Minor Thoughts from me to you

"Let me be clear. If you like the health plan you have, you can keep it." President Obama has made this claim multiple times about healthcare reform. But it's simply not true. Let me offer one small example.

My wife and I enjoy our Flex Spending Account. We put in enough money each year to cover the various drugs we'll need to buy (both prescription and non-prescription), a new pair of glasses, and money to cover any other medical expenses we anticipate. Next year, I'm planning on putting in an extra $4000 for corrective laser eye surgery, so that I can finally stop wearing glasses. We like the plan we have.

Well, under the Senate healthcare bill, we'll no longer have that plan.

Both the House and Senate bills include a change in the definition of a “qualified medical expense” that impacts reimbursements and withdrawals under all types of health care accounts (i.e., FSAs, HRAs, HSAs, and Archer MSAs). As of 2011, expenses incurred for over-the-counter (OTC) medications and products will no longer be eligible for payment or reimbursement from any of the health care accounts. The House bill definition appears to apply to all OTC medications. However, the Senate bill would still allow OTC medicines obtained with a prescription and insulin to be reimbursed or paid tax-free from the health care accounts.

The most significant change likely to be enacted is an annual limit on contributions made by employees to flexible spending arrangements (FSAs) for health care. Both the House and Senate versions of health reform legislation would limit contributions to no more than $2,500 annually. The limit would be indexed to inflation for future years. Under the House bill, these changes would not take effect until 2013. In the Senate bill, these changes would take effect in 2011.

If the current "reform" bills, I wouldn't be able to buy OTC drugs -- Sudafed, Mucinex, ibuprofen, Tylenol -- tax free. If the "reform" bills pass, I wouldn't be able to save tax free for corrective eye surgery. I would no longer have the plan I like.

It's just one more broken promise from a president that's building quite a pile of them. Apparently, "yes we can" act just like any other politician.

President George W. Bush was the biggest spending U.S. President since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He "he presided over an 83-percent increase in overall federal spending, which includes defense, domestic, entitlements, and interest. Even without TARP and Fannie/Freddie, spending was up a huge 70 percent under Bush over eight years. By contrast, total spending under eight years of President Clinton increased just 32 percent."

Voters were justifiably angry about this massive increase in government largesse. In reaction, they threw out the sitting political party and vote en-masse for the candidate who promised a return to responsibility, a turn away from reckless credit card fiscal policies and a return to fiscal discipline. Voters wanted government spending reined in and they were determined to get it. Both the 2006 Congressional elections and the 2008 Presidential election were about spending, to some degree.

So why are voters now so angry at President Barack Obama? Surely they don't blame him for the high levels of government spending? Well, why shouldn't they? Since taking office in January, 2009, he's proposed massive amounts of new spending: a stimulus bill, a cap and trade energy bill, a massive expansion of healthcare, a "cash for clunkers" stimulus, a housing stimulus, and more. For voters weary of out of control spending, the Obama administration's first year has looked remarkably like a left turn into an all-you-can-eat spending buffet.

But don't believe me. Believe the Congressional Budget Office and the Washington Post, who put together this informative little graphic.

Note the $400 billion line, that President Bush's deficits barely managed to creep over. Note that President Obama's deficits aren't projected to get anywhere near this low a level over the next 10 years.

With all of the voter anger about President Bush's deficit spending, why shouldn't the voters be angry about President Obama's much higher levels of spending? Voters don't need to have a short-term memory to be first angry about President Bush's spending and then angry about President Obama's spending. They just need wide open eyes. Apparently, it's President Obama and Congressional Democrats that have the short memory.

White House Seeks CEOs' Help - WSJ.com:

Mr. Gould said the group would talk about inspiring top performance from government employees. Then he explained that this inspiration would have to be done without much in the way of financial bonuses, threats of firing or promotions that leapfrogged the normal civil-service rules.

What's left, exactly? Inspiring speeches? I don't see that doing much to inspire a career bureaucrat in a secure job to suddenly do something new and disruptive.

At the request of BlueCross BlueShield, Oliver Wyman did a study of the Senate health care bill. Unsurprisingly, this study estimates that the bill will cost consumers quite a bit more than the CBO estimated.

John Goodman summarized the findings this way:

Premiums for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own will go up 54%. Premiums for small businesses will go up 20%. Both numbers are over 5 years and both numbers exclude the impact of medical inflation.

I skimmed through the study and it looks pretty interesting. The study points out that reform won't work unless everyone is forced to purchase insurance.

The key implication of our analysis is simple: For these types of insurance reforms to be successful and sustainable, it is imperative to get broad participation. Young and healthy people need to be part of the insurance pool, and people cannot defer buying insurance until they are sick or at high risk. This is true no matter who is paying the premiums--individuals, employers, or the government.

