Friday, December 18, 2009

This is what happens when you rush a vote

 

Here's a funny story that illustrates what happens when you rush through a vote without reading and proofreading the bill.

When he earmarked $100,000 in taxpayer spending to go to Jamestown's library, Rep. James E. Clyburn meant for it to go to the library in Jamestown, S.C., which is in his district.

But in the bustle to write and pass the $1.1 trillion catchall spending bill, Congress ended up designating the money for Jamestown, Calif. - 2,700 miles away and a town that doesn't even have a library.

"That figures for government, doesn't it," said Chris Pipkin, who runs the one-room library in Jamestown, S.C., and earlier this year requested $50,000, not the $100,000 that Congress designated, to buy new computers and build shelves to hold the books strewn across the room.

The library is just one of more than 5,000 "earmarks," or pork-barrel spending projects, totaling $3.9 billion, tucked inside the report accompanying the catchall spending bill Congress sent to President Obama this week. Mr. Obama signed the $1.1 trillion bill Wednesday, violating his own pledge to allow the public five days to comment on bills before he signs them.

Typical government work, isn't it?

Labels: The Budget

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:26 AM 2 comments

Reid's rush

 

Just because the Democrats have come up with their phony deadline of voting on health care by Christmas, Harry Reid has cobbled together an action-filled schedule so as to get the vote by Christmas Eve.

“We’re going to finish this healthcare bill before we leave here for the holidays,” Reid said on the Senate floor Thursday.

To meet that goal, Reid has tentatively scheduled a 1 a.m. vote Friday to cut off debate on the defense-spending bill, which also includes an extension of unemployment benefits and COBRA subsidies for people who have lost their jobs. If the Senate votes to quash the filibuster, lawmakers would proceed to final passage after 30 hours of post-cloture debate, or at 7 a.m. Saturday, according to Democratic sources briefed on the plan.

For the Senate to pass healthcare reform by Christmas, as Reid has pledged, the Senate leader would then have to file take a series of necessary procedural steps that would force votes all week at odd hours.

Reid must file motions to end debate on: the manager’s amendment, which includes all the final-hour changes made to win the support of 60 Democratic senators; the 2,074-page healthcare bill, which lawmakers have been debating on the floor; and on the underlying legislative vehicle, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act.

Republicans may force Senate clerks to read the entire manager’s amendment but that will not disrupt the schedule. That’s because reading the amendment, which will be shorter than the 2,074-page healthcare bill, is not expected to take more than eight hours.

Reid could offer the manager’s amendment on Saturday morning and keep to his schedule as long as he files cloture sometime before midnight.

Cloture motions need one day to ripen, so the earliest the Senate could vote to end debate on Reid’s manager’s amendment would be 1 a.m. Monday.

Democrats would have to allow 30 hours of post-cloture debate to elapse before voting to approve the manager’s amendment. A second cloture vote to end debate on the initial healthcare bill would happen as early as 7 a.m. Tuesday, followed by another 30 hours of post-cloture debate before a vote to adopt that amendment to the underlying bill.

Democrats would then have to repeat the same process on the third motion to end debate on the underlying bill, setting up a cloture vote at 1 p.m. Wednesday.

At any time, the chamber could move up a final vote if every senator agrees. But if a single senator objects, the earliest a final vote on the final package could take place would be 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Got that? Remember this is to pass a program that would remake one-sixth of our economy and yet Reid hasn't produced the Manager's Amendment that contains the meat of the eventual proposal. Yet, he wants to rush through a vote on a bill that none but his favored few have actually read. And we haven't yet seen a CBO report on what it will cost.

And what is the rush? They have to come back after Christmas anyway to vote on raising the debt ceiling. The bill wouldn't be passed this year anyway because we still have to hear from the House. We don't know yet if Nancy Pelosi will force her members to vote on the Senate bill as it is so that they don't have to face a conference clash between the differences in the two house's bills. But whatever they do will not occur until January. This is reminiscent of how they had to rush through the stimulus bill over a weekend when Obama wasn't going to come back until a few days later to sign the thing. But people had to be denied the time to read the $787 billion bill so that it could be rushed through by another artificial deadline.

Sadly, the weather is just not cooperating with Harry Reid's schedule. Washington, D.C. is scheduled to have a major snowstorm over the next few days. It will be the type of weather when the federal government asks non-crucial workers to stay home. Apparently, rushing through a bill that no one will have had a chance to read and when there is time to debate and vote on the bill next month will be in Reid's mind qualify as crucial work. All to fit a political deadline because the Democrats realize that every additional moment that this debate is out there, the less popular their proposals become. Their motto seems to be, vote now before the people realize what we're doing.

Labels: Harry Reid, Health, Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:08 AM 0 comments

Dr. K's 25 year anniversary

 

Charles Krauthammer celebrates his 25 year anniversary as a Washington Post columnist. I enjoy every single thing he writes and wish him another quarter-century of perceptive commentary.

Labels: Media

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:55 AM 0 comments

The real damage from Climategate

 

Patrick Michaels writes today in the WSJ about how the global warming enthusiasts whose emails at the Climate Research Unit have truly damaged the confidence we can have in science. By working to silence those who cast doubt on their beliefs, they've worked to destroy the veracity of climate research.

But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

By working assiduously to prevent critics from getting published, they've been able to claim that they represent scientific consensus. And their results then became the basis for the IPCC report which in turn is the basis for the EPA's recent ruling on regulating carbon dioxide.

Since Francis Bacon, we've come to rely on science as based on empirical research and observable facts. That is why the hard sciences has always seemed so much more dependable than the social sciences.

This scandal has damaged that reputation. Unless we see some self-correction from all the scientific agencies and organizations involved, we will never again have confidence in their research on global warming. They can't pretend, as Al Gore has tried, that these leaks haven't irreparably harmed the entire field of paleoclimatology. Right now, at Copenhagen, they're all whistling past the graveyard and hoping that people won't notice the massive elephant laying a turd right in the middle of their self-proclaimed scientific consensus.

Labels: Environment

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:39 AM 1 comments

The Obamians in Copenhagen

 

President Obama sent Hillary Clinton to Copenhagen to work her supposed diplomatic magic there. It doesn't sound as if it's working. First she is prevaricating about a basic fact that everyone knows.

In private meetings, Clinton bluntly told foreign leaders that her husband had negotiated and signed Kyoto, but could not persuade senators to approve it.

That was after the Senate voted 95 to 0 not to accept any agreement that didn't call for similar reductions from India and China. Clinton didn't even send the Kyoto Treaty to the Senate to be voted on. So much for how much he was trying to persuade 2/3 of the Senate to approve it.

