Mr. Obama’s February budget provided the outline, but the House bill now fills in the details. To wit, tax increases that would take U.S. rates higher even than most of Europe. Yet even those increases aren’t nearly enough to finance the $1 trillion in new spending, which itself is surely a low-ball estimate. Meanwhile, the bill would create a new government health entitlement that will kill private insurance and lead to a government-run system.
Government’s Role
CBO: The Long-Term Budget Outlook
Measured relative to GDP, almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt stems from the three largest entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
via Director’s Blog » Blog Archive » The Long-Term Budget Outlook.
Foreclosures at record high in first half 2009 despite aid – Yahoo! News
U.S. home foreclosure activity galloped to a record in the first half of the year, overwhelming broad efforts to remedy failing loans while job losses escalated.
Foreclosure filings jumped to a record 1.9 million on more than 1.5 million properties in the first six months of the year, RealtyTrac said on Thursday.
The number of properties drawing filings, which include notices of default and auctions, jumped 9.0 percent from the second half of 2008 and almost 15 percent from the first half of last year.
“Despite everybody’s best efforts to date we’re not really making any headway against the problem,” Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac in Irvine, California, said in an interview.
via Foreclosures at record high in first half 2009 despite aid – Yahoo! News.
Average length of unemployment highest since 1948. – WSJ.com
The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.
via Average length of unemployment highest since 1948. – WSJ.com.
YouTube – Rep. John Fleming Health Care Resolution
RNC Knocks Obama For “Failed Stimulus Plan”
It’s Now or Never on Nationalized Health Care – HUMAN EVENTS
One of the most basic precepts of medicine is that you cannot effectively treat the problem until you get the diagnosis right. Yet Democrats have terribly misdiagnosed the disease in American health care. As with nearly everything, they have decided the problem in our health care delivery system is a shortage of government intervention.
via It’s Now or Never on Nationalized Health Care – HUMAN EVENTS.
Of NICE and Men – WSJ.com on Obamacare (or lack thereof)
The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration’s argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out “waste.” Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration’s new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.
A Government Failure, Not a Market Failure – WSJ.com
This was a market failure, we are told, and the promise of capitalism has always been that the self-correcting mechanisms built into the system would preclude the possibility of a systemic market failure.
But the housing bubble only burst after government subsidies pushed house prices up so fast that marginal buyers could no longer afford to chase prices even higher. A bubble created by rigged financial markets and a government-sponsored obsession with home ownership is not a result of market failure, but rather, a result of bad public policy. The belief that home ownership, per se, is such a benefit that no amount of government support could be too great and no pace at which home prices rise could be too fast is the root of the crisis.
There was no market failure.
Morning Bell: The Left’s Assault on the Declaration of Independence » The Foundry
But denying the truth of America’s principles for the sake of “change” can make no claim to progress at all—a point made with unsurpassed clarity by Calvin Coolidge learn more here on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”
We don’t need to remake America, or discover new and untested principles. The change we need is not the rejection of America’s principles but a great renewal of these permanent truths about man, politics, and liberty—the foundational principles and constitutional wisdom that are the true roots of our country’s greatness.
Read the full article here… Morning Bell: The Left’s Assault on the Declaration of Independence » The Foundry.