House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership are frantically trying to find enough votes to pass their giant 2,032 page health care legislation this weekend. But before Speaker Pelosi and liberals in Congress pass their big bill, the American taxpayers should be fully aware of the full price tag of this monster.
As Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true cost is not the net spending on only the coverage related provisions ($897 billion) but rather the total gross spending for the coverage provisions ($1.05 trillion) as well as any additional spending in the bill (approximately $217 billion). That would raise the plan’s price tag to about $1.5 trillion when including the roughly $210 billion cost of the “doc fix” is included. The “doc fix” refers to the undoing of the flawed Medicare payment update formula, which Congress created but has routinely stopped from being enforced. Under current law, that formula would result in a 20 percent reduction in doctors’ pay under the Medicare program. Continue reading…
House Minority Leader John Boehner and his House Republican colleagues have just unveiled a 230 page “Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute” to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s massive 2032 page health care bill (H.R. 3962). Voting on the substitute and the main bill in the U.S. House of Representatives could begin as early as Saturday, November 7, 2009.
In contrast to H.R. 3962, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that the Substitute would reduce average health insurance premiums ( by 7 to 10 percent in the small group market and 5 to 8 percent in the individual market) and would reduce the federal deficit by $68 billion over ten years. Continue reading…
Proponents of global warming legislation or an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions argue that climate change could affect the safety, not only in the United States, but in other countries as more natural disasters will lead to increased global conflict. But the claim that warming causes increased tension and causes wars is misleading according to recent testimony from Heritage analyst James Carafano:
The global climate has always been changing. Adapting to these changes and human efforts to manage their surrounding environment is a permanent feature of human competition. The environment does not cause wars–it is how humans respond to their environment that causes conflicts.
Continue reading…
The Guardian reports today that the International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, but Tehran continues to stonewall requests for relevant information and drag its feet at the sputtering talks over its illicit nuclear weapons program. According to a dossier prepared by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of a “two-point implosion” device that could enable Iran to eventually install small nuclear warheads on its ballistic missiles. One European official said that “It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material.” The article reported on speculation that the Pakistani nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan or a Russian weapons expert may have helped the Iranians to master the synchronized high explosive detonations necessary to build the warhead.
This revelation is one more reason, if any more were needed, to doubt the validity of the controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that assessed that Iran had stopped its nuclear weaponization efforts in 2003. If Tehran already had perfected such a sophisticated technology, then it could afford to suspend further experiments while it amassed the necessary quantities of high-enriched uranium, long regarded as the “long pole in the tent” and the most challenging aspect of building a nuclear weapon. Continue reading…
Cato Adjunct Scholar Aaron Yelowitz reports:
Health care proposals moving through Congress would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would impose price controls on health insurance (“community rating”) that would limit insurers’ ability to offer lower premiums to low-risk enrollees.
Those provisions would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. According to the Urban Institute, many young people could see their premiums double, whereas premiums for older adults could be cut in half.
Read the whole report, here.
As the economy sputters and falters the questions coming up time and again are: What should Obama do? What can Congress do?
They’ve tried spending their way to prosperity and as today’s jobs numbers show, 3.5 million jobs lost since Obama took office and an unemployment rate that shot up to 10.2 percent is damning evidence, turning the propaganda ploy of arguing for 600,000 stimulus-created jobs into a brazen farce.
They’ve tried to play Washington games with certain sectors and it didn’t work. Cash for clunkers gave car sales a quick pop, but much of it went to imports and in any event it evaporated as quickly as it appeared. Whatever help the first-time homebuyer tax credit provided the housing market is now spent.
Forget what failed in the past, what can they do now? Apropos the health care vote scheduled in the House for Saturday: First, do no harm. Continue reading…
Last week former President Zelaya of Honduras signed an agreement with the interim government of Roberto Micheletti that cleared the way for ending the constitutional crisis in that Central American country. Key to the agreement was a provision leaving it up to the Congress to vote on Mr. Zelaya’s possible restoration to office.
Yesterday, the State Department’s official spokesman reiterated, ‘This is a Honduran problem that will have a Honduran solution.”
The Administration must continue to adhere to this position and not backtrack. It needs to move swiftly to restore normal relations, release funding for electoral observers, and unblock foreign assistance so a degree of normality can return to Honduras. Continue reading…
Editor’s Note: On Wednesday, The Heritage Foundation published a blog in The Foundry entitled “Concerns Over Nuclear Waste Importation Should Not Lead to Ban.” You can read it here. Congressman Bart Gordon, a sponsor of the legislation, asked us for the opportunity to respond. While we may have policy differences, an open and transparent debate on these matters is essential to good governance. We welcome Congressman Gordon’s response below.
