Hoover's policies helped cause the Great Depression

Economists at UCLA report:

Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study.

"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover," said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.

The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.

"By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product," Ohanian said. "His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression."

According to this research, Hoover's policies we're responsible for 18 of the 27% decline in GDP. The economists also concluded that Roosevelt's subsequent policies were responsible for 60% of the Great Depression's duration, extending it by seven years.

Considerable quote

"People love honesty, but they hate the truth."

~Unkown

There's no excuse for success

This op-ed piece in the New York Times is quite confusing. To begin with, the piece is titled "Smart Child Left Behind," but begins by summarizing the conclusions of a new study:

Not only is [the No Child Left Behind act] having its intended effect — bettering the performance of low-achieving students — it is raising test scores for top students too. . . .

The new study, by the independent Center on Education Policy, showed that more students are reaching the “advanced” level on state tests now than in 2002. This led the authors to conclude that there is little evidence that high-achieving students have been shortchanged.

The article then takes exception to the study's conclusions, criticizing the study's methodology. Fair enough. I don't know enough about it to take that on.

However, the preferred data the article points to seems consistent with the data being criticized. The authors themselves report that high-end kinds are continuing to make progress:

High-achieving students might be making incremental progress — but is this new? If they were making similar gains before 2002, then might recent progress have nothing to do with No Child Left Behind?

This is bewildering. The stated premise of the article is to examine whether high-end kids are being "left behind" due to NCLB's emphasis on closing the achievement gap. If, as the authors admit, high-end kids are improving at the same rate as they were before, it seems the study in question was correct in concluding "there is little evidence that high-achieving students have been shortchanged."

I guess the point is supposed to be that high-end kids should be improving at an even faster rate under NCLB. But that's an unreal expectation given that the purpose of NCLB was to close the achievement gap. That is has done so, while allowing high-end kids to maintain their rate of growth is rather remarkable and speaks well of the program.

The article continues:

For example, in eighth-grade math, the lowest-achieving students made 13 points of progress on the national-assessment scale from 2000 to 2007 — roughly the equivalent of a whole grade. Top students, however, gained just five points.

That's called closing the achievement gap, and it is precisely what NCLB was designed to do! As an aside, the outcome is exactly what common sense might predict. Kids at the lower end have much more room to improve, so we would expect them to show a large improvement relative to kids that are already in the upper echelon.

Bizarrely, the authors conclude by lamenting the "tens of thousands of high achievers who are black, Hispanic or poor" who are "excelling at their studies, often against great odds" whose educational needs aren't being addressed. So it's not enough that NCLB is doing what it was designed to do, help poor black and Hispanic kids get a better education. It's still a failure in the eyes of these authors because high-end kids -- no, wait. Not all high-end kids, but specifically high-end kids who are black, Hispanic, and poor -- are only improving at the same rate as before.

I'll grant that we need to keep working to help all kids improve academically, but c'mon guys, this is a good thing. Stop peeing int he punch bowl.

Truly a strange article.

More evidence of same

A new poll reports that only 4% of Israelis believe Obama is pro-Israel, while over half think he is pro-Palestinian. For comparison, 88% view George Bush as pro-Israel. This is hugely important. Israel is one of our most loyal allies, and a stronghold in a region rife with people who wish to destroy us and our way of life.

Obama vowed to be a transformative president, and there's no question that he's changing things in a big way, both inside and outside the US. Unfortunately, just about every change has been in exactly the wrong direction.

America betrays our allies

Here's an important story that isn't "sexy" enough to get much attention:

The United States is poised to dump a critical missile-defense agreement with two of its most dependable NATO allies. The Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported yesterday that the Obama administration is going to scrap the "third site" anti-missile system scheduled to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Missile interceptors in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic were scheduled to be deployed by 2013. Now the plan appears to have been shot down.

This move sends the wrong signal to our allies in Eastern Europe. The former Soviet satellites have been among the strongest proponents of a robust U.S. role in Europe because they believed they could count on the United States to defend their interests against perennially predatory Russia. Both countries showed good faith by sending troops to fight in Iraq as part of the multinational force. The Polish and Czech governments acted courageously when they agreed to host the missile-defense system.

