We’re not in Kansas anymore…

From my friend in New Hampshire: the joke of the day:

The “Wizard of Oz” is 70 years old. Today, if Dorothy were to encounter Men with no brains, no hearts, and no courage – She wouldn’t be in Oz – She’d be in Congress

Don’t like Obamacare? You are not alone.

Obamacare has become so confusing as it works its way through the Senate that I don’t even know what is in it anymore. All I know is that when you have to have a committee vote on a Saturday night to be sneaky enough to get it moving to the next step…that tells me it is a rotten fish.

Evidently Americans are also waking up – or expressing their confusion too. In a Rasmussen poll only 38% now favor Obamacare – and 56% oppose it – the highest numbers of opposition yet.

Obamacare Lingo

It seems that part of the plan in passing healthcare reform (reform that most Americans do not want) is adding in anew language most people don’t understand. Perhaps liberals are thinking people that don’t know these terms will be too embarrassed to ask what they are, and just go with their plan.

So here is my attempt to define three of the latest healthcare buzz words:

VAPOR BILL – this is a piece of legislation that has no words. Favored by Democrats to try to quickly get a bill passed so they can add words later – words of their choosing. This is why it is difficult for them to read the bill….it has no words. It sounds…I don’t know… tricky??

CADILLAC PLAN – this is not my plan to get the new SRX Crossover…but the term to describe a huge tax Democrats will impose on insurance companies – a tax that they are counting on to raise money to pay for the healthcare plan. It is a 35% tax on insurance companies that offer individual plans that cost more than $8,000 – or family plans that cost more than $21,000. So if you want to insure your family really well – and you want – and can afford – a generous health insurance plan – the insurance company you buy this from has to pay a 35% penalty for offering you what you want. So guess what happens? They are going to pass that cost along to you. So people won’t pay extra for generous insurance; insurance companies will go out of business because no one is buying their product, and everyone will end up in the government’s plan, and now the government does not have a revenue stream to pay for it.

THE EXCHANGE, OR EXCHANGE CREDIT – this is a tax credit for certain low income people for the purpose of purchasing health insurance. So they get a tax credit for purchasing insurance, which under the government’s plan, everyone will be required to have. If you don’t have insurance, you pay a tax penalty of 2.5%. Read: free insurance for lower incomes or redistribution of wealth.

HR 3200

Here is the link to HR3200 – the trainwreck of a bill that will change America – more taxes; penalities for those who don’t comply; $10 billion subsidy for unions; insurance to non-US citizens; real time access to your finances; mandated Advance Death Care Planning; and $30 billion Prevention and Wellness fund.

The Clunker Results From Cash For Clunkers

Congress just sank another $2 BILLION into Cash for Clunkers before they ran for recess, and before it can be spent there is some serious fallout from the $1 billion-already-spent  ”popular” program.

Charities that depend on car donations have suffered from the day the program began this summer. Read here.

And dealers that have sold new cars are not getting their rebate money. Via Hot Air, a Pennsylvania congressman is reporting fewer than 2% of dealers have received their rebates – the rest reporting paperwork returned for various administrative errors. The money that has been “spent” is no where to be found – at least it is not in the dealer’s hands – the dealer’s who have sold cars with the intention of getting their rebate money.

And the cars that are being bought are foreign. Toyota is the most popular, with 18.9% of cars sold – the majority. The next closest is GM at 17.6%

Maybe what they need is a multi-million dollar website, like recovery.gov, to help keep track of their program. Or maybe they can run it like the Post Office.

Happy 6th Month Anniversary, Trillion Dollar Stimulus

From House Minority Leader Boehner, some items to remember as you mark this celebratory occasion:

Despite the Administration’s promise that the “stimulus” would provide an immediate “jolt” to the economy and create jobs “immediately,” more than 2.8 million jobs have been lost since it was enacted on February 17, 2009.

On the day the “stimulus” was enacted, the national unemployment rate was 7.6 percent.  Today it is 9.4 percent.

On May 13, Vice President Biden issued a reporton the stimulus’ first 100 days asserting that it had “saved or created” 150,000 jobs, and that “an additional 600,000 jobs are expected to be created or saved under the Recovery Act in the next 100 days” for a total of 750,000 jobs.  But the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner told Congress earlier this year that it’s “very difficult for anyone to substantiate” the Administration’s claims – especially since Secretary Geithner recently said that unemployment won’t come down until late in 2010 and that the economy has shed 2.8 million jobs since February. 

