Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Barker's Newbites: Wednesday, March 24, 2010


A continuing chronicle of American decline...
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14 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/429137/the-attorney-generals-initiative/stephen-spruiell

With Joe Biden’s joyous f-bombs still echoing through the White House’s East Room, the attorneys general from 13 states filed a lawsuit in federal court yesterday to challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare. (A 14th, Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli, filed a separate suit.) Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, one of the group of 13, argues that they are “acting out of a sense of necessity: If this legislation is upheld, it will mean that the Constitution as we know it no longer exists.”

Abbott’s arguments parallel those of attorneys David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who are assisting on the lawsuit. Rivkin and Casey have been making the case for months that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. This provision would require nearly all Americans, as a condition of citizenship, to purchase health insurance or else pay a punitive tax. Congress simply does not have the authority, under the Commerce Clause or any of its other enumerated powers, to force citizens to buy a product they don’t want to buy, or to enforce through taxation a regulation that it could not otherwise impose.

* THE PROBLEM IS... FOUR OUT OF THE NINE U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICES SIMPLY DON'T BELIEVE ORIGINAL INTENT (OR ORIGINALISM) IS THE FOUNDATION OF JUDICIAL POWER. AS FOR THE JUSTICE KENNEDY - USUALLY REFERRED TO AS "THE SWING VOTE" - WHILE HE AT TIMES RULES ACCORDING TO THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE INTENT OF THE FOUNDERS, HE'S NOT WED TO THE PLAIN MEANING OF THE CONSTITUTION (OR ITS AMENDMENTS) AS RATIFIED. IN OTHER WORDS, FOLKS, ONLY FOUR OF THE NINE MEMBERS OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT CAN BE SAID TO BE TRUE ADHERENTS TO THE WORDS, MEANING, AND SPIRIT OF THE CONSTITUTION - THUS THE RULE OF LAW AS OPPOSED TO THE RULE OF MAN.

“Never has a court upheld such an expansive view of the Commerce Clause,” Abbott says. “If the Commerce Clause can be allowed to permit Congress to force Americans to purchase a good or service, there really is no limit to congressional power.”

(*SIGH*)

* AND THUS... AMERICA THE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC DIES.

March 24, 2010 at 11:06 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/429132/a-titanic-mess/jim-talent

The president and the Democratic leaders of Congress want the government to fund and control health care in America. That is why they forced the legislation through Congress. In my opinion, the bill the president signed into law yesterday will raise costs, suppress innovation, restrict care, and eventually lead to the rationing of care.

But forget about the merits of government-run health care in the abstract. There is a more fundamental and insuperable objection to the legislation: We can’t afford it.

Literally.

The government is broke.

The Obama administration has spent all the money.

The government is already borrowing at a rate that is unsustainable, to fund the obligations it has already undertaken.

This year, the government will borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Much of its spending simply pays the interest on previous borrowing. By even the rosiest economic and fiscal scenarios, the federal government will continue borrowing indefinitely at amounts that are far above historical levels. None of this is disputed. The facts are readily available to anyone who wants to see them.

It’s the death spiral. The private-sector analogy is when a consumer uses one overleveraged credit card to make the minimum payment on another overleveraged credit card.

The new health-care benefit will cost $150–250 billion annually, depending on whose figures you believe. The Democrats claim that the benefit is “paid for” by Medicare cuts and tax increases. Now, no one in Washington would bet ten cents of his own money on the proposition that this new law will pay for itself. It’s based on fairy-tale assumptions — including that Congress will never enact a “doc fix” to prevent doctors’ Medicare reimbursements from being dramatically slashed. (But only in Washington would such an argument even be considered relevant. Imagine a consumer with massive debts and huge ongoing budget deficits. What if such a consumer announced that he had reduced his monthly budget and was going to use the money, not to reduce his borrowing, but for a new purchase? Who would take it seriously?)

