Monday, November 28, 2016

Hurt by Obamacare


More than 200 million have been hurt by it. Count them: 155 million with employer-provided plans whose deductibles have soared thanks to the ACA, plus the 11 million paying ACA penalties for not enrolling, plus hundreds of thousands of part-time workers whose hours were slashed by employers dodging the mandate, and 55 million seniors harmed when Medicare funding cuts bankrolled Obamacare.
https://spectator.org/trumps-path-to-obamacare-repeal/

I think there's a legit argument that deductibles have to be higher to incentivize better self care, a more competitive market and other more complex reasons with relation to health care cost control.  However, Obamacare is not doing that, it's just raising deductibles.  Higher deductibles with lower costs for care with more choices for patients, insurers and caregivers - and lower premiums for the healthy - is the winning formula.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Sure He Was a Homophobic Murderer But ...

OK, so he was a monster who murdered and tortured many, but his people (the compliant ones that were left after the murdering and torture) could read, and had GREAT health care. And don't forget, Fidel hated racial inequality. The fact that cuban girls were prostituting themselves for soap and shampoo money is a small price to pay for their health care and literacy (unless it was homosexual activity or left them with AIDS in which case off to the pokey for them) - heck they could read about themselves in US newspapers. 
What kind of person forgets the murder and torture when they talk about FC?
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4640553-155/george-f-will-fidel-castro-and

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Why Oh Why Did They Lose?????

AMERICA IS RACIST: A perennial favorite among leftists for explaining, well, everything. When pushing this one, it is helpful to avoid the question of why, or how, this racist nation so recently elected Barack Obama. Twice.

AMERICA IS SEXIST: Another hardy, all-purpose clarifier. In addition to the fact that over 50 percent of voters are female, there is the complicating factor that Trump’s “gender gap” was apparently smaller than the one often suffered by Republicans. Next.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/17/trumps_triumph_explained_132368.html

The why?  Because the Democratic Party (TDP) acts like folks in this country in violation of federal and state laws are victims while white Christians are the problem, and if I happen to think lawbreakers are bad they label me a "hater".  TDP acts as though people who want to pee in a bathroom with people who have different anatomical parts than theirs are victims, and those of us who fear sexual assault in public restrooms are frivolously fearful.

One might think TDP is pandering to the illegal aliens as a means to shore up their base of electoral support in the face of the declining population of African Americans and their fatigue with democrat promises.

I doubt the Christian church would still claim me, by the way, but I know that white Christians are not the problem.

I favor liberal, legal immigration.  I'm not the least bit afraid of people coming from lawless shitholes to find a better life.  Most of the negative unintended consequences of immigration come from criminalization of immigration. I resent being told I'm a hater because I expect people from lawless shitholes and TDP to understand that rule of law is what makes this place better than their lawless shit hole.

TDP acts as if the 99+% of gun owners who never hurt anyone are dangerous.  They act as if religious white people are a threat but Muslim immigrants from terrorist riddled nations need special consideration.

TDP acts as if working people who do not have a college degree are a liability, but those who are dependent on the state are victims.

TDP pretends that a 6'4" black man who attacks a cop and gets shot in the process is a victim, and the white cop getting the beating is a criminal (where were you Barry when you could have made a difference in perception?).  Yes, I've seen the videos of at least four incidents in which cops shot black men with zero justification, and it sickens me.  I'd happily sit on a jury and convict those guilty cops; not because I hate cops but because I took the responsibility to carry a weapon as an agent of the government and I expected to be held accountable for my actions.

TDP acts like the pathetic few who advocate racism or bigotry are a threat, even though those racists dare not show their faces - unless they are non-white.

TDP lost because they invented a racial narrative when a 16 year old dope smoking MMA trained bully tried to beat up an armed man with delusions of protective grandeur. They deliberately supported falsehoods about the circumstances of the young man's death and failed to state the truth; the young man's parents failed to parent him, instead they abandoned him (where were you Barry when you could have made a difference in perception?).  I am horrified that anyone loses their life due to their race.  I would step right between and assailant and your black/brown son/daughter - I went to combat zones 3 times and loved all my team mates of any ethnicity or religious belief.  I also know that if every time a black man dies the facts are distorted to create a "hate crime", people will stop caring about hate crimes.

