April, 2019, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Government Health Care Intervention Equals Less Quality Health Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Let's continue with more disasters today:

1) Although Obama Care and its socialistic tenets turned out to be a massive failure, liberals and Democrats want to go further down this road of failure to a single payer, socialistic health care system in this country. They like to point out that other countries, usually using the Scandinavian countries as an example, have a single payer system and thus, based on that fact alone, we should have it in this country.

But numerous times we have shown what a failure the single payer system is. Long delays to get in to see a doctor, waiting months to get a simple diagnostic test done. Higher and higher healthcare taxes to get less and less healthcare coverage. Citizens leaving a country to come to the U.S. because the wait times for a procedure is so long in a single payer system. Basically, expensive healthcare that makes you die younger.

But the Legal Insurrection website recently ran article that shows that single payer systems in Scandinavian countries are not all that liberals think they are or dream they are:

• The Washington Free Beacon reported: The government of Finland collapsed Friday “due to the rising cost of universal health care and the prime minister’s failure to enact reforms to the system.”
• This caused Prime Minister Juha Sipila and his entire cabinet to resign after his governing coalition could pass the necessary laws to reform the government’s single payer health care system.Much like the U.S., Finland has an aging population with 26% of its citizens expected to be over the age of 65 by 2030.An aging population almost always means higher and higher healthcare costs.
• To head off financial disaster, Finland has tried to cut costs and boost health care efficiency for years but has been unsuccessful in doing so, resulting in more and more financial distress for the government.
• And according to Reuters, Finland is not alone in this crisis: “Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.”
• Other Nordic countries with single payer systems such as Sweden and Norway are facing similar health care financial stress.

Nasty stuff, people getting older and their government likely not going to be able to fulfill its commitment of health care. And yet, liberals and Democrat in Washington continue to champion a losing approach to healthcare with a recent tweet by Bernie Sanders showing just how ignorant he is of reality and finance: “In the United States it costs on average $12,000 to have a baby. In Finland it costs $60.”

So Sanders thinks that for $60 you can give birth to a baby in Finland and that $60 will cover hospital, doctor, nurse, and medicine costs for the birth. It does not cost $60, Bernie. It costs much more, it is just that the couple having the baby pay less while the rest of Finland society and taxpayers pay much more than $60. Are you that ignorant of finance or are you just a flat out liar? In either case, single payer systems are not efficient, effective, or healthy for sick citizens. Obama Care proved that and the Scandinavian countries, along with England and Canada, prove that every day.

2) Chris Pope, recently writing for the National Review website, wrote an excellent article that not only showed how bad Obama Care was but how bad Medicare For All would be, which is really Obama Care on steroids. Rather than review all aspects of his in depth and well researched and reasoned article, I encourage you to read it at:

https://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/msg.jsp?msgid=22&folder=0/b6bb4176c6d599b2e6f150162a4126e9&isSeen=true&x=-838493755

My trying to summarize his analysis and logic would not do it justice. But let me pull out some facts and realities from his work that prove again that Obama Care is nothing more than a series of unfolding disasters, much like Medicare For All would be:

