“Optimism is important for anything in life-to realize that our condition is never final.”
With unbridled and infectious optimism, Jack Kemp (1935-2009) championed hope, growth, and enterprise to overcome poverty and social breakdown in America and around the world. In his roles as U.S. Congressman, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and passionate proponent of the free market, Kemp’s efforts highlighted the powerful combination of great ideas joined with the good works of neighborhood leaders.
Jeff Kemp, son of the late Jack Kemp and President of Stronger Families, pays tribute to his father’s legacy as the social justice conservative of his generation. As Jack Kemp’s example reminds us, social justice begins at the ground level where relationships foster the personal dignity and responsibility that lead to opportunity. Following Kemp’s keynote address, a panel of conservatives from Australia and Britain discussed policy implications of these universal principles, and how they are applying them to stop social breakdown, help families escape poverty, and rebuild communities in their own countries.
After “many months of discussion” in which the National Federation of Independent Business was engaged in efforts to ensure that the high cost of health care was adequately addressed in reform legislation, the organization yesterday came out in full force against the Senate health care bill, declaring it a “disaster for small business:”
Small business can’t support a proposal that does not address their No. 1 problem: the unsustainable cost of healthcare. With unemployment at a 26-year high and small business owners struggling to simply keep their doors open, this kind of reform is not what we need to encourage small businesses to thrive.
We oppose the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act due to the amount of new taxes, the creation of new mandates, and the establishment of new entitlement programs. There is no doubt all these burdens will be paid for on the backs of small business. It’s clear to us that, at the end of the day, the costs to small business more than outweigh the benefits they may have realized.
While the Obama Administration has appeared anything but decisive in response to field commanders’ calls for more troops in Afghanistan, the Administration is earning kudos from some for efforts to protect biodiversity. Rep. Elliot Engle has sent a “dear colleague” urging members to sign a letter to Special Envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke commending the U.S. State Department for developing a biodiversity program in Afghanistan. According to the Engle’s letter, “…thousands of Afghans have been trained in natural resource management, seven environmental laws and regulations have been drafted and 45 community committees link rural communities with the central government in deciding the future of natural resources.”
But that’s not all. Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan’s first national park was established this year. According to the Engle letter the park is a “… series of pristine travertine lakes in one of the safer regions of the country” and “has a history of drawing tourists from around the world to enjoy its cultural and environmental beauty.” Continue reading…
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 2.22pm in Health Care.
House and Senate Democratic leaders are breaking records left, right and center with every new version of Obamacare they roll out. But if you thought they’d be competing to provide better methods for reforming the health care system, you were wrong. Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are duking it out for who can write the biggest and bloated bill that will actually bend the cost curve up. Senator Reid holds the record at a whopping 2,074 pages.
Sometimes the best offense is a good defense and sometimes the best action is inaction. With unemployment surpassing 10 percent (go here to watch unemployment grow), Midwestern Congressmen want to ensure that Congress will protect three key areas of their respective state’s economy: agriculture, manufacturing and small business. One sure way to protect these jobs is not to implement climate change legislation.
Congressman Bob Latta (R-OH) and 31 more Midwestern Members of Congress sent a letter to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House Energy and Commerce, Agriculture, and Small Business Committees requesting a joint hearing to how climate change would affect these important industries, not only in the Midwest, but all across the United States. Let us give you a preview, and the news is not good.
Under current law, the death tax has a top rate of 45 percent and an exemption of $3.5 million ($7 million for couples) this year. But on January 1, 2010 it expires. It only stays expired for one year, however, as it springs back to life in 2011 with a top rate of 55 percent and an exemption of only $1 million ($2 million for couples).
With this impending one-year hiatus looming, members of both the House and Senate were coalescing around an agreement to extend the death tax permanently at a 35 percent top rate and a $3.5 million exemption. Senators Kly (R-Arizona) and Lincoln (D-Arkansas) were successful in including a provision for such an extension in the Senate’s 2010 budget resolution. Representatives Berkley (D-Nevada) and Brady (R-Texas) offered similar legislation in the House. Continue reading…
On his radio show yesterday, former Sen. Fred Thompson upped his criticism of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, predicting:
It really doesn’t matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost. I say this because of one sad and simple fact. The president does not have the will and determination to do what’s necessary to win it. His heart’s not in it, and never has been. The Taliban knows it. Al Qaeda knows it. Our allies know it. And the American people know it.
Our enemies are now emboldened and our friends are discouraged. We cannot prevail if the American people are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary for an extended effort. The case has not been made to them to justify this effort. The case can only be made by the president. This president is unable or unwilling to make that case.
Thompson is half right. If the Obama administration chooses to deny its field commander’s request for the troops and resources necessary to fully implement a counterinsurgency strategy, the results would likely be disastrous. Half measures are guaranteed to fail. Continue reading…
With the event horizon of the vote on the Reid Health Care Bill approaching, it appears that passage of the legislation would, yet again, amount to President Barack Obama breaking his “no new middle class tax” pledge.