Prague and Warsaw knew Moscow would react negatively, but after years of patient diplomacy, they chose to stand with the United States. Canceling the deployment will betray the trust of our allies in Warsaw and Prague, leave Europe defenseless against Iranian missiles, enhance the Kremlin's stature and diminish U.S. credibility. There is no upside.

Wasn't it Barrack Obama who continuously lambasted George Bush for alienating our friends? Wasn't it Obama who promised to foster new levels of trust abroad, and to build the kind of relationships that lead to strong coalition partners? The same Obama who is constantly giving speeches in foreign countries about how arrogant his country is?

To add insult to injury, the article goes on to explain how Obama is playing nice with the Russians. There is a pattern here of Obama turning a cold shoulder to our friends (Israel, Great Britain) and embracing the bad guys (Hugo Chavez, the Iranian mullahs, Honduran tyrants).

The "Torture" report

Steve Chapman relies on the recently released CIA Inspector General report to make the case against the interrogation methods employed on high-level terrorist operatives.

Americans are practical people, which is why they tend to pay heed when Dick Cheney says the harsh methods used by the CIA on suspected terrorists were not merely efficacious but indispensable. The intelligence derived from these interrogations, he assures us, "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks."

Did they really? The report released Monday, done by the CIA's inspector general back in 2004, didn't support Cheney's claim. It said "there is no doubt" that the detention and questioning of detainees "has been effective."

But the report reached no judgment on "enhanced interrogation techniques," saying, "The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured."

The report does say that, but it goes on to say that in all three cases where waterboarding (the harshest of the methods employed) was used, the terrorists became cooperative only after the technique was used. The report states that we can't definitively conclude that it was the waterboarding that made the difference. But it makes clear that the information provided up until that time was "known" or "historical," while the information provided afterward was strategic and actionable, and that it saved many lives.

As Chapman says, Americans are practical people, so even if he sees no support in the report for Cheney's claims, I suspect a lot of practical Americans would. And, in fact, huge sections of the released report were redacted, so we can only speculate as to what else was concluded about the efficacy of the techniques.

The report also makes clear that the interrogation of these detainees was well considered. The Department of Justice and several other agencies contributed to the drafting of the procedures. Both the White House and Congress were briefed. Doctors and psychologists were consulted, both in devising the methods and during the actual interrogations. Some deviations from approved procedures are noted in the report, but it appears there were few of these and that they were largely reported and addressed before the political dust storm hit.

All in all, the report paints a picture of competent professionals doing an extremely difficult job in a high stakes environment.

Chapman goes on to make emotional arguments about how cruel the methods were and how wrong it is to torture. Torture is a loaded word, but I will grant him that description. I'm sure it is torture to believe you are going to drown or be killed. But, as the report states, when the procedure ends, any physical or psychological damage ends with it. Given that the terrorist are actually killing people, I'm not especially bothered by this. I have no doubt that those murdered on 911 would much have preferred to have been waterboarded and still alive today.

Chapman then plays some word and number games:

More than 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody over the last eight years, and the CIA has been implicated in some of the deaths. Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey says dozens of prisoners were "murdered."

A 100 deaths is a lot, but note that the CIA has only been "implicated" (which, according to my dictionary, could simply mean the suggestion of involvement) in "some" of them. I read nothing in the Inspector General's report about allegations of "murder," but if there is actual evidence of such, of course it should be investigated. Short of evidence, this talk is simply designed to appeal to emotion rather than rationality.

Finally, Chapman defers to Ronald Reagan's having signed the 1998 Convention Against Torture. Conservatives, Chapman suggests, should agree with him because Ronald Reagan said so. I'm a huge Reagan fan, but this doesn't constitute an argument. It's a classic example of the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy that I learned about back in high school.