• Mr. Pope reminds us that Obama and the entire set of Washington Democrats promised us that Obama Care would reduce costs and improve medical and health care delivery.
• Obama actually promised that an average American family could actually see their annual health care insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 a year.
• Of course that did not happen, health insurance premiums skyrocketed, health insurance copays skyrocketed, millions of American lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals and drug costs continued to escalate.
• By the numbers, health insurance premiums for individual health insurance programs under Obama Care doubled within three years of the legislation being passed.
• Premiums for Obama Care health insurance plans now average $4,700 a year, almost $400 a month, hardly the $2,500 reduction Obama promised.
• And yet Democrats want even more government intervention in the market even though Obama Care’s intervention was a disaster.
• The state of Vermont, a very liberal state that is the home of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a big Medicare For All advocate, tried to implement a single payer system in 2014.
• Thus, if any part of the country had any chance of making a single payer system work, it was Vermont.
• And yet, when the liberal politicians in Vermont ran the numbers and actually looked at the reality, they decided they could not afford a single payer system.
• The costs on a national level, costs that Vermont found out quite rudely, would add $3 TRILLION to the Federal government operating costs every year, more than double the amount that the Federal government collects in personal income taxes.
• This $3 TRILLION annual incremental cost was independently arrived by analysis done by both the liberal leaning Urban Institute and the conservative leaning Mercatus Center.
• Even Nancy Pelosi’s health policy advisor, Wendell Primus, notes that, “recently noted as fundamental obstacles to Medicare for All the large number of potential losers, widespread opposition from stakeholders, and the desire to reserve funds for other priorities. As the party’s presidential candidates for 2020 have jockeyed for position, many have endorsed proposals in full knowledge that they cannot be implemented. Indeed, even Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose state enacted single-payer but abandoned the plan when the scale of associated tax increases became clear, has refused to advocate abolishing the filibuster in order to enact Medicare for All.”
• One version of Medicare For All that is less expensive than the full blown Medicare for All theory is to allow people of all ages to “buy in” to the program, a facet of Medicare that already exists for senior citizens that have not contributed enough in payroll taxes over their lifetime to qualify for regular Medicare.
• However, this program would cost Medicare For All customers to currently pay $974 a month for Medicare Parts A,B, and D, hardly affordable for most Americans.
• Many Obama Care programs cost much less than $974 a month so things would be worse, not better, under Medicare For All.
• But as soon as liberals decide that the $974 should be subsidized then we are right back to an incremental $3 TRILLION a year in cost.
• And liberals never seem to talk about the reality, that according to Gallup, 80% of Americans rate their current health care as excellent or good so why would the vast majority of Americans want to give up their current excellent or good health care for a long shot, long odds program like Medicare For All?
• Plus, the average out of pocket costs that Americans pay as a share of average household consumption (3%) is actually slightly less than the average among developed countries, another reality that liberals like to ignore.

But consider another reality that the article does not cover: do you really think that Washington, like the following idiots, should be trusted with every aspect of your medical care:

• Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson actually stated in a televised Congressional hearing that he was worried the island of Guam could tip over in the Pacific Ocean.
• Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the Constitution is over 400 years old, that her Congressional district is 50 feet below sea level (it is not), and wondered out loud if a Mars Rover mission would drive by the place where Neil Armstrong planted the flag on the moon.
• Democratic Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi once proudly stated that the Obama Care legislation had to be passed so that she and the rest of the country could see what was in it, like a Christmas present.
• And of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not know the simple definition of the unemployment rate, does not know how tax credits work, chased Amazon and its 25,000 high paying jobs out of her Congressional district, etc., etc., etc.

So, Scandinavian countries’ single payer healthcare plans are going bankrupt, with costs increasing as quality goes down, and Medicare For All is so stupid and ill fated along every dimension imaginable. It is a no brainer that the ore government and the politicians who operate it the less healthy and less wealthy people become.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

By The Numbers: Why Ocasio-Cortez's Socialism is A Pipe Dream and Plain Ignorant of Reality

We have had a great time talking about the ignorance, verbal gaffes, and lack of historical context of newly elected Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

• Despite having an economics degree, she did not know how to compute the simple unemployment rate.
• Despite being elected to Congress, she did not know what the three branches of government are.
• Despite having a college education, she somehow thought that she alone had found $26 TRILLION in wasted Pentagon spending over a ten year period when the ENTIRE Pentagon budget over that same time period was a fraction of $26 TRILLION.
• She says she would rather be morally right than factually right, in other words she would prefer to live in a fantasy world than reality.
• She is a hypocrite since before being sworn into office, she chastised those in Congress that were accepting their salaries during the government shutdown but once in office and drawing that salary she refused to donate it to needy Federal workers or forego it altogether.

We could go on and on but you get the idea. Tough to believe anything this politician says.

She has big, socialistic plans for this country, plans that would make us all poorer and less free. But as always, she never thought through her plans to see how inane they are. For instance, she wants of implement such socialist programs as Medicare For All, the New Green Deal, free college, guaranteed Federal jobs, etc.

