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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Following news this week that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has led to jobs being “created or saved” in Congressional districts that don’t exist, the GAO issued a new report warning that the U.S. Department of Education is falling down on its oversight responsibilities. 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUGmASf-ql0[/youtube] 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 …
