Michael Barone
Thursday, December 10, 2009

"Knowledge is becoming more specialized and more dispersed, while government power is becoming more concentrated," writes economist Arnold Kling in his new book, "Unchecked and Unbalanced." "This discrepancy creates the potential for government to become increasingly erratic and, as a result, less satisfying to individuals."

"Less satisfying to individuals" is a mild way to put it. In a recent Annenberg focus group, pollster Peter Hart asked Philadelphia suburbanites to write the name that came to mind when they thought of Congress. A retired auto executive and 2008 Obama voter wrote, "Satan." When asked why, he said, "Because I wasn't sure of the correct spelling of 'Beelzebub.'"

Kling's point is that such disenchantment is inevitable when government officeholders make sweeping decisions about matters on which they lack, and only a few specialists have, detailed knowledge. Which is what Congress and the Obama administration have been busy doing these past 11 months.

Consider the 2,000-plus-page health care legislation now before the Senate. There is coherent debate on abortion coverage because it's a discrete issue easily isolated from the rest of the bill that raises concerns among people with conflicting strong moral beliefs.

But any abortion provision would have less effect on real life than dozens of other provisions in the bill. The Congressional Budget Office, drawing on specialist knowledge, tells us the Senate bill would result in 10 million people losing employer-provided insurance and increased premiums for buyers of individual health insurance. And the CBO says the bill would not bend the cost curve downward.

Democratic leaders want to pass something, almost anything, for fear of political damage. They want to give government even more power over one-sixth of the economy, and over ordinary people's health care. To that end, they have been happy to game the CBO's scoring system, misusing specialized knowledge to achieve political ends.

On the issue of carbon emissions, the e-mails hacked from Britain's Climate Research Unit show even leading specialists in climate research have been busy manipulating data and suppressing alternative views in pursuit of political ends. Their goal, and that of the Democrats backing cap-and-trade legislation, is government control over energy production and distribution essential to all of the economy.

The Environmental Protection Agency's designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant is an attempt to give EPA bureaucrats such control in the likely event that the Senate fails to pass something like the bill the House passed last June.

So politicians are acting either in ignorance of specialist knowledge or by manipulating and misusing it in the conviction that central planners can organize and control human behavior better than individuals can through markets and voluntary action operating under the rule of law.

History provides copious evidence that this conviction is mistaken. Writing in Policy Review, economists Paul Gregory and Kate Zhou compare the success of market reforms in China and their failure in Russia. They point out that reform in China was bottom-up: Peasants started producing food for private sale and, as markets thrived, Communist leader Deng Xiaoping winked at their rule-breaking and changed the rules. The economy mostly thrived.

In contrast, reform in Russia was top-down: Mikhail Gorbachev changed the rules, but that allowed apparatchiks to gobble up state industries and created new monopolies, over which Vladimir Putin's government re-established control. The economy mostly stagnated.

The Democrats' health care and cap-and-trade bills are classic top-down legislation. Many inside players have bought into the changes and are preparing to game the new systems. Far from banishing lobbyists from Washington, Barack Obama has provided them with enormous amounts of new business.

An alternative approach was taken in George W. Bush's major domestic legislation. Tax cuts, the education accountability bill and the Medicare prescription drug benefit law opened up areas where markets and incentives could operate. Costs came in lower and revenues higher than projected. An economy stalled by recession proved capable of creating new jobs without direction from central planners.

Polls have shown that in the last 11 months, as Americans have started to think hard about Democratic proposals, they have become less confident in government's ability to direct society. Underlying the angry responses in focus groups and tea parties is an appreciation that problems can best be addressed by widely dispersed people with specialized knowledge operating in a predictable framework. Not by central planners acting in ignorance of or by manipulating specialized knowledge.

Emmett Tyrrell
Thursday, December 10, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Do my eyes deceive me? Did I really see President Barack Obama this week calling for a vast increase in government spending? He is promising to "spend our way out of this recession." He plans to build highways and bridges. There will be tax cuts for small businesses. There will be tax incentives for making our homes more energy-efficient. Economic stimulus will be extended for unemployment insurance. Checks for $250 will be sent to senior citizens and veterans. More money will be sent to state and local governments so they will not have to lay off teachers, firefighters and police. It is estimated that the president's eruption of generosity will cost an additional $170 billion, perhaps more.

He has made this promise despite the fact that fear is spreading throughout the country that our government deficits are unsustainable. The so-called independents have forsaken him, owing to their fear that he is bankrupting the country. For that matter, he has expressed the same fear ... half a year ago.