So our newest offer is for the US to pony up 20 to 30% of a fund to give money to undeveloped countries to reduce their carbon emissions.

The new U.S. commitments came after after comments by major participants in the talks, most notably China, that chances of even a modest deal were fading. The United States backed what amounts to the single biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor nations for any one cause -- in a sense offering compensation for decades of warming the Earth.

Clinton pledged that the country would help mobilize $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 -- an amount that is almost equal to the total value of all developmental aid and concessional loans granted to poor nations by the United States, Europe and other donors this year. She did not specify how much the U.S. government would commit to giving, but a senior administration official said it would be 20 to 30 percent. Administration officials said they envisioned most of the money coming from private sources, or from revenue generated by a cap-and-trade scheme, but other sources could include redirecting existing subsidies or a tax on bunker fuel.

Of course, cap and trade won't pass the Senate and that it would generate such sums is quite a bizarre claim. Even if it did, isn't that money supposed to be targeted to help Americans deal with the burdens imposed by cap and trade? If there were such money available from private sources, then we don't need such a big international agreement. And of course the deal depends on China letting international observers in to check up on their policies.

Western leaders pointed to China's resistance to international monitoring as a major stumbling block to hammering out an agreement. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who declined to attend a pre-plenary emergency meeting with Obama and other world leaders, sending an aide instead, urged delegates in his own remarks to trust his country's pledge to reduce its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent.

"We will honor our word with real action," Wen said. "Whatever outcome this conference may produce, we will be fully committed to achieving and even exceeding the target."

Yeah, right.

And if we're going to be funding this sum, where is the money really going to be coming from? It will come from funding our debt by money borrowed from...China!

As the Copenhagen Conference winds down, it seems that a major concern by all involved is to protect Barack Obama from looking bad.

At a time when he’s juggling several political chain saws — health care reform, a Wall Street overhaul, a jobless and joyless recovery — a humiliating setback in Denmark could hobble Obama.

That his aides would seek to lower expectations for Copenhagen is a no-brainer. What’s more surprising is the degree to which the Europeans — and even some activists in American nongovernmental organizations — also realize that a damaged Obama hurts their agenda in the international arena and in Congress.

During the past two weeks here, international NGOs gathered each day to give a “Fossil of the Day” award to the country that was doing the most to hurt environmental efforts. American groups fought to keep the United States and Obama from getting the dishonor, according to one activist who took part in the fight.

Eventually, the United States was given the fossil award, but not without an argument, said the activist — who is publicly critical of Obama and his environmental policies.

That sense of protectiveness is even more pronounced in Europe, where the president has a seemingly inexhaustible well of goodwill, enjoying a 77 percent approval rate, according to a September poll by The German Marshall Fund.

“Because of Obama’s stature, the Europeans gain more from saying they got a good outcome than bashing the U.S.,” said Michael Levi, a fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

While differences remain between Europe and the U.S. — most notably on long-term emission targets, financing and transparency — observers close to the talks agreed that the Europeans had gone far to help out the president. And they may ultimately punt on financing and paper over other differences to buy him more time on Capitol Hill.

All that help from his European allies won't help him get such money out of Capitol Hill. Whatever money that is presumably there is already targeted from his health care boondoggle, his stimulus porkapalooza, and for whatever new jobs program they come up with to try to persuade voters next year that they are dealing with Americans' major concern. And don't forget the war in Afghanistan. Cap and trade won't pass. Payments to the $100 billion slush fund to give out to kleptocracies around the globe is not going to be a popular measure in today's economic environment. This is all playacting on the international stage to pretend that we're doing something. And President Obama seemed to really think that he could swoop in and bring everyone to an agreement merely by the miracle of his blessed presence. It hasn't worked out that way. As Jim Geraghty writes,

From the tone of his remarks, President Obama seems genuinely surprised that an international conference is generating a lot of talk about the importance of the problem but no consensus on the solutions; that countries don't want to sacrifice their standard of living or economic growth to mitigate an environmental issue that seems far in the future; nobody wants to give up some of their wealth so that some other country won't have to give up as much... and that China is not persuaded by his charms nor the ten millionth invocation of, "now is the time to act."

Many of us aren't surprised by any of this at all, but on the radio this morning, they said Obama's frustration was evident. Apparently, he expected the conference to go quite differently.

It should be enough that The One has spoken, but just like so much of his efforts on the international stage this year, it was not enough.

Meanwhile, everyone there tries to ignore the increasing doubts rising out of the leaked emails and computer files from East Anglia. This may well be the high water mark of the global warming crowd and Obama's fly-in could be the symbol of the futility of the whole gathering.

Labels: Environment

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:05 AM 1 comments

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Kids, we're still not there yet

 

There still seem to be some Democratic senators who aren't happy with the Reid bill - at least we assume that there is a bill, although there doesn't seem to be one written. And we're still waiting for that CBO report. I guess it's hard to analyze the costs when the thing keeps changing.

Ben Nelson isn't there yet.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) said Thursday he won't vote to advance the Senate healthcare bill unless it is changed.

Nelson said more stringent restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion must be included in the bill if it is to win his vote.

"If it's not at the point where I think it needs to be with the improvements that I'm pushing — and they've made a lot of them — then I will not vote for cloture on the motion to end debate," Nelson said in an interview on KLIN radio in Nebraska.

"There's a lot of improvement on the legislation but the basic question on funding for abortion hasn't been answered yet," he said.

And now Socialist Bernie Sanders is asking for some of that Lieberman-love.

I’m struggling with this. As of this point, I’m not voting for the bill. … I’m going to do my best to make this bill a better bill, a bill that I can vote for, but I’ve indicated both to the White House and the Democratic leadership that my vote is not secure at this point. And here is the reason. When the public option was withdrawn, because of Lieberman’s action, what I worry about is how do you control escalating health care costs?

It's not clear yet if that means he's going to vote against cloture or just against the final bill. But if Joe Lieberman could hold out and get what he wanted, others might see if it's worth it for them to be a bit obstreperous and see what it gets them. Let's see if the left unloads on him the way they did on Lieberman.

As Yuval Levin writes, what is left of the proposals is unappealing to both liberals and conservatives.

In essence, what's left of the bill compels universal participation in a system that everyone agrees is a failure without reforming that system, and even exacerbates its foremost problem — the problem of exploding costs.

Conservatives in this debate have argued that the tradeoff proposed by the original Democratic concept — massive spending, massive taxes, huge cuts in Medicare that don't address the problem with the program and instead fund a new entitlement, and a proliferation of additional bureaucracy all in return for a significant socialization of the insurance system — is not a wise bargain for the country. Democrats have argued that the bargain would allow the government to control costs and would make the system more fair. In the course of working to get the votes of various senators, however, the Democrats have given up not the downsides of the bargain but the reasons for voting for it from their own point of view.

