Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010


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William R. Barker said...

http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1002/press_room_laughter_dies_down.html

The White House press room was a jovial place to be in the early days of President Barack Obama's presidency. But times have changed.

"There definitely aren't a lot of laughs around the briefing room these days," says Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason. "Robert's little digs and evasions have lost their power to amuse — particularly since we haven't had a presser since July."

Mason also reports frustration in the ranks: "Reporters know how close the press secretary is to the president, and yet the quality of the information we get doesn't often reflect that."

February 10, 2010 at 3:25 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein...“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

* FOLKS...??? IS IT ME...???

February 10, 2010 at 3:25 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055190217079952.html

[By Newt Gingrich and John C. Goodman; President of the National Center for Policy Analysis]

'If you have a better idea, show it to me." That was President Barack Obama's challenge two weeks ago to House Republicans regarding health-care reform. He has since called for a bipartisan forum, not to start over on health reform but to "move forward" on the "best ideas that are out there."

The best ideas out there are not those that were passed by the House and Senate last year, which consist of more spending, more regulations and more bureaucracy. If the president is serious about building a system that delivers more quality choices at lower cost for every American, here's where he should start:

Make insurance affordable. The current taxation of health insurance is arbitrary and unfair, giving lavish subsidies to some, like those who get Cadillac coverage from their employers, and almost no relief to people who have to buy their own. More equitable tax treatment would lower costs for individuals and families.

Make health insurance portable. The first step toward genuine portability—and the best way of solving the problems of pre-existing conditions—is to change federal policy. [Insurance should travel with a person] from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Also, individuals should have the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines. When insurers compete for consumers, prices will fall and quality will improve.

Meet the needs of the chronically ill. Most individuals with chronic diseases want to be in charge of their own care. The mother of an asthmatic child, for example, should have a device at home that measures the child's peak airflow and should be taught when to change his medication, rather than going to the doctor each time.

Having the ability to obtain and manage more health dollars in Health Savings Accounts is a start. A good model for self-management is the Cash and Counseling program for the homebound disabled under Medicaid. Individuals in this program are able to manage their own budgets and hire and fire the people who provide them with custodial services and medical care. Satisfaction rates approach 100%, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

We should also encourage health plans to specialize in managing chronic diseases instead of demanding that every plan must be all things to all people. For example, special-needs plans in Medicare Advantage actively compete to enroll and cover the sickest Medicare beneficiaries, and stay in business by meeting their needs. This is the alternative to forcing insurers to take high-cost patients for cut-rate premiums, which guarantees that these patients will be unwanted.

* To be continued...

February 10, 2010 at 3:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

* Continuing from previous post

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055190217079952.htm

Allow doctors and patients to control costs. Doctors and patients are currently trapped by government-imposed payment rates. Under Medicare, doctors are not paid if they communicate with their patients by phone or e-mail. Medicare pays by task—there is a list of about 7,500—but doctors do not get paid to advise patients on how to lower their drug costs or how to comparison shop on the Web. In short, they get paid when people are sick, not to keep them healthy.

So long as total cost to the government does not rise and quality of care does not suffer, doctors should have the freedom to repackage and reprice their services. And payment should take into account the quality of the care that is delivered. Once physicians are liberated under Medicare, private insurers will follow.

Don't cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong. There is no question that Medicare is on an unsustainable course; the government has promised far more than it can deliver. But this problem will not be solved by cutting Medicare in order to create new unfunded liabilities for young people.

Inform consumers. Patients need to have clear, reliable data about cost and quality before they make decisions about their care. But finding such information is virtually impossible. Sources like Medicare claims data (stripped of patient information) can help consumers answer important questions about their care. Government data—paid for by the taxpayers—can answer these questions and should be made public.

Eliminate junk lawsuits. Last year the president pledged to consider civil justice reform. We do not need to study or test medical malpractice any longer: The current system is broken. States across the country—Texas in particular—have already implemented key reforms including liability protection for using health information technology or following clinical standards of care; caps on non-economic damages; loser pays laws; and new alternative dispute resolution where patients get compensated for unexpected, adverse medical outcomes without lawyers, courtrooms, judges and juries.

Make medical breakthroughs accessible to patients. Breakthrough drugs, innovative devices and new therapies to treat rare, complex diseases as well as chronic conditions should be sped to the market. We can do this by cutting red tape before and during review by the Food and Drug Administration and by deploying information technology to monitor the quality of drugs and devices once they reach the marketplace.

February 10, 2010 at 3:38 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055394016616742.html

Stimulus Plan A didn't work to create jobs or reduce unemployment. That was the $165 billion of tax rebates and money for states in February 2008.

