Tag Archives: political parties

He Built This

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President Barack Obama and his DoT folks, abetted by the press, have done their best to create a commercial travel problem out of the Obama Sequester.  The press, including “fair and balanced” Fox News, are focusing on the ATC Controller furlough-caused 1,600 delays per day since the furlough scheme went in.

What the press cynically omit to mention is that ATC Controllers handle 28,500+ commercial, 27,000+ general aviation, 24,500+ air taxi and charter, 5,000+ military, and 2,000+ air cargo flights, or more than 87,000 flights each day.

Now we’re six days into the Obama-directed Huerta Furlough, and the FAA’s own Web site shows the lack of widespread “staffing” delays.  If you’re patient, and track that site through a day, you’ll see that the “staffing” delays are concentrated in the New York area with an occasional bump in LA or Chicago.

Michael Huerta, FAA Administrator, was asked during his testimony before the House Wednesday why he couldn’t focus ATC furloughs—to the extent they’re needed at all—on regional and small airports, leaving these larger, much busier airports fully staffed.  Huerta responded that he couldn’t pick winners and losers from among the nation’s airports.

Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing when he elevates those regional and small airports to the same level as the US’ air traffic hubs.  Oh, and maximizing what little pain the FAA’s share of the sequester can cause.

Update: The FAA…has suspended furloughs for air traffic controllers….

Air traffic facilities are supposed  to return to regular staffing through today, and  normal ops should be achieved by tonight.

Taxes, Again

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The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution has had time to go over President Barack Obama’s budget “proposal,” and they’ve

found that the budget plan would raise roughly $1.1 trillion over 10 years….

Their graph below illustrates from where those trillion dollars would come.

Notice that.  Those at the bottom of the economic totem pole—a strait contributed to in no small way by Obama’s rather cynical wealth redistribution policies—will see a larger drop in their take home pay from Obama’s tax increase than will his highly touted middle class.

So much for Obama’s promise of not raising taxes on those making less than $250k.  But that promise went by the boards long ago.

Then there’s the sin tax bump on tobacco:

The White House proposes raising the federal tax on a pack of cigarettes to $1.95 from $1.05.  It estimates this would raise $78 billion over 10 years, and it plans to use the proceeds for expanded preschool education.

The White House has defended the proposal by saying it would both discourage smoking and fund an education initiative that low-income families would benefit from the most.

But apparently the sin tax shouldn’t be used to deal with the health-related outcomes of this particular sin.  Never mind that “low-income families would benefit most” from this alternate use.  This is one of the contradictions inherent in Progressive attempts to use our tax code to achieve their social goals.

There’s more; RTWT.

2014 (and 2016) aren’t coming soon enough.

More Obama Sequester Games

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As The Wall Street Journal reports,

This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year.  The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.

President Barack Obama’s hoped for result is

to force airline flight delays until enough travelers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.

Once again, Obama is blowing smoke.  Leaving aside the fact that furloughing ATC Controllers is not the only way in which the FAA could have found the sequester-mandated pocket change savings (FAA Administer Michael Huerta’s “difficult choices” don’t include crossing his boss and making those savings elsewhere), the threatenedhoped forpredicted widespread delays don’t seem to be developing, as the FAA’s own Web site indicates, four days into the furlough program.

The Buckley Rule

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…applies to Federal funding and getting bills passed, also.

Bill Buckley’s originally espoused recommendation was to find the most electable conservative candidate and support that candidate.  Notice that “electable” part.  It does conservatives no good at all to find the most ideologically pure candidate and support that one, when he cannot get elected in the venue in which he’s running.

Now there are Obamacare and Health and Human Services’ health care insurance exchanges.

Health and Human Services Department has already burned through all the dollars appropriated by the Affordable Care Act for implementation.  HHS is now demanding an extra $5.9 billion to set up the law’s insurance exchanges—$2 billion more than it estimated it would take last year—but both Senate Democrats and the House denied the request last month.

HHS responded by announcing that it would simply steal however many dollars it needs from a separate ObamaCare slush fund.  Supposedly devoted to “prevention,” this cash has been funneled to everything from bike-path signs to patronage for liberal pressure groups lobbying for fast-food taxes.  Now HHS is reaching into this till for at least $454 million this year, with no accountability.

House Republicans are planning to remove the remaining $5 billion from that slush fund and transfer the monies to an existing fund that supports insurance for Americans with preexisting medical conditions, a fund that’s currently broke and closed to new insuree wannabes.  Yeah, that fund is idiotic and ought to be done away with, too.  However.

The zeroing out and the transfer have a number of pluses.  For one thing, it would defang a far larger travesty of Obamacare—those government-run exchanges that are a precursor to an American version of Great Britain’s disastrous NHS.  For another thing, it would block another of President Barack Obama’s end-arounds of the expressed will of Congress, this time though his HHS, by leaving those Federally created…insurance exchanges…unfunded and un-set up.  For a third thing, it would force the Democrats in both the House and the Senate, as well as Obama himself, onto the record with their choice between covering sick people now (albeit it badly) or that long-duration HHS waste.

Finally, it comports with the Buckley Rule—it’s the most conservative move that’s actually doable.

Unfortunately, groups like Club for Growth and Heritage Action (the latter is the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, who really should know better) are doing their best to block even this much.  These chuckleheads want the conservatively pure full repeal of Obamacare or nothing.

Of course, in today’s environment they’ll get the nothing option.  They know this, but purity is more important to them than the most doable conservative option.

I wrote about chuckleheads before in another context.  It seems we still have too little shortage of them.

2nd Amendment Rights and Steamrolling

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President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.  It came down to politics.”

“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”

What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed.  No, though.  He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it.  We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen.  The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.

In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry.  That ban was in the bill, true enough.  But the fears are no less real for that.

Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?

This is another failure of Obama’s doing.  As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc.  Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.