What remains, as my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Jim Capretta has argued, is a bill that requires all Americans to pay large and growing premiums to our existing private insurance companies. It then prohibits those companies from charging people differently based on their health, age, and the like, which means they will just charge everyone more. The bill has some subsidies to help people who can’t pay their premiums, but that just means that most Americans will be paying the insurance companies more and more for premiums both as individual health insurance customers and as taxpayers. The bill is basically a massive subsidy to the insurers — it is not a reform of the system.

Liberals and conservatives in recent years have tended to agree that the health-insurance system we have doesn’t make sense. Several federal government policies, and most notably the structure of Medicare and the employer tax exclusion, lead to massive cost inflation. They have disagreed over how to move away from that system — with the Left arguing we should move toward a more socialized system of insurance, and the Right arguing we should move toward a genuine individual insurance market while reforming Medicare. But what is left of this bill doesn’t pick either of those options. It just subsidizes the existing system — which both sides agree is a failure. And it does so at very great expense, while also adding on some layers of bureaucracy and complexity.

For conservatives, this version of the bill is not as bad as what the Democrats originally proposed (because it involves less abject socialization of health insurance), but it is still significantly worse than the status quo (because of the spending, taxes, bureaucracy, and new entitlement involved). For liberals, it is not as good as the bill the Democrats originally proposed, and it is also worse than the status quo — because it funnels huge amounts of money to the insurance companies they hate so much and doesn’t really change the system.

So if both liberals and conservatives think that the bill is worse than the status quo, what is the logic in voting for it? Is it just to have that signing ceremony for Obama to crow about his historic achievement? Is the show that much more important than the substance? And do you think that voters are so terribly dumb that they can't recognize a turkey when they see it? If we ever get to see what it is that Reid has put together.

Crafting legislation is supposed to be like making sausage. But this is getting to be like the sausage in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle - totally unappetizing and bad for everyone.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 2:46 PM 1 comments

Another reason to hate those energy-saving light bulbs

 

Here's a story out of Wisconsin that will give you yet another reason to hate those energy-efficient light bulbs that are being mandated all over the place.

Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don't burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.

"I've never had to put up with this in the past," said Duane Kassens, a driver from West Bend who got into a fender-bender recently because he couldn't see the lights. "The police officer told me the new lights weren't melting the snow. How is that safe?"

Many communities have switched to LED bulbs in their traffic lights because they use 90 percent less energy than the old incandescent variety, last far longer and save money. Their great advantage is also their drawback: They do not waste energy by producing heat.

Authorities in several states are testing possible solutions, including installing weather shields, adding heating elements like those used in airport runway lights, or coating the lights with water-repellent substances.

Short of some kind of technological fix, "as far as I'm aware, all that can be done is to have crews clean off the snow by hand," said Green Bay, Wis., police Lt. Jim Runge. "It's a bit labor-intensive."

In St. Paul, Minn., for example, city crews use air compressors to blow snow and ice off blocked lights.

So how much energy is spent by having employees going around to heat up the traffic lights?

I guess this is part of that green jobs stimulus we keep hearing about.

Link via John McCormack.

Labels: Energy

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:40 AM 9 comments

A beautiful sight: Nancy Pelosi in "campaign mode"

 

After having spent a year forcing her members to take tough vote after tough vote on unpopular measures, Nancy Pelosi is promising not to do that any more. Or at least until the 2010 election is over. She repeated several times to reporters what her approach to being Speaker next year was all about.

Hours before completing work for 2009 and sending her members home until January, Pelosi (D-Calif.) called reporters to her Capitol Hill office to declare that, with an election year looming, she has transitioned from legislator in chief to campaigner in chief.

"As I told the members this morning,” she said, “I’m in campaign mode … I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m in campaign mode.”

Ah, that's nice. She forced her members to vote for the $787 billion stimulus which is increasingly unpopular. She forced them to vote for a pork-filled budget for this year. She forced them to vote for a health care bill with a public option which has now been stripped out by the Senate because it's so unpopular. And she forced them to vote for cap and trade when she knew that it wouldn't pass the Senate because, repeat after me, it's so unpopular. So with that quatrofecta of ugly votes in the bag, now she is promising them that they won't have to vote for anything else that the American people dislike for about 10 months.

Pelosi began telling members privately last week that she would not bring controversial bills, such as immigration reform and “card-check,” to the House floor unless they have already passed the Senate. This is a clear early indication that her legislative plan for 2010 will be far less ambitious than the one she just completed. On Wednesday she reiterated that message publicly.

Well, except for the health care bill vote that will, if the Democrats can get Harry Reid's bill through the Senate, will come early next year. They'll have to vote on a bill that conservatives and independents don't like and which liberals don't like because it lacks a public option. The only people who seem to like it are the Democratic politicians and their flunkies who seem to believe that passing anything that they can call health care reform is part of their historic task.

Of course, those promises for next year didn't include yesterday when she forced her members to vote for a jobs bill. We haven't spent even one-half of the money from the original stimulus bill and she wants more. What could be a better admission that they know that the first stimulus wasn't doing squat to decrease unemployment?

Democrats facing tough re-election fights found themselves trying to determine if voters are angrier about 10 percent unemployment or trillions in deficits.

"My staff is looking at it," said a newly elected Democratic member from a conservative district as the clock ticked down. "If I can't make a good case that a lot of money is coming back to my district, I can't support it. I wish we had more time."

He voted "no."

What a choice. What if his constituents are angry about both unemployment and the trillions in deficits? Isn't that rather likely? Of course, there was no need for such a rush. This bill will sit around for weeks in the Senate before they get around to it. They've got a health care monstrosity to muddle past the cloture line. But Nancy Pelosi was determined to get that vote yesterday. She was going to get those votes no matter what.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stalked the floor with a tally sheet in hand, stomping into the row of seats traditionally occupied by centrist Blue Dog Democrats to find Reps. Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, fellow California Democrats, who she'd won over on healthcare.

Cardoza and Costa hadn't voted, but Pelosi won them over. Cardoza turned and put his card in to vote yes.

The only reason that they were able to pass this bill was because one Blue Dog, Brian Baird of Washington State, who just announced that he was retiring, voted for the bill. So when they don't have to worry about reelection, we can see what the Blue Dogs really believe in.

