his life, conforming him to the reality of his new identity in Christ.

You don't have to make yourself right with God in order to come to Him, and in fact you can't possibly do that. However, after you receive His grace there are some things you should do. To be completely clear, your salvation does not depend on any of these things. That is a done deal and nothing can ever undo it. The Bible says that your name is eternally written in the Book of Life, and can never be blotted out. These are things to do because you are saved, not in order to be saved. One of them is baptism. There is nothing magical about baptism. The water doesn't do anything besides get you wet. The importance of baptism is that you are declaring to the world that you are a new creation in Jesus Christ, that you have been united with Him in His death, and raised by God's power to a new life. Another thing a believer should do is join a local Church and serve in that Church, because we are more effective together than we are by ourselves. The Church is God's only plan for reaching the world with the message of Jesus.

Christians talk about "eternal life", but it is important to understand that eternal life does not start when you die. Eternal life starts the moment you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Living in that reality today is every bit as amazing a blessing as going to heaven when you die. Some people plan to wait until later to turn to God, thinking that they would rather do their own thing for now. The premise is that living without God is better than living with God. This is an irrational way of thinking. The difference between heaven and hell is the presence or absence of God. People can accept that God's way is better after death, but they think that their own way is better now. The truth is that a life lived in fellowship with God and in accordance with His plan is the best life there can be. In comparison to the glory of God, the stuff you hold on to is worthless, self-destructive garbage. Trading that junk for the riches of God is just good sense.

History, ultimately, is the story of God's plan to restore us to relationship with Him. He does not force us or coerce us, but He does provide a way. That way is Jesus. Will you take that gift which is freely offered to you, or will you continue in the destruction brought about by going your own way?

Next they'll tell us the earth is round

2010-04-23T09:33:00.006-05:00

Last year as the debate over health care was raging, I and many others who opposed this massive government power grab accused the President of lying about the supposed cost savings his bill would bring about, and the statists responded with indignation. BO argued in his speech last September that passing Obamacare was critical to reducing the deficit. Surely if BO says that he will reduce the cost of health care, he is going to do it, just as government money will not fund abortion or subsidize people who entered the country illegally. Joe Wilson was soundly chastised for suggesting that the President would lie to us in his effort to ram through Obamacare.

In discussions on this blog, BO fans criticized me for questioning the President's promise that "I will not sign a bill which adds even one dime to the deficit, either now or in the future. Period."

Even then, anyone willing to examine the assumptions behind the claim that Obamacare was deficit neutral would find that it was a pipe dream. It required that hundreds of billions of dollars be cut from Medicare's budget, and that additional reduction of hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse from government spending on health care. Cutting Medicare is a political impossibility. Each year there is a planned Medicare cut, but in nine of the past ten years Congress voted to ignore it. And if finding and eliminating $450 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse is possible, why has it not already been done?

Months ago I posted a challenge to anyone who believes BO's claim that Obamacare will be deficit neutral to "put your money where your mouth is." No one accepted my challenge.

So I was not terribly surprised to hear that the Department of Health and Human Services reported today that Obamacare will not reduce the deficit. It will increase the deficit. After all, this is the President who, in one year, drove the deficit four times higher than ever before. His attempts to posture as a deficit hawk are laughable.

The NY Times article also states that "The report projected that Medicare cuts could drive about 15 percent of hospitals and other institutional providers into the red, 'possibly jeopardizing access' to care for seniors." In other words, government tampering with the free market will drive hospitals out of business, just as 35 million more people obtain medical insurance. In fact, sixty hospitals which were in the planning stages have been canceled as a result of the passage of Obamacare. As demand increases and supply decreases, rationing of care will be necessary. BO drones, Sarah Palin awaits your apologies.

So why is this admission, which blows away half of BO's two-pronged argument for his authoritarian scheme, coming to light now? Has anything changed in the month since the House passed the bill and BO signed it into law? Is there any new information not available as recently as March which turns Obamacare from a deficit reducer to a deficit increaser? No, the truth is that all the facts necessary to know with certainty that Obama was breaking his pledge not to sign a bill which added even a dime to the deficit were there in plain sight for the past year. So why is this report being released from Obama's Health and Human Services now? Simple. The bill is law so there is no reason to lie about it any more.

Where is the sting?

2010-03-01T22:26:00.003-06:00

I've heard people say that someone "lost their battle with cancer."

On Saturday I attended the memorial service for my friend Gary Morey, age 48. Thirty-three months ago, Gary was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, the same aggressive form of brain cancer which killed Senator Ted Kennedy. After operating to remove the major part of the tumor, doctors gave Gary four months to live. What was remarkable about Gary was not so much that he lived much longer than the doctors expected, but that he lived those months in a way which reminded everyone around him that every day we have is a gift from God, but that for a believer in Jesus Christ, death is not something to be feared. Gary made the most of every day, recognizing that he was living on borrowed time on this Earth, but he looked forward with certainty and expectation to being with Jesus.

As I drove home from Gary's memorial service, packed with people whose life he had touched, a song I had not heard for years came to mind. Petra's song "Grave Robber" was recorded in 1983 and the sound is certainly dated, but the message is not: Jesus gives us victory over death. Gary is a testimony to that victory.

In 2008 when Gary first returned to his Sunday School class after his surgery, his teacher asked him about the results. Gary gave his trademark mischievous smile and told him "You're older than me, but I'm going to see Jesus before you do." That may seem glib to someone who does not know Jesus, but for Gary it was a simple reflection of the daily, personal relationship Gary has had with Jesus for years. Gary sneered at death because Jesus has already defeated death and given us eternal life, which is not just some future thing to look forward to. It is the reality of life today.

So I can say with confidence that Gary did not lose his battle with cancer. The loser in this battle was death.

Put your money where your mouth is

2009-10-22T15:11:00.001-05:00

Here's a challenge for anyone who believes the President when he says that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period."

I'm not usually a betting man. I'm on record pointing out what a ripoff the lottery is, not like that's news to anyone. Casinos have no appeal to me. But I do like a sure win. So I propose a friendly wager over Obama's promise that Obamacare will not add one dime to the deficit. If you have the courage to back up your blind faith, match my $500. We'll find someone mutually acceptable to hold the money, and the winner can designate the $1,000 plus interest to the charity of his choice. When I win, I'll select Samaritan's Purse to receive the money.

I've discussed what it means to not add to the deficit, so if you want to understand the thinking behind the metric, read my last few entries, particularly this one.

Here are the terms:

If Obama vetoes the health care reform bill citing the fact that it is not deficit-neutral as the reason, and does not sign any health care reform bill, I will concede the bet.

If Congress does not pass a health care reform bill in 2009 or 2010, the wager is off and each person gets their money back.

If Congress passes a health care reform bill and Obama signs it, we will compute the per-capita health care contribution to the deficit in 2009 dollars for 2009 and for each of the first 5 years that Obamacare is fully enacted. Most of the proposed bills require about two years to take affect, so the years we would consider would be 2012-2016.

Given these inputs:

MedicalCosts(year) = Total actual Federal expenditures for the specified year, for all health-care programs, including Medicare, CHIPS, VA medical program, Medicaid, HHS, Obamacare, etc.

MedicalTaxes(year) = Total actual Federal tax revenue for the specified year levied specifically for medical programs, including Medicare payroll taxes, and all taxes included in the Obamacare bill

CPI(year) = Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, from July 1 of the specified year

Population(year) = Total population of the United States for the given year, according to the Census Bureau

For each year we would compute

RealPerCapitaDeficit(year) = CPI(2009)*(MedicalCosts(year)-MedicalTaxes(year))/
(CPI(year)*Population(year))

If the real per capita deficit is higher in any of those five years than it was in 2009, I win. If not, you win.

The $1,000 with interest will be given in the winner's name to the charity of his choice.

I almost feel bad about taking advantage of fools, but they seem to want it so badly.

Already a mockery

2009-10-09T10:19:00.006-05:00

Today's London Times declares that the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to BO makes a mockery of the Nobel Prize. They have a point. The cutoff for nominations for this year's awards was February 1, at which point BO had occupied the White House for less than two weeks. Thus it seems that the very act of campaigning, reading soaring oratory from a teleprompter, being successful enough at self promotion to get elected, surviving the horrific poetry readings at the inauguration, and unpacking his stuff in the White House was enough to merit the Nobel Peace Prize. In the few months since then, he has talked about closing Gitmo, sent more troops to Afghanistan, ignored Iraq, given wimpy speeches around the world apologizing for America, thrown our closest allies under the bus, overlooked threats from Iran and North Korea, hobnobbed with dictators, bowed to the Saudi prince, declared America to be one of the biggest Muslim nations, and capitulated to terrorists.

But on deeper inspection, awarding BO the Nobel Peace Prize despite his complete lack of tangible accomplishments was not responsible for making a mockery of the Nobel Prize. That was already accomplished years ago, when the same award was bestowed on Yassir Arafat, the hapless Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Anwar Sadat, Mohamed ElBaradei, Gorbachev, and Henry Kissinger.

Alfred Nobel, a great man, established the Nobel Prize to honor “champions of peace” who genuinely contributed to peace in the world. He deplored the “absurd and futile efforts of windbags who are capable of thwarting the best of aims.” But Oslo's Nobel Committee, made up of five Norwegians nominated by Norway's left-wing Storting consistently bases their decisions on politics rather than rewarding real accomplishments of resolving conflict and promoting justice.

The Nobel Prize was a joke long before they added BO to the lineup alongside terrorists, dictators, and frauds. This is just another punchline.

Something you can do

2009-10-08T12:44:00.004-05:00

To a large extent, there is little that you can do to reduce your own tax burden without reducing your income even more. You can pay mortgage interest or contribute to a 401(k), IRA or charity to get a tax deduction, but each of those things take more out of your spendable income than they reduce this year's income tax. For itemized deductions to be worthwhile, you first have to exceed your standard deduction, so for most of us, it won't do much good. Unless you are in the top tax bracket, you have to spend four dollars or more on mortgage interest to save one dollar in taxes. While that is better than nothing, it's not good enough to justify spending more on your mortgage just to get the tax break. Tax-efficient investing using low-turnover mutual funds can make a difference by deferring realized gains, but again, for most people, income taxes, property taxes, and payroll taxes far exceed capital gains taxes. Some people buy expensive annuity products to gain the advantage of tax deferral, not realizing that the investment company's excessive fees eat up more than they would have paid in taxes.

But last week I cut my tax bill for the cost of a gallon of gas and twenty pages of printer paper. I did it by asking for a cut.

In the spring, our annual property-tax appraisal from Tarrant Appraisal District indicated an increase of 5.5% in our property value compared to 2008. Property values in our area have not been decimated as brutally as they have in other parts of the country, particularly on the coasts. But neither have they been increasing. A recent survey indicates that property values in Dallas/Fort Worth are down about 0.2% in the past year. Homeowners in Phoenix, Miami, Chicago, or anywhere in California would be envious of so small a drop, as they lost 20% or more of their homes value. But still there is nothing to justify a 5.5% increase in our appraisal.

On May 30 I filed an appeal with the Tarrant Appraisal District. More than three months passed without a notice of my hearing date, but in mid-September I received a letter indicating that I would present my case to the Tarrant Appraisal Review Board on October 2. Also included were some instructions regarding how to prepare for the hearing and what to bring.

A realitor friend sent me a Comparitive Market Analysis for my house, listing recent sales in our area and houses currently on the market. I got a similar analysis back in 2005, showing twenty o thirty houses which had sold in our area in the past year. The analysis for 2009 indicated that three houses had sold between January 1 and September 1 of 2009. Several more sold in 2008. But a dozen houses within 4 blocks of our house had been on the market for six months or more without finding a buyer. One house just four doors down our street from us has been on the market for eleven months, with the price dropping repeatedly. Now the asking price per square foot is 70% of the appraised value of our house.

On the day of the hearing, I drove over to the Tarrant Appraisal Review Board office with five copies of all of my information, wondering if my efforts were futile. With the current economic situation, tax revenues are dropping like a rock and local governments are strapped for cash. Could I really expect them to cut my taxes in this environment? The information I had received from the county indicated that the review board was made up of impartial citizens, not county employees, and that they would fairly evaluate the true market value of my property, but I was still slightly skeptical.

I signed in at the front desk and took a seat in the waiting room. I dropped the suggested 25 cents into a can for a cup of coffee, which was not bad for the price. Good Morning America was showing on a large screen, but I read a few more pages from Atlas Shrugged until my name was called. I once waited three hours in the Social Security Administration waiting room, so thirty minutes seemed quick. The receptionist led me back to Review Board Room #7. Inside were three men, each roughly 75 years old, and a middle-aged woman at a computer terminal. I had five minutes to present my information, the county representative had five minutes to support the appraised value, I could offer a rebuttal, and the three men would decide on a fair value.

I went through my data, showing that most houses in my area were selling for a lower price per square foot, and that even at those prices, houses were not selling well. I used three of my five minutes. The county representative showed the same list of recent house sales, but also included some houses from the neighboring Crowley School District. In my rebuttal I pointed out that property values in Crowley were higher than in Fort Worth.

The chairman of the review board asked me what result I was hoping for. I indicated that I would like our appraisal to remain where it was in the previous year.

The board went to work, scanning the market data, punching numbers into their calculators, averaging, adjusting for square footage and build date, and comparing their results back and forth. I had no idea if their results were favorable for me or not. Finally they agreed on an average of their three results.

When the chairman announced their decision, I was shocked. They did not give me the 5.5% cut in property taxes I asked for, but instead a 12% cut. I was certain that I had not heard him correctly, so I asked him to repeat the number. He did, and I heard correctly, although I'm still a bit incredulous. I don't exactly like what it says about our property value, but I'm not planning to sell any time soon, and this will make a significant difference when our taxes come due in December.

Joe Biden says that paying more taxes is patriotic but I say that paying more than you have to is worse than just dumb, it is immoral. From a stewardship standpoint, paying taxes you don't owe is worse than playing the lottery, where are least you have some slim chance of winning something back. I encourage you to keep an eye on your appraisal each year, and if it seems out of line, do something about it.

Not religion

2009-09-30T18:31:00.005-05:00

This video is excellent right up to the last line, where it says, "Bringing religion back to school."

Our public schools have plenty of religion. What people need is not religion, but rather the acknowledgment of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, the only hope for mankind. Teaching this to kids is the parent's job, not the school's.

The true cost of war

2009-09-29T16:37:00.004-05:00

Without Bush, media loses interest in "the true cost of war" and coverage of caskets of dead servicemen.

They clamored for permission to show the caskets of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan while Bush was President, saying that they wanted to convey "the true cost of war". Obama gave them permission, but hardly any reporters now show up. So was it really about "the true cost of war" or was it about bashing Bush?

More importantly, when will they recognize 9/11 as the true cost of ignoring an enemy who has declared war on America?

Europe moving right

2009-09-29T16:06:00.002-05:00

From today's New York Times:

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

As America moves towards European-style socialism, that very system is failing in Europe, where voters are electing more conservative governments and moving back towards capitalism:

Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”
European Socialists need “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can’t do in the 21st century,” he said.
Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”

Red-blue dialogue on health care -- final comments

2009-09-28T09:04:00.013-05:00

You can read Colin's latest post here.

I believe that this discussion has gone as far as it can. Colin's idea of "progress" seems to be me conceding to his argument. However, I believe that I have made a far stronger case than he has, so I ought to be attacking him for not agreeing with me rather than vise versa. I'm not sure what Colin's goal was, but finding one complete approach to the issue that we can both agree on was never a possibility. It is clear that we have incompatible views of the proper role of government, so his proposals will always be overreaching in my view, and mine will always be inadequate in his.

We did find many things we agree on: subsidizing insurance for people who genuinely can't afford it, reducing waste and fraud, avoiding unnecessary malpractice and defensive medicine costs, the importance of competition, that insurance companies should be able to deny new coverage for reasonable grounds, regulating insurance companies to assure that they operate in a fair and transparent way, making sure that people can move from one insurance provider to another, and eliminating bad regulations such as the law preventing intra-state insurance purchase.

We disagree on mandating the purchase of insurance, the public option, and mandates on employers to provide insurance. That's a shorter list, but those are central elements in the proposed bills, and they are deal-killers as far as I'm concerned. If someone proposes a bill with the elements most people can agree with, and leave out these other things, I will support it with enthusiasm, regardless of who proposes it, just as I supported Bill Clinton in those cases where he did things right: NAFTA, Welfare reform, etc. But I will continue to oppose bills with a public option or mandates to purchase insurance, an idea Barack Obama opposed throughout the campaign, just as I opposed bad policies when George Bush promoted them, including Medicare Part D, immigration reform, invading Iraq, the economic stimulus package, the appointment of Harriet Meyer, TARP and bailouts of failed businesses, and most importantly his dismal failure to control spending.

You accuse me of exaggerations and quoting talking points, but then mischaracterize what I said. Regarding exaggerations, you keep holding onto the 46 million number even though Obama himself is now saying 30 million. And regarding talking points, for the third or forth time you repeat the line "Every developed nation in the world offers universal health care except the US." That talking point reminds me of preschooler playground logic: teacher, everyone else is doing it!

Here's a news flash: people do go to jail for not paying their taxes. There are currently tens of thousands of people in jail for that reason. My comment was not related to the Ensign note, as that note was released after I posted my comment. Our tax law is not optional, and it is backed up by force of law. If you don't believe me, refuse to pay your taxes and see what happens. Of course not everyone who doesn't pay their taxes goes to jail. If you are a left-wing tax cheat you might end up with a powerful position in the Obama administration, maybe even running the IRS.

I did not say that the reform is equivalent to Marxism. In fact, your tendency to misrepresent what I say has happened so often that I think it must be intentional. In the discussion of auto insurance, I spent five paragraphs demonstrating that states mandating auto insurance is different than a Federal mandate to buy health insurance, but you accused me of saying that the auto mandate was tyrannical, when that conclusion could only be reached if the two were the same. In this case, pointing out that Obamacare is not "modest", I said that if it was modest, it greatly raises the bar to qualify for ostentatious. Modest and ostentatious are antonyms, so relating Obamacare to modest and Marxism to ostentatious do not equate the two. It would be like you claiming that Donald Trump's $125 million Maison de l'Amitie is modest because there are a couple of oil sheiks who live in more expensive houses. If Trump's house is modest, what is left to be considered ostentatious? The Taj Mahal? Pointing out that there are worse ideas doesn't make Obamacare reasonable any more than pointing out someone who advocated nuking the entire middle east justifies invading Iraq.

Then you suggest that I am supporting mandatory purchase of insurance. I did not advocate "forcing people to get insurance when young and keeping it". That's the core difference between your view of government and mine. When I say that someone should do something, I mean that they should choose it freely, but you think it should be imposed by force by a Federal mandate. You support a nanny state imposing its vast wisdom upon the helpless, ignorant proles for their own good. I believe that if we have a minimal level of regulation to ensure fairness and transparency, so that people can choose to buy insurance knowing that they won't be dropped unfairly later on if they get sick and they can move from provider to provider and keep coverage if they move from one state to another, then they have the opportunity to obtain lasting coverage. If they don't do it, that is their decision and they will have to live with it. There is nothing heartless in that, as I didn't impose any decision on them.