The federal government is broke. Long before this new benefit takes effect in 2014, the government will be scrambling just to make its interest payments. It will be doing what California is doing now — furloughing employees, engaging in short-term fiscal tricks, and trying desperately to protect existing programs. The idea of some huge new expenditure will be a bad joke. No matter which party is technically in control of the government, the debt will actually be running fiscal policy.

Perhaps the president is thinking that he can use the impending fiscal crisis as an excuse to raise taxes, and that the increased revenue will enable him to fund the health-care benefit. Here’s a fact he might want to consider. The biggest tax increase in American history was in 1993. If such a tax increase were passed today, and assuming it didn’t cripple the economy, it would produce $71 billion annually in additional revenue — enough to fund the government’s current borrowing for just ten days.

In college, I had an economics professor who liked to remind his students of an important principle of human behavior: “The crew of the Titanic stopped doing dishes when the ship hit the iceberg.” It’s a sound principle, but it assumes that the crew actually recognizes reality. The president and congressional leaders are still working away at the dishes, while the ship is going down.

March 24, 2010 at 11:32 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/428996/tattered-liberty/mark-steyn

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet.

I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

* I URGE FOLKS TO READ THE FULL ESSAY VIA FOLLOWING THE LINK PROVIDED UP ABOVE.

March 24, 2010 at 11:58 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_howard_rich/obamacare_the_bigger_the_lie

President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are spending money that they know we don’t have on a program that they know isn’t going to work – all in an effort to expand government’s control over the private sector and its reach into the private lives of American citizens.

Sound a bit conspiratorial?

It’s not – at least not when you turn down the partisan rhetoric (on both sides of the debate) and start examining what this monstrosity actually does.

“ObamaCare is really about who commands the country's medical resources,” an editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted the day before the legislation was passed. “It vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in contrast to reforms that would fix today's distorted status quo by putting consumers in control.”

With government already purchasing nearly half of all health care services in America (a system that’s rampant with fraud and anti-competitive price-fixing), just who did you think was responsible for the “distorted status quo” that Obamacare ostensibly seeks to correct?

Here’s a hint – it’s not those "evil" insurance companies, which will be receiving nearly a half-trillion dollars in “Obamacare” subsidies.

Consistent with the core fallacy of other recent socialist misadventures (like former President George Bush’s TARP bailout or Obama’s so-called “stimulus”), Washington politicians are once again attempting to solve problems that have been exacerbated by excessive government interventionism with additional government interventionism. “Dumping buckets of water on the head of a drowning victim,” if you will.

Even though America can’t even begin to afford its current entitlement obligations, Washington’s answer is to create yet another new entitlement program – something that Republicans who voted in favor of Bush’s prescription drug benefit know all about. And even as Medicare and Medicaid have failed spectacularly (and expensively) to provide cost-effective health care, Obama and his allies are using this failure as an excuse to dramatically escalate their “government knows best” approach to include individual mandates and huge fines for families and small businesses who fail to comply.

It’s a power grab, pure and simple. And a money grab, which is why “Obamacare” spends $10 billion to hire 17,000 new tax collectors at the IRS to rake in billions of dollars from America’s newly-created class of “illegally uninsured” citizens.

Obviously “Obamacare” isn’t going to reduce the deficit either. In fact when the actual cost of just one of the variables ignored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is calculated into the legislation, its price tag soars by nearly $208 billion (putting it $59 billion in the red).

Even "Obamacare's" worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove overly-optimistic. In 1965, for example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s still twice as expensive as the government originally estimated. Earlier this month The New York Times – ostensibly seeking to build momentum for universal coverage – published a story highlighting the un-sustainability of Medicaid. The story revealed that last year, while state governments were relying on bailout money to fund skyrocketing growth rates, the program added 3.3 million new members – raising its total enrollment to 47 million. It is going broke, clearly, although that didn’t stop Obama and his Congressional allies from raiding $202 billion from its coffers (as well as $53 billion from Social Security) to make their plan appear deficit neutral.