Chapman's conjuring of Reagan does make me wonder where the Gipper would come down on this issue. It was a different time. We hadn't had 3000 Americans murdered on our own soil by non-national terrorists, or watched in horror as our countrymen had their heads sawed off while they screamed in agony. Now that's torture. And there's my emotional appeal.

Update: The Wall Street Journal gets it right, I think:

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week's coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we've had a chance to read the reports, it's clear the real story isn't the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda.

In other words, it worked—at least until politics got in the way.

That's the essential judgment offered by former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in his 2004 report. Some mild criticism aside, the report says the CIA "invested immense time and effort to implement the [program] quickly, effectively, and within the law"; that the agency "generally provided good guidance and support"; and that agency personnel largely "followed guidance and procedures and documented their activities well." So where's the scandal?

The rest of the article is well worth reading, and alerts me to an error I made in my original post. Only two of the three terrorists I mentioned were waterboarded. The third was subjected to a less harsh "enhanced interrogation technique."

Considerable quote

"[I]f we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer."

~Victor Davis Hanson

Considerable quote

"The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition. They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations."

~Ted Kennedy

No Republican plan except for the three Republican plans

CNSNews.com:

President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress -- while pushing their own health care overhauls -- have criticized Republicans as offering only opposition and no ideas for reform, but the GOP, despite the lack of media attention, has introduced three health care bills.

The three Republican bills total almost 400 pages and have been on the table since May and June.

In May, Republicans in the House and the Senate formed a bicameral coalition to produce the130-page “Patients Choice Act of 2009.”

In June, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) introduced the “Health Care Freedom Plan,” a 41-page proposal.

And in July, the Republican Study Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), unveiled the “Empowering Patients First Act,” a 130-page plan.

Some of the provisions included in one or more of the bills include: investing in preventive medicine, an overhaul of Medicaid, reduction of abuse and fraud in the Medicare program, supplemental health insurance for low-income families, tax credits for health insurance, and a ban on federal funds being used for abortions.

However, supporters of the Democratic plans have accused Republicans of trying to derail attempts at reforming health care without having a plan of their own.

“There is no Republican health care plan out there,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told Talk Radio News Service on July 31 about what he called the Republican-backed “misinformation campaign” that is slowing health care reform.

Considerable quotes

Mark Steyn:

"The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can't the government sort out my health care? Why can't they pick up my mortgage?"

"I don't need Barack Obama's help to "spread the wealth around." I spread my wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread."

[Via Right Wing News]

Obamacare: A trillion here, a trillion there

Congressional Budget Office estimates of Obamacare have it costing somewhere between 1 and 1.5 trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000 - $1,500,000,000,000), depending on which plan is ultimately adopted. But the CBO has a history of grossly underestimating these types of things. John Goodman (no, not that John Goodman) put together a disturbing graph showing that these estimates are routinely off by a factor of 10 or more. If history is any guide, we can expect Obamacare to come in at somewhere between 10 and 27.2 trillion dollars ($10,000,000,000,000 - $27,200,000,000,000).

Remember, the rationale for health care "reform" is that current spending is "unsustainable" and that Obamacare would "bend the cost curve down."

[Via Betsy's Page]

The US lagging recovery

Mark Steyn:

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn't afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world's biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can't compete with Obama's $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

I don't know if the "stimulus" plan is responsible for extending the recession. Only a small portion of the money has actually been spent -- that is to say, it wasn't designed to stimulate to begin with. Still, a small portion of a huge amount is quite a lot of money. That's money that was taken out of the economy, and therefore wasn't allowed to contribute to a recovery.

But it's fair to point out that the housing bubble was a US phenomenon, so maybe that's why we're not snapping back as quickly as other countries. Regardless, it's hard to justify taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the private sector (the part of the economy that actually creates wealth) at a time when we desperately need growth. Even if that money isn't taken directly, but is borrowed instead, it equates to less credit available to the private sector, and higher taxes down the road -- both of which retard growth and delay recovery.

As an aside, the article points to yet another example of Obama directly contradicting himself:

But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, "Medicare is a government program that works really well," and if "we're able to get something right like Medicare," we should have more "confidence" about being able to do it for everyone.