And she proposes to fund these massive government bureaucracies by taxing income made by Americans over $10 million at a 70% tax rate. But we did the math for her, something she obviously did not do, and proved conclusively that her plan to fund these idiotic programs with a 70% tax on earnings over $10 million could fund only a tiny fraction of a single program, Medicare For All, never mind using high earners to fund the other socialist programs listed above. That complete analysis can be seen at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2019/01/january-2019-part-8-political-class.html

Do not like my math? Consider a much more detailed analysis by someone smarter than me, as laid out in a recent National Review article by Brian Riedl on January 8, 2019, “Why 70 Percent Tax Rates Cannot Finance Socialism.” His entire article can be accessed at:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-70-percent-tax-cannot-finance-socialism/

The highlights, or lowlights for Ocasio-Cortez, are as follows, with Mr. Riedl reaching the same basic conclusions that I did: the country is not nearly rich enough to support the socialistic programs of this Congresswoman [Note: there are a lot of numbers here but Mrl. Riedl lays out the numbers and the reality they represent logically and simply so bear with the numbers, they are quite eye opening and necessary to understand how stupid these Ocasio-Cortez ideas are]:

• His overall conclusion is that the country cannot fund her programs without “hammering the middle class.”
• He believes, and we have proved it already, that, “A 70 percent tax bracket would raise very little (if any) revenue, while damaging the economy and sending income and jobs overseas."
• Of course, as with most Ocasio-Cortez ideas, there are no details about her plans, just pie in the sky pontificating, since, as we discussed above, she would rather be morally right than factually right.
• Regarding Ocasio-Cortez’s socialistic “New Green Deal” program, a comparable program proposed by Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein would have cost between $700 billion and $1 trillion a year for ten years, requiring anywhere from a 20% to 29% increase in taxes for the Federal government to fund.
• As we calculated in the post above, taxing those Americans’ earnings over $10 million would fund less than 10% of Stein’s program.
• Stein’s proposal would have eaten up 4% of the entire nation’s GDP.
• But this is just for the New Green Deal, Ocasio-Cortez also wants to fund Medicare For all (annual cost = $3.2 TRILLION), Federal jobs guarantee program (cost = $6.8 TRILLION), student loan forgiveness (cost = $1.4 TRILLION), free public college ($270 billion), Social Security expansion (cost = $188 billion), family leave (cost = $270 billion), and infrastructure improvement (cost = $1 TRILLION).
• These programs alone would eat up 21% of the country’s GDP, twice what it is now.
• Additional Federal budget deficits would bring the total up to 28% of GDP.
• Since taxing the rich at 70% would pay for just a fraction of one program, either these program would have to go unfunded or ALL Americans would have to pay SUBSTANTIALLY more in their taxes, so much so that they would be wage slaves to the Washington bureaucracy.
• The article’s analysis shows that if ALL income over $1 million was taxed at 100%, IRS data shows that would raise government spending by 3.8% of GDP, which would not even balance the budget never mind fund the New Green Deal and all of the other programs listed above.
• And that assumes that Americans would still work just as hard to earn what they earn now which is a stupid assumption since who would work hard to earn more than a million dollars if the government was going to get all of it.
• Rather than a 100% tax rate, what if Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the socialists in Washington doubled the top two tax brackets, 35% and 37%?
• This doubling would raise 1.6% of GDP, even further away from funding the New Green Deal and all of the programs above,
• What about Ocasio-Cortez’s example of taxing income over %10 million at 70%, the analysis I did in the post above?
• According to the article, it would raise only $50 billion annually, a pittance that would be used to finance the New Green Deal, Medicare for all, free college, etc.
• Note: my analysis showed that her 70% idea would raise about $105 billion, still not nearly enough, but twice what this article predicted.
• The difference is that the $50 billion estimate realized that half of what these high earners usually earn is from capital gains which would not be subject to the 70% nonsensical tax rate and thus is more accurate, and smaller than my $105 billion estimate that assumed all of these high earners’ income was wages.
• The $50 billion is also probably too high since as the author points out, people this rich would have super smart accountants and lawyers working to shield their income taxable income from the 70%, something regular Americans could not afford.
• For instance, “Jeff Bezos [founder and chairman of Amazon] may be worth $160 billion, but in 2017 he reportedly paid himself an annual salary of just $81,840, with total compensation (including deductible expenses) of $1.6 million. Taxing 70 percent of all salary and wages above $10 million (or even $1 million) would not even touch the Amazon founder.”
• The article then moves on to other tax raising schemes, all of which come nowhere close to funding Ocasio-Cortez-s socialist pipe dreams: “Realistically, additional income and payroll taxes on families earning $400,000 or more could raise at most 1 or 1.5 percent of GDP. So, let’s move outside the income tax. Popular liberal proposals to impose a 30 percent minimum tax on “millionaires” and to more aggressively tax banks, hedge-fund managers, and oil and gas companies would raise a combined 0.1 percent of GDP, according to CBO data. Doubling corporate tax rates would add 0.7 percent of GDP until the entire Fortune 500 moves its headquarters to the Cayman Islands or Ireland.”
• All of these tax schemes would raise taxes equivalent to 2% of GDP, not close to the 4% needed to fund the annual cost of the New Green Deal before talking about the other programs.
• And this 2% assumption does not take into account how Americans would take tax avoidance steps, be it to stop working as hard, hiring accountants to shelter their income, or move their companies overseas to avoid the onerous business tax increases.
• Mr. Riedl then goes about killing the liberal fantasy that the country and economy survives 90% marginal tax rates in the 1950s and 70% marginal tax rates in the 1970s.
• In reality, the rich paid LESS in effective income tax rates during those eras than today, where the marginal tax rates are half of the high rates back then, since there were so many exclusions and shelters that Americans could use to avoid these slavery level tax rates.
• An interesting reality that I didn't know is that in 1960, eight American taxpayers paid taxes at the 90% level, not 800, not 8,000, but just 8 in the whole country.
• Today, Federal income taxes are equivalent to 8.2% of GDP while in the 1950s it was 7.2%, in the 1960s it was 7.6% and in the 1970s it was 7.9% despite tax rates in the 70% and 90% levels.
• Another reality is that no developed country in the world has anything close to Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% nonsense including socialistic Norway and England and Germany.
• These European countries finance their socialism with steep value-added taxes, i.e. a sales tax like mechanism that is added to everything purchased, a tax that savages not just the rich but every citizen.
• And finally, since the top 5% already pay 42% of ALL Federal income taxes, that tax well would get quite dry really soon since they already pay a lot despite what Washington socialists claim.
• The Congressional Budget Office did some analysis that showed that to fund this inane socialistic programs ALL Americans would have to endure a 55% increase in their tax burden or there would have to be a 115% value added tax implemented, e.g. that car that costs $20,000 would now cost over $40,000, which would mean a lot less cars got bought which means a lot less cars would be built which means a lot of Americans in the car industry, and every industry, would be out of a job which would further reduce the tax stream and the death spiral is underway.