Plan B flopped too. That was last February's stimulus that has devoted $862 billion into mostly government programs. The unemployment rate climbed steadily until last month, and the main lasting impact has been nearly $1 trillion added to the national debt.

Now comes Plan C, another February stimulus, though this time everyone has been instructed not to use the "s word," lest it scare the voters. This one is a "jobs bill," as if Plans A and B were about something else. Don't expect this one to work any better than the last two.

This latest Senate Democratic bill will cost $85 billion and is shaping up to be largely a rehash of last year's stimulus: extended unemployment insurance, Medicaid cash for the states, and some public works spending. The one new twist is a proposal for a one-year $5,000 tax credit for small businesses for each new worker hired. President Obama calls the credit "the best way to cut taxes" to help small businesses.

But we've also seen this economic movie before—in 1977 under Jimmy Carter. During the two years it was in effect, a jobs credit worth about $7,000 in today's dollars became a $20 billion free lunch as businesses claimed the handout for one of every three new employees.

In the short term, the Jimmy Carter jobs credit appeared to reduce unemployment. The jobless rate dropped by 1.2 percentage points (to 5.8% in 1979 from 7% in 1977). But that effect was short-lived, and when the subsidies ended two years later the layoffs resumed and the unemployment rate rose again and by 1980 was back to 7.2%.

Citing this not-so-happy experience, Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind says the tax credit is evidence that Congress doesn't "do anything new around here except the history we repeat." The left-leaning Tax Policy Center recently looked at a proposal for a $5,000 payroll tax credit, which is similar in concept to the Senate jobs credit, and concluded that "The problem with subsidies such as this is that they are exceedingly sloppy. A lot of money goes to those firms that would have hired anyway."

They're right: The Labor Department reports that in December 2009 there were 2.5 million job openings. Will the government pay $5,000 for every one of these new jobs that would have existed anyway? In the dynamic American economy, thousands of workers are hired, fired or quit each day.

The President is trying to lure Republicans to support this policy as a "business tax cut." But they should know that it violates sound tax principles. Pro-growth tax cuts, as adopted so successfully by JFK in the 1960s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, are broad-based and lower tax rates for as many people as possible. This reduces the distortions of the tax system, while permanently adding to the rewards for investment and risk-taking.

That's the opposite of Mr. Obama's tax strategy, which is to dole out special tax credits and loopholes for favored behavior or industries—hybrid cars, buying a new house, wind power—and then paying for these by raising tax rates on anyone making more than $200,000 starting next year. The result will be higher tax rates paid on a shrinking tax base, with a misallocation of capital toward projects chosen by politics rather than by prices or potential return on investment

Recent surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business, the small business association, suggest that small employers don't want tax credits. They want a future in which Congress and federal agencies stop imposing new tax and regulatory burdens. Given the damage done by the current Congress, doing no more harm would do far more to increase hiring than a reprise of Carternomics.

February 10, 2010 at 6:22 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520667

* AND NOTE... THIS IS WRITTEN BY A THE COLUMNIST REPRESENTING "OF THE LEFT"

When the president used his Super Bowl Sunday interview with CBS News' Katie Couric to launch this Hail Mary summit pass, he explained that "what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. ...

"'How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance market so people with pre-existing conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don't have health insurance can get it?'

" ... And if we can go step by step through a series of these issues, and arrive at some agreements, then procedurally, there's no reason why we can't do it a lot faster than the process took last year."

Sure, like in the movie "Dave," where the faux president and his accountant buddy order some chow, roll up their sleeves and straighten out the budget books. Except this time, in half a day at Blair House with the opposition party pulling up a chair. On live television.

To take this at face value is to assume that (a) these conversations have not been occurring over the last year, which flies in the face of Democratic assertions that they have accepted numerous Republican ideas, or that (b) Republicans are correct that they've been shut out of the sausage-making, which ignores the endless weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee "Gang of Six."

But the president's proposal was not really meant to be taken at face value. In case the president's ducking of Couric's question about his willingness to "start at square one" wasn't clear enough, the White House came out to emphasize that, no, the president wasn't backing away from the measures that have already passed both houses of Congress. He plans to come to the table with a merged Democratic blueprint as his starting point.

Republicans should feel free to chime in, though.

To call this Kabuki is to insult the Japanese art form. I am no fan of the House Republican leadership, but under these circumstances it's hard to fault Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia for suggesting that they might have better things to do than to serve as Democratic stage props.

February 10, 2010 at 7:08 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520671

Barack Obama's "spread the wealth around" doesn't mean only higher taxes on taxpayers and more handouts to nontaxpayers. More especially, it means transfers of financial goodies to the president's political allies.

