Tag: government

Supercommittee gives up

8:38 pm

The day of reckoning looms: The Congressional supercommittee has given up. The perspective of one member of the committee can be read here. Key quote:

The Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare trustees, and the Government Accountability Office have each repeatedly said that our health-care entitlements are unsustainable. Committee Democrats offered modest adjustments to these programs, but they were far from sufficient to meet the challenge. And even their modest changes were made contingent upon a minimum of $1 trillion in higher taxes—a move sure to stifle job creation during the worst economy in recent memory.

Even if Republicans agreed to every tax increase desired by the president, our national debt would continue to grow uncontrollably. Controlling spending is therefore a crucial challenge. The other is economic growth and job creation, which would produce the necessary revenue to fund our priorities. [emphasis mine]

This needs repeating: regardless of whether you think we should raise taxes in this situation, no tax increase can eliminate the deficit. The problem is out-of-control spending that needs to be seriously curbed.

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Uncertainty rules the day

2:53 pm

The press reports have been unanimous:

Unfortunately, if you read the actual IPCC panel summary report, you find that, though the majority of the press stories accurately describe the report’s worst scenarios and predictions, all of them downplay the most important point of the report, that the uncertainties are gigantic and that the influence of human activity on the increase or decrease of extreme weather for the next few decades will be inconsequential. To quote the report:
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Some historical context in discussing the federal debt

8:41 am

Some historical context in discussing the federal debt.

When Bill Clinton was president, the national debt rose by an annual average of $193 billion; when the profligate George W. Bush was in the White House, the yearly debt increases averaged $612 billion. On Obama’s watch, by contrast, the federal debt has been skyrocketing by more than $1.5 trillion per year. It took 40 presidents and nearly two centuries, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan , for the US government to accumulate $1.5 trillion in indebtedness. The 44th president – aided and abetted by Congress – enlarges the federal debt by that amount every 12 months.

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Obamacare threatens to cripple the American medical device industry

1:26 am

Repeal it! Obamacare is forcing the American medical device industry out of business.

The 2010 law imposed a crippling 10-year, $20 billion tax on revenues — not on profits — earned by companies that make medical devices, such as catheters, artery-clearing stents, scalpels and pacemakers. The tax is prompting American companies to shed jobs, move factories overseas and reconsider niche-market research projects, said Paulson, whose district include medical device companies.

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Another ObamaCare Glitch

9:56 pm

Another ObamaCare glitch.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)

The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.

This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.

The Obama administration’s solution? Ignore the law as written.

I have a better idea: Repeal the damn thing!

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Government inspector forces private citizens in a private house to pour bleach on home-grown food

1:20 pm

We’re here to help you: A government inspector arrives during a meal and forces private citizens on private property to destroy the home-grown food.

Susan [the inspector] deemed our food unfit for consumption and demanded that we call off the event because:

1. Some of the prepared food packages did not have labels on them. (The code actually allows for this if it is to be consumed within 72 hours.)

2. Some of the meat was not USDA certified. (Did I mention that this was a farm to fork meal?)

3. Some of the food that was prepared in advance was not up to temperature at the time of inspection. (It was being prepared to be brought to proper temperature for serving when the inspection occurred.)

4. Even the vegetables prepared in advance had to be thrown out because they were cut and were then considered a “bio-hazard”.

5. We did not have receipts for our food. (Reminder! This food came from farms not from the supermarket! I have talked with several chefs who have said that in all their years cooking they have never been asked for receipts.)

I don’t actually agree with most of the ideas of the organic farm-to-fork movement. However, I find it beyond disgusting that our government thinks it has the right tell us what we can eat.

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NASA, the federal budget, and common sense

12:41 pm

Let’s be blunt: the federal government is broke. With deficits running in the billions per day, there simply is no spare cash for any program, no matter how important or necessary. Nothing is sacrosanct. Even a proposal to cure cancer should be carefully reviewed before it gets federal funding.

Everything has got to be on the table.

Thus, no one should have been surprised when word leaked two weeks ago that the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration was proposing cutting the entire unmanned planetary program at NASA, while simultaneously eviscerating the space agency’s astronomy program. No more missions to Mars. No probes to Europa or Titan. Further and longer delays before the James Webb Space Telescope is completed. And Kepler’s mission to find Earth Like planets orbiting other stars would end mid-mission.

The Obama administration has to find ways to trim the budget, and apparently it is considering eliminating these programs as a way to do it.