Great article with some brutally honest and reality based numbers. There is just not enough wealth generated in this country, the greatest wealth generating country in the history of the world, to fund stupid Ocasio-Cortez fantasies. The economy would be ransacked, every American, not just the rich, would end up paying tremendously more in taxes, and the benefits would be minimal.

And consider this reality: name a Federal Government program that ever came close to being right from a budget estimate perspective? The Big Dig highway program in Boston is a classic Federal government budget example: it was supposed to cost a few billion dollars and ended up costing over $20 billion dollars. The Washington political class has shown time and time again that it can not properly budget upfront or manage a budget during the implementation of a program. Thus, while the above numbers are definitely unreachable, history tells us that the above budget estimates are likely to go higher and be even more unreachable.

Oh, and one other thing. We have previously shown that the Federal government and the state governments already have a huge $109 TRILLION revenue shortfall problem with budget deficits and unfunded liabilities. $109 TRILLION! This comes out to a debt burden of about $870,000 for every American family BEFORE trying to fund Medicare for All, the New Green Deal, free college, etc. The good news is that we are probably heading for an economic collapse long before these socialism program get much underway, these programs would only hasten that collapse.

But as always with people like Ocasio-Cortez, they never do the math. In fact, they have no idea what reality is and/or have little experience with reality, which is probably her problem on both counts. The numbers don't lie even as politicians continue to do so. 

The article points out this following reality: if the socialists in Washington knew how to fund these programs, why have they not laid out their plans and funding levels and tax mechanism already? It is either because they know these are pipe dreams that would never be possible but use them as political points, i.e. they lie, or they really are that ignorant. Until they prove they can fund these program without destroying the country they are out of integrity and/or plain lazy, not doing their homework before opening their mouths with tripe.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2018, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Fiscal Insanity In Stockton, NYC Politicians on the Take, and More Disasters Form The Iranian Nuclear Deal

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) In our last post we discussed the idiocy of a Chicago city government proposed pilot program that would give $500 a month to 1,000 city households with no strings attached. This is a program under the theory of a universal income that somehow people are entitled to get money without doing a darn thing for it. 