Concerns Over Nuclear Waste Importation SHOULD Lead to Ban
While I was encouraged to see the Heritage Foundation is taking an interest in the Radioactive Import Deterrence Act, the organization’s recent posting on its blog, The Foundry, demonstrates a misunderstanding of the fundamental goals of this legislation. Continue reading…
Al Gore has had a busy week. First, the former vice president’s renewable energy investments received some serious backing from the taxpayer as $3.4 billion stimulus package would be allocated for smart grid investment. $560 million went to Silver Spring Networks, a company Gore’s venture capitalist firm invested in, that makes hardware and software to improve efficiency in the nation’s electricity grid. That’s not the only way Gore is profiting from the global warming debate. On November 3rd he published his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which details the need for more wind, solar and biofuels, improved energy efficiency and the use of offsets and trees to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere – among other things.
Gore stresses that the cost of doing nothing is much higher than any dire economic projections that would result from capping greenhouse gas emissions, or as Gore likes to call it, “global warming pollution.” To gain support, Gore paints pictures of rising sea levels that will swallow up islands and devastate the global economy. But this “opportunity cost” of doing nothing must be discounted by the actual effect the “doing something” will have. Doing something like cap-and-trade, does not mitigate climate change entirely, if at all, and therefore the (negative) opportunity foregone (i.e., the expected climate change) is not the full benefit. Continue reading…
Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK) tells the New York Times:
The worst thing we could do in a recession is raise taxes, and this bill does just that. … Finally, I do not believe that the possibility for taxpayer-funded abortion has been clearly and emphatically removed from this legislation.
Boren is dead on. The House bill raises taxes by $700 billion at a time when our unemployment rate is already 10.2%.
And contrary to the President’s promise, the current House bill also enables taxpayer funding for elective abortions.
No wonder Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refuses to let House Democrats go home and listen to their constituents before voting on her health bill.
Today at 2pm the House Rules Committee will meet to consider the rule for H.R. 3962 , the Affordable Health Care for America Act. As of this morning 104 amendments had been filed with the Rules Committee for consideration. Republican’s have filed 87 amendments and Democrats have filed 17. The debate in the Rules Committee and a final vote could continue well into this evening.
The rule being debated today will not only cover HR 3962 but will also apply to HR 3961, the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act, also known as the Doc Fix. This is a procedural gimmick that allows the costly Doc Fix bill to be combined with H.R. 3962 after the bill passes the House. This allows Congressional Leaders to avoid a stand alone vote on Doc Fix in the Senate. A few weeks ago, a $247 billion dollar Doc Fix bill failed in the Senate with 13 Democrats opposing ending debate on the bill. Continue reading…
The heat is happening behind closed doors as the U.S. House prepares for a Saturday showdown vote on health care. Access is everything. By keeping Members of Congress in Washington, D.C., this weekend, Democratic leaders keep them away from angry constituents back in their home states, where the Members normally would depart from Friday to Monday. (Note: The tactics aren’t different from what Republicans sometimes used when they held the majority.)
The first step is to keep Congress in town. The second is to keep them monitored and available for whenever leaders want to summons them for backroom meetings—sometimes to discuss and sometimes to pressure and browbeat and offer deals. A “buddy system” is sometimes assigned so a fellow Congressman from the party’s whip team keeps tab on each undecided member’s whereabouts, their cell and other private phone numbers, the places they tend to hangout between votes, and similar information.
Members don’t like to be found and pressured. As one speaker noted at Thursday’s “House Call” tea party event at the U.S. Capitol: “There may be some members hiding right now. They may be in the basement. They may be in the cafeteria, pretending they’re not a Congressman.” Continue reading…
When Superman rescued a small boy who was plummeting toward the depths of Niagara Falls, it was pretty clear that the kid was in danger and that, but for Superman’s ability to fly, the boy would have faced certain death. It goes without saying that if the boy were not in danger, Clark Kent wouldn’t have donned his cape and flown to the rescue.
Well, back to the surreality of modern American politics, it appears that the purported success of President Barack Obama’s Super Stimulus is as fictional as the Man of Steel, but many of the jobs that Obama claimed to save weren’t in need of rescue.
That, of course, didn’t stop his administration from playing hero in California and taking credit for saving some 26,156 jobs, all at the cost of $268.5 million.
Continue reading…
The United States has a juvenile crime problem that far exceeds the juvenile crime problems of other Western countries. Over the years, state legislatures have responded to this increase in the volume and severity of juvenile crime by providing for sentences that effectively punish offenders, incapacitate them, and deter serious offenses. They have determined by an overwhelming majority that fulfilling their duty to protect their citizens requires making available life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders.