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 12.12pm in Health Care.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) giant new health care bill contains the same provisions as the other House and Senate bills to establish Federal micromanagement of all private health insurance.
Like the others, the Reid bill would subject all private health insurance — whether purchased from an insurance company by employer groups or individuals, or provided through an employer or union self-insured plan — to detailed Federal regulation.
These so called “insurance reform” provisions amount to a de facto nationalization of health insurance and they would produce that effect regardless of whether or not Congress creates another, new government-run health insurance plan. Continue reading…
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 12.05pm in Health Care.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s massive Senate health bill (H.R. 3590) contains a “public option”, a new government run health plan to compete against private health plans within a federally designed system of state health insurance exchanges.
Federally Designed State Health Exchanges. Under Section 1311 of the bill, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services would be required to provide states grants for the establishment of American Health Benefit Exchanges, and by 2014 states would be required to establish these exchanges for the purchase of “qualified” health plans. Such plans would only be qualified if they met federal rules governing benefit packages, provider networks, “essential community providers”, quality standards and measures uniformity of enrollment procedures, the right kind of rating system, outreach, reinsurance and risk adjustment, and a variety of other federally determined processes under federal supervision. States would be able to require the qualified health plans to offer additional benefits and make the health plans more expensive, if they wished to do so, but they could not allow benefit changes that differed from the standards set by the federal government. As for the administration of the new federally required exchanges, they are required to be “self-sustaining”, and may impose assessment or fees on health plans and enrollees to secure the coverage of those administrative costs. Continue reading…
Unemployment has risen above 10 percent and no one in Washington seems to understand what is going on. Yesterday, a little noticed release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shed important light onto the job situation.
The BLS’s Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program uses unemployment insurance (UI) records to track job private sector job gains and job losses. Because the data comes from administrative records it is highly accurate, but it also takes eight months to process. Yesterday the BLS finally released the data for the first quarter of this year.
By now we already know that unemployment has risen. Another government survey shows that between December 2008 and March 2009 the unemployment rate rose from 7.2 to 8.5 percent. The new BED figures, however, tell us why it went up. The main problem was not increased job losses: companies actually shed 53,000 fewer jobs than in the previous quarter. Unemployment is rising because private sector employers are creating far fewer new jobs than normal. New or expanding businesses created 992,000 fewer jobs than in the last quarter of 2008. Continue reading…
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 11.20am in Health Care.
As we mentioned this morning, nobody believes that Congress will follow through on the health care spending cuts used to help pay for the Reid Health Bill. At NRO, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow James Capretta combs through the CBO report and delivers a true price tag for the Reid Bill:
So, here’s the bottom line. On paper, the Reid plan plus the “doc fix” would increase total federal spending by about $4.9 trillion over 20 years. Senate Democrats would resort to bracket creep and other tax hikes to raise $2.2 trillion over the same period. The balance would be made up with spending reductions, mainly in Medicare, that no one believes can be sustained, and in any event do not constitute “health reform.” In other words, it’s a tax-and-spend bill of the highest order. And only the spending is certain to happen.
The challenge thrown down this week by the U.S. State Department to the world’s home video makers is an ambitious one — apparently nothing less than changing the climate of the planet. “Change Your Climate, Change Our World,” is the title of the State Department’s new public diplomacy campaign in the run-up to the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in mid-December. This is hardly an appropriate use of US taxpayer money or effective public diplomacy for the United States as it advances a tendentious political agenda, not knowledge of the United States.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself launched the initiative using the department’s social networking site, ExchancesConnect, hoping to draw in submissions for videos from all over the world. The website is a prime example of Public Diplomacy 2.0, the newest tool in the governments tool box for reaching publics around the globe at the touch of a computer key board. Teenagers from 14 to 17 are invited to submit their entries between now and January 12 next year, from which four will be selected by a panel of judges. Winners will be awarded all expense aid scholarships, a handsome prize. Continue reading…
The GAO reports that the U.S. Department of Education:
…Has made uneven progress in implementing a department-wide, risk-based approach to grant monitoring…Has limited financial expertise and training, hindering effective monitoring of grantees’ compliance with financial requirements… Lacks a systematic means of sharing information on grantees and promising practices in grant monitoring throughout the department….
Last Saturday night Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) forced through a vote on her 2,032 page health care bill only a few days after releasing it to the public. Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is poised for another Saturday night cram down, forcing a Senate cloture vote mere days before his 2,074 page bill was given to Senators. Yet again, Congress will be forced to vote on a bill that none of them have actually read. More importantly, as we pour through the details, it becomes obvious that none of them even believe the plan will do what the bill says.