Regarding my statement that "This bill is an authoritarian power grab bigger than any in American history" you are right. That was an exaggeration. The severity of the impact on those impacted by the cases you cite was much worse, outweighing the much larger scope of the current proposal, which will impact far more people, do much greater economic damage, and last for a longer time. I'm not much comforted that Obamacare is not the worst, but merely near the top of the shameful list of America's biggest authoritarian power grabs.

I used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack as examples of other cases where government intervened in the market and caused a lot of damage. There was no bubble when those agencies were started, either. They were controlled by politicians like Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, and Barney Frank. While there is plenty of blame to spread around in the case of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Fannie and Freddie were two of the biggest players in bringing it about. The central factor is not for-profit versus non-profit, but government controlled versus free market, private sector control. Private medical insurance operates at a 3% profit margin, meaning that if they were to break even, the price would drop by 3%. It was government pressure which led to the lowering of lending standards and changing the rules of aggregating risk which drove the bubble and undermined the market.

I was disappointed and angered to see that you returned to your empty rhetoric about my supposed lack of compassion. This is the cliché liberals flee to when they can't make an argument based on fact or reason, generally right before they start calling the conservative a "bigot". While we have engaged vigorously on ideas, I have tried to avoid personal attacks of this sort. I apologize for my comments lashing back in reaction to this. It was hasty and not thoughtfully considered. Although we disagree on several points, I hope we can keep things friendly and civil. My compassion is not measured by my support of more government programs, but by my personal involvement in other people's lives and my generosity to those around me, which is my business and not yours, so I'm not going to brag about it here. Plenty of people have spent a lot of energy running down America, capitalism, and our medical system, exploiting both real and imaginary victims for political gain, and I am not going to join that chorus either. I am not driven by a desire to "score political points" or deal political defeats to anyone. I could just as easily say that you are driven by self interest, seeking another source of power to wield over the masses, demagoging the issue in every election as Democrats already do with Social Security and Medicare to entrench your party in power. All that I do is based on a vision of America shared by those who left their homes to found this nation, by those who fought to establish liberty and protect it, and by those who still seek liberty today. Those time-proven principles espoused by the founding fathers and outlined in the Constitution made our nation great, and they are not to be trifled with, dismissed, compromised, or smeared as being fringe extremist militia ideas in an attempt to marginalize the speaker. I am none of those things, and your attempt to paint me as such shows your inability to compete on substance in the arena of ideas. The free market is the most compassionate system in the world, far superior to collectivist systems which impose equal poverty, as we have seen in China, North Korea, the USSR, and Cuba. America has surpassed countries which try to mix the two systems, as they do in Europe, because the cost of excessive government is a constant drag on economic growth and wealth creation, which is the key to improving the standard of living for everyone. My goal is for the good of America, which benefits me in the process, but not at the expense of anyone but rather by allowing everyone to benefit.

You, on the other hand, propose real and massive expenses and intrusions into people's lives with ephemeral promises of future benefits and savings. You have only the words read from a teleprompter assuring that this time it will be different from every other government failure. This time our promise of statist utopia will actually be realized. Every other big government entitlement has been a boondoggle, dragged down by waste, fraud, and corruption, but this time we'll get it right. This time we will be fiscally responsible, unlike our mad spending binge earlier this year, and we won't add one dime to the deficit. This time "hope" and "change" from our messiah will lead us to the promised land where no one dies because they can't afford medical care and no one goes broke because they get sick.

It seems that public opinion is moving my way, not yours, as 56% of the public oppose Obamacare and only 41% support it, according to a poll released today.

If Obamacare passes and does not add to the deficit, I invite you to say "I told you so." Until then, I've said what I need to say. I welcome your comments on any posts you see here.

More Red/Blue dialogue on health care

2009-09-24T13:03:00.008-05:00

Check out Colin's latest post here.

Colin, I agree with you that government can do both good and bad. Without government, we would have anarchy and chaos, with no national defense, no law enforcement, and no protection of our essential national interests and individual rights. There are some things that government does better than individuals could do for themselves, such as providing fire stations and roads. These are things that everyone benefits from. I agree entirely with your statement "I believe we must be eternally vigilant about monitoring 'government creep' -- the tendency of government to overreach and regulate things it has no business regulating." I agree in the abstract with your next statement: "But I also think there is a clear and compelling case for government intervention in very proscribed and constrained ways to achieve certain socially beneficial objectives." However, I don't know how a reasonable person can look at the proposed legislation and describe it as "modest" or "proscribed and constrained". If a program spending $1.6 trillion over ten years can now be described as modest, the word has surely been redefined when I was not paying attention. How is it "proscribed and constrained" to mandate that everyone get health insurance, fine those who don't get it, and throw those who don't pay the fine in jail? The good news is that once you're in jail, you get free health care! Surely there are more onerous ideas out there, but if Obamacare is modest, hardcore Marxism must be the dividing line for truly ostentatious. Not only will they fine people who don't buy enough insurance, they'll fine people who buy too much! Since when can Max Baucus decide how much insurance you should buy, and punish you if you buy too little or too much? When the government claims the power to determine who gets medical care and who doesn't, and by extension, in many cases, who lives and who dies, what greater control over your life could there be? This bill is an authoritarian power grab bigger than any in American history. James Madison said that, "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, the powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America." As you say, "The vigilance of American citizens will always be a powerful bulwark to the overreaching of government." That vigilance is driving the groundswell of opposition to Obamacare. It remains to be seen if Congress will remember that they work for us, not the other way around.

I think that you need to re-examine your history about the source of American exceptionalism. Europeans did not leave home and venture to the New World in droves to find a place with more government interference in their lives. They came looking for freedom and opportunity. America is the greatest country on earth not because of centralized control and collectivism, but because of individualism and liberty. Your suggestion that America's success if due to government management doesn't fit at all with the facts. Certainly we were able to coordinate better, be more productive and more innovative, operate more efficiently, and create more wealth than Europe, but that was due to capitalism, not because of government, and often in spite of it. Government does not produce wealth, it only moves it around. The larger the segment of our economy is government run, the smaller the segment which must produce all the goods and services that we consume or trade. Government now makes up about 40% of our economy, meaning that 100% of the people must live on what 60% produce. The fact that Europe is closer to a 50/50 ratio has a lot to do with why we have surpassed them, so moving more in their direction is certainly not a good idea.

Regarding your two added goals, I agree with number two. For a free market to work, consumers must be able to move from one provider to another. Finding ways to allow people who currently have insurance to switch to another provider is very important, and can be accomplished without government mandates. Number one, on the other hand, requires either a public option or a preexisting conditions mandate. I've made my case against both of those options. If we strengthen the rules so that insurance companies cannot drop coverage unfairly or deny coverage for non-material reasons, anyone can avoid the situation of being without coverage due to a preexisting condition by purchasing insurance when they are young and healthy and keeping it.

Although our goals are fairly similar, our approaches to reach those goals are day and night. Certainly my proposal is not "95% in sync with what is being discussed." I flatly reject a public option, mandates on individuals to buy medical insurance, mandates on employers to provide it, mandates on insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions, and fines for buying too little or too much insurance: all the centerpieces of the various bills proposed by Congress. A public option does not increase competition. It is anti-competitive. Government interference in the market is not competitive, it squashes competition and subverts market forces which stabilize and regulate the market. Look at government-chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, major players in destroying the mortgage market, with disastrous results. These semi-government, semi-private entities were created with the virtuous intentions of helping people who might not otherwise qualify for a mortgage to buy a house. Like the public option or "co-ops" they took on the risky cases that no one else would touch, hid the inherent risk, and undermined the entire market. You yourself make the case to prove that the public option could not possibly operate on a standalone basis as Obama claims, with premiums paying for the coverage of expenses: "so that's why some sort of public or co-op option makes sense, to cover the folks that are likely to require more funds to be cared for than they're going to put into the pool." How can that happen without the public option being subsidized? But Obama vehemently insists that claims that the public option will be subsidized are a myth. Is he saying that when the public option runs out of money, he will let it go bankrupt and will not bail it out? Of course not.

You are right that a partial implementation of medical savings accounts exists. It just needs to be made available to everyone, and extended to allow money to be carried over from year to year.

I think I was not clear enough about why I propose implementing insurance subsidies as advanceable, refundable tax credits. First, that does not mean that each individual would have to get the money from the government and then pass it on to the insurance company. That would be a mess, just as you say! The government would pay the insurance companies directly, and the individual would pay the difference. What it does mean is that people who receive a subsidy would be required to declare it on their tax return. Connecting an insurance subsidy to a tax return would help to reduce fraud by making it possible to verify that real, legally eligible people who are paying their taxes are getting the subsidy.

While I agree with the principle of helping those in genuine need to pay for basic insurance, I have an issue with the Baucus proposal, which would subsidize insurance for people making as much as $85,000. According to a 2005 Census Bureau report, 80% of the population makes less than that amount. This is a far cry from a last resort safety net. My comments about families and people in a local community taking care of one another were in the context of a social safety net, not fighter jets and so forth. It is not meant to suggest that there should not be a safety net at the Federal level, but that should be a last resort, only when the local safety net has failed. Washington has spent years convincing people that the Federal Government should be the primary safety net, and that because we pay taxes, our obligation to the needy is fulfilled. I personally reject that idea, and believe that politicians should stop their self-serving promotion of dependence on government as a natural and normal state for most of the people most of the time.

What does "deficit-neutral" mean

2009-09-21T11:28:00.004-05:00

BO has repeatedly promised that his medical insurance bill will be "deficit-neutral."

"I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period."

This in spite of the fact that he has already added $600 billion of deficit spending for health care to his budget, calling it a "down payment" suggesting that he intends to spend a lot more in the future. I fully expect that this promise will be quickly abandoned when the bill is passed and signed. When the costs start piling up he'll just say, "We tried, but we just couldn't keep it deficit neutral. We can't let people die in the streets, so we must meet our obligations to our citizens. The problem I inherited from Bush was much worse than we though." Does anyone really believe that Obamacare will not add one dime to the deficit? And what exactly does that mean? Here's how BO said he would implement it:

"And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize."

I've been looking over everything I can find about the Max Baucus bill, and I don't find that provision in there. When Washington talks about "Spending cuts" they mean something different than what you might think. Those who remember the Federal School Lunch Program fiasco know that Democrats consider a proposal to increase spending on school lunches by six percent to be a horrific cut if someone else had proposed increasing spending by six and a half percent.

Obama's statement does not come close to being adequate to assure that his program is deficit neutral. One could argue that every dollar the government spends adds a dollar to the deficit, so long as there is a deficit. The deficit is one dollar more than it would have been if they had not spent that dollar. But being "deficit neutral" is a lower standard, meaning that new taxes levied to pay for that program cover the additional spending above what was previously being spent. So it is legitimate to use the $660 that Obama would cut from Medicare to offset additional spending for Obamacare. It is also legitimate to count the savings Obama promises from increased efficiency and reduced waste and fraud, if those savings actually materialize. But saying that "we will come forward with more spending cuts" is far too vague. It sounds as though proposing the cuts is enough, and Congress is free to not act on the proposals. He also doesn't specify what they would cut. Does it have to be a cut from medical care, or would cutting the military count?

When Obama says that he "will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits", what is the baseline, and how is he determining if he is adding a dime? The 2009 deficit is going to be somewhere around $1.8 trillion, more than four times higher than ever before. Because the 2009 deficit is swollen by bailouts and one-time stimulus spending, future years deficits are expected to be less. Can Obama claim to have not added to the deficit if the 2011 deficit, with Obamacare in effect, is not more than $1.8 trillion? He could make that claim even if Obamacare increased the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over what it would have been without Obamacare.

Even worse, they could compare against a projected budget, and as long as the deficit stays below that amount, they could claim deficit neutrality. For instance, in 2012 they could say "We projected a deficit of $1.5 trillion for this year, and our deficit is only $1.45 trillion, so we kept our promise of not increasing the deficit." The problem is that the projection is arbitrary, and it would be easy to set it absurdly high so that they could spend huge amounts of money and still claim to be deficit neutral. This is not at all far fetched. It is how Congress routinely does business.

Politicians are really good at playing shell games with our money, and Washington math is nothing like real math. Pinning them down on exactly what they mean is important if we want any kind of fiscal accountability.

It is possible, in a few phrases, to lay out a clear criteria which would make it possible to objectively determine if Obamacare is actually accomplishing its stated goal of reducing the deficit: Medical Reform meets it's goal of being deficit neutral if total real per capita Federal spending on medical care, minus tax revenue collected for medical care, does not exceed 2009 levels.

But in all of Obama's "fleshing out the details" he never makes a specific statement which we can actually pin him down on later, when spending spins out of control. Obama is willing to play fast and loose with the definition of a "tax", even when former top Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos and the AP both say "it is a tax," in order to claim that he is keeping his promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. What makes you think that he won't quibble over the meaning of his promise to "not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future?"

Uninsured in America

2009-09-18T16:10:00.001-05:00

Red/Blue health dialog, part n

2009-09-17T09:07:00.007-05:00

Colin's latest entry is here. Be sure to read it.

This discussion has been very worthwhile, and I've improved my understanding of the rationale behind the proposed bills. With a brand new bill now emerging, quite different from the previous ones, there will be a whole new set of issues. I think that we have pretty much exhausted the points we were discussing, so I'm not going to keep following them point by point. Instead I want to lay out an alternative approach based on my principles of free markets and capitalism.

Before I get there, I want to say that Colin has convinced me that some of my statements about tyranny were too strong. I do believe that the actions our government takes can affect where it falls on the spectrum between liberty and tyranny. I stand by my original statement that the argument of using one case of government exceeding its authority to justify a bigger excess will eventually lead to tyranny. Our government has incrementally exceeded the limits described in the Constitution, and Obamacare would be another step in that direction. But on the continuum between liberty and tyranny we are still much closer to the side of freedom, and most countries are less free than we are. However, the argument that most countries are less free and still maintain a comfortable living standard does not convince me that we ought to move in their direction of more government. Michael Moore can say what he wants about capitalism, but until he gives back the millions of dollars he has made in the capitalist system it is not ringing true. Capitalism remains the best system for creating wealth and distributing it fairly (which is not the same as distributing it equally).

Defining goals is a good place to start the process of laying out an alternative to Obamacare. My goals are very different than those stated by the President or by Colin. Here is what I would be trying to achieve:

1. Medical insurance should be affordable to those who want to purchase it.
2. Insurance companies should provide good service, clearly communicate their policies and coverages, follow through on what they promise, and treat their customers fairly. Those who don't should go out of business.
3. Consumers should have many options for medical coverage and be free to pick the one which best meets their needs.
4. Insurance companies which commit fraud or breech of contract should face severe consequences.
5. There should not be a tax penalty for those who buy individual insurance rather than get it from their employer.
6. There should be a safety net for Americans who genuinely can't afford insurance, to help them pay for private insurance. For most people who are able to work, it should be short-term.
7. People who can afford insurance and choose not to buy it should not be entitled to free treatment.

The central key to the first three items is competition. I don't mean phony competition with a government "public option" or the repackaged "co-op" which doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else. The way to increase competition is to remove barriers which are currently preventing competition. Other types of insurance which are not bogged down by the regulatory maze which already exists for medical insurance offer a far greater array of options to consumers. For instance, the life insurance market provides countless varieties of coverage, making it likely that you will find one which best suits your needs. Competition in the life insurance market has driven costs way down. I was surprised how little I had to pay for a term life insurance policy, and a broker was able to show me rates, terms, and credit ratings for dozens of different companies side by side. There is no reason consumers shouldn't have that kind of choice when buying medical insurance.

One way that we have already discussed is to open the market nationwide for purchasing insurance. Current law prevents people from purchasing insurance across state lines. As a result, many states are dominated by one or two insurance companies. You shouldn't find it ironic that this law was passed to help insurance companies. The law protects big insurance companies from significant competition from small companies. The big established companies can afford to operate branches in many states, but small startup companies can only compete with them in one state. The best way to "keep insurance companies honest" is to break down barriers to competition so that consumers can give their business to companies which treat their customers well. Opening the market to allow insurance policies to be issued across state lines would also allow people to keep their current policy when they move from one state to another, in many cases.

Transparency is important in establishing fair competition. Insurance companies should be required to clearly define their costs, policies, and coverages in a way which makes it easy to compare one policy to another in an "apples to apples" way. Such requirements were recently placed on mutual funds, and it made reading a mutual fund's prospectus and annual report much more understandable.

Many of the anecdotal horror stories used to sell reform would be resolved with real competition. Insurance companies who use technicalities to treat their customers unfairly would quickly develop a negative reputation and lose market share or be forced out of business. When everyone is informed and has multiple options, treating your customers well is good business. I would like to know more about the cases that Obama cites in his speeches. He mentions "one woman in Texas" whose policy was dropped because she had acne. I hope that there is more to the story. Why not put the insurance company executive on the hot seat and ask him to explain what happened? Let the media examine the facts of the case. If any laws were broken, deal with that in the legal system, and if the company acted legally but unfairly let the public know.

Competition can also be reintroduced into the actual purchase of medical services to drive down the costs of the care itself. Today the consumer is largely insulated from the price of the services they receive. When I go to my doctor, I pay a co-pay, usually $10 or $20, and never even see the bill for the rest of the cost. There are various ways that this could be accomplished. One is for insurance companies to return to covering a percentage of the cost for smaller, routine treatments. An 80/20 or 90/10 coverage provides an incentive for the consumer to control the cost. Large expenses such as major surgeries wouldn't apply, because 10% of the cost of open heart surgery is still more than most people can afford. I like this approach better than the use of price caps, which seems to be the most common method today. Price caps are somewhat arbitrary and can't account for the uniqueness of each situation, and price caps don't provide any market pressure below the cap. I am open to other ideas for how to reintroduce market forces to control costs.

Today there is an inequity between the tax treatment of people who get insurance through their employer and those who buy it individually. When an employer pays part of the cost of medical insurance, it is paid using pre-tax dollars. The cost of the insurance does not count as income to the employee, and thus is not subjected to income tax. When an individual buys insurance, they pay with after-tax dollars. Take two people, each with total compensation from their employer of $50,000. The first is paid $44,000 and receives a medical insurance policy which costs his employer $6,000. The second is paid $50,000 and buys a $6,000 policy. The first pays income taxes on $44,000, and the second pays income tax on the full $50,000. I propose that it would be fair to allow the second person to deduct the cost of his insurance from his income when he figures his income tax. Then both people would pay income tax on the same $44,000. Medical savings accounts which allow tax deductible deposits and can be carried over year to year, allowing people to use untaxed dollars to pay for insurance premiums, co-pays, prescription drugs, and other out of pocket medical expenses would be a good way to implement this.