March 24, 2010 at 12:15 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north828.html

To understand what is going to happen to America's health care delivery system, we must first understand what has happened to Detroit.

Detroit is dying. It is the first metropolis in the United States to be facing extinction. We have never seen anything like this in American history. It is happening under our noses, but the media refuse to discuss it. To do so would be politically incorrect.

Two factors tell us that Detroit is dying. The first is the departure of 900,000 people – over half the city's population – since 1950. It peaked at 1.8 million in 1950.

[The Second...] In 1994, the median sales price of a house in Detroit was about $41,000. The housing bubble pushed it up to about $98,000 in 2003. In March 2009, the price was $13,600. Today, the price is $7,000.

* I JUST GOOGLED THIS. YEP. ENTER THE PHRASE AND YOU'LL GET PLENTY OF AUTHORITATIVE HITS CITING $7,000, $7,100, $7,500 (FIGURES FROM 2009)... THOUGH FROM A NEW AP PIECE WHICH RAN IN YESTERDAY'S NYT A FIGURE OF $55,000 IS QUOTED. IN ANY EVENT... DETROIT HOUSING PRICES ARE WELL WITHIN THE MARGIN FOR VEHICLE PRICES THROUGHOUT THE AMERICA MOST OF US LIVE IN.

The city planners, the Federal government's subsidy defenders, and the welfare state aficionados are all discreetly silent about Detroit.

The city funds its schools with property taxes. Property taxes have collapsed as sources of revenue. An honest property tax system will generate less than ten cents on the 2003 dollar.

Last week, the school board announced the closing of one-quarter of Detroit's schools. The city is out of money. The central agency of propaganda by the government is in the process of closing up shop. This is not "anti-business as usual." This is collapse. The American public does not perceive what is happening in Detroit.

When a city simply shuts down from the effects of government mismanagement, the media say nothing. Detroit has become the poster child of government regulation, welfare systems, and a population that has given up hope.

The media say nothing because they are caught in a dilemma. If they say that the local government's welfare programs are not really to blame, what does that leave? The unmentionable issue: 82% of the city is Black. So, that means blaming white employers, who discriminate, despite 40 years of Federal anti-discrimination laws. But the main non-employers today are the region's auto companies, and two of the three are partially owned by the U.S. government. One – GM – is mainly owned by the retirement fund of the United Auto Workers. So, the media are not about to blame the auto companies – not now.

That leaves that other politically incorrect issue: the rate of illegitimacy, which is in the 80% range. That social phenomenon represents a moral collapse, but the participants were all educated by the tax-funded schools.

Who ya gonna blame?

The media pundits cannot decide, so they simply ignore the collapse. "Detroit? Never heard of it."

The lesson of Detroit is this: the experts do not see a collapse coming. They assume that next year will be like today, give or take 3%. They do not believe that anything as complex as a city can collapse.

This brings me to the other subject: the health care law....

I know what is going to happen: 1. Cost overruns; 2. Fraud; 3. Additional coverage extended to groups; 4. Rising deficits in the program; 5. Lower payments to physicians; 6. Lower payments to hospitals; 7. Delays in payments; 8. Rising taxes on the rich; 9. Rationing by doctors, hospitals, government; 10. Delays in treatment; 11. More HMO care: assembly line medicine; 12. A search for scapegoats.

Obamacare will lead to an expansion of these forms of medicine: 1. Concierge; 2. Wal-Mart; 3. ER; 4. HMO; 5. Mexican.

* ACTUALLY... NUMBER 5 SHOULD BE "COSTA RICAN." (*WINK*) ALSO "INDIAN."

* FOLKS... READ THE FULL ESSAY. NORTH'S FEARS AND SUPPOSITIONS MAKE SENSE TO ME.

March 24, 2010 at 2:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=36161

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that, since 1980, some 25.2 million immigrants have entered legally and been granted permanent status with "green cards" to work and become citizens.