A total of 15 states now have unemployment rates higher than 10 percent, including Alabama (10.1 percent), California (11.6 percent), Georgia (10.1 percent), Illinois (10.3 percent), Florida (10.6 percent), Indiana (10.7 percent), Kentucky (10.9 percent), Michigan (15.2 percent), Nevada (12 percent), North Carolina (11 percent), Ohio (11.1 percent), Oregon (12.2 percent), Rhode Island (12.4 percent), South Carolina (12.1 percent), and Tennessee (10.8 percent).

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) is now five million, up from 2.6 million when the “stimulus” was signed into law.

Since the “stimulus” was enacted, Democrats have added $869 billion in new debt that will be paid for by our children and grandchildren.

A $255 million program using stimulus funds designed to help struggling small business by providing them with 10,000 loans of up to $35,000 each, has only given out 1,127 loans, totaling $36.8 million, according to the New York Times.

An analysis last week by the Washington Times found that stimulus money “spending has slowed to a trickle, despite President Obama’s June order to his Cabinet to speed it up.  The average stimulus spending per week has dropped severely, to just $4.2 billion over the past month from $9.7 billion during the prior four months.”

According to the Associated Press, “Tens of thousands of unsafe or decaying bridges carrying 100 million drivers a day must wait for repairs because states are spending stimulus money on spans that are already in good shape or on easier projects like repaving roads.”

Stimulus funds are not getting to those areas that need it most, according to a detailed analysis by ProPublica that found that there’s “no relationship between where the money is going and unemployment and poverty” and that, “…spending is uneven and sometimes runs contrary to measures of need.”

The Fishy White House Enemy List

From the promise of HopenChange comes this: the White House wants American citizens to snitch on anyone they see distributing false or misleading information about healthcare reform. They say the dissent is “fishy”.

They are so desparate to win this battle to reform healthcare for the 10% of Americans that don’t have it, that they want to turn citizen against citizen to do it.

This White House Enemy List is being maintained at flag@whitehouse.gov

The President says no more discussion – time is up.  So you can’t discuss it anymore, dissenters are called angry mobs and “manufactured outrage” by the White House. Meanwhile, members of Congress admit they don’t know everything that is in the massive bill.

I never thought I would see in my lifetime such government arrogance.

Where’s My Cash for Tube?

I have a broken TV. Kinda like a broken car that can be traded in with Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program. If you tow your old broken car in to a dealer – well last week when they had money for this program – you got $4,500 for a new car. It is government money we are going into debt for to take your junk and give you a neat discount on something new. Car dealers love it because they are moving stale inventory. Tax payers hate it- according Rasmussen Reports – because they know they are going into debt to discount their neighbor’s new car.

So my TV – I want a new one. I want the government to give me a Cash for Tube program. Where’s my check for a new TV so I can give  them this old one and get a new one? They already extended the digital conversion to be able to give out more government funded digital box coupons…why not go the distance and upgrade everyone’s TV?

That might be difficult for the Obama administration to manage – since they didn’t manage the Cash for Clunker program very well either…

Obama’s Lies and Complicated Healthcare

Many bloggers (but few in the elite media) are wondering how Obama can continue to say his healthcare plan will not make you change insurance companies, when his plan flat out will require you to loose the coverage you have.

Good article in the New York Post here – lead courtesy of Hot Air.

And the Congressional Budget Office has said Obamacare will add $239 billion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years, but Obama says the deficit will not be added to in the coming year – tricky words.

Why do we need to spend so much to cover the uninsured? And why is this so urgent?

The Blinding Fog of Healthcare

It is very difficult to keep up with the healthcare debate, and that appears to be a deliberate strategy: make the bill so large (over 1,000 pages) and pass it quickly – and no one will know what was in it.

You have Obama, saying today that if you like your doctor, like your health plan, you get to keep it under his new plan. But that is not what he said a month ago.

You have his economic adviser saying the public option for healthcare will never take public money.  (Never take public money? How will it get paid for?)

You have Democrats saying taxes will be raised for people and business earning $280,000 (couples $350,000). The top tax rate – currently 35% – may soar to as high as 45% for these people. (So are these people going to wholesale be paying for this plan?)

The White House says 46 million Americans are uninsured, but 10 million of those are foreigners. Then you have Senator Dodd just randomly rounding up that figure to 50 million uninsured. Did he just grow 4 million overnight?

And then there is the Congressional Budget Office, who says “this legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs”. Well, at least they got it right.

There is no need to rush. Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their healthcare plans. Healthcare needs to be reformed – but not recreated.

The Republican plan addresses what I think is the trouble: out of control lawsuits.