There is one area where increased regulation is necessary. Insurance companies should not be allowed to deny coverage to a policy holder or cancel policies for non-material reasons. A non-material pre-existing condition is not a valid reason to reject an application for a new policy, but a material pre-existing condition is a valid reason. A non-material error in an insurance application is not reason to cancel a policy, but material fraud is a valid reason. There need to be standards on what is material and what is not, and some sort of independent arbitration system to resolve disputes between customers and insurance companies. This small measure should stop many of the anecdotal cases used by Democrats to justify massive expansions of government power.

Tort reform is essential to any effort to control cost. Reforms must be made in a way which allows legitimate cases of negligence or malpractice to proceed but stop frivolous law suits. I don't support a common Republican proposal of capping damage awards. To understand the danger of that approach, look at the case of the Ford Pinto. After hundreds of people died due to the propensity of that car's gas tank to explode in a rear collision, it was revealed that the company discovered the defect when production of the car had just started. Actuaries estimated the number of people who would be killed and compared the cost of paying out settlements in those cases with the cost of fixing the problem. They concluded that it was cheaper to pay the settlements. Capping damage awards makes it easier to reach that conclusion. Juries need the latitude to slap companies who do that with damages severe enough to make sure that it is not cheaper to let people die than to fix the problem.

There are better options. One is to establish "safe harbors" for doctors who use nationally recognized and adopted best practices, protocols and standards of care. Following those procedures would be a defense in a malpractice lawsuit. This would limit the cost of "defensive medicine" to a well-defined set of precautions.

There should be minimal standards for physicians who serve as expert witnesses, to prevent unqualified opportunists from making a career out of testifying against doctors in frivolous suits.

The best idea I have heard is to give courts a third option in their verdict for malpractice cases. In addition to the option of finding for the plantiff or for the defense, the court should be able to rule that a case was frivolous, in which case the attorney who filed the case is responsible for paying the legal bills of the defense. This would put a quick stop to the practice of a few unscrupulous attorneys who file hundreds of law suits every year, most will little merit, hoping to get a big settlement on one or two. These lawsuits cost a huge amount of money to defend against, and that cost is passed on to the consumer in higher medical bills.

Right now we have a sort of safety net, but it is very expensive and not very effective. There is a patchwork of government programs to cover people who can't afford insurance, and there is the Federal law which requires that hospitals treat anyone who comes regardless of their ability to pay. As Obama correctly points out, this is an expensive hidden tax which we are already paying. America is a compassionate nation, and we don't let people die in the streets for lack of medical attention. But I think that we can make the safety net more cost effective. Subsidizing basic private insurance based on genuine need is better than using ERs as a distribution system for indigent care. This should be implemented as advanceable and refundable tax credits to low-income individuals for the purpose of buying private medical insurance.

Coverage of pre-existing conditions has been a hot issue. Insurance cannot exist if people can go without coverage while they are well and then if they get sick, buy insurance at the same price as everyone else. Mandating that insurance companies offer coverage at the same price regardless of material pre-existing conditions would kill the insurance industry. But there are ways to allow someone with existing insurance coverage to move to a different company in spite of a pre-existing condition. An insurance policy covering a person with a chronic, expensive condition represents a liability to an insurance company. The present value of that liability can be computed using the same kind of actuarial formulas used to price insurance. If a group of insurance companies were to negotiate a set of formulas based on all the relevant factors, they could agree to accept customers from the other companies in that group in return for a payment from the current insurer of the present value of the liability as computed by those formulas. As an example, if I am currently insured by company A, and I have a heart condition which will cost $100,000 to treat, I could switch to company B, provided that both A and B are members of such a group. Company A would pay company B to take me. In most cases, thousands of people would be moving each direction, so it would be a wash, more or less. Being a member of such a group would be a major selling point for insurance companies, because it would mean that your coverage would be much more portable. I understand that such an arrangement is not possible with the current regulations, but with the proper changes to the regulations, it would be possible.

Obama says that he will pay for his proposed reform by reducing waste, fraud, and inefficiencies in the current system. I'm all for eliminating those expenses which don't contribute to the goal of providing quality medical care. Saying that we are going to use that money for something else is not reasonable, because as long as we are running a deficit, it is money we don't actually have. So we should work hard to eliminate waste, fraud, and inefficiencies as a means to reduce government spending and bring down the deficit.

There are many people and think tanks from across the ideological spectrum with all sorts of ideas for how the medical system could be improved. Allowing states to experiment with different ideas and find out which ones are the most promising has been very successful in other areas, such as welfare reform. It could work here too.

As a general rule, decisions made closer to the affected people are better than centralized control. If I am being taxed for the school up the street, I can see if I'm getting my money's worth, but if my taxes are going to the Department of Education in Washington to be doled out across the country, there is very little connection between what I pay and what I get back. All I know for sure is that we get back less than we paid because there is always overhead in a huge bureaucracy. The same applies to medical care. The best way to help people is to look out for your family, you neighbors, your co-workers, your friends, and your church members. I see these people every day, and I know when they are in genuine need. When I help them, I can see if the help is effective. Local assistance is the next best thing, with voluntary giving to charity being preferred to government assistance. Charities are accountable to their contributors, which helps to keep their overhead low, so that most of their budget goes for the purpose it was given. Welfare spends $1.11 in overhead for every dollar it pays in benefits. Bureaucrats doing paperwork and adminstrative expenses eat up more than half of the Welfare budget. Many private charities have less than 5% overhead. Central control is the least effective level to offer assistance. The faceless bureaucracy is inefficient and impersonal, not well-suited to reach out to people with compassion to meet their individual needs. The lack of accountability reduces people to lists of figures in a database, which opens the way for fraud and abuse. But over time, people have accepted Washington as the primary provider of assistance to people in need. Society no longer feels obligated to help their neighbors or give to the local charity organizations because they pay their taxes to the government, which has programs to help people. The Federal Government happily supports the tendancy to look to Washington for help, whether it be for relief after local disasters, help with financial needs, medical care, and even fixing school classrooms, which we now learn is the President's job. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. We need to get away from the notion that the Federal Government is the best place to solve every problem and start returning responsibility to individuals, communities, local charities, churches, local government, and state government.

Obama talked about his grandmother worrying about getting coverage for her medical needs, and struggling to fill out the forms. At the time, Obama was professor of constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School, associate attorney with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, and published author of his first memoir "Dreams from my father" for which he reportedly had received a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster. Obama, instead of waiting for government to take care of his grandmother, could have told her "I have good eyesight, arthritis-free fingers, and thanks largely to your generosity, a law degree from Harvard. Let me help you fill out those forms. And don't worry; if your insurance doesn't pay for it, I've got you covered." Delegating your responsibility for your family and community to Washington -- now THAT's coldhearted.

Mandates and more mandates

2009-09-16T09:06:00.003-05:00

I've discussed the onerous mandates Obamacare would impose on insurance companies and individuals, but there is another mandate which it would impose on employers. Companies with a payroll larger than $250,000 would be required to either pay most of the cost of medical insurance for their full-time employees or pay a payroll tax of between two and eight percent. The minimum contribution is 72.5% of the premiums for individuals or 65% for an entire family.

Before you get all excited that they are going to stick it to the man, stop and think about the unintended consequences of this mandate.

Most larger companies already provide medical insurance for their full-time employees. The market demands it to attract the kind of people they need to run a successful business. The companies which will be hit by this are the small to midsize companies. Most any company with more than ten employees will hit the $250,000 threshold. According to the Census Bureau, there are about 1.15 million companies with more than ten employees and less than 100, and those companies employ 29 million people. Another 16.8 million people work for mid-sized companies with more than 100 employees but less than 500. A million companies with between 5 and 9 employees currently employ 6.8 million people. Some of those companies would be affected by the mandate and some would be under the threshold. Together these companies employ about 40% of America's workforce.

According to the recent employment reports, 9.7% of the workforce is currently unemployed, and 16.8 are unemployed or underemployed. There are 14.9 million people looking for Joe Biden's favorite little three-letter word: jobs.

Now imagine that you are running a small business with between 10 and 100 employees. Many companies like yours have gone out of business in the past year, and although business has been slow, you've cut back on expenses and managed to stay afloat. You'd like to start to expand again and hire some more people. That's not only good for you and your business, it's got to happen if America is going to get out of this slump and bring employment rates back up. But now you hear that the government is going to require that you provide medical insurance for your employees. That is going to eat up the small amount of spare money you had, and even that won't be enough. Hiring more people is no longer an option. Most likely you will need to lay off more people to pay for this new mandate. Some small companies will simply close shop. They are already right on the edge, and this will push them firmly into insolvency. Others will transition their employees from full time to part time to avoid the mandate. Any chance of reducing the unemployment rate will go out the window.

It is easy to cheer for the evil corporations getting what's coming to them, but that won't be quite so sweet when instead of free health care you don't have a job anymore. When that happens, try eating your hope and change.

Metrics for success

2009-09-15T12:19:00.003-05:00

Should some version of healthcare reform be signed into law, I'd like to have a well-defined set of metrics to measure how successful it is at achieving its stated goals and objectives.

Clearly, a central objective is to increase the number of people with medical insurance. Democrats have bandied about the number 46 million as the current number uninsured, a number taken from a census bureau report. However, that number includes about 11 million illegal immigrants, who we are assured will not be covered. It also includes 15 million who were temporarily between coverages. The actual number of American citizens who are uninsured in the long term is around 20 million. Reducing that number significantly ought to be one metric. I would propose as a target that within ten years of Obamacare being enacted, the number of uninsured people be reduced to 5 million.

The percentage of America's GDP which is spent on health care is cited as a reason to reform our medical system. Obama has repeated that America spends 16% of GDP on health care, while Canada spends 10% of GDP and covers everyone. France spends 11% of GDP on health care. I propose 12% as a target.

Obama assures us that Obamacare will be deficit neutral, and that the public option will not be subsidized by the government. Measuring the deficit impact of a program is difficult. It is easy to falsely claim that costs have been offset by spending cuts if cuts are defined loosely. Stating that a program plans to increase spending by 10% and then only increasing it by 8% is not a 2% cut which can be used to offset Obamacare spending increases. Neither is the end of a short-term spending program a cut. For instance, the fact that we spent $800 billion on bailouts and stimulus this year and will only spend $300 billion next year does not equate to a $500 billion cut which can be used to offset Obamacare. Also, moving spending from one program to another is not a cut from the one. I propose this metric: for Obamacare to meet its goal of being deficit neutral, total entitlement spending must not grow faster than inflation times population growth. In addition, the public option (if included in the bill) must be self-supporting and not subsidized.

We are told that Obamacare will not reduce the quality of medical care in America. There is not one good metric for quality of medical care, so we have to track several metrics: infant mortality rate, life expectancy, and survival rates for various diseases all should do no worse than to continue on their current trend. "Quality-adjusted years of life" is a metric used by some countries. I don't fully understand how it works, but it sounds promising.

Obama campaigned on bringing transparency and accountability back to the political process. One way to accomplish that would be to build meaningful metrics into health care reform so that we will know if it delivers on the many promises made in the effort to sell the plan to the public.

Rowhousia

2009-09-14T08:56:00.003-05:00

The beautiful nation of Rowhousia has a meteorite problem. Random and unpredictable meteors fall on the nation, destroying one out of every one thousand homes every year. All the citizens of Rowhousia live in identical houses, each costing one hundred thousand dollars. Because the houses are the same size, each house is equally likely to be hit by a meteor, and the strikes are devastating, requiring that the house be completely replaced at full cost.

Insurance companies have sprung up to protect people from the risk of meteor strikes. The actuaries at these insurance companies have the job of computing the cost of the insurance based on the risk and the cost of a meteor strike. It's not a bad gig if you can get it. The equation for the expected payout is simply the probability of a strike times the cost of a strike. In this case 1/1000 * $100,000 = $100. Add a small margin of error, the administrative and overhead costs, and a profit margin, and you get the price of a meteor policy. Companies charge around $120 per year of coverage. Most Rowhousians consider this to be a prudent purchase, and buy a policy. Some decide to take the risk and go uninsured.

One particular company insures a million Rowhousians. In the typical year they collect $120 million in premiums. One thousand of the houses they protect are destroyed during the year, and the company pays out $100 million to repair those houses. That leaves $20 million, some of which goes to pay their employees salaries, the rent for their office building, postage for their statements, and to cover other expenses. Whatever is left is profit for the investors who provided the capital to create the company.

The citizens of Rowhousia fall into four categories:

Some bought insurance and didn't need to collect on it. They were fortunate that their house was not hit this year. They are out $120, but that's a small price to pay for the security of being protected. They are aware that most of their premiums went to replace the houses of other less fortunate Rowhousians, and they are also aware that next year they might be the one who needs the coverage. They have no problem with the situation because they voluntarily decided to participate in the system, having considered the options and decided that it was in their best interest.

Others are very glad that they bought insurance, because it paid for the replacement of their house when it was destroyed by a meteor strike. They would have preferred to not deal with all the trouble of replacing their house, but they are much better off than they would have been without the insurance.

A third group decided to play the odds and got by with it this year. They didn't buy insurance, and their house was not destroyed. They are a little bit ahead of those in the first group, because they still have their $120, but they are living on the edge. Some of them are wealthy enough that replacing their house would not be a problem. Those people may be making a reasonable decision, because the odds of never being hit by a meteor are in their favor, and the overhead costs of insurance make it a losing prospect in the long term. Others don't have enough money to replace their house, and didn't buy insurance because they have other needs they see as more pressing. They are in serious danger because if their house is destroyed they won't have the means to obtain shelter.

A forth group didn't buy insurance and lost their house. These people are the big losers, particularly those who are living paycheck to paycheck. One year the unfortunate members of this forth group decide that they want to buy meteor insurance retroactively, so that the insurance companies will have to pay for the damage which has already been done to their houses. They take their $120 and go to the insurance company, expecting to trade their $120 check and insurance policy application for a $100,000 settlement check. The insurance company representative explains to them that you must buy a policy on an intact house before the house is destroyed. They won't insure a house with a pre-existing meteor strike.

The irate Rowhousians form a grassroots political organization, petitioning the government of Rowhousia to address this grievous injustice. They march, chant, and carry signs demanding "Meteor Insurance Now!" Soon a leader emerged to champion this group. He had never actually had a productive job before, but he could speak in such soothing tones that all who heard him were lulled into a trance, obeying his every utterance. He was known only as Obummah.

Under the leadership of Obummah, the government of Rowhousia passed a new law requiring that meteorite insurance companies sell insurance to anyone, even those with a pre-existing meteor strike. Joy and harmony filled the land.

Uninsured Rowhousians whose house had been demolished hurried to purchase their insurance and claim their settlement. Meanwhile, Rowhousians who had purchased insurance year after year without ever needing to make a claim began to wonder how this was fair. Why should they buy insurance before their house is struck, knowing that in all likelihood they won't need to collect on it? Isn't it much smarter to save your money and only buy insurance if you actually need it?

When it came time to renew their insurance, nobody did. The only people buying insurance were those whose house was already reduced to a pile of smoldering debris. The actuaries recomputed the price for insurance using the same formula: expected payout equals the probability of a strike times the cost of a strike. Only now the probability is not one in one thousand. Every house they insure needs to be replaced. The cost of insurance is 1/1 * $100,000, or $100,000. Add to that the administrative costs, overhead, and profit margin and insurance isn't a good deal, even for those with a pre-existing condition.

Medical insurance is far more complicated than this simple example, but the same principles apply. When you buy medical insurance, you are paying the insurance company to assume the risk that you will need expensive treatment. The calculations that actuaries use to price medical insurance are vastly complicated, taking into account many different risk factors unique to each policy holder. Ultimately it comes down to a summation of the expected costs of a long list of covered conditions. The formula for expected cost is the same as it was in Rowhousia: the probability of a condition occurring times the cost of treating it. The cost of treating a certain form of cancer may be very high, but if only one in ten thousand policy holders get that kind of cancer, the cost is spread broadly and the insurance remains affordable. But if a new customer applies for coverage and already has that kind of cancer, the company is not being asked to assume a risk of one in ten thousand. They are being asked to fund what is certain to be a hugely expensive treatment. The proper pricing for that insurance is more than the cost of the treatment.

For insurance to work, if must be purchased when it still represents a risk, not a certainty. That is why requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions can't work. It undermines the principles of sharing risk which permit insurance to protect their policyholders.

Automobile insurance

2009-09-13T15:37:00.005-05:00

In Obama's speech on Wednesday, he once again used the example of automobile insurance to make the case that it is within the scope of the Federal Government's authority to mandate that everyone carry medical insurance. I pointed out earlier that the cases are not at all analogous, and since then I have heard a lot of confusion on the topic, so I'm going to try to lay out my case more systematically.

First of all, notice that there is NO Federal mandate for drivers to carry automobile insurance. The fact that some states require drivers to be insured says nothing about the Federal government's authority in this matter. The 10th Amendment of the Constitution clearly grants rights to the states which are not granted to the Federal government. To be analogous to automobile insurance, the Federal government should let states decide if they will mandate medical insurance or keep it optional, just as they do now.

Secondly, no state requires that everyone carry automobile insurance. Children don't need to carry it, and neither does an adult who does not drive. Carrying automobile insurance is a requirement to perform a particular activity, not a mandate applying to everyone, simply because you exist.

Third, the purpose of mandatory automobile insurance is not to protect the holder of the insurance, but to protect everyone else on the road. Those states which do require insurance do not require that you carry collision coverage. The only requirement is to carry liability coverage which protects anyone else on the road who might experience bodily injury or property damage as a result of an accident you cause. Without that insurance, and without the means to pay for that damage, you might cause an accident which costs someone else tens of thousands of dollars, and not be able to pay for that damage. The insurance you must buy protects the other driver, not you. In every state, you can choose to not carry insurance to protect yourself. It is completely acceptable to self insure against damage to your own car. If you do that, you are accepting the risk that you might wreck your car, and if you do, repairing it or replacing it will be at your own expense. Medical insurance is analogous to collision coverage, not liability coverage, because it does not protect someone else against damage you might cause. It protects only you. To complete the analogy, those people who have the means to buy medical insurance but choose to self-insure must recognize that if they need medical attention, they will have to pay for it out of pocket, and they can't expect for society to pay the bill for them.

Finally, many states do not require drivers to carry insurance. They allow other options, including self-insurance. The State of Texas Transportation Codes contain the following options:

SUBCHAPTER C. FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY; REQUIREMENTS

Sec. 601.051. REQUIREMENT OF FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. A person may not operate a motor vehicle in this state unless financial responsibility is established for that vehicle through:

(1) a motor vehicle liability insurance policy that complies with Subchapter D;

(2) a surety bond filed under Section 601.121;

(3) a deposit under Section 601.122;

(4) a deposit under Section 601.123; or

(5) self-insurance under Section 601.124.