Pelosi and Steny Hoyer are promising that they'll spend next year on jobs bills and deficit reduction. Once again, their entire policy seems based on the hope that the voters are so dang stupid that they will forget this entire past year and all the unpopular votes that the House Democrats have made. And that people will be so dazzled by their attempts to address jobs and the deficit now that we'll forget how they didn't do anything to substantively address employment in 2009. And they better hope that people don't notice what they've done to the deficit.

Ah, Nancy Pelosi in full campaign mode - what a beautiful sight.

Labels: Nancy Pelosi

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:58 AM 1 comments

When a tax isn't a tax

 

You want to know a tax isn't a tax? It's when a Democrat imposes it.

Remember the countless times when Obama told us during the campaign that no family earning under $250,000 a year would see "one single dime" in taxes increases in an Obama presidency? Of course, there was that increase on cigarettes earlier in the year. That didn't count because it was on smokers and they have a filthy, unhealthy habit so they should pay more. Now we have the health care bill which is chock full of new taxes on lots of people earning under Obama's promised ceiling. The WSJ details those taxes.

Congressional Democrats have loaded up their health bills with provisions raising taxes on the middle-class by stacks and stacks of dimes. And Senate Democrats on Tuesday made clear they won't be bound by the President's vow; 54 voted to kill Idaho Republican Mike Crapo's amendment to strip the bill of taxes on families earning less than $250,000 and individuals earning less than $200,000.

Those tax hits include a mandate of up to $750 a year for Americans who fail to purchase health insurance; new levies on small businesses (many of which file individual tax returns) that don't offer health care to employees; new tax penalties on health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts; and higher taxes on medical spending, including restrictions on medical itemized deductions, as well as taxes on cosmetic surgery. A Senate Finance Committee minority staff report finds that by 2019 more than 42 million individuals and families—or 25% of all tax returns under $200,000—will on average see their taxes go up because of the Senate bill. And that's after government subsidies.

Of course, they need to stock the bill full of tax hikes because they want to claim that their bill won't add to the deficit. Well, someone has got to pay for it and there just isn't enough money to be squeezed from the rich people.

Faced with this clear evidence of supporting exactly what he promised not to do, the Democrats are trying to redefine the terms.

Democrats are instead trying to claim that some taxes really aren't taxes. The President in September engaged in a debate with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, with the President arguing that the individual mandate isn't a tax since it is for the good of America. Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow says increasing the amount of medical expenses a person must accumulate before deducting them also isn't a tax because "most Americans" don't itemize. Except the millions of middle-class Americans who do. Democrats have argued their restrictions on health savings accounts simply close "tax loopholes" and therefore also aren't new taxes.

Americans who will be paying more to the IRS can be trusted to know the difference. In April, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked if the President's tax promise applied to health care. He replied: "The statement didn't come with caveats." On the evidence in December, it did.

How lame are those excuses? How clear is it that they think we're all so stupid that we won't notices such word games? We know what the meaning of is is and we know what a tax is.

Labels: Obama, Taxes

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:19 AM 2 comments

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

One more lie that Gore has been peddling

 

Fresh from his humiliating error at Copenhagen when he claimed that the polar ice cap would be gone in 5-7 years and then was corrected by the very scientist that he was citing, here is another example of an inconvenient lie that Gore has been selling in both his movie and subsequent lectures.

Paul Reiter is a scientist who specializes in studying mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases and he writes about Gore's movie claim that, as global warming increases, malaria is moving into areas where it has never been before. The only problem is that Gore's claim is based on a total lie about the history of malaria.

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

Note that this isn't about a constructing a model to predict temperatures into the future or to reconstruct temperatures from a thousand years ago. This is straight history that could be easily verified by the briefest of research. Despite having had his error pointed out to him, and the fact that an article was published in Lancet exposing the error, Gore continues with the lie. So much for only considering peer-reviewed research.

As Reiter points out, the climate panic-mongers are fond of this argument that global warming will spread malaria to areas where it has never been before. Except that malaria has been in northern Europe before.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.

Rather than lying and fear-mongering about the spread of malaria to regions where it has never been before, it would be much more efficacious to put together a relatively inexpensive program combining DDT spraying and the use of mosquito nets. The World Health Organization now allows the use of DDT to fight malaria and nations that have adopted it have seen amazing decreases in malaria deaths.

A few years after the World Health Organization (WHO) reversed its decade’s long policy against the use of DDT, another African country will begin using it as part of its malaria eradication program.

The nation of Botswana announced it will begin using the very effective pesticide in areas hardest hit by malaria. This follows other nations like Uganda who also reversed their policy after the WHOs policy change.

In Uganda for example, their Health Ministry predicted that infant mortality due to malaria would go from 88 out of 1000 births to 10.

As Bjorn Lomborg estimates, it wouldn't cost much to adopt this sort of policy and save millions and millions of lives.

Take malaria. Most estimates suggest that if nothing is done, 3% more of the Earth's population will be at risk of infection by 2100. The most efficient global carbon cuts designed to keep average global temperatures from rising any higher than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a plan proposed by the industrialized G-8 nations) would cost the world $40 trillion a year in lost economic growth by 2100—and have only a marginal impact on reducing the at-risk malaria population. By contrast, we could spend $3 billion a year on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for new therapies—and within 10 years cut the number of malaria infections by half. In other words, for the money it would take to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

But Al Gore doesn't seem interested in such a cheap way to save so many lives. He'd prefer to continue to lie about mosquitoes and hope that the public and all the schoolchildren forced to watch his movie over and over never learn about his very convenient lie.

Labels: Environment

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:15 AM 4 comments

Charles Schumer's rude habits

 

Here's this little tidbit to let you know what are leaders in the Congress are like when they think they are out of the public eye. Senator Schumer somehow doesn't think that the rules for you and me should apply to him. He's just so much more important than we are.

Sen. Chuck Schumer loves the sound of his own voice, but it carried a bit farther than he might have liked on the US Airways shuttle from New York to Washington on Sunday.

According to a House Republican aide who happened to be seated nearby, the notoriously chatty New York Democrat referred to a flight attendant as a “bitch” after she ordered him to turn off his phone before takeoff.

Schumer and his seatmate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), were chatting on their phones before takeoff when an announcement indicated that it was time to turn off the phones.

Both senators kept talking.

According to the GOP aide, a flight attendant then approached Schumer and told him the entire plane was waiting on him to shut down his phone.

Schumer asked if he could finish his conversation. When the flight attendant said “no,” Schumer ended his call but continued to argue his case.

He said he was entitled to keep his phone on until the cabin door was closed. The flight attendant said he was obliged to turn it off whenever a flight attendant asked.

“He argued with her about the rule,” the source said. “She said she doesn’t make the rules, she just follows them.”

When the flight attendant walked away, the witness says Schumer turned to Gillibrand and uttered the B-word.