On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is "unsustainable" and "running out of money."

By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician's contradictory statements, these weren't made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H.

Considerable quote

Michael Barone: "There are more conservatives than Republicans and more Democrats than liberals."

What about the free market?

Dale Franks has a take on the health care debate that has largely gone unnoticed. He begins with with this:

We need to face a few facts about health care reform. Our current system of health care funding is broken. It’s not broken because we have a free market in health care. It’s broken because we don’t.

He goes on to explain that the US health care system is stuck in limbo between a free market and a socialized approach. He argues that restrictions and regulations are so onerous as to choke the life out of our oft-described "free market" system and that it may, in fact, be more efficient to turn the entire enterprise over to the government.

Frank writes:

Part of the problem is that we really don’t have a free market in health care. Individuals, by and large, don’t buy health care policies. Health insurance is employer-provided. In effect, however, this is underwritten by the US government by making health care premiums deductible for businesses, which results in billions of dollars in lost tax revenues. And then, of course, you have to throw in the $300 billion or so that the state and federal governments spend outright to provide health care. And, of course, once you hit 65, you’re on the government’s health care gravy train, because you’ve got your Medicare, which also covers prescription drugs, now. . . .

So, really, we have what is, in many ways, the worst of both worlds. We have a market-based system, but one in which market incentives are minimized through regulation and subsidies. In effect, government policy bids up health care prices, while at the same time interfering with the market forces that keep a lid on prices.

It’s no wonder that more and more people are looking at single-payer, government-provided health care as an alternative to what we already have. At the very least, a single payer system would end the inefficient and fragmented ways by which health care is currently purchased.

And, indeed, this piece of data drives home the point:

Because of various government interferences, more than 1/3 of all health care spending is purely administrative. By contrast, Canada’s administrative burden on health care funding is about 1%. If we were to switch over to a single payer system, there is an excellent chance that we would, in fact, spend less money on health care than we currently do.

So our current debate, whether we should retain the current system or turn things over to Washington, is incomplete. It ignores the alternative of actually returning to a free market system. I quote at length here, because Frank lays it out much better than I can summarize.

The alternative, of course, is to make the case that our current system costs so much, and is so distorted, because of government interference. We have a mixed system of health care funding in which the government’s intervention imposes a wide range of unnecessary costs. So our choice is not to keep what we have, or eliminate the administrative overhead by turning it all over to the government. The third choice is to return to a free market in health care.

Eliminate state by state coverage mandates, which result in 50 different–and sometimes wildly so–regulatory regimes. Eliminate federal and state laws that prevent insurers from creating nationwide plans and risk pools. Eliminate employer health-care coverage, and personalize it, to make it personal and portable.

Here’s another idea: allow people to buy health insurance. That isn’t what we have now. We have pre-paid health care. The two things are wildly different. For example, look at how auto insurance works. Imagine how much your car insurance would cost if we expected our insurance to cover 80% of the cost of oil changes, tire rotation, wiper blades, new tires, regular service, etc. But that’s precisely what we expect medical insurance to do. And then we wonder why it costs so darn much.

We need to allow insurers to offer simple catastrophic care coverage, with varying deductibles. That way, you can pick up the tab for your own doctor’s visits, but you don’t have to worry about bankrupting yourself if some idiot runs a stop sign and knocks you off of your motorcycle. We need to allow anyone who wants to set up a medical savings account. Heck, if we really want “the government” to finance it, we could offer a 100% tax credit for health care expenditures.

We don’t need the government to rescue us from the unsatisfactory state health care is in. We can accomplish the same goals of universal coverage and lower cost, by getting the government out of health care as completely as possible. There are so many ways we could use free markets to relieve us of the distress the current system of funding is in, that they’re almost impossible to enumerate.

This makes a lot of sense. It's a lesson we learned (or should have) from Ronald Reagan: Government is the problem, not the solution.

