I see there's a bunch of numbers floating around along the lines of "X thousand people died because they didn't have health insurance".Nobody in the United States of America has died because they lacked health insurance. Ever. I defy anyone to produce a valid death certificate where the cause of death is "no health insurance."In fact, the absence of insurance is not a serious impediment to obtaining medical care in this country, thanks to laws concerning emergency rooms, MediCare and MedicAid programs, private charities, and the compassion of hospitals, physicians, nurses, and government funded EMTs. In all the horror stories that have been bandied about, including stories about people losing their insurance, I have yet to find one that (after fact-checking) sustains an assertion of life-saving medical care refused because of a lack of insurance - except in countries with socialist health care systems like Canada and Britain. In the U.S., however, it hardly ever happens if at all.The number, whatever it is, and the claim of which it is a part, is a lie - but that shouldn't surprise us, coming from liberals.
Jobless claims fall more than expected! For almost four months I've been seeing headlines like this one. I'm not sure exactly what they expect, frankly, but the AP, Yahoo, CNN, and all the rest keep touting this kind of news. In any event, I'm not at all clear on why repeated failures by their bevy of economists to accurately predict anything should somehow make me happy.What's really strange, however, is that the number of people unemployed keeps going up, along with the rate of unemployment, even though they have been systemically reducing the size of the labor force they used to calculate the unemployment rate. Long term, systemic unemployment is by some calculations actually closer to 17.5% while the Bureau of Labor Statistics says it's 10.2%. Yet the "stimulus" was supposed to keep us from going above 8.25% unemployment with the peak hitting somewhere in late August. They told us we had to pass that thousand-page monstrosity of pork right away to save the economy - didn't even have time to read it, the need was so urgent.Now, because we expected 525,000 people to lose jobs and only 502,000 did, we're supposed to be happy and think the "stimulus" is working. We get ridiculous claims like "640,000 jobs saved!" without thinking what that means. If an $800 billion stimulus bill "saved" 640,000 jobs, that figures to about $1.25 million per job - we'd be money ahead just giving a $100,000 check to everybody who loses a job. Many of the so called "jobs saved" were jobs that weren't going to be lost. A high percentage of them are government jobs. And a lot of them are temporary jobs of 3-6 months.Now, with this health reform/destruction act passed by the house and an energy tax bill looming as well, businesses are hedging their bets as best they can. Until they know how much their cost of doing business is going to go up, they can't make a long-term commitment to an employee. They're not going to start hiring any time soon. Sure, productivity is up, but it has to be. Thanks to increases in taxes and other costs coming down the pike, those increases in productivity will not translate into higher wages or increased employment. They'll translate into more moeny confiscated by the government through taxes. Even their give-aways are taxed (yeah, that $4,000 you got for your clunker is "income" and you will be taxed on it).Look out, folks. The worst is yet to come.
A brief naval action off the coast of Korea has everyone on that peninsula a bit edgy. Apparently a North Korean patrol ship crossed into South Korean waters. Warning shots were fired, the North Korean ship returned fire, and the South Koreans shifted from warning to contact, setting the North Korean ship on fire and sending it limping back north. There were no South Korean casualties. Brinkmanship along the 38th parallel continues - and Obama thinks we can just talk through this.For a fair expression of my views regarding the Ft. Hood terrorist - and I think that is the appropriate label, however much he may be a free-lancer instead of a bona fide "member" of such an organization - see Jonah Goldberg's article at National Review Online. It is, in essence, the result of a failure to challenge politically correct notions with reality in order to protect one's career. Such is the age we live in. Historical fact, present reality, logic and reason are all trumped by politically correct propaganda. These Islamists - who are mainstream, not a radical fringe of some few extremists - want to kill us because we are not muslim. If they think they can, they will. If they think they can't, they'll wait until they can. For them, there is no negotiating - either they die or we do. This, too, is a fact our own Dear Leader refuses to acknowledge.Korea and Iran need to be contained and/or destroyed. For the militants in the mountains along the Afghan/Pakistan border, destruction seems to be the only option. None of this will happen without the credible threat - and at least occasionally the effective use - of force.Meanwhile, dithering over Afghanistan continues. Obama is trying to find a way to do it without upsetting his pacifist base.This ain't paintball. There are no do-overs. Screwing these things up means people die - like the twelve in Ft. Hood.But, whether addressing celebrants at the Berlin Wall, or grieving soldiers and their families at Ft. Hood, all attention is to be focused on our narcissist in chief. As long as he can talk about himself and how wonderful he is, who cares?Maybe, instead of comparing him to a fascist like Mussolini or a communist like Stalin, the most apt historical precedent for our current president is Nero.