When Obama presented his multitrillion-dollar budget, he declared with great fanfare that he was calling for a freeze in discretionary spending. Feminists immediately had a tantrum to complain that the freeze exempted funding for the military, intelligence and homeland security.

Now we learn that all feminist programs and organizations will also be exempted from the freeze. Instead, they will get what White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield admits are "significant funding increases."

A White House document titled "Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls" describes 15 federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the feminists.

The "Women and Girls" document reveals that Obama's budget would appropriate $50 million to give grants to incentivize the states to adopt paid family leave. That longtime feminist goal would be very costly to small business and result in a loss of jobs.

Head Start, which already receives $9 billion a year, is scheduled for additional funding of nearly $1 billion, despite the fact that recent studies show that Head Start provides little or no beneficial results toward the stated goal of helping disadvantaged children catch up with other children.

The budget also increases funding for a special program to give women (instead of men) more jobs in academic science and engineering careers.

February 10, 2010 at 7:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520675

[T]he ADP Small Business Report for January shows companies with fewer than 50 workers shed an additional 22,000 jobs. These are the businesses that account for 48 million jobs, or 44% of all private nonfarm employment — and two-thirds or more of all employment growth in recent years. [D]espite efforts by government to "fix" their problems, they've only grown worse. The programs were ineffective or never got off the ground.

Last year, amid much hoopla, the White House announced plans to give tax credits to "green" energy companies. As a result, according to reporter Renee Schoof of McClatchy Newspapers, the U.S. installed a record 9,900 megawatts of wind-power generating capacity last year — enough to power 2.4 million homes.

A boon for conservation jobs? Hardly. Indeed, the American Wind Energy Association reports the industry cut 2,000 jobs last year, in part because some of the wind energy equipment is made overseas.

Then there was the program unveiled in March to spend $15 billion to "unlock" lending to small businesses. That grew to a $30 billion program later in the year after TARP funds were added to the mix. But as noted by ABC News reporter and blogger Jake Tapper, this is a "phantom" jobs program.

Even Neil Barofsky, head of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, admitted as much. As of Dec. 31, he wrote recently, "the details of the initiative under this program had not been announced and no funds had been disbursed."

In short, the White House talked about $30 billion in aid to small businesses, but never did anything about it.

Some of Obama's ideas aren't bad. But even if passed, they likely wouldn't help much. The problems that small businesses have aren't about small businesses per se; they're about the economy.

Small businesses have the same doubts as the rest of us. Besides all these "jobs programs," they see a failed $862 billion stimulus, a $700 billion TARP program that has turned into a politicized auto and bank bailout fund, Cash for Clunkers, attempts in Copenhagen to impose massive taxes on America to stave off global warming, a $1 trillion health care overhaul, new "responsibility fees" on banks, and worry for our economy's future.

Worse, the new budget contains $2 trillion in tax hikes over a decade, mostly on multinationals and successful entrepreneurs. These taxes undo all the good the White House and Congress would do with their "incentives" and "credits" and whatnot.

Washington thus has it wrong. Businesses aren't awaiting more "stimulus." As the NFIB suggested, they're clinically depressed, seeing the government's dead weight lying across the economy for years to come in all its spending, taxing and ad hoc rule-making.

What sensible entrepreneur would commit his wealth to a money-making project in such a high-tax, high-regulation environment — one in which those who make profits are routinely demonized?

February 10, 2010 at 7:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703455804575057650062572536.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_news

An Arizona sheriff said he planned to defy Washington's attempts to roll back his staunch enforcement of federal immigration law, a move that could put him on a collision course with the U.S. government.

Late last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the largest arm of the Department of Homeland Security, stripped Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of the authority to use 100 of his deputies to enforce federal immigration in his jurisdiction, which includes Phoenix.

In an interview this week, Mr. Arpaio said he would ignore Washington's effort to clip his powers and would train all of his 881 deputies to enforce federal immigration law on the streets.

"We have the inherent right to enforce federal immigration law," Mr. Arpaio said.

When it attempted to curtail Mr. Arpaio's authority, Washington limited his deputies' ability to verify the immigration status of people in the streets during the course of duty.

"Since the Department of Homeland Security took away 100 of our federally trained deputies…we are going to train every sworn deputy to teach them how to enforce state and federal immigration laws," the sheriff said in a telephone interview.

The course, which will mainly be taught via computer, will equip deputy sheriffs to "recognize…immigration violations" in the course of duty, Mr. Arpaio said.

Mr. Arpaio has partnered with Kris Kobach, a law professor who has gained prominence as a national advocate for stricter measures against illegal immigrants.

Mr. Arpaio said "we don't engage in racial profiling." He noted that the training for his deputies would include a lesson on how to avoid the practice.