“The senator made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn’t have made, and he regrets it,” Schumer spokesman Brian Fallon told Shenanigans.

I'm sure he just regrets that his rudeness was made public.

Labels: Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:08 AM 1 comments

Policy-making doesn't begin or end with Obama

 

Yesterday, President Obama met with the Senate Democrats and told them that it was crucial for them to pass health care RIGHT NOW because they would never get this chance again. If Obama fails with this, no other president would undertake it.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House said Obama would warn Senate Democrats in the White House meeting Tuesday that this is the "last chance" to pass comprehensive reform.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told POLITICO: "If President Obama doesn't pass health reform, it’s hard to imagine another president ever taking on this Herculean task. For those whose life's work is reforming health care, this may be the last train leaving the station."

Previewing the message, Vice President Joe Biden said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe": "If health care does not pass in this Congress ... it's going to be kicked back for a generation."

This is baloney. It's part of Obama's hubris that he is The One sent to lower the oceans and heal the sick. And it is part of the liberal myopia that they are the only ones who can make policy that will help the unfortunate.

This is the constant strawman that Obama has inserted into his speeches to pretend that the only possibility is passing his preferred policies or doing nothing. Actually, conservatives are brimming with ideas to address health care. These ideas aren't the preferred liberal choice of putting the government in charge and on the hook for health care, but they are solid ideas that are just not being heard because the Republicans are in the minority. Paul Ryan is a GOP leader in the House with a multi-faceted approach to health care. But because his ideas would use market-based solutions, the liberals ignore them.

If the massive bill being crafted behind closed doors fails, there will be space for a truly bipartisan bill to be crafted with some of the best ideas from both sides. It wouldn't be a bill that would make Howard Dean happy, but it could be a bill that came from the middle rather than being crammed down on a totally unipartisan basis.

So it is safe to ignore Obama's grandiose self-referential rhetoric. If this bill fails, it would certainly be possible to craft a new sort of bill that would gain bipartisan support. Unfortunately, that is a path that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid never thought of taking.

Labels: Health, President Obama

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:16 AM 1 comments

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

What gets traded off by global warming activists

 

Since money still doesn't seem to grow on trees, it stands to reason that money spent by wealthier countries to fight global warming is money that won't be spent on other causes. The question is what is worth more to people? Would more lives would be saved if money were spent on fighting malaria or malnutrition or HIV/AIDS than on trying to reduce carbon emissions. Bjorn Lomborg has been arguing this point for a long time. He produces some of these sobering statistics today.

ake malaria. Most estimates suggest that if nothing is done, 3% more of the Earth's population will be at risk of infection by 2100. The most efficient global carbon cuts designed to keep average global temperatures from rising any higher than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a plan proposed by the industrialized G-8 nations) would cost the world $40 trillion a year in lost economic growth by 2100—and have only a marginal impact on reducing the at-risk malaria population. By contrast, we could spend $3 billion a year on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for new therapies—and within 10 years cut the number of malaria infections by half. In other words, for the money it would take to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

Many well-meaning people argue that we do not need to choose between tackling climate change and addressing these more immediate problems directly. We can, they say, do both. If only that were true. Just last week, activists from the international aid agency Oxfam reported evidence that European countries were planning to "cannibalize" existing development aid budgets and repackage them as climate-change assistance. According to Oxfam, if rich nations diverted $50 billion to climate change, at least 4.5 million children could die and 8.6 million fewer people could have access to HIV/AIDS treatment. And what would we get for that $50 billion? Well, spending that much on Kyoto-style carbon-emissions cuts would reduce temperatures by all of one-thousandth of one degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/Aids prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation. This does not mean that we should ignore global warming. But it does raise serious questions about our dogmatic pursuit of a strategy that can only be described as breathtakingly expensive and woefully ineffective.

If I were prone to ascribe motives of evil to those with whom I disagree, I would argue that perhaps the reason why those who advocate these draconian carbon cuts don't worry about the lives that could be saved if that money were spent elsewhere is due to what Anne Applebaum writes about today - the anti-human thread that runs through much of the extreme environmentalist movement.

It's true that I'm not crazy about the Kyoto climate negotiation process, of which the Copenhagen summit is the latest stage. But I'm even more disturbed by the apocalyptic and the anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement, some of which do indeed filter down to children as young as 9.

Over the years there have been many radical statements of this latter creed. In the infamous words of a National Park Service ecologist, "We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." A former leader of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals once declared that "humans have grown like a cancer; we're the biggest blight on the face of the earth." But it is a mistake to think that this is the language of only a crazy fringe.

Look, for example, at the Optimum Population Trust, a mainstream organization whose patrons include the naturalist David Attenborough, the scientist Jane Goodall and professors at Cambridge and Stanford -- and that campaigns against, well, human beings. Calling for "fewer emitters, lower emissions," the group offers members the chance to offset the pollution that they generate, merely by existing, through the purchase of family-planning devices in poor countries. Click on its PopOffsets calculator to see what I mean: It reckons that every $7 spent on family planning generates one ton fewer carbon emissions. Since the average American generates 20.6 tons of carbon annually, it will cost $144.20 -- $576.80 for a family of four -- to buy enough condoms to prevent the births of, say, 0.4 Kenyans.

The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: that human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Weapons of mass destruction should perhaps be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions. Perhaps they should be encouraged?

I don't think that the environmentalists advocating massive carbon-emissions cuts back to 19th century levels actually wish for people to die of malaria or malnutrition. But they seem not to understand the concept of tradeoffs. They think perhaps that we can afford everything desirable if only the rich countries would cough up the money. But back in the real world tradeoffs matter. And we do have limited money. And Lomborg is exactly right. We could improve more people's lives by fighting malaria and malnutrition than by crippling our economies in order to lower temperatures by mere fractions of degrees.

Labels: Environment

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:57 AM 2 comments

The Democrats' lack of confidence in their own bill

 

If the Democrats had confidence that they were crafting a great bill on health care that would truly have the support of the American people, they wouldn't be so rushed to try to finish the thing, come Hell or high water, before the calendar shifts to an election year. They would be proud to campaign on their support for their historic bill and to make the election a referendum on their ideas. The fact that they're rushing everything through in back rooms tells us something.

Rich Lowry points to their lack of confidence in their own bill as he terms the Democrats new "impatient style" in politics.

This isn't the behavior of a self-confident majority secure in the knowledge that history is on its side. In fact, it's panicked, weaselly and willfully careless. The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of the "paranoid style" in American politics. Obama Democrats have perfected the "impatient style." Reid's latest exertions fit the pattern of a headlong rush to a slapdash social democracy, justified by whatever arguments happen to be at hand and effected by whatever means necessary.