Kills Jobs: All told, the Reid Bill raises taxes by $370.2 billion over the next ten years with many of those taxes starting to be collected this year while unemployment is at 10.2% and rising. Worse, the bill includes a job killing employer mandate which taxes companies for hiring people. Specifically, companies with more than 50 employees that do not offer a health plan approved by federal bureaucrats will be forced to pay a $750 per employee job tax.
Hurts Small Businesses: The Reid Bill acknowledges it is terrible public policy for small businesses and tries to address this problem by including a “small business tax credit” to minimize the impact of the job killing employer mandates and regulation-caused rises in private health insurance premiums. But the tax credit only lasts two years and largely excludes small business owners, small businesses with high-average payrolls, and firms with 25 or more workers. After all exclusions, essentially the only eligible firms are those firms with 10 or fewer workers as well as those with low-income workers—the least likely to offer coverage even with a significant price reduction. Continue reading…
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 7.21am in Health Care.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled his 2,074 page health care bill with claims that the massive measure falls under the $900 billion cost threshold promised by the President.
To put it charitably, the truth is more complicated. The bill depends on budget gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions and projected savings to reach this goal over the 10 year budget window.
Consider the four most outrageous “Budget Tricks”. By its construction, the bill:
Excludes the Costly “Doctor Fix”. Like the House bill, the Senate bill conveniently ignores the over $200 billion price tag associated with stopping the unavoidable cuts to physicians under the Medicare program. Separating the health care bill like this enables Senator Reid to claim his bill will reduce the deficit. However, in a letter released today, CBO estimates that combining the House bill (H.R. 3961) with the “Dr. Fix” bill (H.R. 3962) would actually “add $89 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period.” Continue reading…
In today’s Morning Bell, we wrote about the historically bad decision Attorney General Eric Holder made in announcing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other terrorists would be tried in a civilian court in New York City rather than before a military tribunal.
Edwin Meese III, the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation as well as the United States Attorney General between 1985 and 1988, called Holder’s decisions a “a tragic mistake.”
In the video below, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) questions Holder on his decision during yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight hearing of the U.S. Department of Justice. His questions illustrate why trying terrorists in civilian court is such a tragic mistake.
Posted November 19th, 2009 at 5.37pm in Health Care.
In order to pay for a massive health care bill (H.R. 3590), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) creates a host of new taxes. These taxes will total $370.2 billion in the next ten years, and many of the taxes will start being collected in 2010, even as the economy continues to struggle.
The most shocking tax increase is a payroll tax increase that will permanently sever the link between the Medicare Payroll tax and its contributions to Medicare. This payroll tax increase of .5% on earnings above $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for joint couples will contribute money to the general fund for health care instead of directly for Medicare payments.
This change means that Medicare taxes are no longer solely dedicated to social insurance and safeguarding Medicare. Instead, Medicare payroll taxes will be used for other government programs. It is ironic, that the shift emerges from the liberals as they have long been worried about turning social insurance programs into welfare programs that redistribute wealth. The Reid payroll tax is a huge step down the road of using social insurance payroll taxes as regular taxes to transfer income. Continue reading…
Defending Attorney General Eric Holder’s historically bad decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other terrorists in civilian court, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told CSPAN this morning: “For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden, we’ve got enough on him we don’t need to interrogate him.” Watch:
This statement goes to the heart of why the Obama administration’s decision to use civilian criminal courts to deal with terrorists is a grave danger to the American people. If we caught him. it would be irresponsible NOT to interrogate Osama bin Laden as an enemy combatant. He would provide a treasure trove of intelligence value to our war effort that could save the lives of both American serviceman overseas and civilians here at home.
Holder claimed yesterday, “I know that we are at war.” But as Leahy’s statement shows the Obama administration is thinking like prosecutors whose only priority is winning convictions, not like general who are responsible for winning a war.
The 2074 page Reid Health Bill (H.R. 3590) generally follows the Senate Finance and HELP versions on Medicaid and in the creation of a new health care program, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act.
Curiously, in the short term (2010-2013), the Reid bill helps fewer people gain coverage than the Senate Finance bill. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates 2 million will lose Medicaid/SCHIP coverage each year in this period compared to current law. But, by 2019, Medicaid/SCHIP enrollment will increase by 15 million, accounting for nearly half of all individuals who will gain coverage.
More Welfare. The Reid bill expands Medicaid eligibility for people below 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), significantly changing it to a pure income based federal entitlement. It also raises, then lowers, the federal matching rates for different populations and states. In a provision aimed at Louisiana, the Reid bill provides a special “disaster recovery” match rate for states that have had a major disaster declared (Section 2006). CBO estimates that state spending under the Medicaid provisions will still increase by $25 billion. Continue reading…
Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?—Jesse Helms (1921-2008), writing in 1959 on compromise in politics.
Posted November 20th, 2009 at 4.27pm in Enterprise and Free Markets, Family and Religion. 
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