"Immigration, Political Realignment and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects" is the title of the CIS report, which understates the crisis. Bottom line: The more immigrants in an electoral district, the more grim the GOP prospects. Consider a few of the largest counties in the nation.

Between 1980 and 2008, Los Angeles, No. 1, grew by 2.5 million to 10 million people. The immigrant share went from 22% to 41%. Over those decades, the GOP share of the presidential vote fell from 52% in Ronald Reagan's rout of Jimmy Carter to 29% for John McCain.

Orange County, the bastion of Barry Goldwater conservatism, saw its population rise from 1.9 million in 1980 to 3.2 million in 2008, with the immigrant share rising from 13% to 34%. Reagan swept Orange County with 68%. McCain got 50%.

Consider Cook County, the nation's second largest. While Cook grew by 350,000 from 1980 to 2008, the character of Chicago changed, with the immigrant share of the population rising from 12% to 25%. In those 28 years, the GOP share of the presidential vote fell from 40% to 23%.

In Kings County (Brooklyn), the immigrant share of the population rose from 24% to 44% and the Republican share of the presidential vote plummeted from 38% to 20%.

Richard Nixon and Reagan carried California seven times on presidential tickets. Both carried New York and Illinois in their greatest victories. Yet the GOP has not won one of those three pivotal states even once in the last five elections.

If California, New York and Illinois are moving out of reach for GOP presidential candidates and the party is being annihilated in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, our three largest cities, what of red states Arizona, Texas and Florida?

They are going the same way.

Dallas County added a million people to hit 2.5 million by 2008, as its immigrant population surged from 5% to 27%. Where Reagan won 59% of Dallas County, McCain got only 42%.

Phoenix is sited in the fourth-most-populous county, Maricopa. Its population in 30 years has gone from 1.5 million to 3.8 million. Where 5.5% of Maricopa was immigrant in 1980, the percentage is now above 15%. And where Reagan carried Maricopa with 65%, McCain, an Arizonan, carried Maricopa with only 54%.

In Dade (Miami), the immigrant share of the population has gone in 30 years from 36% to 58% and the GOP share of the vote has fallen from 60% to 42%. In Broward (Ft. Lauderdale), legal immigrants tripled as a share of the population, while the GOP presidential vote fell from 56% to 32%.

* To be continued...

March 24, 2010 at 2:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)

The correlation seems absolute. The more immigrants who come in and become citizens, the more Democratic the country becomes. Why? Almost all immigrants, legal and illegal, are poorer and less skilled than Americans, and depend far more upon government. Among immigrants who have not yet become citizens, 70% identify as Democrats, 15% as Republicans. The sooner Democrats get them naturalized, registered and voting, the sooner the bell tolls for the Grand Old Party.

Is the GOP problem its hard line on illegal immigration?

This is a myth. According to a Zogby survey done for CIS, 56 percent of Hispanics and 68 percent of African-Americans say legal immigration is too high. Only 7 percent of Hispanics and 4 percent of African-Americans say it's too low. On no issue is the gulf between elites and the people so wide and deep.

What would be a GOP policy that advanced both the national and party interest?

First, an offensive against the administration for laxity in enforcing our immigration laws against businesses that hire illegals. Each time a business is forced to let illegal workers go, the jobs go to some of our 25 million unemployed and underemployed.

Second, a Put-Americans-First moratorium on legal immigration until U.S. unemployment falls below 6 percent.

And what is Republican Lindsay Graham up to? Collaborating with Sen. Chuck Schumer on a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

March 24, 2010 at 2:43 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2010/03/24/constitutional_awakening

If there is anything good to say about Democrat control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, it's that their extraordinarily brazen, heavy-handed acts have aroused a level of constitutional interest among the American people that has been dormant for far too long.

Part of this heightened interest is seen in the strength of the tea party movement around the nation. Another is the angry reception that many congressmen received at their district town hall meetings. Then there's the rising popularity of conservative/libertarian television shows such as Glenn Beck's [and] John Stossel's.