February 10, 2010 at 7:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/10/governments_increasing_power_threatens_freedom.html

[By John Stossel]

At the beginning of "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that's at stake when the government controls our lives: "The most important change ... is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."

This shouldn't be controversial. If government relieves us of the responsibility of living by bailing us out, character will atrophy. The welfare state, however good its intentions of creating material equality, can't help but make us dependent. That changes the psychology of society.

According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60 percent will soon be 70 percent.

Kurt Vonnegut understood the threat of government-imposed equality. His short story "Harrison Bergeron" portrays a future in which no one is permitted to have any physical or intellectual advantage over anyone else. A government Handicapper General weighs down the strong and agile, masks the faces of the beautiful and distracts the smart.

So far, the Handicapper General is just fantasy. But Vice President Joe Biden did shout at the Democratic National Convention: "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you." If he meant that we're all equal in rights and before the law, fine. If he meant government shouldn't put barriers in the way of opportunity, great. But statists like Biden usually have more in mind: They want government to make results more equal.

Two actual examples of the lunacy:

When colleges innovated by having students use Kindle e-book readers instead of expensive textbooks, the Justice Department sued them, complaining that the Kindle discriminates against blind students. The department also is suing the Massachusetts prison system because it makes prospective prison guards take a physical test. Since women don't do as well as men on that test, Justice claims the test discriminates against women.

* BTW - I WAS IN THE STUDIO AUDIENCE FOR THE TAPING OF THE EPISODE OF THE STOSSEL SHOW THIS OP-ED REFERS TO

February 10, 2010 at 8:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020902464.html

The new era of Democratic bipartisanship, like cut flowers in a vase, wilted in less than a week.

During his question time at the House Republican retreat, President Obama elevated congressman and budget expert Paul Ryan as a "sincere guy" whose budget blueprint -- which, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), eventually achieves a balanced budget -- has "some ideas in there that I would agree with."

Days later, Democratic legislators held a conference call to lambaste Ryan's plan as a vicious, voucherizing, privatizing assault on Social Security, Medicare and every non-millionaire American. Progressive advocacy groups and liberal bloggers joined the jeering in practiced harmony.

To Ryan, the motivations of Democratic leaders are transparent. "They had an ugly week of budget news. They are precipitating a debt crisis, with deficits that get up to 85 percent of GDP and never get to a sustainable level. They are flirting with economic disaster." So they are attempting some "misdirection," calling attention to Ryan's recently updated budget road map -- first unveiled two years ago -- which proposes difficult entitlement reforms. When all else fails, change the subject to Republican heartlessness.

Fiscal Obamaism is not just a temporary, Keynesian, countercyclical spike in spending; it is deficits to infinity and beyond. "It is the interest that kills you," Ryan says. In a few weeks, he expects the CBO to report that, in the 10th year of Obama's budget, the federal government will "spend nearly a trillion dollars a year, just on interest! This traps us as a country. Inflation will wipe out savings and hurt people on fixed incomes. A plunging dollar will make goods more expensive. High tax rates will undermine economic growth. It is the path of national decline."

But unlike other deficit hawks, Ryan courageously -- some would say foolhardily -- presents his own alternative. His budget road map offers many proposals, but one big vision. Over time, Ryan concentrates government spending on the poor through means-tested programs, patching holes in the safety net while making entitlements more sustainable. He saves money by providing the middle class with defined-contribution benefits -- private retirement accounts and health vouchers -- that are more portable but less generous in the long run. And he expects a growing economy, liberated from debt and inflation, to provide more real gains for middle-class citizens than they lose from lower government benefits. Ryanism is not only a technical solution to endless deficits; it represents an alternative political philosophy.

For decades, culminating in the Obama health reform proposal, Democrats have attempted to build a political constituency for the welfare state by expanding its provisions to larger and larger portions of the middle class. Ryan proposes a federal system that focuses on helping the poor, while encouraging the middle class to take more personal responsibility in a dynamic economy.

Both sides of this debate make serious arguments, rooted in differing visions of justice and freedom. But the advocates of security, including Obama, have a serious problem: They are on a path to economic ruin.

February 10, 2010 at 8:39 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/424508/climate-gtterdmmerung/the-editors

Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960s. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the “limits to growth” fad of the 1970s to acid rain to ozone depletion, always with an overlay of moral condemnation of anyone who dissented from environmental correctness.

With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot — a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be falsified and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that “we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration he ended up at the United Nations.)

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University “Climategate” scandal have come a series of embarrassing retractions from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses.

The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups — not rigorous, peer-reviewed science. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC “consensus” computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.

Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. (The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press — even the left-wing Guardian and the Independent — is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance.)

February 10, 2010 at 8:39 PM

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