That, too

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrats are keeping the government shut down over their demand to extend—permanently, no negotiations—the Obamacare subsidies that the Progressive-Democrats during the Biden reign had scheduled to expire in November of this year, pretending at the time that the subsidies were just temporary, to tide people over during the Wuhan Virus situation. Their core claim on this aspect is that Obamacare premiums, as paid by the policy holder (carefully excluding, per those same Progressive-Democrats, the premium costs paid for by us taxpayers via those subsidies), will explode.

What the press, with equal care, ignores is that the purported need for those subsidies is a direct result of the cost of the government-run health care coverage program that is the Affordable Care Act. Government-run because these are coverage policies whose coverage suites are mandated by government, including the worst mandate of them all: the requirement to charge premiums (within narrow government set bands) for ailments and potential ailments without regard for the risk of the ailment being covered, and for some of those ailments at no cost to the policy holder at all.

The Wall Street Journal has pointed out an additional price to us average Americans:

If Republicans don’t extend the turbocharged subsidies, she [Minnesota Progressive-Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar] warned, “early retirees like Bill & Shelly [who live in Meridian, ID] will see their health insurance premiums increase nearly 300%—from $442 to $1,700.”

And [emphasis added]

This is a tacit admission that ObamaCare encourages Americans to stop working. The Biden subsidies turbocharged that incentive by making subsidies larger and available even to those with incomes above 400% of the poverty line. The couple in Ms Klobuchar’s example had north of $130,000 of income in 2024….

This demand for permanentizing the ObamaCare subsidies is just one more aspect of big government taking over our lives, reducing individual liberties (the health coverage industry does not exist in a free, competitive market where individuals can make their own choices of what coverages they want, at prices that competition would make possible) and taking the flip side of individual liberties, individual responsibilities, away from the individual and, instead, spreading them across all of us together, as brokered by Government.

The editors offer some solutions that would be a good beginning toward correcting the failure that is the ObamaCare essay into socialized medicine.

  • codifying association health plans that let small businesses join up to form a larger risk pool to improve the economics of offering insurance
  • continuing to expand plans that can be paired with tax-preferred health-savings accounts
  • fix[ing] some ObamaCare regulations like the medical-loss ratio that obliges insurers to spend 80% of premiums on claims, which in practice is a profit cap

Also needed, I claim:

  • allowing health coverage plan providers to sell policies that cover preexisting conditions at premiums consistent with the risk involved. The risk here is not certainty since the preexisting conditions will not all flare up and require medical intervention simultaneously; the risks can be amortized across time, if government only got out of the way
  • allowing individuals to choose from, and insurers to offer, tailored coverages: only primary care—annual exams, for instance, and the occasional flu or broken bone
  • coverages only for catastrophic health potentialities
  • reducing the regulatory burden on doctors who want to eschew being reimbursed via health coverage providers by doing cash reimbursements, perhaps by annual subscriptions

But to do any of that, it’s necessary for the Progressive-Democrats to end their extortionate demand on subsidies as a condition or reopening, so those discussions can begin; it’s necessary for the Progressive-Democrats to release from their basements us American people, especially the poor and their children, whom they’ve taken hostage against their demand.

Monetary Misconception

Posted on by
Reply

Judy Shelton, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, has this one. She wants the Federal government to issue a gold-backed bond would strike a blow for sound money.

Mr Trump has criticized currency manipulation in global trade relations. Challenging other nations to emulate the US [gold-backed bond] by guaranteeing some portion of their sovereign debt in gold would demonstrate America’s vision for stable money as the proper foundation for fair trade.

This is naïve. “Other countries” will continue to manipulate their currencies, just as they do now; this move only would add a new tool for manipulation—varying the value of the metal backing their own debt instrument(s).

Governments have been debasing their metal backed currencies ever since money was invented, doing so by shaving coins minted in the metal; by replacing some of the money-backing metal with other, cheaper metals; outright announcing a differing, lower values for a unit of the metal.

The most infamous recent example of the latter was during our own Great Depression when then-President Franklin Roosevelt (D) seized all privately held gold and then promptly devalued the gold in US dollar terms.