Yes, this generosity comes from the same president who told a C-SPAN interviewer last spring that "we are out of money." That grim revelation came from President Obama in response to this observation by the interviewer: "You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?" The president's response was: "Well, we're out of money now. We're operating in deep deficits."

About the time the president announced that this nation -- which is "out of money" -- is going to "spend our way out of this recession," the Gallup Poll spoke. According to it, the president's approval rating is lower than that of any of his predecessors at this point in their presidencies, and few came in with President Obama's high favorable ratings. Today he polls at 47 percent, down from 53 percent last month. A wit at the Los Angeles Times notes that the pulchritudinous former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is now within a point of the president in popularity.

What is going on here? I suspect that the citizenry is coming to the realization that the Democrats who have been in charge of the country since January are not doing so well. The average American is telling the pollsters that "the country is going in the wrong direction." One of the ways the country is going in the wrong direction is not simply with huge government spending but with huge government, period. Ordinary Americans are uneasy about trusting their fate to huge government. They know that government services are inefficient and expensive and occasionally repressive and subject to corruption. More than that, huge government is unreliable.

The health care debate has got to be reminding ordinary Americans of their unease over government promises. Think about it. The same big-government Democrats who are promising government-secured health care are promising "health care savings" that are clearly the denial of Medicare services to the elderly. That is to say, Medicare services that once were promised to seniors by Medicare's advocates are being taken from them under the false claim that they are savings. Face the facts; the Democrats' health care savings are actually health care denials to those who have been counting on those services for years.

Government does not keep its promises. Yet government is the Democrats' solution to practically all our current problems. Many Americans who have followed the health care debate are increasingly aware of this. The longer the health care debate continues the more aware Americans will be that they are about to be cheated out of the health care that they now have.

When Medicare first was passed, it was understood that government would stand aside from the relations that a patient has with a doctor. Supposedly, these relations always would be a private matter between the doctor and the patient, free of government interference. Yet on Page 146 of the Senate's version of health care reform, it is clearly written that once the bill is passed, insurance plans certified by the government can only pay the fees of a doctor who "implements such mechanisms to improve health care quality as the Secretary (of Health and Human Services) may by regulation require." In plain English, henceforth government not only will intervene between doctors and patients but also will control that relationship.

Once again, government cannot be trusted. What government gives to us, government can take away. So maybe the president will not be spending that additional $170 billion.

Hugh Hewitt
Thursday, December 10, 2009

In an interview on my radio show Wednesday, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl underscored the fact that Senate Democrats do not have the 60 votes they need to pass Obamacare, and that reports about the inevitability of Obamcare passing are part of the Democrat's strategy. (The transcript of the interview is here.) Kyl asserted that Harry Reid routinely announces, and then the MSM echoes, statements about the inevitability of the bill's passing, but then reality catches up.

This is happening again today as the premature reports of an agreement to expand Medicare to those 55 and older are exposed as more puff talk from a disappointed and reeling left that has seen its dream of a public plan take some serious blows in the past few days. David Drucker's and Emily Pierce's report in Roll Call (subscription required) conveys the difficulty facing Reid:

Democratic Senators involved in crafting what Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) described as a “broad agreement” on health care policy appear to be at odds over both the policy proscriptions and the notion that they had even reached such a deal.

Though Reid announced late Tuesday that negotiations among a group of 10 liberal and moderate Democratic Senators had largely resolved the intraparty standoff over the public insurance option, participants in the group said their “agreement” had been mischaracterized and that they agreed only to send the proposal to the Congressional Budget Office for a cost estimate, saying more information was necessary before making any firm decisions.

Seniors especially have to hope that the new deal falls apart as it represents a savaging of Medicare. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid assault on Medicare has three parts now.

First, Obamacare proposes to loot Medicare of about a half trillion dollars in benefits. Obamacare enthusiasts dismiss the devastating impacts to Medicare Advantage enrollees as necessary to rebalance the system, but the loss of benefits to those senior citizens will be huge. So too will the cutbacks for hospitals treating the elderly if the bill passes.

Second, Medicare payroll taxes are raised in the Senate bill, but that massive flow of new revenue isn't going to secure the financial future of Medicare, but to instead pay for new entitlements, thus crowding out a source of future funding for Medicare when it hits the rocks in a very few years.

And now, third, Democrats are proposing the expansion of the nearly insolvent Medicare program to millions of new enrollees 55 and older. This enormous mistake will not only quickly drain the program of its remaining resources, it will accelerate the trend of doctors heading into concierge practices, abandoning the low-paying Medicare patients for the much more equitable payments provided by the dwindling number of privately covered patients.

