Obama's Version of "Read My Lips"

The Heritage Foundation:

Throughout his campaign President Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people: “If you’re a family that’s making $250,000 a year or less you will see no increase in your taxes. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your personal gains tax, not any of your taxes.” Just 15 days into office, President Obama signed a bill expanding Medicaid eligibility that was paid for with a 156% tax hike on tobacco. Since slightly more than half of today’s smokers (53%) earn less than $36,000 per year, Obama’s first effort at expanding government’s role in health care also became his first broken promise. But that first Medicaid expansion was minor league compared to the estimated $1.5 trillion health care plan Congress is considering now.

And how does Congress plan on paying for this $1.5 trillion in new spending. Tax hikes. Some of these tax hikes even conform to Obama’s promise. They only punish our most productive workers and investors. Proposed tax hikes in this category include: 1) capping the value of itemized deductions including gifts to charities; 2) a 3% surtax on households earning more than $250,000; and 3) a millionaires tax.

But the left is beginning to figure out that you can only squeeze so much revenue from class warfare taxation. So Congress is also considering a slew of other taxes that will, again, force Obama to break his not tax hike promise. These include: 1) a tax on soda; 2) a tax on beer; 3) an increase in employer and employee payroll taxes; 4) a flat tax on health insurance companies; 5) broaden the Medicare tax on investment income; 6) an employer mandate; and 7) a value added tax on everything but food, housing, and Medicare. And we’re sure we missed some. The left sure can be creative when they are desperate to raise revenue.

So, no tax increase on 95% of Americans . . . except for all those, um, taxes. I wonder if this will get as much coverage as Bush 41's "read my lips" pledge. No wait, I don't.

Today's Presidential Forecast: Mostly Cloudy

From barackobama.com:

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

Jim Harper: "At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. "

The Cost of Preventive Medicine

Yuval Levin:

There are now literally decades of data on this question, and the answer is very clear: prevention does not save money. It does sometimes save lives, of course, it’s not bad medicine. It’s often very good medicine. But like a lot of good modern medicine, it’s very expensive. We can decide if it’s worth the cost or not, but let’s not ignore the cost, let alone imagine it will save us money.

The most recent serious scholarly review of the data on this question was an article in the journal Health Affairs earlier this year (here’s the link, but it requires a subscription). The author’s conclusion:

Over the four decades since cost-effectiveness analysis was first applied to health and medicine, hundreds of studies have shown that prevention usually adds to medical costs instead of reducing them. Medications for hypertension and elevated cholesterol, diet and exercise to prevent diabetes, and screening and early treatment for cancer all add more to medical costs than they save.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue preventive medicine, it just means we shouldn’t pretend it’s going to reduce health care costs.

Where the Stimulus Money is Going

Stephen Spuriell:

James Pethokoukis links to a GAO report that surveyed 16 states and the District of Columbia to see how stimulus funds are being spent. The study found that 90 percent of the stimulus funds spent so far have gone toward bailouts for fiscally irresponsible state governments. These states made commitments on health care and education spending commensurate to what they could afford during the boom years. When the economy crashed and tax revenues dried up, they had no way to pay for these commitments short of raising taxes, which none of them wanted to do. (Most states' constitutions restrict their ability to run deficits.)

This is what the stimulus was really all about — not creating or "saving" jobs, but preventing states from suffering the consequences of their profligacy.

Journalistic Malpractice from George Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos did a poor job of reporting on his recent interview with Joe Biden. He let a lot of Biden's false and misleading statements go unchallenged. It's one thing to let these statements slip by during a live interview; it's another to recycle them without correction in a written follow-up summary.

Stephanopoulos quotes Biden as saying, "The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy."

No, the truth is that hundreds of prominent economists disagreed with President Obama's read on the economy and went on record advising against his massive "stimulus" package. It's irresponsible for Stephanopoulos to let Biden's statement to go unchallenged.

Stephanopoulos writes:

Biden acknowledged administration officials were too optimistic earlier this year when they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent as part of their effort to sell the stimulus package. The national unemployment rate has ballooned to 9.5 percent in June -- the worst in 26 years.

Fair enough, but shouldn't Stephanopoulos have pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ran Obama's numbers and concluded that we'd be better off doing nothing than passing the "stimulus" plan?

Back to Biden:

We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," he said. "The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of money.