If hate crimes were an everyday occurrence, no one would feel the need to imagine one where it did not happen.

TDP lost because they made the political calculation that attacking lawful gun ownership would be more popular than saying what is obvious - most gun violence is related to, paid for and inevitably due to the drug war.

TDP lost because they pretend to fear the power of the rich, but they are the rich.  They lost because they own the universities and can't tell the difference between the fantasy that is university life and the real world with real consequences that the rest of us live in.

TDP lost because they think or pretend to think that an AR-15 has some modern military voodoo, when in fact the AR is a semi automatic variant of a fully automatic rifle invented in the 50s. They are too ignorant to know, or pretend not to know, that magazine fed semi automatic rifles have been used by sportsmen since the 1930s.

TDP lost because they won't honestly discuss the science of climate alarmism and will happily sacrifice thousands of coal jobs on the altar of their Chicken Little redux.  Just say it - anthropogenic global warming is a conjecture and is not even close to being proved.  AGW conjecture is about strongly held belief, like religion.  Honesty about that simple, inarguable fact shouldn't be so rare.  Like the fat-makes-heart-disease conjecture, it is easy to manipulate even very smart people with weak science, and doing so hurts a lot of folks.

TDP lost because they nominated the presumptive first female president with plenty of reasons to know she would be a poor candidate or president.  They lost because they kept pretending that time in high government office means competence and ignored her willingness to get away with anything she thought she could.  They lost because they were willing to ignore how ignorantly she proceeded - fearing oversight within a US government email system, she gave state secrets to those who hacked her personal server.  They lost because when their destabilization of Syria and Libya exploded in their faces, killing 4 US citizens in service of the US government, they pretended like it wasn't their fault.

TDP lost because even after a succession of obvious and serious lies they kept riding the dead horse of Clinton. They kept supporting the person who had the nerve, after a career filled with monstrous lies and bullying of females victimized by her husband - to call Trump supporters deplorables.  Clinton number 2, a millionaire by virtue of shaking down donors for "charitable donations" in exchange for political access, feels entitled to label those who oppose her deplorable. It took someone like her to make Trump look good.

TDP because it has one basic message, repeated over and over in different forms:  "if you would just let us get together with our academic elite friends and organize the nation with innumerable new laws designed to create social justice, equality and unicorns for all of our friends; and send enough folks out in uniforms (and guns) to make you either comply (or be incarcerated), we can make it utopic around here."  It's the ultimate irony - TDP loves people with guns, as long as it is the government's agents are using those guns to coerce the citizenry to do what the TDP has decided is best for them.

TDP lost because they scoff at liberty, ignore the miracle of cooperation (you and I buy/sell from each other when you and I decide that's what's best for both of us) and oppose no new regulation while ignoring the faudulent disasters of government (10+% fraud in Medicare, year after year after year).

TDP lost because they talk out of all sides of their mouths and think we can't tell that's what they are doing, and while lying full time wear good intentions like the emperor's clothes.

TDP lost because their deplorable candidate couldn't even beat the worst imaginable opponent, the nearly criminally incompetent politician Donald Trump.  The joke is on them.

I have no joy in Trump's victory, and I hated depending on him to save me from TDP.  But at least he's better than JFK was.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Grow or Die

With 4% growth, most of the federal government's shortages - the ones we fight over - would go away. I don't know if an economy as large as ours can grow at that rate, especially when the rest of the world is stuck in the economic muck of authoritarianism. Growth rate increase should be the priority, it nudges every other lever for humans to thrive.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-entrepreneurial-way-to-4-growth-1479254382

Everything Costs Something To Someone

Earlier this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the No Slacker Left Behind provision resulted in wage reductions of about $1,200 a year for workers with employer-based insurance coverage -- whether or not they had adult children on their plans. In effect, childless working people are subsidizing workers with adult children who would rather stay on their parents than get their own.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/16/the_slacker_mandate_and_the_safety_pin_generation_132360.html

And, even the benefits are overestimated ...