Throughout the financial crisis, we were constantly told that the free market had failed and that we must give Washington the power to moderate it. But when you start peeling away the layers you find that government had a heavy hand in directing the very elements that failed -- through the Community Reinvestment Act, which put heavy pressure on banks to make bad loans; through racial quota systems which forced banks to ignore sound lending practices; by backing those bad loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All down the line, the government was pushing bad decisions that wouldn't have been made in a free market.

The same thing is going on with our health care system. And more government control will only make it worse. I caught an interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday in which he isolated a single aspect of the debate and brought it to clarity. He pointed out that we are telling private insurance companies that they must provide coverage to everyone. We are telling them that they must cover pre-existing conditions. And we are telling them that they aren't allowed to charge more for what will undoubtedly cost them more. Then comes the simple question: what do you expect will happen to the insurance business because of this?

And finally, it bears repeating that the two areas of health care where there is the least government interference -- plastic and lasik surgery -- are the only two areas where costs have actually dropped.

So why aren't we taking a look at a true free-market approach?

Obama's misleading statement(s) of the day

Seems like every day now President Obama gets caught making false statements in an effort to sell his health care plan. Today, the American College of Surgeon's takes their turn fact-checking the president:

The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

-- Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.

-- Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon's decision to remove a child's tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what's right for the patient. . . .

The President's remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.

Fact-checking the president

USA Today did some fact checking on some of President Obama's statements at yesterday's town hall meeting in Portsmouth, NH. Obama doesn't fair so well. Michelle Malkin and QandO add their own commentary.

Obama seems to be devoting most of his attention to spreading misinformation while claiming he is correcting misinformation. This has become his go-to tactic on every issue -- claiming one thing while doing exactly the opposite. The big question is whether America will catch on before the Dems are able to push ObamaCare through the way they did the "stimulus" and the budget.

Update: Obama fairs even worse under the Heritage Foundation's fact-checking.

Any doubts that President Barack Obama’s “townhall” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday was a complete farce were dispelled early on when the hand picked crowd broke out in a chant of: “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!” at the close of his opening remarks. Recognizing his campaign’s signature slogan, the President responded: “Thank you. I remember that.” Comforted knowing he was surrounded by a room full of die-hard supporters, President Obama then want on to make a number of misleading and outright false statements about the health care legislation still working it’s way through Congress.

The article then gives seven examples, providing links to the impeaching evidence.

Another self-debunking by Obama

In a previous post, I reported how Obama debunked himself by admitting that Medicare, to which Obamacare is often compared, is in fact "socialized" and "government-run" medical care.

A short time later, I watched Obama's town hall meeting in Portsmouth, NH, where he debunked himself again. In response to a question about whether private insurance companies would be able to compete against the stacked deck of government-run health care, Obama replied: ""UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."

That's the whole point. It's the government-run stuff that is always having problems. So maybe, just maybe, that's a clue that putting the government in control of 17% of the economy isn't such a good idea.

Physician's union drives up medical costs

One of the reasons medical costs in the US are so high is that the number of physicians is kept artificially low. I first heard about this about 10 years ago from radio talk show host Larry Elder. Elder explained that the American Medical Association is a powerful union that exerts a lot of control over how many applicants medical schools can accept. This, of course, keeps the number of physicians small, and the whole supply and demand thing kicks in to increase doctor's salaries.

I haven't heard anyone talking about this during the current debate on medical care reform, so I had begun to wonder if Elder's info was bad or whether things had changed. But I found some online articles which indicate that the union is still very much in control and that the shortage of doctors is indeed due to their influence. Wall Street Pit summarizes the situation:

One reason we might have a “health care crisis” due to rising medical costs, and the world’s highest physician salaries is that we turn away 57.3% of the applicants to medical schools. What we have is a form of a “medical cartel,: which significantly restricts the supply of physicians, and thereby gives its members monopoly power to charge above-market prices for their services.