All of the versions of Obamacare are radical assaults on seniors, but the latest version is a recipe for disaster for Medicare, and seniors know it. The seniors' political punishment of all Democrats will come in 47 weeks, but right now they have to act to alert the few Democrats on the fence that voting for this reckless scheme is political suicide.

Here are the five steps that everyone should take, but especially those already or soon to be covered by Medicare.

Readers should also take a moment to review the Democrats' plan on the debt limit --lifting it by nearly $2 trillion!-- which is every bit as reckless as their gamesmanship with Medicare. This is another transparent political trick, one that will further undermine the dollar and lock in future inflation that will destroy the savings of seniors that are in fixed investments.

Two days ago, Rupert Murdoch wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the failures and future of journalism. The very first thing that journalists must do to have their enterprises survive, Murdoch wrote, is to "give people the news that they want."

This doesn't mean the lowest common denominator of news such as sensational tabloid stories, but it most certainly does mean news about how readers' lives are going to be impacted by what D.C. does. Right now I am devoting most of every show to Obamacare because the audience is huge and very dialed in to how the Democrats' massive scheme will change their health care and thus the arc of their lives. Incredibly, MSM is not covering this aspect of the story --is not talking to seniors or doctors or hospital execs. Instead the Beltway-Manhattan media elite is covering Obamacare like a game of whether or not Harry Reid can get to 60 votes. Not surprisingly Reid announces he is going to win and the MSM scurries off to report that Reid is on the verge of winning. Almost nothing is being written about what the proposed deal will do to seniors' health care, just as the impact on the dollar of the massive hike in the debt ceiling is also largely unreported.

If Obamacare was fully and fairly explained, it would have been dead long ago, and the opinion polling shows that despite the best efforts of MSM to ignore the realities of the bill, it is deeply unpopular in the country and is triggering a massive blowback for Democrats, as it should.

Never have so many reporters produced so little in the way of accurate meaningful coverage of so important a bill. Perhaps they are simply not up to the complexity of the story, but the failure of MSM to get the story straight or the facts right or even to ask moderately difficult questions of so-called Democratic centrists like Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey is remarkable.

New media will continue to report the reality of the Democrats' assault on older Americans, and all the AARP propaganda and MSM misdirection will not obscure the growing recognition that Obamacare is a massive bait-and-switch that is not going to help Americans get better medical care but will instead hasten the collapse of Medicare and the arrival of rationing.

 I am writing this to make clear to all who look at my video's, they are for information purpose only.  I don't post anything that I think isn't possible, the problem is in these times all things in some way, shape or form can be possible. History will educate us from the past to see into the future possiblities. Some of these video's may seem like "Yeah Right", but some of them are Right On. It's sad in so many ways to see the evil of a few out to destroy so many, to enslave man-kind for their own power hungry purposes.  The Truth is many times stranger than fiction and can be frightening, but there is always hope and I personally believe in a Righteous, Just God, who one day will set it all straight once and for always.  In the meantime I feel, better to look, research and study what is going on around us. I can draw much from the past and see how it has led us to where we are and having studied Bible Prophecy for over 35 years safely say: The pieces of a giant puzzle are all coming together in our time.  There is not much left to be fulfilled and even if your not a believer, all prohecy in the Bible (except what is yet to come) has happened without exception. What God speaks does not come back to Him unfulfilled.  Having said that, I only wish to keep you informed and if you guestion - Good" do the research for yourself and draw your own conclusions.  What is happening now goes back, way back in history. A path that has led to the present.  We must put God back in His rightful place at the head of this Country as it was intended and let all live free regardless of who or how they believe.  When prayer was taken out of school, then began the era of sorrows and continue's today.  Just look at the world around you and the daily news - that should be enough to convince anyone that things are not as they were or should be.  This is my own personal statement of what I believe and I do not impose it on you as personal but to inform only.  I report you decide." LOL.  God Bless you all and keep standing strong - This is God's America and ours by His Grace - we can prevail and let freedom forever ring.  I for one, like Patrick Henry, say: "Give me Liberty or give me Death".  I do not endorse violence in any way, but protest and make my voice heard ,  I feel compelled to stand for Right and Justice and Freedom for all.  Even face death if it should come to that - I cannot and will not backdown from my hearts beliefs. May we all have the courage to take that stand, come what may.  Much has been sacrificed by others along the way, much blood has been spilled to keep us free, it's our turn now.  I stand for God, Country, family and my fellow human beings.