The Obama White House will brag that the slacker mandate has resulted in increased coverage for an estimated 3 million people. As usual with Obamacare numbers, it's Common Core, book-cooked math. Health care analyst Avik Roy took a closer look and found that the inflated figure came from counting "(1) young adults on Medicaid and other government programs, for whom the under-26 mandate doesn't apply; and (2) people who gained coverage due to the quasi-recovery from the Great Recession."

Federalism Means ...

During Sunday night’s game against the Seattle Seahawks, the New England Patriots won Time of Possession, 30:35 to 29:35. But they lost where it counted, like Hillary Clinton.

Clinton winning the so-called popular vote, an aggregation of the votes in the 50 states and District of Columbia, is irrelevant. Our federalist system, spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, awards the presidency to whichever candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College.

With no Republican U.S. Senate candidate on the ballot in California, Clinton ran up the score, amassing enough votes in the Golden State to overtake Trump nationally.

This may soothe Clinton supporters still feeling the sting from last week’s upset, but it does not provide any reason to scrap the Electoral College. There have been some longtime critics of the Electoral College, but the newfound fervor to replace it is mostly sour grapes.
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/editorial/College-education-Popular-vote-doesnt-matter-11162016#sthash.v13vqvd3.dpuf

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Unity? Anything but

At the time of the Constitution's ratification in the late 1700s, its proponents expected federal power to be restrained by having a wide swath of different Americans in a large republic form many factions. These diverse factions would restrain federal action by hindering consensus. In James Madison's words in Federalist #10:

"The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other."

Thus, according to Madison, having a lot of people with diverse interests restrains federal power and protects liberty by deterring the formation of oppressive majorities.

Since America has consistently had two major political parties instead of dozens of factions, Madison was, in a word, wrong. He overlooked the significance of voting rules.
https://fee.org/articles/the-accidental-genius-of-the-electoral-college/

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

TF Has No Idea

The idea that large numbers of manual factory jobs can be returned to America if we put up a wall with Mexico or renegotiate our trade deals is a fantasy. Trump ignores the fact that manufacturing is still by far the largest sector of the U.S. economy. Indeed, our factories now produce twice what they did in 1984 — but with one-third fewer workers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/opinion/donald-trump-voters-just-hear-me-out.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

He says he understands about Trump, he has no idea.

Cannot Be Shamed

As the presidential campaigns sink to the challenge of demonstrating that there is no such thing as rock bottom, remember this: When the Clintons decamped from Washington in January 2001, they took some White House furnishings that were public property. They also finished accepting more than $190,000 in gifts, including two coffee tables and two chairs, a $7,375 gratuity from Denise Rich, whose fugitive former husband had been pardoned in President Clinton’s final hours. A Washington Post editorial (“Count the Spoons”) identified “the Clintons’ defining characteristic: They have no capacity for embarrassment. Words like shabby and tawdry come to mind. They don’t begin to do it justice.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441669/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-campaign-2016-sleaze-sweepstakes

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

CO2 War?

National polls show that climate change is low on the list of voters’ priorities. For good reason: In the U.S., and for much of the world, the most dangerous environmental pollutants have been cleaned up. U.S. emissions of particulates, metals and varied gases—all of these: ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur—fell almost 70% between 1970 and 2014.

Further reductions will come from improved technologies such as catalytic removal of oxides of nitrogen and more-efficient sulfur scrubbers. This is a boon to human health.

But a myth persists that is both unscientific and immoral to perpetuate: that the beneficial gas carbon dioxide ranks among hazardous pollutants. It does not.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-war-against-co2-1477955418

When will they just admit - they have no way to test the degree to which CO2 adds to heat retention?

Biggest Policy Flop in a Generation

By now, everyone knows that Obamacare is the public-policy flop of this generation. With the latest news of premiums increasing 22 percent, insurance companies dropping out, rising taxes and less completion, this is truly the Hindenburg of health plans.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/01/obamacare_implosion_exposes_web_of_lies_and_deceit_132214.html

Every. Promise. Broken.