The study then goes on to indicate that the current bill likely will allow people to free-ride, with bad results. They're basing their conclusions on several states' experiments with healthcare reform.

• New York and Vermont: Average premiums in the individual market today are about 60% higher than the national average

• New Jersey: Reform caused much higher premiums forcing thousands of individuals to drop coverage. The individual market decreased from 157,000 people in 1993 to 88,000 in 2007

• Maine: Individual market enrollment in Maine dropped from 90,000 to 41,000 between 1993 and 2007 following the state's reforms.

Even in Massachusetts, there is evidence that individuals are selectively jumping in and out of the market when they need healthcare. Data from health insurers in Massachusetts indicate that the number of peopl ein the individual market with coverage of less than 12 months has doubled post reform. These individuals have a significantly higher claims to premium ration when compared to those who had coverage for more than 12 months but let it lapse or those that are active.

Without strong penalties, similar types of behavior are likely to emerge in the reformed individual market--resulting in significantly higher premiums for the insured.

This is one of the reasons why I believe that the "reform" bills will just make American healthcare worse than it already is.

Yesterday, I linked to an op-ed that said Sarah Palin was remarkable for bucking her political patron over a garbage hauling vote. How remarkable was she? Well, let's just say that that kind of thing rarely happens in Chicago.

For the first time since Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed him to the City Council seven years ago, Alderman Thomas Tunney (44th Ward) voted against the mayor's $6.1 billion budget proposal.

Alderman Thomas Allen (38th), below, a Council member since 1993, also voted against Mr. Daley's budget for the first time.

For my money, President Obama is at least as vapid as Sarah Palin has been portrayed to be. But given a choice between the pol who voted against her patron the first time and a pol who comes out of the Chicago tradition -- I'll take Palin.

(Which, of course, says nothing about whom I'd vote for if my choices included more than just President Obama and Sarah Palin.)

I admit. I'm still intrigued by Sarah Palin. I'm not convinced that she's the blithering idiot that so many of my peers see. Nor am I convinced that she's the great conservative / libertarian hope that many others see. But I'm definitely intrigued by anyone who can attract as much attention as she has attracted.

That's why this op-ed caught my interest: Palin in Wasilla: Resistance to insider assimilation.

Early in the second chapter of "Going Rogue," a chapter titled "Kitchen-Table Politics," you learn everything you need to know to understand why [Palin is so hated].

... Recruited to run for the council in 1992 by local power broker Nick Carney, Palin was seen as an attractive face who would support the usual way of doing business in Wasilla. She wasn't.

In one of the first tests of her independence, Palin opposed a proposal touted by Carney, her political patron, to force residents to pay for neighborhood trash pickup rather than hauling their garbage to the dump themselves, as most did, and as Palin says she still does.

Why was this so important to Carney? Because he owned the local garbage truck company. If you've never had much exposure to local politics -- and this is largely true anywhere you go -- it's a pretty big deal for a young, inexperienced politician (especially a woman) to so blatantly go against the person who recruited you into politics and supported you in your first campaign. You come under tremendous pressure to fall into line. Most cave, right then and there, long before they ever sniff politics at a higher level.

Palin didn't.

During her terms on the council, she consistently opposed heavy-handed community planning initiatives and burdensome taxes.

... Among Palin-haters, one of the most popular canards is that she is an airhead, and clearly not capable of dealing with the intricacies of government. As this chapter demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth.

Palin not only has a keen grasp of the details of governing and budgeting, she also understands the political difficulties inherent in making government responsive. Many of her antagonists at the national level scoffed at the notion that her experience in Wasilla was of any value. Quite the contrary, local government is where a public official's decisions have the most direct impact on the electorate. It's where you really have to understand the ins and outs of what you're doing.

Interesting, no? And, yes, I am planning on reading Going Rogue. I'll pick it up sometime after the Kindle edition comes out.

Maurice Clemmons

It is of course entirely possible that, as FOXNews.com quotes the Pierce County sheriff's department, "Maurice Clemmons [who is said to have killed four policemen] was shot to death after a 'very alert patrol officer' investigating reports of a stolen car recognized him."

But I think it should be noted that it is certainly also possible, considering it's a fairly open secret that the Thin Blue Line easily transforms into a Thin Blue Garrot when its own go down, that Mr. Clemmons was simply executed. Not that I'm necessarily wringing my hands about that, mind you, but why do we simply take the word of notoriously biased investigation boards?

Incidentally, FOX's story includes a great quote that I think illustrates one of our society's many faulty paradigms. When asked what motive Clemmons had, the spokesperson replied: "There is no answer, other than that he was angry about being incarcerated... There's never going to be an answer that makes any sense."

