Tag Archives: political parties

Respect for our Nation

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Here is an illustration of what the Left—what Democrats—think of our nation.  Recall NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s “protest” against our flag and our nation, wherein he shows his disdain by kneeling during our national anthem.  Now the infection has spread to a State government.

State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, a St Louis Democrat, refused to stand while her colleagues recited the Pledge of Allegiance in the state Capitol. She said her silent protest on the Senate floor was intended to show solidarity with the San Francisco 49ers quarterback.

Democrats just don’t like our nation, apparently.

There Are Charities, and There Are Charities

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The Daily Caller has some numbers on the Clinton Foundation, which is pleased to refer to itself as a charity.  The Clinton Foundation spent, according to its 2014 Form 990 (the latest available)

  • a hair under $91.3 million in 2014
  • $34.8 million on salaries, compensation, and employee benefits.
  • Another $50.4 million was marked as “other expenses”

And

Despite taking in an additional $30 million in 2014, the Clinton Foundation spent 40% less on charitable grants in 2014 than in 2013. Even as it slashed charitable spending, the foundation increased the amount spent on salaries, employee benefits and compensation by $5 million in 2014.

Here are those 2014 vs 2013 numbers, taken from lines 8-19 of the Foundation’s 990 (rounded, in dollars):

Item 2013 2014 Change
Contributions and grants 142,900,000 172,600,000 +29,700,000
Grants and similar amounts paid 8,900,000 5,200,000 -3,700,000
Salaries, compensation, employee benefits 29,900,000 34,800,000 +4,900,000
Other expenses 45,300,000 50,400,000 +5,100,000

“Other expenses” include things like “legal” and “accounting” (small amounts); “occupancy,” “travel,” and “conferences” ($25 million); “other program expenses” (nearly $3 million), and so on.

Wait, what did the Clinton Foundation spend on actual charity?  Those “grants and similar…”: $5.2 million, down 42% from 2013, despite a 21% increase in revenue (those “contributions and grants”) over 2013.

Of the total Foundation spending of some $91.3 million (I’ve omitted some minor spending in my table above), the Foundation only spent those $5.2 million on “grants and similar….”  That works out to less than 6% of the money spent going to actual charities.  The rest went to the Foundation’s and Foundation personnel’s personal benefit.

There’s also this curious datum from the Clinton Foundation’s 990:

Under Liabilities (Part X, Line 18): “Grants payable” is $0.00 for both 2013 and 2014.  It’s an unusually efficient “charity” that has all of its charitable commitments fully paid by the end of every year.

TDC says that a well run charity spends only about 25% on administrative costs.  Take that with a grain of salt; I’ve seen numbers as low as 10% on admin, and numbers above 30%.  In any event, the Clinton Foundation doesn’t even come close to a decent or proper charity to expense ratio.

As Rick Moran, of PJMedia, put it in his description of these data,

If there’s a better definition of “pay for play,” I have yet to hear it.

The Clinton Foundation tax return can be seen here or here.

Obamacare Fail

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The headline of this Wall Street Journal piece pretty much says it all: Average Cost of Employer Health Coverage Tops $18,000 for Family in 2016.

The sub-head, with careful reading, adds clarity: Pace of cost increase slowed by accelerating shift into high-deductible plans, new survey shows.

That cost of employer coverage, buy the way, refers to the premiums employees must pay: $18,142 for a 2016 typical employer-offered family plan, and employees have to pay 30% of that, typically, up from 29%.  Like a sergeant I once worked with liked to say, sort of, “Holy cats.”

Is that cost increase rate actually slowing, though, where it matters to the individual—the employee?  Not in the deductibles.  Shifting into high-deductible plans means the policy holder—the employee—has to pay lots more out of his own pocket just to get to the point where the coverage plan begins to pay its 50%, or 60%, or maybe as high as 80% of the medical costs.  For that year.  Then the deductible has to be paid anew.

Notice another part of that sub-head: accelerating shift into high-deductible plans.  That means that in that next year, the erstwhile high-deductible plan may not be available: the employee may be stuck with purchasing a different plan, perhaps with an even higher deductible, perhaps with higher yet premiums, perhaps with coverage not as useful to the employee.

This is what Obamacare, not the employers, has wrought.  This is what needs to be tossed in its entirety into the medical waste disposal and replaced with a more honest environment within which actual insurance can be had, and competitively so.

Yet Another Democrat’s Disregard for An Inconvenient Law

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Recall that Governor Terry McAuliffe (D, VA) granted en masse a restoral of the right to vote to some 200,000 convicted felons, and the Virginia Supreme Court said Virginia law didn’t allow that: any such restoral had to come only after individual, case by case evaluation of each felon separately from any other felons.

McAuliffe replied that he “cannot accept” the ruling. He called it a “political decision” that “reminded” him of Bush v Gore and that the justices were “scared” of the legislature. He has since acted on his defiance by restoring rights to some 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote when the state Supreme Court’s decision invalidated his executive order.

McAuliffe also is insisting that he’ll restore the vote to the remaining 200,000 before he’s out of the Governor’s mansion.

In addition to that contempt of—and for—Virginia’s Supreme Court, his charge that the Supremes were scared is nothing but an FDR-esque effort to intimidate those Justices to rule more…suitably…in future.

The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly at the above link:

McAuliffe has nullified the Virginia Constitution’s guidelines on felon voting simply because he dislikes those rules.

And

At stake is whether an executive can first rewrite the law in defiance of the legislature and then do what he wants anyway in defiance of a court.

This is the risk we run from a Clinton extension in 2017 of the Democrats’ rule over our nation.