All currency is fiat currency, whether it’s minted in the metal or it’s printed on paper formally backed by the metal (at a rate the issuing government has announced for the time being), or it’s printed on paper and allowed to float in the markets for goods and services—and currencies. That currency has the value, in legal terms, that government says it has from time to time.

Backing a bond with a precious metal has no material meaning. What makes a money sound is the stability of the issuing government; the economy it oversees with a light hand; and that government’s ability to protect its people from invasion, whether physical, economic, or political. Nothing else does.

No—All Must Suffer

Posted on by
Reply

Recall House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D, MA) saying the suffering of Americans during this Schumer Shutdown is leverage for Party. Recall further, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) saying the longer his shutdown continues, the better it is for Party.

Now we have two bills on offer that demonstrate the political bankruptcy of Party’s position, to say nothing of its moral bankruptcy. One is a bill on offer from Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) that would fund the SNAP program during the shutdown so the needy could retain access to nutrition for themselves and their kids. Ten Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. Exactly one Progressive-Democrat has.

The other bill is one offered by Senator Ron Johnson (R, WI) that would pay essential Federal workers and those furloughed now rather than after the Schumer Shutdown ends. Many of those employees, furloughed or still working, will without their paychecks find themselves—and in too many cases are alredady finding themselves—in any of a variety of breadlines because they can’t afford groceries. The bill would be especially important for those still required to work since those folks are ineligible for unemployment benefits. Here, too, only one Progressive-Democratic Senator has signed up to support it.

Marie Antoinette was a piker. The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians won’t even let our needy and our Federal employees have any cake* to eat.

*Cake: not the modern-day sweet confection, but for the French of Antoinette’s time, cake was the bread crust burned onto the peasants’ tiny oven walls as the loaves expanded hard onto those walls.

Hysteria

Posted on by
Reply

It runs deep in the Progressive-Democratic Party, even if it is artificial and cynically constructed. The latest example is provided by Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA):

Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE.

Not immigration reform differences, not Obamacare subsidies, not spending or taxing policy differences. Just whether a President is allowed to remodel a portion of the White House.

This is how far Progressive-Democrats’ focus on manufacturing hysteria about anything Trump has taken them from matters important to us average Americans.

More Whining and Bodice Ripping

Posted on by
Reply

This time, it’s from a Wall Street Journal editor, Collin Levy.

President Donald Trump (R) is expanding the East Wing with a ballroom fit for its purpose—to entertain visiting numbers of national leaders, not just any dignitary, and to put on the welcome and entertainment that fits such large gatherings. The expansion is to replace convening those same large gatherings in a collection of tents out on the White House lawn. Levy objects, and she opened her cri de coeur with this:

It [the new ballroom] might have been be tacky, but the republic can withstand some nouveau riche architecture on federal property.

That’s typical journalistic arrogance; she’s masquerading her opinion as received fact. On the contrary, what’s tacky is entertaining foreign leaders outdoors in tents as though the White House lawn is home for trailer park trash.

She closed her tearful piece with this:

It [the White House] is a symbol of power, legacy, and national identity. Respect for the nation and all that it has built still matters. These aren’t trifles or overreactions. They are the foundations of the republic we built. That’s worth defending.

The White House as an edifice is, indeed, a symbol. The larger, more important symbols of our nation’s power, legacy, and national identity, though, are our respect for and rule of law, the integrity of our national borders, and our American culture centered on the idea of inalienable rights coming from our Creator, not any government, and of individual liberty along with liberty’s dual, individual responsibility. And that culture, ideal of law (including those borders), and culture are what the White House stands in symbol of.

Those symbols presently are threatened by domestic terrorism; politicians musing on and hoping for the murder of political opponents and their children; attempts at murdering a President by a Leftist; politicians’ threats of violence against Supreme Court Justices and attempts at murdering one of them; the actual murder by Leftists of a leading Conservative activist; and the divisive likening of political opponents to Hitler and fascism, followed by attempts at mass murder of Republican Congressmen.

Yet, all this WSJ editor can find—all she can think of—to worry about is a needed remodel and expansion of the White House’s East Wing, a modification that will add to the White House’s grandeur.