Right. 'Cause everyone knows, when someone locks you up in a cage for a major part of your limited time here on Earth, ya just gotta laugh it off.

I believe this post finishes our site's libertarian conversion. We now occupy the same portion of the libertarian spectrum that LewRockwell.com occupies.

I don't like America's wars of aggression. The problem, as I see it, is that it can be hard to tell the difference between a war of aggression and a good preemptive defense. For instance, I'm still not convinced that going into Iraq was the right thing to do. I'm not sure what risk we were defending ourselves against.

On the other hand, Afghanistan was a necessary war. You give safe harbor to people who blow up part of a city, you die. It's just that simple. But I think that we should have left a while ago. I'm not sure that we're accomplishing anything worthwhile by propping up a corrupt Karzai government. I know about the fear that that terrorists will get Pakistani nukes and attack us with those. But I'm not sure how likely that scenario is or how fragile Pakistan's own government is. So I'm not sure if what we're doing is preemptive defense against a nuclear scenario or whether we're engaging in blatant imperialism for no good return.

But I am grateful for those who do decide to join the military and protect our borders. I respect their loyalty, their sense of honor, and their dedication. I don't always agree with their mission but I know that I'm not qualified to judge how necessary each mission is. As a result, I do sympathize with them and with their families. For this attack, especially.

The Army, for its own inscrutable reasons decided that stateside military bases should be gun-free zones. That strikes me as absolute lunacy. Had someone removed this nut months ago when it became apparent that he was a nut, soldiers would be alive today. Had someone decided to allow our soldiers to carry the guns that they were trained to carry, more of them would be alive today.

I have a lot of sympathy for people who are hamstrung and betrayed by their own leadership. Incidents like this raise a lot of questions about whether a bureaucratized military is the best way to protect a country. I'm not sure that it is. The institutional Army protects its turf quite fiercely, even when that turf isn't worth protecting. Instead, I'd like to see us get back to the old way of doing things: no standing army and a fully armed citizenry that stands ready to form an ad-hoc army as conditions warrant.

Michael Z. Williamson envisioned a heavily armed libertarian society in his book Freehold. I rather like it. And I can think a large portion of our current military would like it too. I don't think they're in the military because they're thugs. I think they're in the military because it's the only institution we have that will allow them to arm up and stand on the borders, protecting those within. Getting called upon to engage in dubious ventures is an unfortunate cost of being a protector. And that's why I sympathize with them.

And, just for the record, I think this LewRockwell.com post is more than a little nuts itself.

While I don't like it when anyone gets hurt, on the other hand I find it difficult to work up sympathy for a bunch of people who are dead now because they promised an organization that in return for a minimum of $350 a week (as an enlisted) or $664 per week (as an officer), they'd help kill anybody they were asked to.

My lovely wife's birthday, my store's grand reopening after many millions of dollars' worth of construction work, and (ya wouldn't have caught me doing this in my Christian days - and in fact I'm still not enthused) a Halloween costume party all clamor for my time this week. So, stress for me. And a link for you.

FreeKeene.com - One of the largest concentrations of Free State Project movers - libertarians who have all moved to New Hampshire to campaign for civil liberties - exists in the town of Keene, New Hampshire, making it a nexus of libertarian news. My favorite radio program, Free Talk Live, is actually based there. FreeKeene is where you go for the latest news on all the real work being done by the hardcore activists, from the constant civil disobedience initiatives to the bills being introduced by libertarian legislators in the State House. If you believe in liberty more than security or society, you owe it to yourself to make with the clickie. Current hot topics are the arrest of six marijuana-smoking activists at the annual Pumpkin Day Celebration and a medical marijuana bill.

I'd also like to note that as a comic book fan, it just tickles me pink that it's not uncommon at Free State protests to see someone wearing these:

One kernel of common wisdom often repeated among American Christians today is that God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

The great majority don't actually believe it, of course; most of them are firmly convinced that those bastards on the opposite side of the political spectrum (by which I mean about a quarter-inch over - both Dems and 'Pubs have a fairly myopic view of what positions are available, too) are the ignorant, hateful pawns of Satan himself. And the few who do mean it when they say it are usually making the claim that Jesus simply eschewed politics altogether, not that Jesus' politics simply don't match either party platform.

They're all wrong. Of course Jesus had politics, first of all - everyone has politics, however little exercised, because they're inseparable from having a world view - and of course they don't match up along today's political party lines. In fact if Jesus were to run for president of the United States in '12, likely every voter to read or hear His platform would be absolutely horrified.

Which is why I present it for their pleasure below - 'cause that's a good enough reason for me.

