Obamacare Fail

Posted on 22 May 2013 by eehines

…again.

Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.

Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country.

This, of course, is backwards. The coverages here should be paid out of pocket. The better policy would cover only catastrophic events—like hospitalization.

Then there’s this:

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Let’s Try That Again

Posted on 21 May 2013 by eehines

Joe Rosenberg, Loews Corp Chief Investment Strategist, has suggested that large, rich corporations should bailout a spendthrift, debt-ridden Federal government. After all, he says, since the Federal government had bailed out some big businesses in the Panic of 2008, it’s only proper to return the favor. As if two wrongs would make a right.

Rosenberg’s proposal is this in its essence:

Companies like Apple, J&J, Microsoft, and other US multinationals are major vendors to the federal government. Instead of the deficit-ridden government borrowing money to buy their products, let the companies offer the government long-term, no-interest financing in lieu of cash.

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Of What Are They Afraid?

Posted on 20 May 2013 by eehines

British PM David Cameron, in another step in his push to give the British people a vote on their continued membership in the EU, has

given his Conservative Party’s backing to a draft bill that would commit the UK to holding an EU referendum by the end of 2017[.]

Of course many of his governing coalition partners oppose this bill—they not only want continued membership in the EU, they want the matter closed without the people’s further input.

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ObamaTaxes

Posted on 16 May 2013 by eehines

Compiled by the good folks at Americans for Tax Reform. Se the link below for details.

President Barack Obama, in a cynical Mothers’ Day “defense” of Obamacare, actually called these taxes the

largest health care tax cut for working families and small businesses in our history.

Here’s an excerpt of the list.

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Another Obama Sequester Fail

Posted on 15 May 2013 by eehines

Recall that California’s gas and oil industry has been shrinking for years. It’s a slow shrinkage, but in the present political clime—the green political clime—it’s been inexorable. This graph tells the tale (ignore, for this post the loud contrast with Texas).

Now this administration’s Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for leasing and permitting of Federal lands to oil and gas producers, is claiming that it’s helpless to reverse this trend—the sequester, you see. The BLM has announced that it

will stop scheduled oil and gas leasing on public lands for the rest of the fiscal year. At least two auctions of more than 3,000 acres with promising oil deposits have already been canceled.

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Business Factoid

Posted on 14 May 2013 by eehines

Matthew Payne, writing in The Wall Street Journal this weekend on a related subject, had this little tidbit. Quoting a Chief Executive Magazine poll of business-worthy states, he wrote,

CEOs are well disposed to Texas, and it’s not hard to understand why. 52 Fortune 500 companies now call Texas home.

That’s 10% of the Fortune 500 that live here.

If those 500 companies were spread evenly across the 50 states, there would be 10 of them here. If the 500 were spread proportional to each state’s population relative the nation’s population, Texas would have 4 of them.

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Debt, Taxpayers, and Morality

Posted on 13 May 2013 by eehines

President Barack Obama wants to forgive another batch of debt, this time owed by America’s youth. This is another of those tidbits buried in his latest pseudo-budget proposal.

Obama wants to

increase the number of borrowers eligible for a program known casually as income-based repayment, which aims to help low-income workers stay current on federal student debt.

Borrowers in the program make monthly payments equivalent to 10% of their income after taxes and basic living expenses, regardless of how much they owe. After 20 years of on-time payments—10 years for those who work in public or nonprofit jobs—the balance is forgiven.

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A Grant of Dominion

Posted on 10 May 2013 by eehines

…of one group of Americans over another, courtesy of President Barack Obama, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), and their Obamacare.

Dr Ezekial Emanual, ex-health-care adviser to Obama and presently senior fellow at the Center for American Progress strongly recommended this grant in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

In touting Obamacare’s health “insurance” exchanges, he recommended government add overt pressure on our young to buy health “insurance,” in addition to the existing Individual Mandate requirement, because their participation is a necessary subsidy for others’ purchase.

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A Thought on Wealth Redistribution

Posted on 10 May 2013 by eehines

The Heritage Foundation has released their study on a potential cost to existing US taxpayers of legalizing existing illegal aliens under the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform program. Andrew Stiles, writing for National Review Online, has provided a useful summary of that 100-page document.

Rather than commenting on the implications vis-à-vis immigration reform, though, I want to comment on the implications for us taxpayers with respect to the larger question of wealth redistribution in our country.

Stiles noted that

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A Thought on Taxes

Posted on 9 May 2013 by eehines

As the idea of reforming our mendaciously Byzantine tax code starts to come up again—whether as a reform in its own right or as a bargaining chip in the coming debt ceiling debate (which debate properly focuses on cutting spending more than on taxes)—some thoughts occur to me, triggered by a couple of recent Wall Street Journal articles.

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