In his classic book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman describes the American Medical Association (AMA) as the “strongest trade union in the United States” and documents the ways in which the AMA vigorously restricts competition. The Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the AMA approves both medical schools and hospitals. By restricting the number of approved medical schools and the number of applicants to those schools, the AMA limits the supply of physicians. In the same way that OPEC was able to quadruple the price of oil in the 1970s by restricting output, the AMA has increased their fees by restricting the supply of physicians.

Seems like this should be getting a lot of attention, but I had to go digging just to refresh my memory.

White House health care infomercial

The White House has set up a web site called Reality Check where, it says, Americans can "get the facts" about health insurance reform. I just watched a video there of someone named Kavita Patel which, the site claims, 'debunks the myth that reform will mean a "government takeover" of health care or lead to "rationing."'

Patel "debunks" the "myth" of Obamacare being a government takeover of health care by denying that it is a government takeover of health care. She then shows a video of Obama likewise denying that it is a takeover of government health care. There it is, folks, all the "facts" and "proof" you need. Who knew debunking could be so easy.

Patel also "debunks" the "myth" that Obamacare will lead to rationing by simply stating that rationing already takes place and that Obamacare will stop it. Whew, yet another piece of right-wing propaganda withers in the face of the "facts."

Patel is correct that health care rationing takes place now, in the sense that rationing takes place whenever choices are made about how money is spent. We also have rationing of food, cars, electricity, clothes, and everything else we buy. Guess Obama will be going after those things next.

About the only real debunking that takes place on this video is when Obama debunks himself. After denying that Obamacare will socialize medicine and result in government-run health care, he mocks a lady who wrote him a letter opposing "socialized medicine" and "government-run health care" and then imploring him to leave her Medicare alone. Obama responds with amusement, "that's what Medicare is."

While Obama sees the irony in the woman not recognizing the nature of Medicare, he's entirely blind to the irony that he considers Medicare "socialized" and "government-run" health care, while denying that Obamacare, which is modeled on Medicare, is also.

Are US infant mortality rates really so high?

I keep hearing that the US has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world. This doesn't make sense to me, given that we are arguably the most technologically advanced country in the world. So I took a couple of minutes to goolge "myth united states infant mortality," and quickly learned that infant mortality is defined and reported quite differently in different nations. While the US strictly adheres to the World Health Organization's definition, apparently we're about the only one who does. For example, we count stillborn deaths, while many other countries do not. We count deaths that occur within the first 24 hours; many countries do not. We count premature births under a certain weight and size; many countries do not.

So it's not at all surprising that our numbers are going to be considerably higher than those reported by other countries. But using those "cooked" numbers to argue that the US has inferior health care is unfair and dishonest.

As always, when considering statistics, it's important to run the reports through the filter of common sense and life experience. If things don't seem to make sense, it's usually an indication that something fishy is going on. Fortunately, it often takes only a couple of minutes on the Internet to clarify what's going on.

Another proposal for health care reform

Charles Krauthammer's two point plan for health care reform:

1) Tort reform: As I wrote recently, our crazy system of casino malpractice suits results in massive and random settlements that raise everyone's insurance premiums and creates an epidemic of defensive medicine that does no medical good, yet costs a fortune.

An authoritative Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors admitted they order tests, procedures and referrals -- amounting to about 25 percent of the total -- solely as protection from lawsuits. Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year.

(2) Real health-insurance reform: Tax employer-provided health care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It's economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness.

The health care benefit exemption is the largest tax break in the entire U.S. budget, costing the government a quarter-trillion dollars annually. It hinders health-insurance security and portability as well as personal independence. If we additionally eliminated the prohibition on buying personal health insurance across state lines, that would inject new and powerful competition that would lower costs for everyone.

These aren't new ideas, but they are worth restating, especially whenever Obama claims that the opposition is simply being obstructionist without any proposals of their own.

Obama and Bush: Contrasting styles of handling dissent

TheConservatives.com compares how the Bush and Obama administrations handle protest rallies. The difference is rather stark.

The public option: a thought experiment

Neil Boortz on the "public option":

The Democrats and looters want you to believe that they're just going to set up a "public option," a government health care plan that will "compete" with the private insurance plans and keep them honest.