Self-insurance is an option. So using automobile insurance to make the case that self-insurance should not be allowed is a flawed argument.

This is a common argument, which comes up almost any time statists attempt another expansion of the power of the Federal Government. The argument is essentially that the government is already exceeding its authority, so why not exceed it some more? Even if the analogy held in this case, that's not a sound argument. It is one which leads to tyranny.

Hidden tax

2009-09-12T08:43:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday did you hear Obama admit something he has denied all year? "And it's why those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it – about $1000 per year that pays for somebody else's emergency room and charitable care."

He has a valid point here. When someone who does not have medical insurance goes to the ER for "free" treatment, the cost is simply passed along to those who do pay for treatment. The hidden tax is the inflated price we pay for insurance or for medical attention.

So when is Obama going to admit that Cap and Trade is also a hidden tax on anyone who drives a car, uses electricity, or buys a product which consumes energy to produce or transport?

Red/Blue dialogue on health care, part 4

2009-09-11T16:28:00.004-05:00

Check out Colin's latest response here. I'm finding the interchange to be helpful. It's impossible to rehash the past discussion, so I'll respond point by point to the numbered items in Colin's response. It will be helpful to look at his post to get the context.

1. There is a lot we can do about health care, but the specific proposals of Obamacare are like outlawing a hurricane because to work they would have to violate the laws of economics. Extending coverage to 46 million additional people would increase demand. Supply and demand dictates that prices must go up, but Obama's promises of keeping the program budget-neutral depends on prices going down.

Much of the existing problem with the price of health care comes from government involvement. Federal law prohibits people from buying insurance across state lines, meaning that in many states, one insurance company dominates the market, creating a monopoly-like condition. In a familiar pattern, government creates a problem by interfering with free markets, blames the problem on capitalism and too little government intervention, and prescribes more government as the solution.

2. I found it amusing that the "change of heart" of the former insurance company executive was precipitated by Michael Moore's propaganda film which practically oozes with admiration for Castro and Cuba's communist government. It would be more convincing if his conversion had been based on a work of non-fiction.

3. Free market forces are the best way to get insurance companies to treat their customers fairly. If there are many companies competing for your business, if one of them is unfair, word will get out quickly and people will take their business elsewhere. Creating a government monopoly will not solve this problem, because when they start rationing care, where can you go?

4. Towards the end of my first post I proposed a number of free market approaches aimed at reducing cost, increasing competition, and addressing frivolous malpractice lawsuits. That's not inaction, but it's not government mandates imposed under threat of prison either. I also support subsidizing insurance for those who genuinely can not afford it. We pay for their care one way or another, and I think that providing basic insurance is better than just waiting until they show up at the emergency room.

5. The WHO ranking is based on factors which favor socialized medicine, such as "Fairness in financial contribution". A country which is uniformly horrible will be ranked higher than one which is unequally superior. Using life expectancy as a metric does not isolate health care, because it is influenced by many other factors. Comparing survival rates for specific diseases is a better indication of how well the medical system performs at treating those conditions, and America excels in this metric.

6. Demand will increase, but government will be controlling the supply and forcing the price down artificially to keep the program within their budget constraints. If you believe Obama's pledge to keep Obamacare deficit neutral, you must conclude that he will dramatically reduce expenditures per capita, so the profit potential will be greatly reduced. That is the factor which will squelch innovation.

7. Again, auto insurance is not required. Most states allow drivers to self insure. To do so, you must demonstrate the means to pay for the damage you may inflict to someone else. It is not acceptable to self insure and then not pay for those damages, which would be equivalent of not having medical insurance and then expecting free treatment. So people who can afford insurance but choose not to purchase it should not expect us to foot the bill. But using auto insurance as an arguement against allowing people to self insure is a non sequitur.

8. Obama and Pelosi have both said that the public option is intended as an incremental step towards a single-payer system.

9. It is true that the Constitution does not spell out every item that the government can be involved in, but it does set forth principles of freedom and ordered liberty, and it defines the government's role in the framework of the civil society. Limited government is a central principle in the Constitution, and the government is to curtail the liberty of the people only to the extent that one person's liberty infringes on another's rights. In 1864 Abraham Lincoln wrote "We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name--liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny." When Congress dictates how we should live our lives and what we must do with what we earn, that is tyranny. The fact that they do it with the best of intentions and warm hearts, forcing upon us what they in their infinite wisdom know is best for us doesn't make it any less so. To be clear, this is not to say that Barack Obama is a tyrant, in particular. The move towards tyranny has been a gradual one, beginning with FDR and the New Deal. Johnson brought about a second major move away from liberty. Clinton attempted such a major shift, but was largely unsuccessful, being thwarted by millions of citizens like myself who stood up and opposed it. Obama is attempting to bring about a third. The line we have discussed which marks the accepted limit of government has been pushed very far from where it was intended to be, and Obama's latest expansion of Federal power represents another large shift in that line.

10. I don't think that the restriction against selling insurance across state lines is going away, although I'm not sure. If it's in the bill, I'd like to know about it. I think that what Obama was saying is that the public option will be added to the current options, not that you can buy private insurance from anywhere in the nation. His statement about malpractice reform was entirely unspecific, and there is nothing in the current bills about it, so until we get something specific, we'll have to wait and see.

11. Obama has a rhetorical talent for using language that sounds moderate or conservative to lure his listeners into complacency, but he is still pushing for hard left policies. It is really easy to think that he is agreeing with you, but in the end the result is always more government, less liberty, more taxes, more spending, more government mandates, more redistribution, more centralized control, more collectivism. He talks about competition and choice, but what you get is government monopoly and mandates. He talks about market forces, but imposes centralized controls. He talks about self-reliance but makes policies which create dependence on government. He talks about the perils of too little government, when our government is the nation's largest creditor, borrower, lender, employer, consumer, tractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. He promises that Obamacare will be deficit neutral. The spending increases are real and immediate, but the matching cuts are unspecified and unenforceable. I've seen too many cases when politicians promise future spending cuts which never happen. We're still waiting for the spending cuts Congress promised to Bush Sr. in exchange for a tax hike. The taxes went up, but the spending cuts never happened. Why not put the spending cuts in the bill along with the spending increases? I'm watching what he does, and it doesn't match his words.

Running the numbers

2009-09-11T12:14:00.002-05:00

A major argument presented by Democrats in support of Obamacare, along with extending coverage to uninsured people and preventing unfair treatment from insurance companies has been that we need to reduce the rate of growth of medical costs. Obama cited the statistic that medical expenditures are growing at 6% annually, about 50% more than inflation. The National Health Statistics Group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported in March that expenditures in the United States on health care surpassed $2.2 trillion in 2007, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990, and over eight times the $253 billion spent in 1980. With annual population growth over that period running at 1.3% that does represent a 6% growth in per-capita medical costs.

Why would medical costs rise faster than the cost of other things, like bread or cars or clothing? There are several reasons.

One is that the demographics of the nation have changed. The percentage of the population over the age of 65, who account for a large portion of medical expenses, has increased from 9.8% in 1980 to 12.7% today. That number continues to increase as the baby boomers reach retirement.

A more fundamental reason is that the medical services you buy today are not the same as the ones you bought in 1980. The advances in diagnostics, treatments, medications, and surgical procedures are staggering, and those advances are expensive. Bread, on the other hand, has not changed much. Thus it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In circa 1980 health care was available today, it would certainly cost much less than modern health care, but there is not much call for outdated medical care.

Notice that these two factors are interconnected. As medical care improves, longevity increases and the number of elderly people consuming large amounts of medical services increases.

The cost of malpractice insurance and defensive medicine is another driver of medical cost inflation.

A key argument in Obama's speech on Wednesday was that Obamacare would save money in the long run by reducing the growth rate of medical expenses. Because government currently pays nearly half of the nation's medical costs, controlling those costs is essential to controlling the Federal budget. He said "If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close." This is completely true.

Where he gets fuzzy is when he addresses this problem by increasing the portion of medical costs paid by the government in the hope that those very real costs will be offset by nebulous future savings which may or may not materialize.

“And if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year -- one-tenth of 1 percent -- it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.”

I wanted to see if this was a reasonable claim, so I ran the numbers.

In 2009, the population of the United States is 307 million and the per-capita cost for medical care is roughly $7996. The total cost for medical care is $2.455 trillion, of which government pays $1.1 trillion.

According to Pelosi's estimates, which are exceedingly rosy, Obamacare would increase the portion of total medical costs paid by government from 45% to 50%. Any time the government has a big pot of money to give away, you can count on there being more takers than projected, so I expect a much larger increase, but we'll just go with her number.

Over time the objective is to see the lower growth rate make up for the immediate cost of the increase in the government-paid portion of medical costs. The only problem is that it doesn't. In the first year, the government spends $122 billion more than it would have spent, and the additional cost increases every year until 2106. Instead of reducing the deficit by $4 trillion, Obamacare increases the deficit by $23 trillion in 2009 dollars. Much more in nominal dollars.

If we have to wait nearly one hundred years for the benefit to outweigh the cost, that's not much of a payback.

If we assume that Obamacare will slow the growth of medical costs by twice as much as Obama suggests, the savings would outweigh the cost in 2065, but it would take another 28 years to recoup the cost from the first 55 years.

In any case, there is no reason to believe that Obamacare will result in any fundamental reduction in the long-term growth rate of medical costs. Obama claims that they will achieve some savings by improving efficiency and eliminating waste, but in the unlikely event that those are actually realized, they are one-time savings, not permanent reductions in the rate of growth which will compound year after year.

One can still argue that the benefits of extending coverage to more people is worth the cost, but Obama's attempt to tie Obamacare to the financial crisis by suggesting that his plan will reduce the deficit is just more misdirection. Obamacare is not fiscally responsible. It is just more runaway government spending.

CNN joins Obama spin team

2009-09-10T15:32:00.002-05:00

Democrats have been trumpeting the results of a CNN poll, suggesting that Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last night increased public support for Obamacare from 53% to 67%.

They neglect to mention that 45% of those polled were registered as Democrats, and only 18% were registered as Republicans. The results are not surprising given the non-representative sample.

At my house support for Obamacare remained at zero percent.

You lie

2009-09-10T12:30:00.005-05:00

Now that Obama's speech is over, it's the proper time to yell out "You lie" as we point out the distortions, deceptions, and misrepresentations in his latest in a long series of speeches on health care.

Obama repeated his assertion that his plan will allow you to keep your existing insurance and doctor, but threw in a subtle twist: "If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the V.A., nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have." In earlier speeches he said "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." While his new statement is technically correct, it is very misleading. The Congressional Budget Office said that by 2016, Obamacare would lead to employers dropping coverage for roughly 3 million people. So while "nothing in the plan will require" you to change coverage, losing coverage will be a direct result of Obamacare for millions of Americans.

As I pointed out earlier, his statement that illegal immigrants will not receive benefits is untrue. But another fib is that tax money will not go to fund abortions. He skirts around that one by saying that tax money goes to fund insurance, and insurance pays for the abortions, but the fact that the money passes through a middleman doesn't change the fact that your money will be used to pay for babies being chopped up and flushed down a garbage disposal. Instead of these obvious lies, why can't the President just be honest here, and say "We are going to ask you to pay for some things you may not agree with, including medical care for illegal immigrants and abortions" and then explain why he considers that to be necessary?

Obama also repeated his pledge that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period." For anyone who believes this, I've got some oceanfront property in Phoenix to sell you. Historically, big medical entitlement programs cost at least five times more than projected. This one will be no different.

Obama also reiterated his soundly debunked claim that he will make Obamacare deficit-neutral partially by using preventive care to reduce costs.

"And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies. Because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse. That makes sense. It saves money, and it saves lives." It makes sense and saves lives, but it does not save money. Two out of three is not bad. In an August report, The Congressional Budget Office found that: "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall." Preventive care is a good policy, but we can't count on it to reduce costs to pay for his entitlement spending.

Obama resorts to his classic strawman tactic of misrepresenting the opposition's position: "On the right, there are those who argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own." There may be some person somewhere who supports that idea, but it is not anywhere close to a mainstream conservative position. Later in the speech he brushed aside the claim that, "We plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." There has been some overstated rhetoric on this topic, but behind that rhetoric is a genuine concern that Obamacare will result in rationing of care, and that the dramatic cuts in Medicare will result in seniors being disproportionately denied care. Obama confirmed this concern when he suggested that an elderly lady who needed a pacemaker would instead be given a pain pill under Obamacare. His reinstitution of "The Death Book" in VA hospitals further reinforces the concern that budget pressures will cause the government to look for ways to save money by encouraging old people to die quickly and inexpensively. Obama refuses to address the real issue and instead simply marginalizes the critics. Towards the end of the speech he said "I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are." No one wants to keep things exactly the way they are. This failure to acknowledge the true objections of the majority of Americans reinforces the perception that Obama and the Democrats responded to the outpouring of opposition to Obamacare by willfully placing their fingers in their ears and yelling "La la la la la! I can't hear you!"

In his discussion of the "Insurance Exchange", Obama said that "As one big group, these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage. This is how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance. It's how everyone in this Congress gets affordable insurance. And it's time to give every American the same opportunity that we give ourselves." This is a deceptive attempt to deal with the objection that Congress exempted itself from Obamacare by giving the impression that Obama is extending to the unwashed masses the same coverage that Congress currently enjoys. Don't be fooled -- Obamacare won't be anything like Congresscritter Care. Your Senator will not be stuck in the same waiting list with you, waiting for rationed care.

And the old worn-out automobile insurance analogy, which has been refuted so many times that you have to conclude that Obama is intentionally distorting the facts: "That's why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance." Most states don't require you to carry auto insurance. In nearly every state you can opt to self insure, meaning that you are responsible to pay for any damage you cause. Therefore, using auto insurance as a precedent to argue for mandates against self insuring is nonsensical.

Obama's discussion of the public option included a major shift in how it was presented, attempting to minimize the scope and importance of that portion of the legislation. He claimed that less than five percent of Americans would sign up for the public option, and that no one would be forced to choose it. This is not true of any of the bills currently in Congress. Although there are now so many bills that you can't possibly keep them all straight, the primary House and Senate bills both require that large employers offer the public option or face heavy penalties, and they require doctors to enroll uninsured patients in the public option before treating them.

Obama also denies that the public option would be subsidized by tax money: "I've insisted that, like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums its collects." This is far from the truth in any bill we have seen. The public option will be subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Obama repeats the claim that the public option will save money through increased efficiency and reduction of waste: "But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers." Who has ever heard of a government entitlement program which was not bogged down by excessive administration, waste, fraud, and bureaucracy? In its heyday, Welfare spent $1.11 in administrative overhead for every $1 they paid out in benefits. The bureaucrats got more taxpayer money than the Welfare recipients. Obamacare will not be run more efficiently than private companies which face constant pressure to reduce costs.

Another mindboggling assertion: "I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need."

Enough said.

He made the following promise: "I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promise don't materialize." This kind of provision has been included in other bills, and Congress routinely ignores them. A promise of unspecified future spending cuts isn't worth the paper it is printed on.

In trying to reassure seniors that Medicare cuts would not impact their coverage, Obama said, "That is why not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan. The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies." The first claim is cleverly phrased to deceive without being technically untrue. There is very little money in the Medicare trust fund, which operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, Medicare money would be diverted from the budget to pay for Obamacare. And if we can save hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, why have we not already done so?

Obama mentioned medical malpractice reform, but carefully avoided committing to anything specific: "I'm proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine." If anyone has a clue about what that means, let me know. Defensive medicine is only half of the equation in reducing unnecessary malpractice costs. Tort reform is the other half, and he carefully avoided mentioning that in the presence of all his trial lawyer friends.

Obama repeatedly accuses his opponents of demagoguery, distortion, and fearmongering, but wraps up his message by saying, "Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most. And more will die as a result." Talk about demagoguery, distortion, and fearmongering.

Obama said that "If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out." Perhaps he should start with himself.

The proper time and place

2009-09-10T09:11:00.002-05:00

This is just a quick note about the furor over Joe Wilson's interruption of Obama's speech. There are two separate issues involved:

1. Was Wilson right in identifying Obama's statement as a lie?
2. Was it a good idea to shout it out in the middle of the speech?

The President claims that the bill will not cover illegal immigrants, and he bases that claim on a provision in the bill which states that it will not cover illegal immigrants. But as we all know, writing it in a bill does not make it so. Obama could say "People can't come into this country illegally" and back that statement up by pointing to the immigration laws, but the fact is that millions of people do come into the country illegally. Medicare and Medicaid both have provisions written into the law saying that illegal immigrants will not be covered, but millions do receive benefits from those programs. The bill as it exists now does not contain any enforcement provision to implement the "no coverage for illegal immigrants" assertion, and when such an amendment was presented, Democrats voted it down. Illegals will certainly be covered by Obamacare, Obama was lying about it, and Joe Wilson was correct when he said "you lie".

But being correct is not always enough. You also have to be smart. Yelling it out in the middle of the speech was not smart. There is a proper time and place to point out the numerous fallicies in Obama's speech. I will do it here, Republicans had a chance to respond to the speech, and anyone else can point out the factual shortcomings verbally or in writing after the President is done speaking. Wilson's outburst gives ammo to those trying to shove this bill down our throats, deaf to the majority of Americans who oppose it, and it distracts from the important message of why Obamacare is bad for America.

A red/blue dialogue on health care

2009-09-09T09:34:00.008-05:00

Twenty years ago I attended high school along with Colin Rule. He is as nice a guy as you could meet, with his trademark tag line "Rah!" Colin is smart, well educated, thoughtful, and well spoken. In high school he was the champion of the debate team, while I was the physics ace. After graduation, we went our separate ways, and only recently did we reconnect via Facebook. He has a degree in Peace Studies from Haverford College, which only increases my admiration for him: I could never have pulled off the coup of getting my dad to pay the tuition of a fancy private New England college to pursue a degree in Peace Studies. Colin describes himself as "A secular humanist Democrat, living in the Bay area, working at an internet company resolving disputes." You can read more about him here.

Last week, Colin was one of many people on Facebook who had a status message saying, "No one should die because they can't afford health care, or go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status today." I responded by suggesting that Congress should outlaw hurricanes while they are at it, because they could prevent untold damage, death, misery, and destruction. The point is that Congress can't just make problems go away by mandate, in defiance of the laws of physics or economics. Colin responded by saying that I am cold-hearted. The fact is that I am not cold-hearted in the least, but I am a realist. Conservatives define compassion differently than liberals. Liberals measure compassion based on how many people are on government assistance, while conservatives measure compassion based on how many people no longer need government assistance. I pressed Colin for a more specific explanation of how he thought the ideals in his status could be achieved. The discussion quickly outgrew the limits imposed by Facebook comments, so we decided to continue on our blogs. You can read Colin's first entry here.

