It’s another day, another failure, for Britain’s National Health Service. America has some prominent congressional advocates of a “single payer” system of national health insurance run by the government. They always promise high quality care at low cost. But, in fact, it always comes at a high price. Britons who get sick, and have to try to live through it, pay for it at a steep personal cost to themselves and their families. The report of conditions in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust in yesterday’s Times makes for grim …
Maybe Jay Leno should host Meet the Press. Bowling and canine questions aside, Leno pressed President Barack Obama hard on the House’s vote to strip AIG employees of their retention bonuses via the tax code: Well, here’s something that kind of scared me. Today they passed this thing that says we’re going to tax 90 percent of these bonuses. And the part that scares me is, I mean, you’re a good guy — if the government decides they don’t like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we’re going to …
Remember ACORN? The Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), which has been plagued by allegations of voter fraud and abuse? It appears the chips just keep getting cashed in for the group that President Barack Obama once counseled as an attorney. First it was discovered that they were going to literally ‘cash in’ on the $800 Billion “Stimulus” bill that lawmakers ensured would give them access to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not really the ‘stimulus’ people were expecting. Then it was discovered that the White House and Congressional leaders …
Britain’s National Health Service is under fire, again, this time for the hideous conditions in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust that killed between 400 and 1200 patients in a three year period. As always, bad news encourages others to come forward. An anonymous NHS doctor has just leaked [1] the flow-chart he is supposed to use to answer the simple question “Do you smoke?” It is incomprehensibly complex. But it’s worse than that. The failures in Mid Staffordshire occurred because institution’s managers were so obsessed by meeting centralized targets …
Can you imagine? It’s movie night at 10 Downing Street, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain has the popcorn popped and is ready to break into that set of DVDs that President Obama so graciously gave him on his recent visit to Washington. Then he sees the display say ‘error’. It turns out that the DVDs that the White House deemed fit as a symbolic gift of our relationship with Great Britain were not coded for the DVD players in Europe. Does the White House have a DVD player that …
What does creating an “enduring legacy for America’s wild places,” have to do with denying employees the right to vote by secret ballot during a union organizing election? Nothing—or so it seemed until the earlier this week, when the Sierra Club began urging its members to support the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). In the March 17 issue of Currents—Sierra Club’s weekly electronic newsletter—the group urges its members to support EFCA. Their rationale?
We know what the EU’s leaders want out of April’s meeting of the G-20 in London: lots of regulations to tie down Britain and the U.S. And we have a pretty good sense of what the outcome of the meeting will be: the Europeans will get what they want, and will throw a bone of a token approval of so-called fiscal stimulus to the U.S. But now we know what the Russians want. It almost makes the Europeans look modest. The Russians unveiled their proposals yesterday, after a meeting with …
Protectionism is always bad policy. But protectionism during an economic downturn, after taxes have already risen, and in addition to a massive $2 trillion tax on energy consumption is, well, not good. Yet that is exactly what Energy Secretary David Chu seems to be edging towards. In response to the notion that American companies will move overseas when CO2 is capped, Secretary Chu suggested that the U.S. simply levy a carbon tariff on imports. This is why Secretaries of Energy should stick with energy and not economic policy. This is …
Hold onto your thermostat as well as your wallet! Annual utility bills may rise $1,800 under President Obama’s “cap and trade” energy tax plan. That wipes out his pledge of a $800 a year tax cut for 95% of Americans. The White House admits low-balling the cost in Obama’s official budget, which claimed that his plan would add $646 billion to energy costs over 8 years. The new price tag is three times as high, close to $2 trillion in 8 years, according to Jason Furman, deputy director of Obama’s …
In the run-up to the G-20 summit in London on April 2, a curious division has emerged. On one side stand the U.S. and Britain, both sounding like continental Europeans in their enthusiasm for deficit spending. On the other stand France and Germany, rejecting stimulus packages but eager to impose a new system of “global governance” on the world’s markets and nations. As Sally McNamara has noted, Britain’s stance is a problem for the EU, which, as always, is seeking to use the global financial crisis to advance its aim …