Reid acts like a hunted man for good reason. The RealClearPolitics average has 53.5 percent opposed to the Democrats' health-care plan and 37.7 favoring it. A CNN poll last week found the public against it by nearly 2-1. The numbers have gotten worse as the Senate has debated the measure in all its varied splendor -- the tax hikes, the Medicare cuts, the abortion funding. Reid is like the tormented narrator of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum": With the clock's every tick, a vast blade promising doom swings nearer.

It's astonishing that with 60 votes in the Senate and an 81-vote majority in the House, Democrats have still managed to push the health bill to the point of failure. When significant headwinds developed in August, the prudent play was obvious -- scale the bill back, pick off a few Republicans and settle for 3/4 or less of a loaf. They couldn't bring themselves to do it, preferring to work with duct tape and baling wire to try to hold together an unwieldy bill that isn't paid for and doesn't reduce costs as advertised.

Reid's struggle getting to 60 makes some liberals fear that America has become "ungovernable." In other words, it isn't putty in their grasping little hands. Unfortunately for them, the Founders created a balky system resistant to precipitate change. It is designed to frustrate ideologically drunken (and perhaps temporary) majorities insistent on passing sweeping, unpopular legislation. Reid's difficulty is exactly the way James Madison would have wanted it.

If the health-care bill is necessary and wise, it will withstand a temporary defeat. Democrats could campaign on it around the country next year. They could rebuild public support, turning around the polls. They could enhance their majority in the House and the Senate, bringing more Democrats to Washington determined to pass it. That's how you usually pass historic legislation in a system naturally inclined to the status quo.

But they know that they don't have public support and so are vainly hoping that they can pass this monstrosity and that Americans will forget about the stimulus porkapalooza, the attempt to pass cap and trade, and this dreadful health care Frankenstein of a bill by November of 2010. Do they really think that American memories are that short?

Labels: Democrats

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:56 AM 2 comments

Harry Reid as the maestro of the Senate's Kabuki Theater

 

They make it so hard to teach a class of high school sophomores on how a bill becomes a law. We are supposed to have this committee system where the subcommittees hold hearings on the viability and ramifications of a certain proposal and then it goes up to the committee which votes. Instead we get minimal hearings and a bunch of backroom bargaining and Max Baucus emerges with a health care bill. Eventually, they vote that out onto the Senate floor where they are supposed to be debating the bill, proposing amendments, and eventually voting on the original bill plus amendments or minus the parts that have been voted out. Instead we get some debating and amendments passed, but it all means nothing.

The real work is still being done behind closed doors in no-smoke-filled back rooms. Harry Reid comes up with another amendment, fills it with some language that will never come to pass such as promising extensive cuts in Medicare, then sends it to the CBO, and gets back reports that acknowledge that those cuts will never happen, but the CBO still does an analysis that both sides trumpet as helping them. Of course, the analysis is faulty to begin with because of the assumptions about Medicare cuts that everyone knows won't happen.

Then Harry Reid will write some massive Manager's Amendment. That can hold everything from brand new provisions that have never been debated to provisions that cancel out whatever has already been voted on. For example, Ben Nelson insists that he will vote against whatever health care bill emerges unless it contains Stupak-like language to bar federal payments for abortion. That was voted down on the Senate floor, but everyone assumes that Reid will insert that language into the final Manager's Amendment in order to get Nelson's vote on the final bill. Those who voted against the language on the Senate floor will now vote for the entire bill, but they can tell their constituents that they voted against it before they voted for it.

And, contrary to the entire legislative procedure that has been set up to provide for reasoned and informed analysis of legislation, Reid will come up with something in a few days, written in secret, and then rush, rush to get the entire thing voted on with minimal debate.

Then the rumors are that the House, which has already approved a much more liberal bill, will certainly vote to accept the exact same bill that Harry Reid produced in the Senate.

And we all know that few, if any, of these guys will actually read the final result of the bill. They'll be voting on some bill that will be over a thousand pages long with some massive Reid-Amendment that was thrown together at the last minute, and they'll be voting on it without know all the little provisions that are lurking in paragraph 389, subsection C, clause 4. But it will be left to some unelected bureaucrats to interpret this stuff and decide how health care will be provided for the rest of us.

All the hot air emitted in the debates over this or that amendment or provision will be wasted since it all will come down to whatever Harry Reid has written for him by his staff. All the posturing by liberals that they won't stand for this or that unless they get a public option or pay for abortions won't mean anything because Joe Lieberman's veto vote will outweigh their threats of a veto since no one believes that, when it comes right down to it, that they would vote against the final product. It's all Kabuki Theater. If this version of the play is eventually produced, who would have thought that our entire health care system will have been written by the people working in Harry Reid's office, not all those posturing senators appearing on Sunday shows. It won't be ObamaCare or PelosiCare, but ReidCare. Shudder.

Labels: Harry Reid, Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:17 AM 0 comments

Monday, December 14, 2009

Some other ideas for increasing employment

 

Since the Democrats have already tried massive Keynesian spending to fight unemployment and come up empty, what can they do now? More of the same? They can try more spending, but it seems doubtful that it would have a different impact than the original stimulus.

Here are some other ideas of how to increase employment.

Greg Mankiw argues that it is time to try tax cuts instead of just another Keynesian stimulus. He notes that there is plenty of evidence to contradict the Democrats' arguments that Keynesian spending will do more to stimulate the economy than tax cuts.

One piece of evidence comes from Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. In work with her husband, David H. Romer, written at the University of California, Berkeley, just months before she took her current job, Ms. Romer found that tax policy has a powerful influence on economic activity.

According to the Romers, each dollar of tax cuts has historically raised G.D.P. by about $3 — three times the figure used in the administration report. That is also far greater than most estimates of the effects of government spending.

Other recent work supports the Romers’ findings. In a December 2008 working paper, Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago apply state-of-the-art statistical tools to United States data to compare the effects of deficit-financed spending, deficit-financed tax cuts and tax-financed spending. They report that “deficit-financed tax cuts work best among these three scenarios to improve G.D.P.”

My Harvard colleagues Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna have recently conducted a comprehensive analysis of the issue. In an October study, they looked at large changes in fiscal policy in 21 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They identified 91 episodes since 1970 in which policy moved to stimulate the economy. They then compared the policy interventions that succeeded — that is, those that were actually followed by robust growth — with those that failed.

The results are striking. Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending.

Meanwhile, Charles Lane has three good ideas of ways to stimulate the economy.

The first idea is to repeal sugar price supports which drive up the price of sugar in this country and drive manufacturers overseas to avoid the higher sugar prices in the U.S.