We agree that there is plenty of room for improvement in the way that Americans get health care, but disagree profoundly in what specifically should be done.

In a previous blog post, Colin quotes a New York Times opinion piece which paints insurance companies as greedy, evil corporations making obscene profits by denying treatment to customers forcing them to seek treatment in livestock pens, to fund private jets and limos for their executives. It takes up the theme set by Colin's Representative, Nancy Pelosi, when she called private insurance companies "villains".

The image of people being examined and treated in livestock stalls is certainly compelling, suggesting that people are being treated like animals. It reminds me of Canada, one example of the reality behind the Utopian dreams of government-run health care. In Canada, MRIs are free, like all other medical services, paid for by the government. The only problem is that as with many procedures, there is a six to eight month wait to get a free MRI. But there are patients in Canada who can get an MRI right away. It is not free. You have to pay for the service, but there is no long wait living with the pain of an undiagnosed internal problem. However, to qualify for immediate service you must be an animal. Private veterinarians provide immediate MRIs and other services which people in Canada must wait months to receive. Socialist health care treats people worse than private health care treats animals.

The medical insurance industry as a whole operates at a 3% profit margin. Out of the 100 largest industries, they rank 82nd in profit margin. While insurance companies provide a service which people want and need, bought voluntarily by consumers at market prices, the government taxes insurance companies at a rate of about 24%. It is easy to attack insurance company executives for riding in jets and limos, but have you considered that Nancy Pelosi adds more to the cost of insurance with the 24% tax burden which she uses to fund her personal jets and limos? Do you think that she will give up her jets and limos when she starts rationing care? Has it occurred to you that the shareholders of the insurance companies may feel that they are getting their money's worth when they pay their executives? And if you are not a shareholder, why is their compensation your concern?

The Times article cited by Colin went on to criticize insurance companies for denying expensive treatments to patients. One wonders if Obama's proposed government-run system will do any better. The laws of economics say that it can't. That mantra from the left has been that there are 46 million uninsured people who will be given coverage by Obamacare, which amounts to about a 20% increase in the demand for medical care. Obama promises to cover all of those people without cutting quality or increasing the deficit. Even if the money to fund that promise was there (and it's not) the resources to deliver that medical attention do not exist. Congress can not magically create 20% more doctors, 20% more nurses, 20% more clinics, 20% more hospital beds, 20% more operating rooms, etc. This problem will only get worse with time. Countries where government has taken over the medical system have huge outflows of doctors. Many come to America to escape the government system. Who will want to spend 12 years pursuing a medical degree only to deal with a government bureaucracy determined to pay them less than market rates? The supply dries up in every one of the "industrialized countries" which have socialized medicine, and it will happen here if we go down that path.

Obama says that he will extend coverage to 46 million people without increasing the deficit by making things more efficient and reducing waste. So point me to one big government social entitlement program which is not bogged down by waste, fraud, incompetence, bureaucracy, and corruption. Medicare? Social Security? Welfare? TARP? Porkulus? Cash for Clunkers? Government does not make things more efficient. On the contrary, whenever Congress has a big pot of money to manage, it invariably is wasted on administrative costs, used to buy votes, grabbed up by scammers, or as in the case of TARP, simply evaporated without a trace. Yet statists continue to cling with inexplicable faith to more government as the solution to our problems.

The CBO says that Obamacare will cost $1.1 trillion over ten years. But Congress has consistently underestimated the cost of medical entitlement programs. In 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee predicted that Medicare Part A would cost taxpayers $9 billion in 1990. It actually cost $67 billion, 744% as much as predicted. In 1967 Ways and Means predicted that the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. It actually cost $110 billion, 917% of the projection. In 1987, the CBO predicted that Medicaid’s Disproportionate Share Hospital payments would cost $1 billion. Within 5 years, the cost had passed $17 billion. Obamacare is sure to cost many times more than the predicted amount, not that $1.1 trillion is anything to sneeze at.

Colin claims that every other industrialized nation has universal coverage. That doesn't mean we should do it as well. People there wait six to eighteen months for the most basic treatment. Need surgery? It's free, but you have to wait a year. They come here to get the treatment they can't get at home. Why should we want to be like every other country? America has survival rates far above those of any of the socialist countries for cancer, heart attack, and diabetes. America creates the new technology that they rest of the world uses. The vast majority of new medications, new diagnostic tools, new surgical methods, etc. are invented in America by the private sector because we are the closest thing left to a free market system, where those who create new innovations can profit from them. The government doesn't create those life-saving advances. Companies, evil corporations seeking profit, people, private citizens all motivated by the opportunity that exists in America, the opportunity which will be squelched if government runs the medical industry.

Colin cites the much-repeated comparison between medical insurance and auto insurance. "And it's perfectly appropriate for government to require that we all participate -- much like auto insurance. We're all required to purchase auto insurance to protect against the risk of an accident. ... How is health fundamentally different?" Good question. Anyone who drives is required to show proof of financial responsibility. If you don't drive, there is no requirement. And financial responsibility does not necessarily mean insurance. Providing proof that you have the means to pay for the damage you may cause is sufficient. The requirement is not meant to protect you. Collision insurance is not required, and many people opt to not carry collision insurance, which would pay for their own car in case of an accident. Those people are choosing to self-insure rather than pay someone else to assume the risk to their own vehicle. The law is intended to protect the other drivers who you place at risk by being on the road. If you are at fault in an accident which damages someone else's property or causes injury, you must be able to pay for that damage. That is not at all analogous to your medical insurance policy, which only protects you.

Moving on to the biggest stink-pot in the bills proposed in Congress, the "public option." Obama claims that the intention of the public option is to "keep insurance companies honest" by adding choice and competition. It does neither of those things. Private insurance companies can not possibly compete with a government-run plan subsidized by our tax money. The public option, being a government agency, has unlimited resources based on the government's ability to tax, borrow, and even print money. Therefore the public option does not need to make a profit or break even, to stay afloat. In fact, the CBO estimates that it will cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years, meaning that it will be heavily subsidized by our tax dollars. As the bill is currently written, 20% of the cost of the public option would come from tax money. That means we are paying for it whether we use the "option" or not. If I choose to keep my private insurance, I am still forced to pay for the public option through my taxes. The public option can be priced 20% less than the private insurance because it is subsidized by my tax dollars. That is not competition, because private companies can't possibly win. Meanwhile, all sorts of new regulations are placed on private insurance, increasing their cost of doing business. The result is that private insurance companies will be forced out of business, and the "public option" will be the only option. When the private insurance companies go broke, Obama will be right there, just as he was with the auto companies, ready to nationalize the industry. Then we get to their ultimate goal: a single payer system. Obama admitted that this was his intention, in an unguarded moment. So where is the "choice" and "competition" in that?

Colin correctly identifies the central issue: where does individual self-determination end and collective interdependence begin? He writes "We all have to jointly pay for our national security, we have to jointly pay for our food safety, we have to jointly pay to combat H1N1, we all have to jointly pay to protect the environment -- individuals cannot solve these issues alone, so we as a society have to work together to address them. The question is whether health care is one of these things. I believe that it is."

Each person can have their personal beliefs about where that line should be drawn, but ultimately the Constitution delimits the powers given to the Federal Government. Article One Section Eight of The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the responsibility and the authority to "provide for the common defense." The Constitution does not grant the Federal Government the authority to mandate medical insurance or run a public insurance company in an authoritarian system filled with mandates backed by force of law. The tenth amendment states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Obama's attempt to create a national health care system exceeds the authority granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution, and that alone is adequate reason to stop it.

So instead of forcing us all into a government run mess, why not try to address the real issues and leave alone the parts of the system which are working?

We want to bring down cost? Why not make all medical insurance premiums tax deductible? That would eliminate a big part of the inequity between those whose employer provides insurance and those who have to buy it themselves. And it would reduce the cost for most people who don't have employer-provided insurance. Obama won't do that, because it doesn't advance his goal of increasing the scope and power of the government.

We want more competition? Allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Right now, Federal law restricts people to only buy insurance in the state where they live. Open up the market nationwide, and everyone instantly has many more options, and the competition will certainly drive down prices and improve quality of service. But again, Democrats won't do this because their goal is not more competition. They want control.

Medical malpractice insurance is a major driver in the cost of medical care. Some of the cost is legitimate, and some is based on frivolous lawsuits. Some attorneys make a lot of money by filing hundreds or thousands of frivolous lawsuits on a contingency basis. The doctors they sue spend huge amounts of money defending themselves, and that cost is passed along to patients. The attorney who files the suits is happy if he wins one or two out of every hundred. It costs him nothing to file the suits. If courts were given the option of finding a lawsuit to be frivolous and ordering the attorney who filed the suit to pay the expenses of the defense, those frivolous lawsuits would stop. But Obama won't do that either, because his administration is in the pocket of the trial lawyers, as was the Bush administration and every president in recent history. So Obama's big reform bill does not contain any tort reform, ignoring one of the biggest components of cost growth.

There are lots of ways we could improve the access to health care without destroying the best parts of the greatest medical system in the world by forcing everyone into a government-run system which rations care.

Yet another reason

2009-09-03T14:30:00.010-05:00

Next Tuesday, President BO will bypass the parents and speak directly to kids in government-run indoctrination centers across the nation. This speech will be followed by discussion about how the kids can "help the President." Students will be encouraged to express their devotion to the President in songs, poetry, and essay form. Then, much as in George Orwell's 1984, where kids were taught to listen at their parents' door for any sign of thought crime, kids will be sent home to make sure that their parents conform to statist orthodoxy. If they hear anything "fishy" they can report it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Plans to include "Goose-Stepping With Nancy Pelosi" were dropped at the last minute.

Reason #374 that I am glad our kids do not go to public school.

No President in American history has ever targeted a speech to public school students, directing for it to be shown in every classroom, to every student from Kindergarten to High School. George Bush never did it. Neither did Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, or any other American President. If BO were honest, he would encourage students to beg their parents to send them to private college-prep schools like the ones he attended and currently sends his own kids to. Although BO will attempt to portray this speech as a non-political unobjectionable effort to convey the importance of education encouraging kids to do well in school, the fact remains that anything done by any President is political. You can't stand there with a straight face and tell me that this is not all about BO's floundering approval rating and the public rejection of his health care takeover plot. But even if this was a President I liked, it would be a bad idea. No President should be doing this, regardless of his party or ideology.

This is not a First Amendment, freedom of speech issue. The President certainly has the right to give a speech any time he wants to, and to say whatever he wants to say. Mandating that the speech be shown to captive audiences in public schools, funded by taxpayers, bypassing parents to indoctrinate impressionable kids is not anywhere close to the Constitutional role of the President or the Federal Government. But remember that BO spent several years working with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayres distributing millions of dollars for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to fund political indoctrination and radicalization programs in public schools. BO is an experienced veteran in the art of using public schools to train up the next generation of statist drones.

One school district in our area has announced that they will refuse to interrupt their instruction time to show the President's speech, but will instead make it available on their web site to be viewed outside of school hours at the parent's discretion. This is an ideal solution, because it allows parents to view the speech with their children, if they wish, and to discuss the content with their kids. We must never forget that parents are still the primary authority in the lives of their children, and it is the parent's responsibility to mold and shape the character and values of their children.

The Fort Worth school district has a much less satisfactory approach. They plan to interrupt the school day to show BO's speech. The FWISD web site says that the speech is "available but not mandatory." In other words, students will have to opt out if they wish to not see the speech. The time which should be spent teaching math, English, history, or science will be lost even for those who opt out. The announcement from the ISD indicates that "Those who elect not to participate will be provided alternative activities." You know what "alternative" means, don't you? When I was a kid, they sent the teenage delinquents and the troublemakers to "Reform School." That term is not politically correct anymore. Today they call those same schools "Alternative School." "Alternative" is the euphemism for where they send bad kids who need to be re-educated and reformed.

There will be a lot of people who don't see the problem with what BO is doing. They will assume that the President has nothing but good and pure intentions and is motivated by nothing but a genuine desire for kids to excel in school for the good of America. As if the reason that American public education is a colossal failure is that kids have not been told by the President to study. Have you noticed the bizarre advertisements popping up on the internet which say "Obama tells moms to go back to school" or "Obama says to refinance your mortgage" because we don't know what is good for us unless the nanny-state President takes our hand and guides us? The President is not behind those ads, but the ads reflect a growing way of thinking which depends on government to run our lives. Government can't even run a "Cash for Clunkers" program. It is not the job of the Federal Government to motivate your kids to learn and excel in school. It is YOUR job. Don't delegate your responsibility to a government school, and certainly don't delegate it to a statist President.

And say, isn't your kid feeling a bit under the weather?

Hurry up and die!

2009-08-25T15:55:00.002-05:00

The BO Administration reacted with indignation to the suggestion that their medical takeover would include measures intended to steer people away from expensive life-prolonging treatments. After all, when someone obliges to die quickly they consume less of the limited medical resources. Because government will be controlling who gets health care, they can give more care to younger people who are still working, paying taxes, and voting, if they can get bothersome old people to die faster.

Sound crazy?

It is. But what part of the BO medical takeover is sane?

Last week BO told a bunch of rabbis that "We are God's partner in matters of life and death." There are far too many cases where the President prefers death, particularly if you are an unborn baby or an elderly burden to society.

BO wants us to believe that the government would *NEVER* try to save a buck by talking old people into dying quickly and inexpensively. But the fact is that he is already doing that right now with one sector of health care which is already under government control: Veterans Administration.

During the BJ Clinton Administration the VA developed a booklet with the Orwellian title "Your Life, Your Choice."

The 54-page booklet starts out well, encouraging spouses and families to talk about the care they want to receive and the lengths they would go to in the effort to keep them alive. This is a discussion that families ought to have, but when government sticks their nose into the matter, you find a coercive attempt to steer the result in favor of lower cost to the government rather than seeking the best interest of veterans who fought for our freedom.

Page 21 contains a worksheet titled "What makes life worth living", where veterans are asked to consider different medical conditions which they may find themselves in, and determine if "Life like this would be "Difficult but acceptable", "Worth living, but just barely", "Not worth living", or "Can't answer now". There are about 20 cases to rate, including "I can no longer walk, but get around in a wheelchair", "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being", "I need someone to take care of me all the time", "I can no longer control my bladder", "I live in a nursing home", "I am a severe financial burden on my family", "I cannot seem to shake the blues". The worksheet asks you to clarify your answers. If you checked "Can't answer now", in what cases would you rather just die? Are the combinations of factors which would make life not worth living?

The message is clear: hurry up and die, life is not worth living, you are just being a burden.

Within the VA Hospital system, employees don't call this book "Your Life, Your Choice". They call it "The Death Book".

When George W Bush became president, he suspended use of The Death Book by the VA. Barack Obama reinstated The Death Book.

Obama wants us to think that he would *never* let budgetary considerations railroad people to "hurry up and die". The fact is, he already does exactly that with veterans. If he thinks that people who fought for our nation are a burden, not worth keeping alive, he certainly won't hesitate to apply the same methods for the rest of us.

When is an option not an option?

2009-08-04T14:01:00.003-05:00

Several people have asked me what exactly is this "public option" that Democrats are pushing as medical insurance "reform".

The first thing you have to understand is that it is an "option" only in the sense that paying your taxes is an "option." It will soon be the ONLY legal option.

On page 16 of the one-thousand-plus page bill being proposed in the House of Representatives is a provision which makes it illegal for insurance companies to issue private medical insurance to individuals.

Instead, if you want to buy medical insurance, you have one option: you must buy the government's insurance. You can't even go directly to a doctor and pay out-of-pocket. The law mandates that if someone goes to a doctor without government-approved insurance, the doctor must enroll that person in the government program.

The good news is that this government insurance will supposedly cost less than private individual insurance costs today. This is because it will be subsidized by taxpayer money. This is kind of like "free" public schools. They are not really free -- you pay for them with your taxes whether you use them or not. Many private schools provide a better education for a lower cost than the public schools, but they are not affordable to some people because they are already being taxed to pay for public schools. In the same way, private medical insurance will provide better quality, more timely care, but when you are forced to pay for the public option whether you use it or not, the private insurance can't compete.

While BO has promised that taxes will not go up for middle-class taxpayers, and that people will be allowed to keep their employer-provided insurance, you can count on those assurance going by the wayside as soon as the new entitlement it irrevocably entrenched. Yesterday tax cheat Tim Geithner, who heads BO's Treasury Department, admitted that huge tax hikes are coming. The cigarette tax and "Cap and Trade" are tax hikes which BO supports which directly affect the middle class, as is the devaluation of currency by printing massive amounts of money. BO may disguise his taxes, but the middle class will pay for his rampant spending.

The video I posted earlier today includes admissions from BO, Pelosi, and other Democrats that the public option is intended to lead to their real goal: single-payer healthcare, where the government provides all medical services and doctors work for the government rather than for the patient. The House bill includes punative payroll taxes on larger companies who don't offer the "public option," essentially forcing them to comply, with the expectation that the taxpayer-subsidized public option will be able to underprice the other plans and choke them out.

Once you have been herded into the public "option" medical plan, all your troubles are over, right? Free health care! Who could wish for anything more? But the reality is that you will face a bureaucratic maze of government officials whose job is to ration treatment, insulate you from your doctor, and reduce your access to treatment in an effort to keep costs down. You will have to deal with newly-created entities such as the "Health Insurance Exchange", the "Health Choices Administration", "National Center for Health Workforce Analysis", "Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation", "Bureau of Health Information", "Health Benefits Advisory Committee", "Accountable Care Organization", "National Priorities for Performance Improvement Administration", and "Public Health Investment Fund", all newly created government agencies enmeshed in a mindboggling bureaucracy interposed between you and your doctor.

Every country which has tried government-run health care has been forced to resort to increased rationing of care. Extremely long waits to see a doctor are the norm. Even emergency surgeries may require waits of six months to three years. And treatment for those deemed to be too old or to sick to be worth expending limited resources on is simply denied. The House Bill creates a "Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission" whose task is to determine where money is most effectively spent for treatment. That sounds good until you consider that it means that some people will come out on the wrong end of their research and be denied treatment. When flood of Canadians cross the border to get medical care in America that they can't get in their government-run system at home, one wonders why we are trying to emulate their system.

But here is one more aspect to consider: the House bill requires seniors to receive "end of life" counciling to encourage them to make a living will. I don't have any problem with someone deciding to make a living will, but it is none of the government's business if I make one or not. However, when government is paying for everyone's medical care, it becomes the government's business. Many things that you really don't want the government involved with become the government's business. If granny dies more quickly, that saves taxpayers' money. If someone smokes, should we all be forced to pay for his cancer treatments? If too many people are falling off ladders, maybe we should ban ladders? Or require that only unionized ladder workers can use ladders? McDonald's food drives up medical costs as well, so the government will have to regulate the content and portions served at restaurants. Suddenly every choice I make and every risk I take becomes a matter of state interest because the government pays for the resulting medical bills. Democrats should be aware that this cuts both ways: when only government can provide healthcare, a pro-life President could eliminate abortion funding with a single executive order.