The sentence stands up to constitutional scrutiny. All state supreme courts and federal courts that have considered the question have concluded that life without parole for juvenile offenders does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court’s proportionality standard—the highest level of scrutiny it has applied to non-capital punishment—does not prohibit states from punishing murder and other serious offenses with lengthy prison terms; the Court has said that judges should second-guess state legislatures’ determinations of criminal punishment only in the rarest cases where the punishment is wholly disproportionate to the harm of the offense. Continue reading…
The Obama Administration ironically recognized the legitimacy of Iran’s thuggish Islamist regime only a few months before the Iranian people renounced its legitimacy in a spontaneous popular backlash against the stolen June elections.This has led to considerable confusion and growing bitterness within Iran’s embattled opposition movement. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, the Iranian protesters who chanted “O ba ma!” (“He with us” in Farsi) in demonstrations against the Ahmadinejad regime last summer, now are chanting, “Obama, Obama—either you’re with them or with us.”
The courageous Iranians risking their lives to support the “Green Revolution” opposition movement have been increasingly disillusioned by President Obama’s hesitant and half-hearted rhetoric regarding their struggle for democracy and human rights. They fear that Obama, in a rush to sign a flawed deal on Iran’s nuclear program, has turned a deaf ear to their calls for freedom in a misguided effort to appease the regime that oppresses them. They are right to be concerned about the Obama Administration’s myopic policies. Continue reading…
The Department of Labor announced today the economy shed another 190 thousand jobs in October, pushing the unemployment rate to 10.2 percent and the running Obama jobs deficit to 5.7 million. Earlier in the week the Obama Administration released figures purporting to show the Obama stimulus had saved or created 640,000 thousand jobs. Only in Washington can jobs be saved by the thousands while being lost by the millions.
So far in his term in office, employment has dropped by about 3.5 million jobs, yet Obama repeatedly promised he would create 3.5 million jobs if only we would elect him President and give him control over the nation’s economic policies beginning with the enactment of a massive economic stimulus package. The President’s jobs promise means total employment should be at least 138.6 million by 2010, leaving him with a total deficit to close between now and December of 2010 of 7.7 million jobs. By his own standard, these results attest that Obama’s policies are failing. Continue reading…
Today the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that despite all of the Obama administration’s job creation claims, unemployment has risen to 10.2%. Instead of focusing on job creation, the left in Congress continues to pursue other priorities like their $1.5 trillion health care plan which is partially finance by job killing employer mandates. See chart below:
Continue reading…
In his September address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama stated he would be the last President to take on health care. Perhaps, but that may be at the cost of everything else, including education.
By expanding Medicaid in the health care bill, Congress will set off political tornadoes across the country that will leave governors and state legislators to clean up afterward. The math is simple. State revenues are still in a slump and will continue for a least a few more years. The two largest state and local expenditures are education and Medicaid. If you have a balance a budget, which nearly every state does, and you cannot touch the entitlement to Medicaid, where will you turn to fill the budget gap? There will be little choice than to go after education. Continue reading…
Last week the Obama administration issued a report purporting to show that the President’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan had saved or created exactly 640,329 jobs. Such a precise number for such a fuzzy concept as jobs “saved or created” immediately raised doubts about the veracity of the report in any honest American’s mind.
And since that report was issued, a once compliant press has filed story after story tearing the credibility of the Obama administration’s job creation claims to shreds. Just enter the words “stimulus”, “jobs”, and “report” in a Google News search and these are just some of the headlines you will receive: Continue reading…
On November 9th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments challenging the constitutionality of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences. In preparation for oral arguments, JLWOP: Faces & Cases will be an on-going series on The Foundry that will tell real stories about juvenile offenders who are currently serving LWOP sentences.
Defendant: Donald Torres (14)
Victims: Harry Godt, Jennifer Godt, Jon Godt (age four), Jennifer Godt (age one and a half)
Crimes: Four counts of first degree murder
Crime date: February 24, 1989 in Middletown, Delaware
Summary
Donald Torres broke into his neighbor’s house, doused the floor with kerosene, set the house ablaze, and watched as the flames spread, killing a family of four.
Facts
Shortly before midnight on February 24, 1989, 14-year-old Donald Torres broke into the home of his neighbors, the Godts. He found a can of kerosene, spread the liquid over the kitchen floor and stairway leading to the bedrooms, and ignited the kerosene with a lighter and some newspaper. Continue reading…
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