We easily showed how stupid that program could end being, theoretically adding over $5 billion to a city budget which is currently only about $8 billion. In other words, where are the city politicians going to get the money to roll out this program? And how long do we think that working, taxpaying residents are going to stay in Chicago when they are working so hard so that city politicians take their money and give it to people that are not working at all or as hard?

But politicians in Chicago are not the only idiots thinking this is a good idea:

• Politicians in Stockton, California have also proposed a similar program.
• Keep in mind as you read this that Stockton politicians have already driven the city to file for bankruptcy with their inept handling of the city’s finances but that bad experience is not stopping them from proposing this program of financial nonsense.
• The politicians hype that this program will guarantee that no one in Stockton, population of 300,000, “lives in poverty.”
• A hundred city residents will get $500 a month to do anything they want with it over an 18 month trial period.
• The city will then decide whether to rollout the program city wide.
• The program has the backing of a number of Silicon Valley billionaires who, of course, will not have to pay the tab for the program if and when it rolls out.

So many problems with this type of thinking:

• You already bankrupted the city by not having enough taxpayer money to cover city expenses, where are you going to get the type of money to pay for this program long term?
• If the money can be spent on anything then what stops a person from wasting it on drugs, booze, gambling, hookers, etc.?
• While anyone would enjoy getting $500 a month with no strings attached, this amount, $6,00, a year is not lifting anyone out of poverty as promised by the city advocates for this type of nonsense.

Let’s do some simple math and easily show how stupid this program is: 

• Assume that 10% of Stocktons’ population is eligible for the program after the trial, or 30,000 participants.
• At $500 a month, $6, 000 a year, the annual cost of just handing out the money would be $180 million a year without counting administrative expenses.
• The 2019 total revenue stream for the city is expected to be $704 million.
• Thus, this program would consume over 25% of the city’s current revenue stream which would mean more 25% more in taxes on those working and living in the city which would likely cause some productive people to leave and seek a place with less taxation which would reduce city revenues which would mean higher tax rates and we are now in a financial death spiral.

So we have a program that would never fulfill its primary objective, i.e. lift people out of poverty, would increase taxes causing outward migration which would reduce city tax streams which would require tax increases, etc. Idiocy.

Oh, one final note that Stockton and Chicago politicians should be aware of. Socialist leaning Finland has already tried a program like this. They ended up shutting it down and not rolling it out, leading one to assume that it was a financial disaster. Thus, if a socialist nation like Finland opted out of a socialist program like this, what makes you think you can make it work? 

2) Airbnb is a highly successful program what allows citizens to easily rent out their homes or apartments to strangers in order to maximize the value of their real estate. The rentals are usually short term, days vs. months. For example, if a person owns a home in a good beach town and is going to be away for a period of time, rather than allow that home to sit vacant, Airbnb facilitates that homeowner finding someone who would like to visit that good beach town for a short amount of time.

Everyone wins. The home owners gets rental money, the renter finds interesting places to stay that are often less expensive than staying in a hotel, and Airbnb makes a profit from setting things up. It is classic free market economics, a willing seller easily getting hooked up with a willing buyer.

Unless you live in New York City. According to a recent National Review article by Kyle Smith on July 19, 2018:

• Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city town council are putting together legislation that would make it more difficult for Airbnb to function in the city limits and force Airbnb to give the city the names of its city customers who rent out their homes vias the Airbnb service.
• According to the article: “Consider how viciously anti–New Yorker this law is: You’re going to be out of town for two weeks on vacation, or to look after a sick relative, or on business. You could make thousands of dollars renting out your home on Airbnb. But it’s illegal. It would be legal for you to host a guest while you yourself are still living at home for those two weeks — but how is City Hall supposed to monitor whether you lay your head down on your own pillow each night? It would take a Stasi-level surveillance regime to catch all of the violators. The law creates the predicate for massive government intrusion into private home-sharing transactions.”
• This type of over regulation caused Airbnb listings to drop a dramatic 50% in San Francisco when that city implemented a similar city ordinance, robbing that city’s residents the opportunities to earn extra money from an asset they own.
• De Blasio has increased his “Office of Special Enforcement” by four fold over the past several years to make sure that city inspectors can make sure that Airbnb customers toe the line which is forcing people to forgo the hassle of dealing with the city via Airbnb and thus losing out on extra income.
• The article points out how stupid this over enforcement is: “You might think that if an apartment is safe enough for a family of New Yorkers to live in it full-time, then it’s probably safe enough to rent out some of it for a few days.”