U.S. candy-makers and other food processors cite sugar costs as a major factor in their industry's recent job losses -- including 70,000 between 1997 and 2004.

In 2006, the Commerce Department estimated that the sugar program cost three confectionery manufacturing jobs for each job it saved in sugar growing and harvesting.

His second proposal is to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act which requires that all federal jobs pay the "prevailing wage." In effect, that means that they have to pay the union rate.

A large staff at the Labor Department calculates prevailing wages using a formula skewed to reflect union pay rates. This inflates the cost of labor on public construction by an average of about 10 percent, according to a 2008 study by the Beacon Hill Institute of Suffolk University in Boston. The added cost to taxpayers was $8.6 billion in 2007, the study found.

Repealing Davis-Bacon would enhance the employment impact of Obama's proposed infrastructure spending. In fact, the president has the power to suspend the law by declaring a national emergency. If the job crisis doesn't qualify, what does?

At the very least, Congress could change the size of covered projects from the absurdly low minimum established seven decades ago, $2,000, to a more plausible $1 million. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that would free up half a billion dollars over five years.

And finally, Lane proposes lowering the minimum wage which forces cuts in employment at the lower end.

But study after study has shown that this supposed benefit to the poor prices low-skilled workers out of entry-level jobs. It was unwise to keep raising the cost of hiring them in a recession.

Economist David Neumark, co-author of a definitive book on minimum wages, said in a June Wall Street Journal op-ed that the July increase probably killed 300,000 jobs that would have otherwise gone to teenagers and young adults.

As Charles Lane writes, if the politicians really cared about increasing employment, these are three things they would be advocating. But there are entrenched special interests that would oppose any such move. The sugar lobby would fight lifting the price supports and the unions would veto any repeal of Davis-Bacon or the minimum wage increase. And the politicians would rather cater to the special interests than take an action that would benefit many instead of the few.

Labels: Economics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 2:32 PM 1 comments

The student who helps edit the professional journalists

 

There's a student at George Washington University who is keeping the pros on their toes. Daniel Lippman fires off dozens of emails a day to all sorts of journalists pointing out mistakes in their typos, grammatical, and punctuation errors in their writing. And they're grateful.

The 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University has become the Washington press corps’ independent fact checker, copy editor and link distributor extraordinaire. His e-mails almost always lead off with a soupçon of praise, such as “In your excellent article today,” followed by a link to the story and polite notification of a mistake, anything from a broken hyperlink to a misspelled name. He offers the correction — “It’s ‘Haass,’ not ‘Haas,’” he wrote in regard to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations — and often a link as proof. He signs off coolly: “Best, Daniel.”

He has sent notes correcting typos in White House pool reports and notes praising reporters’ appearances on television. Those who e-mail him also open themselves up to grammatical corrections.

Lippman mops up after the Beltway’s hacks so consistently that it’s a wonder he hasn’t yet flunked out of college. Scarcely a wanton apostrophe or misspelled name will appear in a story without Lippman’s quickly issuing forth an e-mail. — Given that there are still just 24 hours in the day, one has to wonder if Lippman has found some rip in the time-space continuum.

“There isn’t really a week that goes by in which I don’t get an e-mail from him with a comment or suggestion on an article I’ve written,” says Huffington Post writer Sam Stein. “Next to my immediate family, I’d say he’s my most consistent follower.”

“He’s very quick and diligent about reading our material as soon as we post it,” says New York Times Chief Political Correspondent Adam Nagourney, who notes that Lippman has also become a good source for movie recommendations.

“If he sends me as many tips as he does, I can only imagine how busy he must be contacting his wide diaspora of other journalists,” adds The Atlantic’s James Fallows.

While this is a sweet story about one student's ability to help out the professionals, you have to wonder about what those professional editors who are supposed to provide such an extra layer of skills to professional journalists are doing to earn their salaries if some 19-year old kid keeps finding mistakes that they missed.

And if all these professional journalists are so happy to hear from a kid telling them about their typos, I'm sure that they're super glad to hear from bloggers who write about their mistakes in content. Right?

Labels: The media

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:44 AM 0 comments

The one government program that Democrats will cut

 

Everything in the federal budget always seems sacrosanct, but there is one program that the Democrats are willing to cut - the tiny vouchers program in Washington, D.C. They've been gunning for it since they took over, but, after pressure last summer, they promised to take a look at it and examine whether it was successful. But now they've put in the omnibus spendings bill a provision to defund any new scholarships. Even the Washington Post is not happy with them.

IT IS DISTRESSINGLY clear that congressional leaders never really meant it when they said there would be a fair hearing to determine the future of the District's federally funded school voucher program. How else to explain language tucked away in the mammoth omnibus spending bill that would effectively kill the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program?

Deep in the folds of the thousand-page 2010 spending bill, which wraps together six bills, is language that (thankfully) would continue funding for students currently in the program but close it down for new students. Also included are onerous requirements about testing and site visits.

Contrary to claims of this being a compromise, the measure is really slow death for a program that provides $7,500 annually to low-income students to attend private schools. The number of students participating in the program has already shrunk from more than 1,700 to 1,319, and the nonprofit that administers the scholarships has said that it may have to pull out because the conditions would be untenable. It's also possible that some schools that now enroll voucher students could be forced to shut down.

Key lawmakers in the appropriation process have been, at best, disingenuous about their intentions, thus placing the program's advocates in their current no-win situation. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) made encouraging comments about allowing new students but, despite his clout as majority whip, did nothing to make that happen. Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) said that he didn't want to usurp local control, even as the mayor, the schools chancellor and a majority of the D.C. Council lobbied for the acceptance of new students.

Keep in mind that the legislators are happy to tuck in all sorts of earmarks for their own state's education programs. Over at Heritage, you can check out some of the education pork in the new spendings bill.

* Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa appears to have secured lots of pork for the Hawkeye state. The largest earmark is $7.3 million for the “Harkin Grant” program which subsidizes school construction and modernization.
* The Utah-based “I Won’t Cheat” Foundation for anti-steroids education receives $250,000.
* The Lincoln Center in New York City receives $800,000 for a jazz program.
* The Rodel Foundation of Delaware gets $150,000 for its Parent Leadership Institute.
* A dropout prevention program in Scottsdale, Arizona gets $150,000.
* College football fans will notice that there is even some BCS-pork in the Omnibus. Fans at Boise State and the University of Iowa can celebrate $465,000 in education earmarks at their bowl games this year!