Here's a brief piece worth reading when you think of government's claims to "create jobs" - whether it's a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. The money quote is the last line in her post - "...government data shows that government spending can't create jobs."Government can encourage economic activity, which will create jobs, or it can stifle economic activity which will kill jobs. No economist of any credibility would suggest that the policies enacted by Obama, Pelosi & Reid encourage economic activity. So, while some people will find a way to make money off them, there will be no significant improvement in the job market as long as current policies are pursued.Some people think this is on purpose, to create as many dependent voters as possible. I would prefer to think they're just idiots. In Reid's case, that's plausible. In Obama and Pelosi, it's hard to sustain that contention. And Obama's behavior in other contexts certainly suggests that it is intentional. Hard to fathom, but that's what it looks like.
So, they got their liberty-killing health care legislation past the House of Representatives. They even got one Republican (a guy from Louisiana) to vote for it. Some 39 Democrats voted against it. I didn't see if any abstained or were absent, but Pelosi got her 220 votes after some serious arm-twisting and some massive deals that we will find out about once subsequent legislation is in process.
Attention now moves to the Senate. The Dems have a 60-40 majority there, but there is less available to offer recalictrant Democrats and there are more Republicans inclined towards this measure. That renders one's calculations a bit more thoroughly hypothetical.
But we have the government we elected and are, for the moment, powerless as we watch our freedoms stripped away, taxed into oblivion, or simply ignored.
Will Americans wake up and accept the responsibility of freedom? Or will we surrender our liberty in order to avoid responsibility? We have been on a knife's edge with respect to that question since Reagan. It seems we are at a decision point.
I had rather thought that the United States would survive me. Now I'm not so sure. With trillions in debt and multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as we can forsee, with Social Security and Medicare already in debt and due to go belly-up in the next 30 years, with states struggling under federal mandates, and citizens that seem increasingly apt to pray to the president and congress more often than to God - well, I must confess it's all quite depressing.
Oh well. The United States may yet make it to its 300th birthday in 2076. God is in control of history and if, in his wisdom, it is time for this country to go the way of Babylon and Assyria and Egypt and Persia, so be it. A lot of places don't even get 200 years.
Pray for the victims and the families of the fallen, as well as those who are tending to the wounded. May God grant wisdom to those investigating that the truth might be brought to light and justice served.
The government of California is running in deficit again. So they decided to simply increase income tax withholding by 10%.
They claim it isn't a tax, since they'll have to pay it back when you file in April, but it is a tax. They can't borrow the money from anyone willing to loan it to them because they can't afford the interest their lousy credit rating would entail. Instead, they are forcing citizens to loan them the money at 0% interest. In effect, they are taxing their citizens - at the very least - the interest money they would be entitled to as bond holders. This assumes they'll actually have the money to repay their citizens in six months, which is a highly suspect assumption
More to the point, rather than practice the fiscal discipline one expects of everyone else, they simply decided to take the money from their citizens. No votes. No recourse. No options. The state of California simply said, "We're just going to confiscate additional funds from the people who live and work here."
In 1775, a bunch of Americans went to war rather than submit to this kind of thing. I rather think most Californians will go meekly to their jobs as serfs of the all powerful state instead.UPDATE: Apparently there's a form DE-4 (similar to the W-4, just for the state of California). Filing a new one in which you add one to your deductions should offset the state's attempted theft. Whether it's legal or not, I can't say, but I would surely do it if I lived in California.