Now, you might try and make the case that de Blasio and the council are just trying to make sure that everyone stays safe and that is why there is such over regulation and enforcement. But you would be wrong since the article correctly points out that the mayor and council are beholden to special interest groups and that is why they are using their governmental powers to unfairly cripple one industry (Airbnb) that does not contribute to their election campaigns and favor an industry (the hotel industry and its union members) that does finance their election efforts:

• New York City average hotel room stay prices peaked in 2014 and have decreased since then, corresponding with the rise in Airbnb’s popularity.
• In response, the hotel industry paid out almost half a million dollars in campaign donations in 2013 and 2017 in an attempt to buy political influence.
• City council speaker Corey Johnson got $15,600 of that money and the anti-Airbnb bill sponsor Carlina Rivera got $33,800 of that money.
• De Blasio himself and his campaign organization, “One For New York,” received $400,000 from a hotel union related group.

Just another instance where greedy politicians have stepped into people’s personal lives not to make those lives better but to protect and prosper form their positions of power. Disgustingly insane.

3) Let’s wrap up today’s insanity with a quicker hitter from Iran. Remember how Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran was supposed to minimize the risk that an nuclear armed Iran would pose to the world? We have previously discussed how this was one of the worst international agreements that this country ever made: shoddy inspection requirements, backroom deals that were not disclosed to Congress or the American people, late night, secret shipments of cold cash worth over a billion dollars to the worst terrorist sponsoring nation in the world, an aborted illegal attempt to find a way to use the American banking system to funnel billions more to the Iran regime, and the refusal to shut down an Iranian-backed group’s heroin trade.

To this list of failures we add another. According to Alice Green, writing for the Punching Bag website on July 19, 2018, the Iranians now brag that they have stockpiled 950 TONS of uranium. Iran’s Nuclear Chief Ali Akbar Salehi recently made that pubic claim of 950 tons, adding that this is enough uranium to run 190,000 enrichment centrifuges. Even worse, he claims that 400 tons of that uranium stockpile was imported since Obama signed the nuclear deal with Iran back in 2015. Salehi also claimed that Iran has completed construction of a new factory to help build the rotor blades for those centrifuges.

Way to go Barack, much like Obama Care, the nuclear deal with Iran is nothing more than a continuing array of disaster after disaster.

That will do it for today’s insanity: Iran continues its march to atomic weapons, New York politicians are on the take, and fiscal insanity and stupidity in Stockton. One more set of insanity to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:



www.loathemygovernment.com It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday. Please visit the following sites for freedom: http://www.reason.com http://www.cato.org http://www.bankruptingamerica.org http://www.conventionofstates.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

August, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama's Illegal Obama Care Money Laundering and Medicaid's Continuing Financial Problems

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) Not only was Obama Care a failure in every legal way possible, it now appears that it was a failure from an illegal perspective also. According to a new stash of government documents (about 3,500 documents in total) that have become available:

• The Obama administration took profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and illegally funneled those funds to the Obama Care process.
• That is the bottom line of the analysis of a new set of documents that showed that this was the case and that it was not an accidental accounting screw up, it was an intentional misuse and illegal use of government resources to prop up the failures of Obama Care.
• Once Fannie and Freddie recovered from their horrific financial losses as a result of the 2008 recession, the Obama administration changed the terms of the loans that Fannie and Freddie took out to refinance themselves and basically stiffed those that had loaned them the money and their ability to recover their loan dividend payments.
• Instead, those dividend payments were swept out of Fannie and Freddie’s profits into the general Treasury fund.
• The bulk of these stolen funds were used to pay the health insurance subsidies promised in the Obama Care legislation, without which the whole Obama Care house of cards would have collapsed back in 2012 according to some estimates since the money expected to be generated to fund the subsidy pools did not materialize to the levels promised.
• This information was discovered only after years of litigation were needed to unlock the access to this illegal money laundering scheme.

Thus, not only has Obama Care failed on a financial basis, an economic basis, a health care basis, a health insurance basis but apparently it should have also failed back in 2012 as a subsidy basis if not for the illegal transfer and manipulation of the loan terms of Fannie and Freddie.

