Inappropriate
An additional $2 billion has been appropriated to states for care for the aged outside of nursing homes, and there is also $350 million to combat fraud and waste in Medicare. (NYT, 6/21/2012)
Did we read that correctly? $350 million to combat fraud and waste? Here's another idea: let's just not spend that money. Chances are we will end up ahead.
Share-Holders
The largest share of the money to date, about $5 billion, has gone to employers, public retirement plans, unions and others that provide insurance coverage for workers who retire before they are eligible for Medicare. Under this early-retiree program, General Electric and the United Automobile Workers were among those entities receiving money.
G.E., for one, said it had used the $39 million it received under the program to reduce its costs and the costs of both active and retired employees. Republicans like Senator Mike Enzi from Wyoming have argued that much of the money went to unions and state retirement plans as a way of rewarding “politically connected constituencies.”
Let's see....unions - public sector and other - are enormous contributors to Democrats and GE's Jeffrey Immelt is an Obama supporter. Yes, rewards to "politically connected constituencies" sounds about right.
Denmark
Rewind to 2009. The fight over ObamaCare is raging, and a few news outlets report that something looks ethically rotten in the White House. An outside group funded by industry is paying the former firm of senior presidential adviser David Axelrod to run ads in favor of the bill. That firm, AKPD Message and Media, still owes Mr. Axelrod money and employs his son.
The story quickly died, but emails recently released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee ought to resurrect it. The emails suggest the White House was intimately involved both in creating this lobby and hiring Mr. Axelrod's firm—which is as big an ethical no-no as it gets. (WSJ, 6/21/2012)
Hold on a second here. We simply cannot deal with all of the Obama administration scandals at once. Let's take them one at a time. First we'll do Fast and Furious, then Solyndra, then the intelligence leaks, then Axelrod.
The most ethical administration....
It's A Drag
One of the largest drags on our economy has been the layoffs of public employees like teachers, firefighters and police officers due to state budget cuts. Even as American businesses have created nearly 4.3 million private-sector jobs over the past 27 months, state and local government employment has fallen by 450,000 jobs during that time. But Congress has failed to act to put hundreds of thousands of teachers and first-responders back to work. (Jeffrey B. Liebman, WSJ, 6/21/2012) Mr. Liebman is a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a senior economic policy adviser to the Obama campaign. From 2009 to 2010, he was executive associate director and then acting deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
We were tempted to label this: Why Republicans Will Win. RedStateVT does not want to get too cocky about the November election, but the thinking outlined above is certainly cause for optimism. Inexplicably - after the mid-term elections, after Scott Brown's victory, after the failure of the Wisconsin recall - Democrats still do not get it. Did they not see what happened in Wisconsin? The people do not think that the answer to America's economic malaise is to hire more teachers! But when you hear Howard Dean exclaim: First of all, we view Wisconsin as a win, you realize that Dems are destined to wander in the wilderness. Which is where they belong at this moment in history.
No comments:
Post a Comment