As long as the federal government is funding anti-steroids education in Utah and jazz in New York City, surely we could help some inner city students in the nation's capital get a better chance at education. It seems that the NEA is getting value for all the money it spends on education. They're number one in interest group spending on national political contributions. And they have said ixnay on anything resembling vouchers so the D.C. program has to go.

Labels: Education

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:53 AM 2 comments

Peter Orszag's fairy tales on health care savings

 

John Fund traces how OMB director Peter Orszag convinced the Obama administration that it was possible to reap so many savings from cutting waste and fraud that they could fund expanding federal health care. It was never real - just his own fantasy.

ObamaCare's core promise—better quality care for everyone at lower costs—is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control.

As Obama budget director Peter Orszag put it at a revealing media breakfast earlier this month, the Senate bill does everything the experts recommend to "get at the underlying drivers of health-care costs." While he admitted that "we don't know enough" to produce results right away, the key is to encourage "continuous improvement" through pilot programs and demonstration projects. Cost containment will actually take "years to decades," Mr. Orszag conceded.

The torch was then passed to Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic Monthly, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and editorial writers for the New England Journal of Medicine, among others. Last week the New Yorker ran a 5,000-word apologia from Atul Gawande, who likewise owned up to the fact that there is "no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs," only "a battery of small scale experiments." Keep in mind, this is an argument in favor of ObamaCare.

They might have piped up earlier: What they're finally admitting is that all the grandiose talk about "bending the curve" used for months to sell ObamaCare really comes down to their hope that bureaucratic improvisation will make a difference over the long term. Yet the liabilities of the greatest social spending program in American history will be added to the budget almost immediately, and what happens if Mr. Orszag's technocratic revolution doesn't work as promised? Or rather, when it doesn't?

Forgotten in ObamaCare's march-to-the-sea campaign is that during the transition and early on, the White House was divided on whether to pursue health reform at all. Opponents included Larry Summers, worried about the economy and deficits, and David Axelrod, worried about the politics. Another faction led by Tom Daschle preached from the conventional social-equity church of liberalism.

Mr. Orszag proposed another option, citing academic research observing that as much as 30% of health spending is "waste" that doesn't affect outcomes. He argued the country could save $700 billion a year without harming quality—more than enough to pay for universal coverage.

Thus cost control migrated from Orszag theory to free political lunch. Mr. Gawande wrote an influential New Yorker essay on the topic in June, and the theme shaped both the case for a new entitlement and especially the appeal to potential opponents in business.

Unfortunately, few analysts believe his math.

But then Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf testified in July that "the curve is being raised," given that ObamaCare lacks "the sort of fundamental changes" necessary to tamp down costs. Meanwhile, it became clear that Mr. Orszag's favored research was always more nuanced and qualified than his pose of papal infallibility. One of his main gurus, Jonathan Skinner, mused recently that "the key lesson" from a new study challenging some of his findings "is how little we know about the science of health-care delivery."

Well, sure. A field as dynamic and innovative as U.S. medicine, in which costs are largely driven by new technologies and better ways of caring for patients, is rife with complexities and uncertainties. But no one bothered to strike that note of caution when Washington was hopped up on a cost-control gambit that was too painless to be true.

The new cost-control apologists concede that there isn't any actual plan for controlling costs: Throw enough speculative policies against the wall, they say, and some breakthrough will stick. Yet Mr. Orszag's no-less-confident predecessors spent decades trying to pull down Medicare spending with little to no success. Technocracy rarely if ever works as intended. Mr. Gawande points to the case study of U.S. farm policy, and if politically sacrosanct agriculture subsidies and rural price-supports are the best to hope for, then what's the worst?

Oh, that's encouraging - that health care will be conducted like federal agricultural subsidies that are created and never die.

Ironically, Orszag used to be the head of the CBO before Obama tapped him to run OMB. I wonder if he'd be presenting honest evaluations of all these Democratic plans if he were still in charge of the CBO. Or is it the move to the Executive Branch that led him to believe in such fairy tales?

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:38 AM 0 comments

The cost-cutting myth of the Democrats' plans on health care

 

The Democrats have been claiming that their health care reforms would save money, but it's all bogus. Remember when the Republicans had proposed a cut in the increase in Medicare in the 1990s and the Democrats slammed them for making cuts in health care and never explained that it was merely cuts in the rate of growth? Well, as Robert Samuelson explains, that's part of the Democrats' plan today.

In 2009, national health spending will total an estimated $2.5 trillion, or 17.7 percent of gross domestic product. By 2019, it's projected to rise to $4.67 trillion under present policies, or 22.1 percent of GDP. With CAP's [Center for American Progress] "savings," it rises a little less sharply to $4.49 trillion, or 21.3 percent of GDP, according to Harvard economist David Cutler, the study's co-author who provided these figures. Similarly, family health insurance premiums rise from 19 percent of median family income in 2009 to 25 percent in 2019 under present policies and 23 percent with CAP's "savings."

Even such a cut in the rate of growth, government spending on health care will still be out of control.

The point is simple: Even with highly optimistic assumptions, health spending remains out of control. It absorbs more of government, business and family budgets. Higher health spending would put pressure on future budget deficits, already projected to total about $9 trillion over the next decade. If new taxes and Medicare "savings" are real, they could be used exclusively to pay down deficits, not finance new spending.

But many may not be real. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, gave the various health bills a "failing grade" and said they wouldn't "control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care." Quoted in Newsweek, Dr. Delos Cosgrove, head of the Cleveland Clinic, said much the same. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, doubts the cost-saving provisions touted by CAP would save much money. He's also skeptical that Congress, facing complaints from hospitals and a squeeze on services, would allow all the Medicare reimbursement cuts to take effect. True, Congress has permitted some reimbursement reductions to occur but has repeatedly blocked the Sustainable Growth Rate adjustment for doctors, which most resembles the new proposals.

Health cost increases might spontaneously recede, but history suggests skepticism. The relentless advances reflect an open-ended insurance and delivery system that gives neither patients nor providers any reason to restrain spending. To attack costs first would be politically challenging. It would require admitting that all good things are not possible simultaneously and that the uninsured already receive much medical care. It would require genuine bipartisanship, not just a scramble for a few Republican votes. And it would require stronger measures to dismantle a fee-for-service delivery system that now rewards more, not better, care. That's a demanding and realistic approach; Obama's is wishful thinking.

The Democrats still want to claim that they can deal more federal health care for more people while still cutting costs. Sure. As if the federal government ever saved money on any of their massive programs.

If there are such available savings in Medicare that Congress is willing to vote for, let's see them do it now. Then, after we've seen the savings we can think about taking on such a massive expansion. We'll be waiting a long time, since they'll never vote for the type of savings that are truly necessary to make.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:26 AM 0 comments