2) We have often talked about how wretched a program Medicaid is from a number of different perspectives:

• Research study after research study have showed that people on Medicaid are either only as healthy as people with no health insurance or sometimes are found to be LESS healthy than people without health insurance.
• Obama Care promised that the number of emergency room visits would go down if people had Medicaid but since many, many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients, the increased number of Medicaid patients as a result of Obama Care has caused emergency room visits to increase, the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen.
• Medicaid costs have been escalating rapidly, so much so that four states devote over 30% of their state government budget just to Medicaid funding, leaving less money for schools, infrastructure and other state government needs.

Chris Pope, writing for the National Review recently, highlighted some of the other troubling aspects of Medicaid:

• Almost 60% of Obama Care costs in 2017 ($70 billion out of $119 billion) will be solely to support Medicaid recipients so as Medicaid costs continue to go up, the overall Obama Care costs will continue to drive upwards.
• While the original beneficiaries of Medicaid, the elderly, the disabled, and pregnant women, receive a 50% to 75% subsidy for medical services, Obama Care provided a 90% subsidy to able bodied, non-pregnant, non-elderly people who came on board the Medicaid train as a result of the Obama Care legislation, i.e. Obama Care financially took better care of those that could take care of themselves than the elderly, disabled and pregnant.
• While Medicaid enrollment has gone up just under 100% from 2000 to 2015, Medicaid spending has gone up almost 150%, 50% faster than the growth in enrollment, indicating a cost spiral that is out of control.

So that is the current, sad situation of Medicaid. But Mr. Pope does provide a solution to this Medicaid problem that is reasonable and would definitely help alleviate the high and rising cost of the program with minimal impact to benefits. His complete plan and reasoning can be accessed at:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450097/medicaid-expansion-dilemma-how-capita-caps-point-way-compromise?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-03&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

That will do it for today: illegal goings on during the Obama administration that were needed to keep Obama Care from collapsing and Medicaid out of control and ineffective but with a proposed solution that might actually work. In fact, any solution would work better than Obama Care itself.

Tomorrow we will, as always, take a step back from the global numbers and results that highlight Obama Care’s failures and look at some real life stories of real life Americans and how Obama Care wrecked parts of their lives, their wallets, and their health.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2017, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Obama's Promises Unfulfilled and Medicaid Still Sucks

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) Obama promised that if Obama Care was passed, by the end of 2016 over 20 million incremental Americans would have obtained individual health insurance coverage from Obama Care insurance policies from participating insurance companies. 

Of course, we now know that the number of Americans who got coverage from Obama Care policies is about 50% below that promise from Obama. And since Obama Care caused 6 to 7 million Americans to lose their current insurance coverage, the incremental number of Americans who got coverage insurance is really only 3 to 4 million, not the 20 million that Obama promised.

And things appear to be going in the wrong direction from an insurance coverage perspective:

• According to a Moneymax article on July 10, 2017, the number of uninsured Americans has risen by 2 million over the past year.
• This was the latest estimate from the Gallup-Sharecare Well Being Index.
• The current percentage of uninsured is 11.7% at the end of June, 2017 vs. 10.9% at the end of 2016.
• This is a statistically significant difference.
• The losses were concentrated among younger adults and people buying individual insurance policies, the market segments that Obama Care was designed for.

But none of this should be a surprise since:

• Premiums and deductibles for Obama Care customers have risen dramatically despite Obama’s promise that annual insurance costs would go down upwards of $2,500.
• Young adults were duped into Obama Care policies in order to have their premiums subsidize the health needs of less healthy Americans which tend to be much older than the young adults dropping their insurance coverage.
• As more and more insurance companies leave the Obama Care market, leaving fewer and fewer options for health insurance in a market, it should not be a surprise that people are dropping insurance since their choices for insurance are getting thinner and thinner.
• So not only has Obama Care fallen over 50% short of its rosy predictions but as time goes on more and more Americans are deciding that that they are not getting the value for their health insurance costs that Obama promised.

So much for Obama Care curing the country's healthcare problems.

2) Obama Care supporters like to brag that well over 10 million Americans now theoretically have health insurance via Medicaid. Which on the surface would appear to be a good thing except that, according to a recent article in the National Review:

• A “gold standard” research project of a randomized control trial of Medicaid in the state of Oregon found that Medicaid provided no significant improvement in health in Medicaid recipients vs. uninsured people.
• Analysis by economist Raj Chetty concluded that health care access to Medicaid for low income households had nothing to do with life expectancy.
• Yale researchers determined that states achieve better health outcomes when they allocate LESS of their social spending towards health care.
• Somehow, since Obama Care was enacted the country’s mortality rate stopped decreasing and actually started going up, a trend that was WORSE in the states that enrolled in Obama Care’s expanded Medicaid program.
• A study of Medicaid in three states found that Medicaid expansion under Obama Care found no improvement in mortality in Arizona and Maine and a decrease in mortality in New York state, showing that maybe or maybe not, at least in this study, Medicaid is at best a hit or miss at improving the health care of people.