Well, that's a long answer to a short question. The "public option" is the Democrat's Trojan Horse scheme to get single-payer socialized medicine, and destroy the capitalist system which makes American medicine the envy of the world. Be sure to let your Congresscritter know what you think about it while they are home for the August recess.

In his own words

2009-08-04T09:11:00.000-05:00

Clearing the water

2009-07-20T10:40:00.002-05:00

I have gotten several questions from people who are confused about how BO's government takeover of the medical industry will work. Looking at how they run other things, like medicare, social security, or the VA medical system sheds some light on the question, as does looking at other countries with government-run health care, where quality and availability of care are substandard. But this chart really clears things up, at least for me. Here is how BO wants to make sure you get good, low-cost health care.

BO's jobs approval plummets

2009-07-08T22:22:00.002-05:00

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 32% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-seven percent Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of –5.

The index has plunged from more than +30 to -5 as Americans realize that this guy is taking the country in exactly the wrong direction.

See the full story here.

A day at the office

2009-06-30T13:53:00.004-05:00

(June 22, 2009) An Air Force F-22 Raptor executes a supersonic flyby over the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74). John C. Stennis is participating in Northern Edge 2009, a joint exercise focusing on detecting and tracking units at sea, in the air, and on land. (Click on photo to see enlarged version)

A Muslim Nation

2009-06-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

The President says that America is one of the largest Muslim nations.
If you disagree, that makes you an Infidel. Proudly proclaim your infidel status.

Infidel by DonTDodson

Just plain racism

2009-05-28T13:55:00.004-05:00

Today Fox Forum asks readers if they agree with the charge of "reverse racism" for BO's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's statement: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Is that reverse racism? My answer?

No!

There is no such thing as "Reverse racism". Sotomayor's statement is just plain racist. Terms like "Reverse racism" or "Reverse discrimination" are nonsense. It makes no difference who is racist against whom, or who discriminates against whom. It is wrong whenever and wherever it occurs.

Beyond that, her statement demonstrates that Sotomayor is not a judge who will apply the law as it is written. Race and gender make no difference before the law. To be just, the law must apply regardless of the race or gender of the person being judged and of the judge. Equality before the law precludes Sotomayor's notion that the law should be applied differently in different cases based on race or gender.

While Sotomayor has a compelling life story, that has nothing to do with being a Supreme Court Justice. The "richness of her experiences" is not relevant to the law. The fact that Sotomayor thinks that those experiences matter indicates that she does not intend to base her decisions on the Constitution, the Law of the Land, but rather on her own opinions and ideology.

That reason, even more than her blatant racism, should disqualify Sotomayor from being confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Making Policy

2009-05-26T14:21:00.004-05:00

BO's nominee for Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who has said that appeals courts "make policy", was one of three Federal Appeals Court Judges to take the position that the Second Amendment does not limit state or city governments from banning guns.

Last year the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in DC vs Heller, holding that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies to individual citizens in their private lives. Any other interpretation would seem absurd. In fact, California's liberal Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states, in an opinion supported by far-left judges appointed by Carter and Clinton. This is so obvious that even most liberals get it.

But not Sotomayor.

Last January she issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo saying that the Second Amendment does not apply to states. Now Sotomayor believes that the "right" to an abortion, made up out of thin air, prevents the states from banning abortion. But the second item in the Bill of Rights, explicitly stating that "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" does not apply to the states.

This is a judge who uses the power of the courts to make policy. She said so herself. Instead of applying the law as written, she makes it up to fit her leftist ideology.

Watch out BO. As Barbara Boxer said, the NRA gets the votes.

Joining the NRA

2009-05-20T16:13:00.002-05:00

“It is a shame,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California. “But you have to come to a realization around here that at this point in time, the N.R.A. gets the votes,” she said referring to the National Rifle Association.

With an endorsement like that, I think that I will have to join the NRA.

Environmental fraud kills

2009-05-20T14:12:00.003-05:00

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT, is the most lifesaving man made chemical in the history of the world.

In World War II it was used to kill mosquitoes and other disease-spreading insects which were killing soldiers, often at a higher rate than enemy weaponry.

After the war, DDT was used to control the spread of malaria, a disease now considered synonymous with Third World nations, but which once kills thousands of people a year in America. Over the next decade, malaria was nearly wiped out worldwide. The death toll dropped by millions.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published a book filled with horrific claims of death and destruction caused by DDT. "Silent Spring" became a bestseller and launched the modern environmental movement. The Environmental Defense Fund was established for the express purpose of banning DDT. Fear that DDT was poisoning wildlife, destroying the environment, and harming humans was widespread, and anyone questioning that claim was branded a heretic.

In 1972, the EPA banned the production and use of DDT and used its influence to prevent other countries from producing the chemical.

Malaria death rates in Africa, which had been greatly reduced, returned to their previous levels. More than a million people died in each of the next thirty years because of the DDT ban, 90% of them in Africa, most less than five years of age. Environmental dogmatists lost no sleep over the rampant death.

In 2006, thirty four years after DDT was banned, scientists concluded that the hysterical claims of "Silent Spring" were false. Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, WHO assistant director-general for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria proclaimed that "DDT presents no health risk when used properly."

Environmental groups such as The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Environmental Defense Fund, who for decades opposed the use of DDT, are now backpedaling. Greenpeace spokesman Rick Hind told the New York Times, "If there's nothing else and it's going to save lives, we're all for it. Nobody's dogmatic about it."

But what about the millions of people who died in the meantime, while the environmental wackos refused to budge on the ban? Don't hold your breath waiting for an apology.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are spreading hysteria about their new bogeyman: global warming. Or "Climate Change" as they call it now that data shows that global warming is not happening.

Just as their fraudulent science killed millions with the DDT ban, draconian measures based on the phony global warming crisis will kill far more people than they want to admit.

Yesterday BO ordered car makers to increase the average fuel efficiency of their fleets to 35 miles per gallon.

If such a reduction could be accomplished safely and economically, the free market would make it happen. However, the laws of physics don't cease to apply simply because of a Presidential edict. Making cars more fuel efficient requires that they be smaller and lighter, which makes them more dangerous in collisions. Physicist Dr. Leonard Evans wrote in his book "Traffic Safety and the President of Science Serving Society" that "The conclusion is that CAFE has caused, and is causing, increased deaths.... CAFE kills, and higher CAFE standards will kill even more."

According to a 2003 NHTSA study, when a vehicle is reduced by 100 pounds the estimated fatality rate increases as much as 5.63 percent for light cars weighing less than 2,950 pounds, 4.70 percent for heavier cars weighing over 2,950 pounds and 3.06 percent for light trucks. Between model years 1996 and 1999, these rates translated into additional traffic fatalities of 13,608 for light cars, 10,884 for heavier cars and 14,705 for light trucks.

That is 38,000 Americans dead due to CAFE Standards. These numbers will certainly increase as a result of BO's pronouncement in the name of stopping Global Warming.

In addition, BO is preparing a massive new tax called "Cap and Trade", also to reduce carbon emissions. The cost of this tax will be hidden from most taxpayers, but it will severely punish anyone who drives, uses motorized transport, uses electricity or natural gas, or purchases products of any kind. Each year people die in America because they can't afford to heat or cool their homes. Those numbers will dramatically increase due to Cap and Trade.

Remember when the fear mongering intensifies that these same people predicted dire results from DDT and stood by as millions died as a result of their fraud.

Pete and Repeat

2009-05-19T08:58:00.005-05:00

Pete and Repeat are twins who spent forty years working for the same boss in the same button factory.

No, its not a joke.

Each brother has a wife and 2.4 kids. They both earned the same amount each year and saved away part of it. One year ago they each had $1 million in a 401(k) invested 70% in stocks, 30% in bonds. At that point, after 64 years of doing everything the same, Pete retired and Repeat did not.

Conventional economic wisdom says that when you retire, you should establish a withdrawal rate and maintain that rate, adjusted for inflation, for the duration of your retirement. There has been some debate about how much can be safely withdrawn, without depleting your savings before you die.

Peter Lynch suggested a seven percent withdrawal rate from a 100% stock portfolio. Many studies show that Lynch's advice is very dangerous. A withdrawal rate that high is very likely to deplete your savings too fast. If the market declines for several years, a 7% withdrawal rate turns into a much higher rate, which can eat up principal to the point where you can never recover. Dollar cost averaging, which in the accumulation phase works in your favor by causing a fixed dollar amount to buy more shares when prices are down, works against you in distribution by causing you to sell more shares when prices are down, exactly the opposite of what you would like to do. Applying Lynch's formula to historical stock market results shows than in 41% of the cases, the investor would be broken within 25 years. Lynch was great at running mutual funds. Seems he's not so good as a financial advisor.

Today most research suggests an initial withdrawal rate between four and five percent.

When Pete retired one year ago, he decided to use a 4.5% withdrawal rate from his savings, giving him an income of $45,000. Not lavish, but enough to live comfortably. Over the past year, his retirement account has declined due to the drop in the stock market and the withdrawal of $45,000. Today Pete has $645,000. Following the standard procedure, he will adjust his income for inflation. This year he will take $46,575, or 7.22% of his nest egg.

Repeat kept working for one more year. His 401(k) also took a major hit. Instead of taking money out, Repeat added $5,000 more. He now has $685,000, or $40,000 more than his brother. Repeat retires, and using the standard 4.5% formula, he computes his safe withdrawal rate as $30,825.

Now take a look at the situation. Repeat has more money than Pete, but conventional methods of financial planning tell Pete to take about 50% more income than Repeat. Pete followed the cautious advice of the Trinity Study, but is now worse off than the reckless and discredited 7% withdrawal rate of Peter Lynch.

I'm going to suggest that they both have the entirely wrong way of looking at the problem. Conventional financial wisdom is way off the mark. It forces you to plan for a worst-case scenario, and if we have learned anything in the past year, it is that the worst case is far worse than we thought. The simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach may sell books and help brokers sign up clients, but putting your finances on autopilot is never a good plan. It is very important to consider events as they happen and adjust your plan accordingly.

When you retire, you must plan based on what you know at the time. But five years from now there is no reason to stick with a plan based only on what you knew five years ago. The failure to respond to market movements works against you both ways: it can cause you to go broke when the market drops, and it prevents you from benefiting from increases in the market. Pete, faced with a loss of a third of his investment assets, needs to reduce his withdrawals to avoid going broke. When the market recovers, Repeat will be stuck with his low income even if he could afford to increase it.

Every investment plan has risks. It is possible to mitigate some of the risks, diversify the risk, or trade one risk for another, but you can't eliminate risk altogether. The conventional method exposes the investor to the risk of going broke, leaving him with no means of support for his last years of life. Even the safest possible retirement plan, building a TIPS ladder, carries the risk of missing better opportunities.

A few years back I invented a method to deal with these issues.

My proposal trades the risk of going broke prematurely for the risk of a declining purchasing power, but also eliminates opportunity risk. In other words, you may have less income this year than you did last year, but it is guaranteed that you won't run out of money before the time you planned to.

There are several important decisions to make. First, you have to select the date when you will run out of money. The idea is to pick the closest date that you are comfortably certain you will never reach. Your 100th birthday might be reasonable. Another school of thought is to plan until your 90th birthday and just assume that if you last that long, your finances are someone else's problem.

The key concept is that we are going to divide up the money into a parcel for every month from now until the date you picked. If that date is 35 years from now, there will be 420 parcels. Each month you only touch the parcel for that month. The performance of the investments determines the actual value of that parcel, but regardless of what the stock market does, you have one parcel for every month. Short of a total worldwide economic collapse reducing the value of all investments to zero, you are guaranteed to have some income every month. Given average market returns you can expect to do better than the conventional method. In the case of somewhat below average results, you'll do about the same. If there is a prolonged market downturn, your income will be less than those using the conventional method, but when they go broke, you won't. And if the market excels, so do you.

Using Modern Portfolio Theory, we can design an asset allocation which maximizes return at a given level of risk, and over the long term it should be possible to outpace inflation. Therefore, the parcels should not all start out equal. The earlier parcels should have more, and the later parcels start out with less, because they are expected to grow over time. I'm not going into the math here, but if you want to see it, ask me. Essentially it comes down to this: each month you take a percentage of the total value of your portfolio as income, and the percentage increases over time in a predetermined way.

Another decision you must make involves the tradeoff between initial income and expected income growth. If you start with too much income early on, it is very likely that over time your purchasing power will decline as the income fails to keep up with inflation. With careful consideration it is possible to find a reasonable balance between current income and inflation hedge. Typically you can start with an income a bit higher than the conventional method allows with a high probability of maintaining purchasing power.

I found that it works well to use the monthly withdrawal to help keep the portfolio balanced by taking the money from the fund which is most above its target allocation. This helps to further counteract the reverse dollar cost averaging I discussed earlier. Because you are selling a certain percentage of the assets, you don't sell more shares when prices are down, and by selling the fund which is most above the target allocation, you naturally sell high. Funds which are underperforming relative to the rest of the portfolio will not be sold as often, giving them time to recover.

If Pete and Repeat had used this method, their results would be much more sensible. Instead of the large and inexplicable gap in their incomes, with problems looming in Pete's future, both would have similar incomes proportional to their portfolio value, and they would have the security of knowing exactly how long that income would last.

Meet Al Franken

2009-05-04T09:04:00.000-05:00

The man who is handing BO a veto-proof Senate.

Statist Indoctrination Centers

2009-04-28T08:44:00.004-05:00

Last night a friend told me that his son came home from school and announced that the swine flu outbreak is caused by our lack of government-run health care. He knows because his 10th grade social studies teacher says so.

So let's get this straight:

Here is what you know if you go to a government-run school:

Flu outbreaks are caused by not having government health care

And here is what you don't know if you go to a government-run school:

The Constitution and Bill of Rights
How to locate the United States on a map
What we can learn from history
How to think critically
Why the Federalist Papers are important
How to express an idea in a grammatically correct sentence
The significance of America's Christian heritage
Math

So what makes anyone believe that government would do better with health care than they do with education?

Best cities for jobs

2009-04-25T10:44:00.005-05:00

Forbes Magazine recently published their 2009 ratings for job markets in different cities. The results were rather remarkable.

Texas cities held all 5 top spots on the ranking of large cities. Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin were the five best cities in the nation to find a good job.

On the list of mid-sized cities, Texas held two of the top ten spots.

Texas towns held half of the top ten slots for small cities.

The overall list which included cities of all sizes was not much different. Texas held seven of the top ten slots. With 8% of the nation's population, Texas grabbed 70% of the space in the ranking of the best job markets. It's just not fair.

To find any sign of the big liberal Meccas of New York or California, you have to search down to location fifty, where Bakersfield California makes the state's only showing in the top 100. New York doesn't make the list until position 90, where tiny Ithaca pops its head up. New York City is at at location 95 and Los Angeles is ranked an abysmal 279th.

Texas must be doing something right.

If high taxes and intrusive government was a winning proposition, California and New York ought to be dominating Texas.

A bit of perspective

2009-04-20T20:14:00.000-05:00

How to save the housing market

2009-04-20T10:33:00.004-05:00

The collapse of the housing bubble triggered the snowballing events which landed us into the current economic situation. Politicians have been trying all of the standard methods to prop up the market: tax incentives, artificially lowering mortgage rates, and throwing billions of tax dollars at the problem. These approaches have proven to be insufficient to put a floor under housing prices.

Current projections suggest that home values may fall another 10% before the end of 2010, so the pain is not over yet.

Economist Gary Shilling has an outside-the-box idea which might be far more effective, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Instead of stop-gap approaches, focus on the root of the problem: the current oversupply of houses. The housing bubble of 1996-2006 produced a surplus of 6.7 million homes. Shilling estimates that 3.9 million of those were making up for underbuilding during the S&L collapse in 1987-1991. Reduced building over the past two years has compensated for another half-million extra homes. That leaves a surplus of 2.4 million homes today.

In other situations when a glut of certain kinds of farm produce was driving prices down, the government has paid farmers to not produce certain crops. The analogous action for the current situation would be for the government to buy houses and demolish them. This would certainly alleviate the surplus of houses, but it would not be productive use of tax dollars.

Shilling has a much more sensible idea. If we open up our borders to legal immigrants who can buy homes, the housing surplus can be absorbed, resulting in the stabilization of housing prices. A million immigrants in 2009 and a million more in 2010 should go a long way to rebuilding the foundation of our housing market.

Buy a home. Save America. Become a citizen.

Sounds good to me.

But do you pay yours?

2009-04-15T08:05:00.001-05:00

Some tax facts

2009-04-08T14:13:00.003-05:00

The Declaration of Independence contains 1,337 words.

The Gettysburg Address was 269 words.

The King James translation of the Bible contains roughly 773,000 words.

Compare that to the Federal Tax Code, which last year exceeded 8 million words in length.

Every year the IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions, killing more than 100,000 trees.

There are now more than 600 different tax forms.

Even the 1040 EZ "simple" form comes with 33 pages of instructions.

It is estimated that taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours each year complying with Federal tax laws and completing their tax returns.

The IRS employees 114,000 people, four times as many as the FBI.

The average two-income family pays 39% of their earnings to the government in Federal, State, and local taxes.

The annual tax burden consumes every dime Americans earn from January 1 until April 13.

Gangbanger wannabe

2009-04-04T23:37:00.005-05:00

Here is me as a gangbanger wannabe. You can find these guys all over myspace. They got the hat turned backwards and the stoopud gang signs. And they try to look all bad with their gun turned sideways like they saw it in some brainless action movie. And of course there is the dumb expression on the face that just begs you to go smack the little twit upside the head. So what I want to know is why someone would wanna be a gangbanger? What is the least bit appealing about any of that? Yo, wazzup wit dat, cuz?

In the dark

2009-03-28T23:14:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure what the big deal about today's "Earth Hour" was. I mean, being in the dark is nothing new for a liberal.

Gratulations Conresswomun

2009-03-25T10:29:00.001-05:00

I don't even know what to say.

Essential movies

2009-03-23T12:37:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, Yahoo Movies released their list of 100 Movies to See Before You Die. They are careful to make the point that their criteria went beyond the entertainment value, commercial success, or awards earned by each movie to assess the cultural and historical importance of each movie.

They avoided the most common trap of focusing too much on recent movies. With 76 of the films made before 1980, they acknowledge what we already knew: they don't make them like they used to.

Naturally, no two people will ever agree on such a list. They were not far off on a lot of their picks, but some titles just don't belong there, and other very deserving films are omitted.