While the odds on favorite is that the Republicans will do well in the fall elections, Americans who want constitutional government should not see Republican control as a solution to what our founders would have called "a long train of abuses and usurpations."

Solutions to our nation's problems require correct diagnostics and answers to questions like:

Why did 2008 presidential and congressional candidates spend over $5 billion campaigning for office?

Why did special interests pay Washington lobbyists over $3 billion that same year?

What are reasons why corporations, unions and other interest groups fork over these billions of dollars to lobbyists and into the campaign coffers of politicians?

[The] explanation for the billions going to the campaign coffers of Washington politicians and lobbyist lies in the awesome government power and control over business, property, employment and other areas of our lives. Having such power, Washington politicians are in the position to grant favors and commit acts that if committed by a private person would land him in jail. The greater Congress' ability to grant favors and take one American's earnings to give to another American, the greater the value of influencing congressional decision-making. There's no better influence than money. The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied another group of Americans.

Hopefully, our nation's constitutional reawaking will begin to deliver us from the precipice.

There is no constitutional authority for two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does. Our constitution's father, James Madison, explained, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined ... (to be) exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."

* AMEN.

March 24, 2010 at 7:59 PM
Moose said...

I've been reading the Federalist Papers recently. Particularly poignant lately are #44, #45, and #57. You don't need to "interpret" what the framers meant...Madison says it all right there!

This is not meant as a shot only at President Obama but of all our elected (and NON-elected) officials in DC.

Cheers.

March 25, 2010 at 8:36 AM
William R. Barker said...

Good for you, Moose!

There's a local weekly published across the (Hudson) river from me called the Putnam County News and Recorder.

http://www.pcnr.com

They've recently begun running excerpts from the Federalist Papers on their editorial pages!

Great idea, huh! (If only more newspapers would follow their their lead!)

A bit of trivia... last year Roger Ailes bought the privately owned newspaper and his wife Elizabeth is the publisher.

BILL

March 25, 2010 at 3:57 PM
Rodak said...

Hey, Moose! I left my copy of the Federalist Papers on the hay wagon. How 'bout giving us'ns out here in the toolies a synopsis in plain English of those concepts in the cited numbers that you are able to relate particularly well to current events?
Thanking you in advance, I remain,
--Skeptical in Dogpatch.

March 26, 2010 at 5:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

Hey, Rob...

(*SMIRK*)

Perhaps you've heard of these buildings called LIBRARIES...

(*SMIRK*)

We also have these places called BOOKSTORES scattered around.

(*CHUCKLE*)

Oh, yeah... and last but not least... the Federalist Papers are open source - a quick google will find 'em and you can read 'em in your underwear in the comfort of your own home.

(Or... perhaps in your underwear at work... that would be funny!)

(*LAUGHING OUT LOUD*)

Seriously... Rob... as is so often the case you seem PROUD of your ignorance rather than ashamed.

(*SHRUG*)

Sad. Very sad.

BILL

March 27, 2010 at 11:46 AM
Rodak said...

Just pointing out that nothing Moose wrote shows that he understood even one word of what he read.

March 27, 2010 at 1:13 PM
Rodak said...

You don't need to "interpret" what the framers meant...Madison says it all right there!

Says what? I don't have any reason to doubt Moose, but if I did have any reason to doubt him, I wouldn't know from what he wrote that he actually even read what he says he read.
What did the framers "mean?" This tops any Sarah Palinism for vagueness. And. btw, anything but a word-for-word reiteration is an "interpretation"--unless it's a non-sequitur.
How are we to know what Moose is referring to-- based on what he claims for these writings--when we are provided with no specific citation and no content of any of the texts to which he's referring?
It is easy, in the light of this kind of thing, to see why so many people (approx. 1 in 5) have been taken in by the vacuities of Palin and her ilk: if it sounds right, they buy it; uncritically and according to some kind of misplaced faith.

March 27, 2010 at 1:56 PM

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