OK .. let's build a little scenario here. You're in business for yourself. You own a restaurant. You find out the government is going to open a restaurant right next door to you. The government says that they're not trying to run you out of business .. they just want to give you a little competition so that you will improve your product. You find out, though, that while your restaurant will have to operate at a profit to survive, the government restaurant can operate at a loss ... for ever. If the government restaurant needs money all it has to do is go out into the community and seize it. If you tried to do that you would be arrested and charged with robbery. You also learn that the government restaurant is going to be able to set all the rules about how you operate: How you cook and serve your food, what kind of menu you will have, the hours you will be open ... everything. Those same rules will not necessarily apply to the government restaurant.

Yeah .. that's some fair competition, isn't it? Can you tell me how you are possibly going to stay in business? The answer is, you won't. Sooner or later you close your doors, and if your customers want to eat ... they head to the government restaurant.

Real health care reform

Arthur Laffer explains what effective health care reform would look like:

Implementing Mr. Obama’s reforms would literally be worse than doing nothing.

The president’s camp is quick to claim that his critics have not offered a viable alternative and would prefer to do nothing. But that argument couldn’t be further from the truth.

Rather than expanding the role of government in the health-care market, Congress should implement a patient-centered approach to health-care reform. A patient-centered approach focuses on the patient-doctor relationship and empowers the patient and the doctor to make effective and economical choices.

A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.

By empowering patients and doctors to manage health-care decisions, a patient-centered health-care reform will control costs, improve health outcomes, and improve the overall efficiency of the health-care system.

Congress needs to focus on reform that promotes what Americans want most: immediate, measurable ways to make health care more accessible and affordable without jeopardizing quality, individual choice, or personalized care.

Questions for the president

Greg Mankiw:

1. During your campaign, you said that under your tax plan, "no one will pay higher tax rates than they paid in the 1990s." The House healthcare reform bill, however, raises tax rates for top earners well above the 1990s levels. In many states, the top marginal tax rate would exceed 50 percent. Do you still stand by that campaign pledge, and would you veto any bill that violates it?

2. During your campaign, you said, "The danger in a cap-and-trade system is that the permits to emit greenhouse gases are given away for free as opposed to priced at auction. One of the mistakes the Europeans made in setting up a cap-and-trade system was to give too many of those permits away." The climate change bill now being considered in Congress does the same thing. Are you now willing to have the United States make the same mistake the Europeans made, or would you veto the bill?

Obamacare: selling the unsellable

The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that Obamacare will cost over a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000). This isn't good news for something that is supposed to save us money and "bend the cost curve down." In response, the rhetoric has changed from emphasizing the money that will be saved to claims that the reform will be "revenue neutral." This isn't good news either, as we are learning that keeping it revenue neutral will require enormous tax increases, not to mention that "revenue neutral" means staying on the same "unsustainable path" that was given as a reason to enact reform in the first place.

I expect the next phase of the evolving attempt to sell Obamacare to be the claim that we need to spend crippling amounts of money now so that we can save money down the road. This is a tough sell in a struggling economy, but it has the virtue of kicking accountability down the road until Obama is out of office. By the time it becomes apparent that long term costs have actually increased due to government overstepping, Obama won't be around to take the blame.

But anyone paying attention doesn't have to wait 10 years to discover that Obamacare is a sham. The CBO's report flatly states that "the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window."

This thing deserves to go up in flames.

7 lies of the Obama administration

Just another of those "clip and save" articles that are nice to have handy when someone starts droning on about The Obamessiah.

Do the rich pay their "fair share" of taxes?

Taxfoundation.org:

Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes.

Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.

Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. In 2007, the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid twenty years ago.

Some in Washington say the tax system is still not progressive enough. However, the recent IRS data bolsters the findings of an OECD study released last year showing that the U.S.—not France or Sweden—has the most progressive income tax system among OECD nations. We rely more heavily on the top 10 percent of taxpayers than does any nation and our poor people have the lowest tax burden of those in any nation.