These are some of the titles from their list which I agree with completely:

Casablanca
Chinatown
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Lawrence of Arabia
Schindler's List
Shawshank Redemption
Vertigo

But these films don't merit inclusion:

Alien
Blue Velvet
Breathless
Die Hard
Do the Right Thing
Enter the Dragon
The Exorcist
Goldfinger
The Graduate
Groundhog Day
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
National Lampoon's Animal House
Princess Mononoke
Terminator 2
Titanic
When Harry Met Sally
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

But where was "North by Northwest", Hitchcock's film which set the bar for the mystery adventure comedy?

And why was "A Witness for the Prosecution", one of the all-time great courtroom drama mysteries, not included.

"Laura" is a definitive film in the hardboiled detective genre.

Other films which deserve inclusion more than those listed above are:

The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Big Sleep
Notorious
Dial "M" for Murder
Taxi Driver
Rebecca
Pan's Labyrinth

In Memory

2009-03-09T14:55:00.002-05:00

If I were the devil...

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

If I were the devil, I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

By Paul Harvey
August 16, 1999

Introducing Obama Inc

2009-03-03T17:05:00.001-06:00

Read news the way the mainstream media wouldn't dare to tell it: not factual but entirely true. Introducing Obama Inc.

More fractals

2009-03-03T12:43:00.016-06:00

Several people asked about the fractal I posted last week, so I'll post a few more, even though this is somewhat off topic for this blog. These are images of the Mandelbrot Set, which is a generating function involving imaginary numbers. It just takes a few lines of code to generate the image, but the detail in the image is limitless. This means that you can zoom in on one portion of the image and find more detail. My program allows the user to select a rectangle with the mouse, and then zooms in on that rectangle. Here is the top level of the Mandelbrot Set.

Here are other views, zoomed in closely to different parts of the Mandelbrot Set. Remember that you can click on any image to see it in full resolution.

If anyone would like to try this program out, I'll give you a copy. It's kind of fun in a geeky sort of way.

Fiscal responsibilty?

2009-03-02T10:15:00.004-06:00

BO's staged "Summit on Fiscal Responsibility" and his whining about the deficit he "inherited" from President Bush are losing more credibility every day. The irony of claiming to follow a "pay as you go" policy days after signing a $787 billion pork spending bill that will still be accruing interest when our grandkids are footing the bill was overshadowed when BO proposed a budget with a $1.75 trillion deficit.

For Democrats and other mathematically challenged in-duh-viduals, that is a quadrupling of the previous record deficit. In a single year the government will go $5,800 further into debt for every man, woman, and child in America, making BO the most reckless money waster in history. If he wants to waste his own money, I'm fine with that, but he is wasting our future and the futures of generations not even born yet.

BO proposes a myriad of tax increases to go along with his spending binge. He admits that these taxes will not pay for everything he wants to spend, which is not surprising. According to CBO figures, even if he taxed 100% of all income over $75,000 it would not pay for all of his spending proposals.

I'm sure you were relived to hear that only people earning more than $250,000 would be affected by BO's tax hike. If I doubled my income tomorrow I wouldn't be close to that, and unlike the President I cannot confiscate other people's earnings by fiat. But these 2% of the highest earners in America who BO loves to demonize are the people who make our economy work. They already pay more taxes than the remaining 98% of us put together. They own businesses and invest in wealth-creating enterprises which create jobs and generate prosperity that benefits everyone.

If you think that BO's massive tax grab will not affect you, think again. His budget includes a mammoth energy tax, which he estimates will generate $650 billion. Do you drive a car? Ride in a bus, train or airplane? Do you use electricity? Do you rely on natural gas to heat your home? Do you buy groceries? This tax will hit you hard. BO's $13 per week tax cut won't go far to offset the $1.30/gallon jump in gas prices or the doubling of your electric bill.

Another horrendous proposal is eliminating itemized deductions for those evil people who earn more than $250k. Those same people who create most of the jobs and prosperity in this country and pay most of the taxes also give more to charity than anyone else. Private charity groups who work in our communities and around the world to help people in need will be pounded mercilessly by this tax hike, and it won't be the rich who are punished, as BO suggests. The United Way, March of Dimes, Feed the Children, Salvation Army, American Cancer Society, World Vision, and hundreds of others will see contributions plummet. I believe that this is entirely intentional, as BO wants to be the sole benevolent benefactor with as many people as possible dependent on him for their subsistence.

The most insidious tax of all is being levied on us all right now, without any legislation passed by Congress or signed by the President. It is a tax on the value of our currency. In the past few months, the US Treasury has fired up the printing presses to a record rate and flooded the economy with money created out of thin air. The money supply, which had been growing at a fairly steady rate of six or seven percent a year for decades, was nearly tripled in just a few months, and even more is on the way to pay for more bailouts and the porkulus bill. With three times as much money chasing the same amount of available goods and services, rampant inflation is sure to set in as soon as people start spending money again. Right now, people are fearfully hoarding money, due in large part to BO's gloom and doom rhetoric and dire predictions of the catastrophe awaiting is we don't immediately rush his harebrained agenda through which is destroying what shreds of consumer confidence were left. This demagoguery ensures that the economy will not recover in the short term, which is fine with BO, who wants to take full advantage of the situation to seize as much power as possible and entrench countless new entitlements and government bureaucracies while people are gripped with the urgency of a crisis mentality. But when all of the newly created money starts to move again, inflation will hammer the purchasing power of your savings and income. This hidden tax will hit everyone, not just the evil rich people. In fact, those people who are having trouble affording the basic necessities right now will feel the effects the most, when the price for food, clothing, electricity, gas, and rent all skyrocket.

Is this the change people voted for? If BO had campaigned on a platform of quadrupling the deficit, taxing the life out of private charity, sending energy costs sky high, and decimating the value of the dollar, would he have been elected? BO is betting his Presidency, his re-election, and his legacy on big government socialism. History says that is a losing bet.

My rotary phone won't dial that site

2009-02-25T15:13:00.003-06:00

I'm gonna dial up the VP's web site as soon as I get my modem hooked up to my TV.
Maybe we should get Al Gore, the inventor of the internet to help with this.

The Skeleton in my Closet

2009-02-25T09:40:00.002-06:00

Everyone has their own skeleton in the closet. You know what I am talking about. It's that dark secret from your past that you hope to take to the grave with you. It is the horrific event from your past you would never tell even your closest friends, because you are sure they would recoil in disgust and never speak to you again. It is the thing that they dig up when you decide to run for public office to ruin your chances of being elected.

Everyone has one, and right here on this blog, I am going to share mine with you. I am not really sure why I chose to reveal myself in such a public way. Perhaps I hope that the catharsis will purge my soul of the burden of this awful truth. Maybe I just want to defuse the story so that when the media gets ahold of it, it will not ruin my presidential bid. Or could it be that I hope that you will learn from my tale of woe, and change your ways before it is too late for you.

Consider yourself warned. What follows is of a highly offensive and explicit nature. If you are squeamish, read no further. If you don't wish to have your opinion of me shaken, stop now. You have been warned.

And now, without further ado, the skeleton in my closet, the dark undisclosed secret from my past now brought out into the light, the most shameful episode from the hidden recesses of my memory: I went to high school with two members of the Dixie Chicks.

There. I said it. It is out in the open. I'm not sure which word I am more deeply ashamed of: "Dixie" or "Chicks". Or maybe it is their music. Or perhaps their tendency to insert their foot firmly in their mouth. In any case, if you no longer wish to associate with me, I completely understand. But I feel so much better. They say that confession is good for the soul.

A plan for our future

2009-02-24T10:25:00.003-06:00

I was talking to my friend Jim Pannell yesterday, and he had a brilliant idea.

We should split the country in half and give half to the whiny bleeding heart commie pinkos who voted for BO, and give the other half to the real Americans who didn't. We've tried dividing the country north and south, and that didn't work too well, so I think that east and west would work better. We'll give the left half of the country to the lefties. That works out well, because most of them have already gone to California anyway, and they are welcome to it. There are quite a few in New England who will have to move west, but they can deal with it. New Jersey will be deserted, because conservatives sure don't want it.

The left coast can be ruled by BO and all of his czars. He's got a czar for everything, so there should be plenty of czars to go around. We will elect a President and restore the long-lost relic of Constitutional government. Both countries can govern themselves as they see fit. The left coast, which will most likely decide to call themselves "The People's Republic of BO" will soon be owned entirely by the government, and their citizens won't know how badly the government is botching everything because the kids graduating from government schools won't know how to add. They will have no military and no prisons because the government budget will go entirely to socialized medicine, funding abortion, government housing projects, poetry readings, condom distribution in preschool, replacing cars with mule carts, gay pride parades, carbon credits, and racial sensitivity training. Because all of the productive and educated citizens are on the east coast, within a year they will have reverted to a medieval existence.

Meanwhile, the east coast will be called "America" and will revive a lost form of government called a "Democratic Republic" based on a forgotten document, "The Constitution." We will have a low tax rate and a non-intrusive government whose primary purpose is to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens. When criminals notice that America has prisons and an effective legal system, they will all move west. America's citizens, unbridled and free from excessive taxation, over-regulation, and absurd union demands, will flourish with innovation and productivity, as the engine of capitalism creates an abundance of wealth that anyone with ambition and determination can share in. America will have a strong military and will trade freely with any nation that respects human freedom.

After three or four years, America will invade PRBO and take it back. They won' t have a military, electricity, internal combustion engines, the will to fight, or any freedom to defend, so it will require about a dozen guys with BB guns. We will be greeted as liberators.

The Fox and the Hen House

2009-02-23T21:28:00.003-06:00

Today when I saw that BO is staging a "Summit" to come up with a plan to achieve fiscal responsibility, I spewed a mouthful of scalding coffee all over my computer terminal.

After all, this is the guy who, just last week, promoted and then signed Nancy Pelosi's massive pork bill spending money we don't have on things we don't need. And this week he is concerned about fiscal responsibility? His claim that we are going to "Pay as we go" was pretty much blown last week.

His game plan is to bring in 75 "experts", primarily Democrat special interest groups and left-wing think tanks, put them in a room, send them off in groups with the assignment of devising a plan to cut the deficit in half in four years. I'm not sure if the baseline for that halving was last year's $450 billion deficit or this year's trillion dollar deficit (and counting).

It all sounded pretty ludicrous until I stopped and pondered exactly what BO is trying to accomplish. You see, when I think about fiscal responsibility, it means that you control spending to live within your means. This is what fiscal responsibility means to conservatives, and it is how most real people must live their lives. We can't spend more than we bring in year after year, or eventually we end up in a lot of trouble. So if we have a deficit, the problem is that we are spending too much money, and the solution is to spend less.

But BO's spending frenzy proves that controlling spending is not what he has in mind here. Liberals have a whole different way of looking at things. If the government is running a deficit, it means that they are not taxing us enough, and the solution is to raise taxes. The idea of reducing spending to balance the budget is heresy to a liberal, whose personal empowerment comes from his ability to take our money and dole it out to those who will ensure that he remains in power.

So the purpose of this contrived political theater is to make an excuse for BO's plan to raise taxes much higher and more broadly than he told us in the campaign. The conclusion that this anti-capitalist crowd of union bosses, environmental wackos, community organizers, gay rights activists, ACORN nuts, left-wing professors, liberal politicians, and fringe think tanks reaches will surely not be that we need to reduce government spending. They will conclude that the only course of action is to raise taxes. And who is the President to disagree. He'll go along with their recommendations. After all, that's what the experts said to do.

Loose lips

2009-02-19T16:22:00.002-06:00

Where I work we often have to deal with classified information, which is a big responsibility because the lives of many Americans depends on keeping that information secure. Our briefings instructing us on how to handle such sensitive information stress that we must never confirm or deny any statements from which classified data could be inferred. The fact that such data has been printed in the newspaper is not relevant.

It seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, never got that briefing.

Feinstein answered a reporter's question about the location of our Predator drones by saying, “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base.”

Her defense for offering this highly sensitive information was just repeating what she had read in the newspaper. I'm not buying it. First of all, she didn't say "The newspaper said they were flown out of Pakistan." She cited her own understanding, and she is in a position to know for sure. There is a huge difference between making an allegation in a local paper and having the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirm it.

Feinstein's ill-considered blabbermouthing didn't go over well in Pakistan. “The Drones Are Here!” proclaimed the Pakistan Daily Times. This places Islamabad in an uncomfortable situation, though the government issued a swift and unequivocal denial. Who can blame them?

Fighting an intelligence-based war such as the one in Afghanistan requires a great deal of discretion, and a trusting relationship with friendly nations in the area is critical. In one thoughtless moment, Feinstein blew that trust. Not only will blowing the cover on this operation endanger the cooperation we have gotten from the Zardari government and make Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke's job that much harder, it will also endanger our drones, which are now sure to be a high-priority target for al Qaeda.

The Democrats are showing again that they are simply not ready for prime time in fighting the war on terror.

Fractal

2009-02-18T16:28:00.002-06:00

Several years ago I wrote a program to generate Mandelbrot Set fractal images. You can zoom in on any area of the image, revealing infinite complexity. I hadn't looked at it for a long time, but today I was just messing around with it and found this interesting view. No real significance, just here for your viewing pleasure. Click on the picture to see it in full resolution.

In the news

2009-02-12T09:00:00.003-06:00

Police made an arrest in the January murder of Plano resident Sherlock Holmes. When asked what had helped to crack the case, police detective Lt. Watson responded that it was “elementary”.
A bank robber who disguised himself as a woman to hold up a bank last week was arrested. He looks forward to his new notoriety in the prison yard, where he is known as “The Drag Queen Bandit”.
Barack Obama said that “all sides had to compromise” to reconcile the House and Senate versions of his huge pork handout bill. The President cited the $500 per person tax cut which he promised in the campaign as something he had given up. Congress scaled it back to $400. Biting his lip in a fashion reminiscent of BJ Clinton, BO said, “It’s a sacrifice for me, but I’ll just have to live with the fact that for the foreseeable future you’ll all have to keep sending me that hundred dollars a year.”
When two BO appointees were withdrawn for ethical reasons concerning their failure to pay more than a hundred thousand dollars in taxes, reporters asked if another tax cheat, Tim Geithner, would keep his job as head of the IRS. BO responded, “The American people are tired of hearing this same partisan bickering. We need to get back to the important business we came here to do: attacking rich people for failing to pay their fair share.”

Why the outrage?

2009-02-11T12:37:00.002-06:00

I got an email from a co-worker about a certain actress who went on an anti-Jesus rant in her Emmy acceptance speech. She said that "A lot of people get up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that nothing had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to tell Jesus to "Suck it". The email encouraged Christians to boycott her show.

Now I had never heard of this particular actress or the show for which she won an Emmy, and I wouldn't watch the show even if she had gotten up there and recited the Lord's Prayer, so saying that I am boycotting the show would be pretty pointless. Even so, I don't see any reason to be outraged by what she said. Her statement is no different from what every person on earth, starting with Adam, has said to God.

Every person thinks that their own way is better than God's way. This belief is based on the lie that God's law is intended to deprive us of something good. God's law is based in His love for us and His way results in every blessing. Adam's sin was much deeper than the act of eating a piece of fruit. He was rejecting God's way, which leads to life, and asserting his independence to follow his own way, which leads to pain, destruction, and death. Each one of us has followed in that same pattern, telling God that we don't need Him, we can do better on our own, and He can "Suck it." That act of defiance to God is responsible for all the evil in the world. We can't say that we don't deserve it because we choose it. Blaming God for the consequences of our rebellion against Him makes no sence at all.

The fact is that God would have been completely justified in leaving us to self-destruct, and then say, "I told you so" as we enter eternity seperated from Him. But He didn't. Knowing full well that this actress would look Him in the face and tell him to "Suck it", Jesus, God in human flesh, loved her so much that He gave His life to save her. She has been offered the most precious gift imaginable that she could never deserve or earn, but she rejects His forgiveness and tells Him to "Suck it." Rather than outrage, that makes me incredibly sad for her.

While you're at it, buy me a kitchen

2009-02-10T18:12:00.001-06:00

In last night's press conference did you see that woman who, back in October, was gushing about how BO was going to buy her gas and pay for her house? She showed up again, wondering where her freebies are, and asking him to throw in a new car and a kitchen as well. After all, he's been in office for three weeks, so what's the holdup? Ok, maybe it was not the same woman. BO drones all share the pathetic stupidity of expecting the government to take care of all of their problems.

Now any reasonable person would have taken the opportunity to clear up some common misperceptions. In America if you want to improve your situation you go get educated, develop some marketable skills, work your tail off, and earn your own way. But BO didn't tell her that. He told her to talk to his staff and they'll see what they can do.

BO's vision of America is of a place where all good things come from government. The financial crisis is a result of government, and the solution is a massive expansion of government. Health care can only be accomplished by another massive expansion of government. And if you want to remodel your kitchen, talk to the President's staff.

Going against the flow

2009-02-09T11:08:00.004-06:00

In the past four months there has been a record movement of funds inside 401(k) and IRA retirement accounts out of stock funds into "safe" bonds or money market funds. This move didn't happen before the plunge in stock prices of September, when it would have avoided the huge losses. Instead people sold their stock at the low price, essentially locking in the loss and missing the chance to take part in the recovery. The Hewitt Associates 401(k) Index indicates that in each of the last four months of 2008, 401(k) participants transferred nearly a billion dollars out of equities and into fixed income investments.

If you had moved your money out of stocks last summer, I would congratulate you on your unusual foresight. I've given up on trying to predict short-term stock market fluctuations years ago. Most people who try that game end up losing. In the ten years from 1998 to 2007, the S&P 500 returned 11.81% annually. "Safe" Treasury Bills returned 4.53%. The average 401(k) account returned 4.48%. People who try to "beat the market" or avoid down markets consistently do worse than they could do with a simple "buy and hold" discipline.

Today people are still doing the wrong thing. Two years ago there was a general agreement that stocks were a good buy, when stocks were priced at about $15 per dollar of earnings. Today stocks are "on sale" in search of buyers, with the price discounted to $9 per dollar of earnings. If stocks were a good buy at $15, shouldn't they be an even better buy at $9? I think so.

It is a mathematical certainty that $100 invested in stocks today will return more in the future than $100 invested two years ago. Historical data also supports my claim that today is a prime buying opportunity. Steven Leuthold studied the returns of stock bought at different valuation levels. He divided the initial price per earnings into deciles. Stocks bought in the top 10% of P/E lost 1.3% on average over the next five years, while stocks bought in the lowest 10% of valuations returned 19.3% annually, on average.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has heard the motto: Buy low, sell high.

Right now stocks are well below the average price per dollar of earnings. According to Leuthold, stocks bought at our current level of valuation have historically returned 14.1% over the next five years. Admittedly, it will take a majority of that upswing to recover the loss from the last year, but if you flee to safety now, you won't ever recover those losses.