So saying that Obama Care is great because millions of people now have access to a government health insurance program that does not improve health is ridiculous.

For the original article and more details, go to:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449107/obamacare-probably-didnt-save-any-lives

Another day, another set of Obama Care failure examples.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Dragging Medicaid Down the Drain With It

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) One of the major tenets of Obama Care was to dump millions and millions of Americans onto the failing and flailing Medicaid program. Previously we have reviewed why such a strategy was a failure from day one:

• Medicaid is infested with waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud, wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.
• Putting millions of more people on the Medicaid roles and increasing the budget to handle the increase resulted in more waste and criminal fraud.
• Less than two thirds of the country’s doctors currently serve Medicaid customers and less than fifty percent are accepting new Medicaid patients, leaving many Americans with Medicaid insurance coverage but without the ability to use that insurance to visit a doctor.
• Medicaid was designed for the nation’s poor, disabled, blind, and childless adults but Obama decided that it was a good idea to put an entirely different set of people on the program, not poor, not disabled, not blind, and not childless, a segment of the population that the program was not designed for. Thus, a bad program designed for one segment of the population got worse when it had to handle a whole different segment that it was not designed to help.
• Continually increasing Medicaid costs are killing state budgets with some states devoting over 20% of their entire tax revenue stream just to the Medicaid program.

What a disaster, made multiple times worse by Obama Care.

But now some states are fighting back and trying to get the program under control and focused on what it was supposed to do, not what Obama shoved down their throats to do. Consider a recent article by Wes Goodman, an assemblyman from the Ohio state government, writing for the Heritage Foundation website on June 30, 2017:

• Ohio realized that the Medicaid program in their state was failing and getting way too expensive besides leaving the most needy state residents behind, all as a result of Obama Care.
• As a result, the state government recently imposed a freeze on Medicaid enrollment in their state to try and finally get a handle on the problems of the program.
• The intent was to, “free up resources for those who are truly vulnerable and to ensure that our Medicaid program, and state as a whole, is financially sound for the future.”
• Currently in Ohio, there are almost 60,000 state residents who qualify for traditional Medicaid benefits including, “children and adults with developmental disabilities who need anything from specialized medical equipment to assist them with their daily lives to therapeutic intervention, to at-home medical services.”
• But Obama Care forced the states to divert Medicaid funds from these types of truly needy people to fund Medicaid coverage for middle class, working, non-disabled, childless adults.
• In the opinion of the writer, “The truly vulnerable have been forced to wait for services, while many who have the capacity to provide for themselves have been jumped to the front of the line.”

Finally, someone somewhere doing a simple set of math calculations and then applying those calculations to help the truly vulnerable in our country. We have previously reported on how the state of Maine slashed their Medicaid budget to help the truly needy in their state with wonderful results, results that did not harm anyone in the process: 

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-2017-part-2the-unfolding-disaster.html

2) An article from the National Review website on June 27, 2017 shed more light on how the Medicaid expansion under Obama Care continues to be a disaster, a disaster upon the original disaster that is Medicaid:

• Since the more that states spend on Medicaid the more they receive in financial support from the Federal government, in some cases getting three dollars for every dollar they spend, there has never been an incentive for the states and Medicaid to be cost efficient since there ineptness and wasteful spending is paid for by the nebulous “American taxpayer.”
• In 2016, improper and criminal Medicaid payments accounted for a whopping 12% of all Medicaid payments, making just the wasted/lost wealth about equivalent to the size of the whole Kenyan economy and certainly larger than the GDP of dozens and dozens of entire countries.
• Even though the people that Obama Care put on Medicaid tend to be healthier, wealthier, and able bodied, the Obama Care legislation gave them preference and better benefits over the people originally intended to be covered by Medicaid, older, poorer, disabled, etc.

What a mess. Obama Care is a disaster and Medicaid is a disaster so Obama thought it would be a good idea to put these two disasters together. Still no cure for stupid.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w