This is the part where Stephanopoulos should have pointed out that Obama spent weeks talking down the economy while trying to push his "stimulus" package through Congress. It's tough to buy the excuse that they didn't know how bad it was when they were daily throwing around words like crisis and catastrophe and describing this as the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Stephanopoulos should also have pointed out that one of the key criticisms opponents had of the "stimulus" package was that most of the "stimulus" wouldn't come until after the economy had recovered. In fact, the CBO concluded exactly that. For the administration to now say that it's too early to expect results because the bulk of the money hasn't been spent is pure humbug.

Remember, this is the bill Obama argued had to be passed immediately -- legislators weren't even given a chance to read it before they were forced to vote on it -- because any delay would be "inexcusable and irresponsible." Now that we aren't seeing the results they promised, it's become convenient to admit that the bill that couldn't be delayed doesn't really do much for the first year.

I don't know whether bias, laziness, or incompetence is to blame for Stephanopoulos not doing his job, but it's obvious that he didn't do it. The whole "we report; you decide" approach to journalism is damaging the country. It's a journalist's job to provide context and basic fact checking. If they won't do that, what good are they?

Exploding Health Care Costs

I've been posting a lot of graphs lately, because they show so clearly what's going on with various aspects of the economy. Here's another, from the Goldwater Institute (via John Stossel), which shows health care cost skyrocketing as patients pay a diminishing share of those costs.

Updated Unemployment Graph

I posted an earlier version of this graph a while back. The good news is that there has been a slowing of job losses. The bad news remains that unemployment continues to track at a much higher rate than President Obama said it would without his stimulus package.

Re-analyzing the housing crisis

Stan Liebowitz says the accepted explanation of what caused the housing crisis is wrong and that, therefore, our approach to solving it is also wrong:

What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house -- that is, the balance of the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. This means that most government policies being discussed to remedy woes in the housing market are misdirected.

Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards.

But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures. . . .

[T]he most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home. . . . A simple statistic can help make the point: although only 12% of homes had negative equity, they comprised 47% of all foreclosures.

We need real sunlight in Washington

President Obama's "Sunlight before Signing" pledge, in which he promised to post all new legislation online and wait five days before signing it in order to give Americans a chance to review it, was a promise empty of any real meaning. With no expectation that this policy would affect whether or not the president signs a bill, it matters not whether the "viewing period" comes before or after the actual signing. It seems clear that the promise was purely a political one, a nod to "transparency" with no tangible effect.

Still, it's disappointing that Obama has been unable to keep even his token promise. At a time when trust in government is fragile, the breaking of even a vacuous promise -- possibly especially a vacuous promise -- isn't helpful.

What would be helpful, in terms of both transparency and trust, would be to build some meaningful delays into the legislative process. Congress has become increasingly irresponsible in its willingness to rush through pieces of legislation without due deliberation. We saw this with the "stimulus" bill, where legislators were forced to vote on a 1000-plus page bill to cost taxpayers $787,000,000,000 within a few hours of its becoming available to them.

This was clearly done for political reasons. Polls showed that the more the public learned about the bill, the less they supported it. Democrats had to ram it through before we figured out what was in it. Three months later, we're still being surprised by what is in it, and how ill-conceived it was.

The Democrats were properly criticized for not allowing enough time for reams of legalise to be read (let alone digested, considered, and debated) before forcing a vote. Their response was to hire speed readers to read subsequent bills into the record. This is what passes for responsible government in our nation's capital.

The handling of the cap-and-trade bill, passed by the House yesterday is an even more egregious example. In this case it wasn't merely a matter of not allowing the time to read a bill, but the fact that there was no actual bill to read. Apparently, the only "copy" of the bill was two separate stacks of paper, the first being a 1000-plus page earlier draft of the "bill," the second being a 300-page "amendment," comprised of statements which take the form: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..."

It's outrageous that our government is enacting a massive energy policy that will cost over $1,000,000,000,000 in this reckless manner. Even the most trivial of laws should deliberated upon. That it has become commonplace for $1,000,000,000,000 bills to be slapped together in this way is beyond irresponsible; it is obscene. Any member of Congress who voted for this bill should be removed from office for malfeasance and violation of the public trust.

If Obama wants to do something meaningful in the area of transparent and responsible government, he should be pushing Congress to enact some meaningful policies which ensure that all bills that come before his desk have been well researched, well considered, and well debated. These are not unreasonable requirements. This is what our representatives are elected for. It is their job to know what they are voting on, and it's sickening that that they can't be trusted to do it.

[h/t Andy McCarthy, Powerline]

High cost of government schools

Andrew Coulson reports that Washington D.C. spends over $27,000 per student on public education. Meanwhile, the tuition in D.C. private schools averages $6,600 per student, and those students read two grade levels ahead of their public school peers.