Tag Archives: economics

Some More re Obamacare

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal provided an interactive and a graph earlier this week in their online issue.

The Healthcare.gov Explorer, available here, allows you to quickly explore the highlights of what’s available in your county.  As I’ve mentioned before, what I can get in my little county in Texas would be vastly more expensive in terms of premiums required and deductibles to be paid by me before the health plan would begin to pay (only) some of my expenses, were I to have to replace what my wife’s employer provides due to the employer’s decision to cancel its program.

This (these) graph(s) shows the subsidies you’re paying, both in terms of additional Obamacare taxes and in terms of those higher premiums and deductibles in order to pay for someone else’s health plan.  I’ve broken the WSJ‘s single image into two parts for convenience.  Keep in mind that the example presented is for a single person (and for that person living in Ohio).  The first part gives the basis for subsidy calculations:

This second part gives the additional subsidies that are available under Obamacare:

I’ve written elsewhere about the poverty trap that is government welfare, and the rational nature of the economic decision to stay on welfare rather than take a wage increase which is that trap.  Here, we see that a person making $11,490 (a student, perhaps) who graduates and takes an entry-level job at $28,725 will see his health plan out-of-pocket costs skyrocket from $1,000/yr to $5,000 and his $100 deductible go to $1,500.  He’ll also see his monthly premium (heroically assuming that the two plans in these two graphs have identical premiums, but you get the idea) increase by $1,212 per year.  The total health plan cost increase of $6,612 per year represents nearly 40% of that wage increase—and this is before considering the other welfare subsidies which this man also loses from that wage increase.

Jobs

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s where we are, five years into the Obama “recovery” from the Panic of 2008:

  • 4.1 million fewer full-time workers today than in November 2007
  • 81% of workers are full-time now vs. 83% prerecession—and that per centage is of a smaller labor force than extant in 2007
  • per CBO, employment at the end of 2013 was about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its prerecession level…”if the participation rate had risen to the level it would have attained without the current cyclical weakness”

Real wages have gone nowhere in this recovery:

And this graph of the performance of the Obama “recovery:”

This recovery is some 10 per centage points below the recoveries of the three prior…recessions.

If this sounds like a broken record, it’s because this “recovery” is a broken record.

Sanctions and Competition

Posted on by
1

Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czech Republic have directly appealed to our Congressional leadership to expedite turning on the export spigot for our natural gas.  These four nations see the directness and immediacy of the advantage of buying natural gas from us rather than from the Russians.

There’s another effect, though, from our increasing our gas, and oil, exports as quickly and as far as we can.  That’s the effect on oil and gas pricing in the global markets.  Such a large and easy increase in supply will depress those prices, which will have a competition-based double whammy on Russia: it will deprive Russia of billions of dollars in income from its own oil and gas exports by lowering the price, sharply, that Russia can demand, through depriving Russia of its energy monopoly.  Keep in mind, also, that the Russian economy almost exclusively is built on oil and gas exports—it has nothing else other than cheap, second tier military equipment, and while that remains a strong Russian industry, it’s not strong enough to carry the Russian economy, much less provide the funding necessary for Russian…adventurism.

The other whammy also is in those sharply lower oil and gas prices.  That decrease will make it easier for erstwhile Russian “clients,” including Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, the EU (Germany, France, and Great Britain especially) to get their energy from somewhere more reliable than Russia, and at a cheaper price.

That cheaper price for these others produces a separate whammy for them: cheaper energy can be only to the good for their economies as they struggle to break out of the doldrums remaining from the global Panic of 2008.

But that’s what competition does—it lowers prices and sets economies free to generate prosperity.  An attempt to boycott Russian oil and gas is unnecessary.

Budget Lies

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the mendacious NLMSM, is touting his latest “budget” proposal as cutting spending by $600 billion over the next 10 years.  But Scott Rasmussen, cited in The Wall Street Journal, has noted,

in the current year, the federal government is expected to spend $3,651 billion.  …the president’s budget calls for spending $3,901 billion in 2015.  That’s $250 billion more than this year.  It’s not a one-year aberration either.  Spending increases are projected every single year for the next decade and beyond.

Calling that a spending cut is an outright lie.  Even if the spending increases are smaller increases than originally planned, they’re still increases, not cuts.

As Rasmussen also pointed out, this isn’t unique to Obama, though; it’s been going on since at least the ’70s.  But it’s got to stop.  Full stop.

Speaking of Out of Touch

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) demonstrated the depth of his condition of out of touchness in a Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.  Although Sanders’ out of touchness is amply demonstrated by his full-throated defense of the dinosaur that is the United States Postal Service, I want to look at a couple of other things he said in his piece.

First, there’s this:

There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.  They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services….

He says this in all seriousness, as if shrinking government and returning the bulk of its functions to the private sector where they belong is somehow a bad thing.  And that there would be profit in that private sector (and not only for “Wall Street and corporate America,” but also for medium-sized and small businesses and the Americans these would employ) is something only an avowed Democratic Socialist like Sanders would decry.  Moreover, it’s not only the powerful and special interests who want this shrinking of government and a divestment of its present array of “functions.”  Apparently he’s missed the Tea Party revolution that’s been going on these last five years.

He also had this (with some overlap with the quote above):

They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services, and couldn’t care less how privatization or a degradation of services affects ordinary Americans.

This is a false dichotomy.  Privatization doesn’t at all degrade services—it improves those extant and leads to vast expansion of new services, and at lower prices than before.  This is the example of the breakup of Ma Bell, effective at the start of 1984.  Under Ma Bell, we had a very good land line telephone system.  After the breakup, we got an even better land line system of competing companies (until their effective remerger); a cell phone system of competing companies; a cable system of more-or-less competing companies, which also compete for telephone business; and all of them competing for Internet business—including telephony communications.

A further example is the USPS, which prior to the divestment of package delivery and mail service other than first class, did a very good job of delivery.  Now we have competing package and special delivery service companies that are cheaper, faster, and even more reliable, and they have a broader range of special delivery services that the USPS is scrambling to match.  Additionally, all those communications services above are functionally competing for first class mail delivery, too, even though only the USPS can handle formal first class.  That’s what email, texting, Skype, AIM Chat, Twitter, and on and on—even that other dinosaur, faxing—are doing.

Apparently, Rip van Sanders has been sleeping through the end of the 20th century and this beginning of the 21st.