"Buy low, sell high" is easy to understand but very hard to do, mainly because it requires that we not join in with the mania of the day. When everyone is abuzz about the killing they made in the latest craze, be it internet stocks, real estate, or tulip bulbs, remember that someone is going to be stuck with those when the bubble bursts, and you don't want to be that person. On the other end of the spectrum, when things look grim and the outlook for the future is doom and gloom as far as the eye can see, the emotional response is to get out. When you go with the flow you will always buy high and sell low.

Nathan Rothschild once said to "buy when the blood is running in the streets." But to actually do that requires a really strong stomach. In the late 1990's, people were buying up internet stocks, tech stocks, and telecom stocks with no regard for the fundamental value of the companies they were buying. The price per earnings of companies like Lucent Technologies soared as high as $300. Other companies were snatched up at even higher prices, and their P/E could not be calculated because they had no earnings. At the same time, the Asian stock market was in the tank, making today's S&P 500 look rosy by comparison. The Japanese index was down 80% in one year. Today Lucent no longer exists and most of the "internet" stocks are worthless, but investors who bought Japanese stock that year were rewarded with an average return of 21% annually for the next ten years.

So I am resolutely doing nothing. My retirement savings, what is left of them, are staying right where they are, and each week I continue to contribute eight percent of my paycheck to my 401(k), invested primarily in the same diversified assortment of stocks I have used for years. I am counting on a principle which has held true in the past: I don't know if today's stock price is high or low compared to tomorrow or next month, but it is certainly low compared to 2036, when I plan to start selling.

Porkulus

2009-02-06T21:00:00.002-06:00

I've been saying for a couple of weeks that BO's "stimulus" bill is little more than a huge barrel of pork handed out to his key Democrat special interest groups. Here is a rundown of all the stuff in the bill, very little of which creates real jobs or boosts the economy. A quarter of a billion dollars for film for Hollywood? $850 million for Amtrak? The bill is filled with wealth transfer programs, funding for various departments of the government, and loads of money to unviable "green energy" research which is likely to never amount to anything. In addition, the bill will transfer $79 billion from states who worked to balance their budget to states that didn't. In other words, from states run responsibly by Republicans to those run into the ground by Democrats.

Dead middle

2009-02-05T12:53:00.002-06:00

The Brady Campaign just released their "State Scorecard Ranking" which rates each state's gun control laws based on which "sensible gun control laws" they implement. States can curry favor with Sarah Brady by restricting the sale of ugly or cheap weapons, by requiring various ridiculous gadgets be sold along with guns, by allowing cities to hold gun makers liable for shooting deaths, and by limiting, delaying, licensing, registering, and recording gun sales.

It is no surprise that The People's Republic of Kalifornia ranks first, with the most oppressive laws restricting your Second Amendment right to bear arms. Those liberal utopias of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Illinois, and Pennsylvania round out the top ten.

I was surprised to find where Texas, with it's wild west image, ranks on the list: Dead middle. We are tied with Vermont, Wyoming, and South Carolina for 27th. Indiana, Georgia, Kansas, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, and 15 other states all have more freedom than Texas.

Come on Texas, we can do better. Texas law does not permit licensed citizens who have undergone training and background checks to carry a concealled weapon on a college campus, even though they can carry it in most other public places. Employers are also allowed to ban the transport of a legally-owned firearm in the employee's car in the parking lot, which effectively forces the employee to travel to and from work without the protection of a firearm. The employer does not assume the liability for the safety of their disarmed employees. Why, in Texas of all places, is the government ensuring that criminals have access to large groups of disarmed targets?

Let your state lawmakers know that we can do better in these areas. Even better, exercise your rights by owning a handgun, knowing how to use it, getting a CHL, and joining GOA.

Love America, not the tumor

2009-01-30T12:04:00.004-06:00

The left is in a tizzy about Rush Limbaugh daring to say something that I said a few days earlier: I hope that President Obama fails. They are out in full force, smelling blood in the water, DNC talking points telling them to attack conservative's patriotism. Frank Schaeffer starts out with a particularly absurd statement: both Limbaugh and Al-Qaeda want BO to fail. So Al-Qaeda hopes we stay in Iraq and keep killing their suicide bombers in droves. Obama bin Biden (oops, Freudian slip, I meant Osama bin Laden) is crossing his fingers and praying to Allah that BO fails to weaken America? Al-Qaeda operatives are lining up for waterboarding at Gitmo? It would just make the terrorist's day if we learned of their plans for mass carnage by listening in on their phone calls to terror cells operating in America, captured them and threw away the key? They are just begging for more bombs and less talk? If anyone is cheering for BO to succeed, it is Al-Qaeda.

I want BO to fail for the same reason that I want Al-Qaeda to fail: they are both seeking to do harm to America.

The liberal mantra that it is unpatriotic to oppose their messiah is based on the basic liberal fallacy that America's government is America and therefore love of country requires love of the government and everything that it does. I love America because it is the world's protector of freedom and liberty and a land of endless opportunity for every person. I respect the Constitution which protects those principles by limiting government's power to prevent it from becoming tyrannical, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to our military which fights to establish and defend freedom and liberty, both for America and for others.

To illustrate this dichotomy, let me tell you about a family I know at my Church. Their little daughter, Tory, has neuroblastoma, a form of cancer which attacks the brain and central nervous system. Her father, a pastor from Ukraine, brought her to Fort Worth for treatment. Having talked with Tory's mother and father I can tell you that they deeply love their daughter. They also hate the cancer that is choking the life out of her. They have gone through many rounds of chemotherapy and surgery to remove the cancer. It is a painful process and sometimes it takes Tory right to the edge of death.

You could say that they hope the cancer fails.

So does that mean that they hate their daughter? Of course not! They love their daughter and therefore they hate the cancer that is killing her.

In the same way I hate the tumors of liberalism, of runaway government spending, of egalitarianism and collectivism, of socialism which chokes the life out of economies and kills freedom, of the soft tyranny which looks to government as the solution to every problem and justifies crippling taxation as necessary to achieve equality of outcome. I hate the cancer of all BO stands for because I love my country and I can't stand by and let the cancer run its disastrous course. BO is not America and their fates are not synonymous. I want BO's Presidency to fail because that is the only way that America can succeed.

Media in the Tank

2009-01-30T11:15:00.003-06:00

We all have known for a long time that the media is way off the liberal deep end. The New York Times, Newsweek Magazine, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. are completely, one hundred percent in the tank for BO. So the recent news coverage is nothing surprising, but it does provide further confirmation, as if we needed any.

These t-shirts being hocked on CNN, presumably to make up for sagging revenues from their plunging audience numbers, are a prime example. The one pictured above features the headline from their gushing video of inauguration day, filled with people overcome with emotion by the wonderfulness of having another big-government liberal president.

If this one isn't enough to make you puke, there are plenty more:

This is America happening
Obama's era of change arrives
Obama fever goes global as hopes rise
44th president is a 1st for the nation
Obama's moment arrives
Obama: It's time to remake America
Change comes to Washington
Obama: 'We have chosen hope'
'This is my moment too,' witness says
Obama makes history
Cheers great Obama on parade route
One dad sees MLK's dream in Obama
Lovey-dovey first couple melts hearts
A long way since Jim Crow, Powell says
Inaugural tickets hot, hot, hot
Obama inspires historic victory
Obama fever spreads around the world

You know, there is medicine for that fever.

Noticeably absent are:

"Obama shreads the Constitution"

"Obama weakens America"

"Obama capitulates to terrorists"

"Obama funds infanticide"

"Media reveals bias"

But do not fear, I am here to take up the slack. Right now on Zazzle.com you can find the missing headline tshirts. Don't miss your chance to buy a piece of history!

Cutting poor babies stimulates economy

2009-01-29T21:24:00.001-06:00

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News’ George Stephanapolous Sunday that the Democrat’s economic stimulus bill, containing hundreds of millions of dollars for “family planning” services for the poor, will make real cuts in the number of low-income people, thereby saving taxpayer dollars, and increasing average income for everyone.

“Poor people are a luxury we just can’t afford,’ said Rep. Pelosi, “They cost us a lot of money to maintain; what with food stamps, housing and health care. So if we can rapidly reduce the number of poor people through contraception and abortion, that’s a net gain for federal and state budgets, and a fast track to economic recovery. Every poor baby prevented is like money in the bank.”

A spokesman for Planned Parenthood, the world’s leading abortion sales chain, confirmed Mrs. Pelosi’s assertion, noting that “even if the stimulus bill helps harvest only the low-hanging fruit by reducing live births among blacks and hispanics, that would be a major boost, since minorities comprise nearly 50 percent of those on Medicaid.”

Planned Parenthood continues to lobby Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration to include even more funding in the stimulus bill for better marketing efforts to attract minority women who have not yet considered abortion as “a viable lifestyle choice.”

“Despite our best efforts to date,” the source said, “only 1-in-5 pregnancies ends in abortion. We need the marketing money to spur growth in what we call our frequent-flier segment. Blacks make up only about 13 percent of the population, yet they have 40 percent of the abortions. We still think there’s real upside potential there.”

The spokesman added that, “Planned Parenthood, since its inception, has been the Sam’s Club of abortions for minority communities. We keep the product cheap so our customers can buy in large quantities. What we lose in profit per procedure we more than make up for in volume. Of course, our work also helps reduce racial tensions by adhering to time-tested Darwinian principles.”

So sorry to win

2009-01-26T10:35:00.004-06:00

Yesterday The Covenant School of Dallas fired its girls basketball coach, Micah Grimes, because he would not apologize to Dallas Academy for his team's 100-0 victory.

On the coach's web site he posted a statement saying, "I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel 'embarrassed' or 'ashamed,' " part of the post says. "We played the game as it was meant to be played and would not intentionally run up the score on any opponent. Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy."

When the score was 25-0 three minutes into the game, the coach instructed the players to not play a full-court press. In the second quarter he put in his bench players. The winning team made only four 3-point shots, three of them in the first quarter. The coach noted the quarter-by-quarter score: 35, 24, 29, 12.

Covenant School headmaster Kyle Queal announced the firing, saying "It is always good to spread the points around." He suggested a new "athletic justice" rule to take points from winning teams and award them to losing teams.

No word yet on when we can expect an apology from the Dallas Academy coach for stinking so bad.

Money wiz can't figure taxes

2009-01-22T13:43:00.002-06:00

Today BO's financial wiz-kid blamed his failure to pay $33,500 in payroll taxes on Turbo Tax, a software package used successfully by 18 million average citizens every year.

Tim Geithner, BO's nominee for Treasury Secretary, said that Turbo Tax didn't tell him that he needed to pay social security and medicare taxes on his self-employment income, and the man slated to run the IRS said that he had no clue that he was supposed to pay those taxes.

Earlier he stated that failing to pay these taxes was "a common mistake". BO echoed this claim, saying, “It is an innocent mistake. It is a mistake that’s commonly made for people who are working internationally or for international institutions. It has been corrected. He’s paid the penalties.” However, the ethics department at the International Monetary Fund, the source of his untaxed income, found that only one of the 1,800 other IMF employees failed to report their income and pay the required taxes.

BO is unshaken in his conviction that Geithner is the man for the job, “My expectation is that Tim Geithner will be confirmed. And my expectation is that he is going to do an outstanding job on behalf of the American people.”

Senator Lindsey Graham said, "We need a new secretary of treasury who understands where this country is at financially and has a game plan to move forward. I think he’s the right guy.”

I am very relieved to hear that solving our nation's financial crisis is easier than filing your taxes.

BO is pro-life!

2009-01-22T13:17:00.003-06:00

BO angered his pro-abortion base on Tuesday when he revealed his pro-life views which he had cleverly concealed throughout the campaign. BO used strong language in his inauguration speech to emphasize his support for all human life:

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

An outraged spokesman for Planned Parenthood, America's largest abortion provider, said, "We can see through President Obama's thinly veiled rhetoric. You can't pass anything forward from generation to generation unless you are allowed to live, and to pursue their full measure of happiness, one must first successfully escape the womb. We are appalled that President Obama would wish this for anyone."

BO went on to promise swift justice to those who attempt to carry out abortions:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

All that remains is to see how BO intends to implement his pro-life views and overturn Roe-vs-Wade through legislation, by packing the Supreme Court with like-minded judges, or simply by using his rhetorical powers to get a majority of Americans to "hope" for "change".

I'm embarassed for her

2009-01-22T08:38:00.003-06:00

I finally got around to watching the rest of the Inauguration last night.

You know, BO has a lot of gall to object to torture and then subject the nation to this poetry reading. I thought the Bill of Rights protected against cruel and unusual punishment.

Getting right to business

2009-01-21T09:54:00.002-06:00

BO wasted no time getting right to work for the American people.

After listening to what most concerned average Americans and carefully considering all of the important tasks that lay ahead, he hit the ground running. BO tackled the most important and pressing issues facing every American. Using his new powers as leader of the Free World, BO acted decisively and swiftly to address the tough problems we face as a nation.

What did he do?

On his first day as President, he ordered the trials of the terrorists responsible for killing 3000 Americans on 9/11 to be stopped.

It is good to know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has an advocate in the White House.

Is this the "new tone"

2009-01-21T09:45:00.001-06:00

Joseph Lowery, considered by some to be the "dean" of the civil rights movement, gave the benediction at yesterday's inauguration. He closed with this little ditty:

"We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... When yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right."

Can anyone tell me how this is not a blatantly racist portrayal of minorities as helpless victims of evil white oppressors? You'd think he is stuck in 1958 Mississippi. The fact that BO was elected president proves that his depiction of America is way out of date.

Flubbing the oath

2009-01-20T12:32:00.001-06:00

"And I will execute..." (Hey! Where is the teleprompter???)

What is success?

2009-01-20T09:19:00.004-06:00

I got an email from a BO drone who had some questions for me:

Don't you know that Obama is our President? His election is a historic event. Don't you want his Presidency to succeed?

Let's take these one at a time.

The drone was a bit premature to declare Obama "our President", but at noon today that will be the case. BO will be the President of America. Unlike the Democrats, we are not going to question the legitimacy of his Presidency. He will have all of the powers the Constitution gives to the President. But that does not mean that we have to agree with everything he wants to do to America, and just step aside and let it happen. In fact, that is exactly what our Constitution was designed to avoid through its system of checks and balances. The Bill of Rights explicitly protects the God-given right of American citizens to raise grievances against the government, and you can count on me to take full advantage of that right.

Yes, Obama’s election is a historic event. BO is the first black man to be elected President. Well, not really. He is the first half black, half white man to be elected President. One must wonder why he chooses to identify himself with the bigamous, drunken, corrupt man who abandoned him and his mother rather than with the mother and grandparents who raised him and gave him all of the opportunities that allowed him to be where he is today. He proves that you can overcome the oppression of slavery and become President. Well, not really. His father was Kenyan, not the descendant of slaves. He proves that you can come from poverty and do anything. Except that he was raised in an affluent family and went to an elite private school in Hawaii before going off to Harvard. But it is a historic event. No one from Delaware has ever been elected Vice President. (While it is true that Biden lived in Pennsylvania for 11 years, he is 83% Delawarian, which gives him much more solid claim to the title than BO’s 50% blackness.)

Finally we come to the real question: “Don’t you want his Presidency to succeed?” The question suggests that if I answer “No” then I am wishing for harm on America. However, that all depends on how you define success.

Do I want BO to succeed in implementing his radical agenda to surrender to the terrorists, raise taxes sky high, nationalize huge portions of the private sector, and “spread the wealth around” through massive socialist redistribution programs? Of course not! I intend to see to it that those goals go down in smoke just like BJ Clinton’s medical takeover scheme crashed and burned when the American people rejected the huge government power grab.

If, as the drone suggests, success means doing what is good for America, then for BO to succeed he would have to come to some kind of epiphany. But I really don’t expect that some fine morning BO will wake up and realize that prosperity does not come from the Government, that free markets private sector innovation and productivity is the only way to create wealth and spread it around effectively, that corporations create jobs and government creates nothing, that terrorists won’t just leave us alone if we try to make nice with them, and that in most cases the best thing the government can do is get out of the way.

So I do hope that BO will succeed, but I’m not counting on it. America can prosper either way. We prospered in spite of BJ Clinton. Every economic cycle has a downturn and a recovery. BO will try to claim credit for it, but the industriousness of the American people is the engine driving American prosperity.

Thanks, Son

2009-01-13T20:57:00.004-06:00

Dear Son,

I wish to thank you for a great gift you probably didn't even know you were giving me.

In 2008, the Federal Government committed a total of $8.5 trillion to the most massive bailout in history. Thank you, son.

You might wonder why I am thanking you?

Well, the government doesn't have a spare $8.5 trillion laying around. In fact, the Federal Government was already running a sizable deficit. So we will have to borrow that money and add it to the national debt. There is no way that we will ever pay off the debt, so you can count on paying interest on the money spent bailing out failed businesses for the rest of your life.

At a typical interest rate of six percent, this will cost $510 billion a year, forever. Your share of this cost will be $1,700 per year every year for the rest of your life, or $4.65 every day for the rest of your life. Odds are, you will be forced to pay more than your share, in the name of "fairness".

Like I said, Thanks.

It is good to know that we learned something as a nation from this fiasco. For instance, we learned that overextended debtors with a history of irresponsibility with money should not be taking out big 30-year ARM loans with no money down and no idea of how they are going to make the payments. Which is why our government, a model of financial irresponsibility, already saddled with more debt than they can ever pay off, is borrowing $8.5 trillion more. But if the government ever gets into real financial trouble, they can always just print more money to pay their way out of the problem. If you did that they would throw you in jail. When the government does that, it drives up prices and devalues your money, your life savings, and your income.

It's also good to know that government has learned their lesson about meddling with the free market. Their policies, starting with Jimmy Carter, strengthened under Bill Clinton, and continued under George Bush encouraged mortgage companies to loan money to uncreditworthy borrowers. Government chartered organizations, Fannie and Freddie, guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars of risky loans, packaged them up and sold them as highly rated mortgage securities. So now the solution is for the government to nationalize vast additional portions of the financial industry, buying up failed insurance companies, mortgage companies, and banks which are in such bad shape that no one else would touch them. But it's all ok because we will just pass the bill on to you. By privatizing the profit and socializing the risk, we are sure to encourage companies to make prudent decisions in the future, certain that if things go badly the government will be there to bail them out.

I have taught you how to budget your money and account for what you spend. At any time you can tell me how much money you have and account for every penny of your allowance money. You carefully set aside saving money for long-term purchases. It is good to know that the politicians who have made a career out of using our money to buy votes, favors, and influence, are sure to be at least as careful with your money as you would be. As a matter of fact, they can't say exactly what happened to the first $350 billion that they passed out.

So when Harry Reid, George Bush, and Nancy Pelosi lecture the auto makers on how the Government will demand financial responsibility and accountability as a condition of the auto industry bailout, maybe they ought to start by getting some for themselves. After all, it is not their own money that they are dishing out like candy on Halloween. It's your money and your future.

Love,

Your Dad

New mugshot fashion statement

2009-01-12T09:42:00.002-06:00