Yet, the money spent on space astronomy and planetary research is a pinprick. Considering that the federal government overspends its budget by approximately $3.5 billion per day, and the total amount of money spent on these two science programs equals about $2.4 billion per year, it seems senseless at first to focus on these kinds of cuts. Quite clearly, even eliminating them entirely will not put the federal budget into the black.

Now I am not one to say, “Cut the budget, but please leave my favorite programs alone!” I recognize the serious financial state of the nation, and realize that any budget suggestions I make must include significant total cuts to NASA’s budget.

As a space historian and science journalist who knows a great deal about NASA, however, I also know that there is plenty of room for cuts in NASA’s budget. By picking our priorities carefully at a time when our options are limited, NASA might even be able to accomplish more, not less, with a smaller budget.

Moreover, if I, as a space junky, think it is possible to continue NASA’s most important programs and still trim its budget by 15% to 20%, in real dollars, doesn’t that suggest that the same could be done across the entire federal government?

All it takes is a little knowledge, some common sense, and the courage to say no.
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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the challenge to Obamacare during this term

8:48 am

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Obamacare during this term, with an expected decision to occur prior to next year’s elections.

No matter how the court rules, the timing here is not good for Obama and the Democrat Party. If the court kills the law, it will illustrate how misguided it was. If they uphold it, it will only fire up the voter base that wants it repealed to vote against the party that passed and still supports the law. And that voter base has consistently been made up of large majorities of the population, based on every poll taken since the law was first proposed.

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Supercommittee to the rescue

12:08 pm

The Supercommittee to the rescue!

They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

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Escape from Berlin

6:01 pm

An evening pause: In honor of the fall of the Berlin Wall on this day in 1989, I post below Part 2 of a documentary on the history of the Wall’s construction and the many escape attempts by East Germans. Though the documentary does a poor job of explaining why East Germans desperately made attempt after attempt to flee to the west (a wish to escape from oppression and go somewhere where they could freely live their lives), it does include some incredible film footage showing the various escape attempts. Part 1 outlines the Wall’s initial construction, during which many people could easily break through.

Part 2, embedded below, describes the first deaths, when the communist East German government gave its guards orders to “shoot to kill.” Part 3 is even more fascinating, showing the effort by West Germans to dig tunnels under the 150 foot death strip in order to get friends and relatives out. Parts 4 and 5 show later attempts, when the Wall had become more impregnable, including one escape using an arrow (!) and another using two ultralight airplanes. Part 6 shows the Wall’s fall in 1989.

For twenty-eight years a government decided it had the right to imprison its citizens because they longed for freedom. In the end, all that government really achieved was to prove that freedom is better, and that good intentions — based on intellectual ideology and imposed on people by force — lead nowhere but hell.

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We’re still not cutting

8:49 am

The day of reckoning looms: We’re still not cutting.

In the spring fight to avert a government shutdown, Republicans promised $100 billion in real cuts but then compromised for $38.5 billion in future savings. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office found the deal still resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011. The “largest spending cut in history” ended up being a spending increase.

And this:

But the [super]committee isn’t really trying to cut spending. It seeks only to spend the country into bankruptcy a little slower. Rather than letting the country rack up $23.4 trillion of debt by 2021, the supercommittee hopes to keep it to $21.3 trillion. It’s the difference between speeding off a cliff at 91 miles per hour versus 100 miles per hour.

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A breathtaking view of the Apollo 15 landing site

2:03 pm

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team has released a wide angle side view image of the Apollo 15 landing site, showing the lunar module and the areas around Hadley Rille and the Apennine Mountain range that the astronauts explored using their lunar jeep. Below is a cropped close-up, showing the landing site near the top of the image with Hadley Rille near the bottom. Below the fold is a second image showing a wider view that includes the Apennine mountain slope that the astronauts drove their rover up.

Close up of Hadley Rille and Apollo 15 landing site

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New conservative website: Not Mitt Romney

1:01 pm

On another campaign note, a new website, put together by some noted conservative Republicans, has just appeared called Not Mitt Romney. An explanation can be found here.

Remember how Nancy Pelosi said we need to pass Obamacare “so you can find out what’s in it?” Well, is it any different with Mitt Romney? Does anybody really have the slightest idea what he’d do as President? Nobody can even reasonably predict where the guy will be on any issue six months from now, much less what he’ll do if he becomes the leader of the free world.

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