Abortion: I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they claim the Bible is either silent about or in favor of abortion: I assume that they are joking. If Jesus held the predominant view of other rabbis in his time, He believed Genesis 4:10 informs us that people are alive before they are even conceived. Because God claims in that verse to hear Abel's "bloods" (plural, though most translations don't show it) and the Jews thought/still think it very strange that God did not use the singular "blood", they decided the additional blood belonged to all of the descendants Cain might have had if he'd lived. Similar ideas still stand in many sects of Judaism today.

Government Control of the Economy: In His guise as the Father in the Tanakh, Jesus set up a socialist safety net that releases many citizens from their debts and forbids landowners from reaping their entire harvests. At certain times passersby are also allowed to freely eat what they can pick from other people's property.

Sales and Work on Sunday: Absolutely forbidden, except for doctors, nurses, et al. on call.

Gay Marriage: One problem that often results from the claim that the Bible is God's Word is that it encourages people to read it as if it's a legal document and they are lawyers. Never mind the Good Book's historical context or even any clear implications one might make from its stories about how the ancient Hebrews saw the world; a contested ban must not only be very specifically written down in the Bible (with God as the speaker or that's an easy out) but also include a note to the effect of "and this holds true for every possible permutation of said offense", else it doesn't hold water. For any secular student of the Bible, the idea that any ancient form of Judaism or Christianity right back to Jesus and Moses ever looked kindly on homosexual activity is just totally bizarre. Not so for the desperate churchgoer.

The Death Penalty: Jesus approvingly quotes the Torah's well-known position on the topic in several gospels (Matt. 15:3-4 and Mark 7:8-11 - and don't let the story of Jesus sparing the adulteress fool you, by the way. It's not authentic). But try to be honest with yourself - do you really need citations to know that? That this question is ever debated is an excellent example of how Christians like to rip the Bible free of its historical context. Being against the death penalty was more or less unheard of in Jesus' time - and if Jesus had been against it, that would've been major news, certainly all the Jews needed to write Him off as a blasphemous kook.

Religious Tolerance: Jesus doesn't say much about these values, but since He is "one substance" with the Father - and since the Jews of His time still wanted to bring back the Tanakh's example of Hebrew government - we can always dig for His answers in the Old Testament. And what we find there is that in so far as religious expression goes, you really should stay in your own country if you're anything but a worshipper of the LORD - God repeatedly demands the desecration and destruction of other religions' temples and holy sites, along with the deaths of anyone who leads the public away from His worship. No separation of church and state here, that's for sure.

Form of Government: God supports a monarchy for most of the Tanakh's length and for all of Israel's existence as an actual nation (prior to that it was an alliance of tribes). Sometimes the king is answerable to a greater, spiritual guide (for instance, in the case of Saul and Samuel). For a comparison, one might look to the make-up of the Iranian government today (sans the voting pretense), with a dictator nominally in control of the country but nonetheless answerable to the ayatollah.

Yessir - and it's high-time we returned to the values on which I'm told this country was founded.

It’s probably a good idea to write my next review on somone about whom I have generally positive feelings, if a few criticisms – and God bless him, economist Thomas Sowell certainly counts.

A perfectly publishable 500-750 word opinion piece isn’t difficult to write. I can write one in ninety minutes. But to write a good one, one needs either a specialized perspective or a unique voice with which to communicate one that’s unremarkable. Ann Coulter is a good example of someone with the latter (yes, she’s a lawyer by training, but that almost never figures into her commentary anymore).

Mr. Sowell possesses the former due to his background as a working economist; the almost constant theme of his column is what people think and say versus what the reality of a situation is, form versus substance. Yet the thought process he earned from that same background enjoyably imbues him with a style, too; I’d be willing to bet money that no other conservative commentator uses the question mark to punctuate his sentences as much as Mr. Sowell does. His string of them from “Listening to a Liar” (Sept. 8 of this year) is just one of numerous examples:

"If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years-- more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe?

And that’s why Mr. Sowell is one of few Townhall.com columnists I still recommend: Everyone is offering answers, but far more often than most Sowell will point out for you factors you might not have noticed and demonstrate the line of inquiry he used to unearth them, thus actually educating you.

About those “few criticisms” I mentioned at the beginning, though: personally I chalk it up to the bad influence of other successful columnists, but occasionally Sowell does mimic their unattractive habit of using disparaging terms for Leftists – “limousine liberals”, “feminazis”, and the like. For many columnists this habit doesn’t make any difference, since only a dyed-in-the-wool Republican would ever be caught dead reading their vitriol anyway (Ann Coulter, again), but Sowell’s logic is so universally applicable and appealing that it’s a real shame when he provides statists with a big notice that he is their enemy and hence should be dismissed.

And speaking of statism, Sowell’s occupation as an economist and his accompanying love of free markets sometimes seems to take a backseat to his Republican identity. Despite his understanding of how unrestricted trade across borders benefits all and competition improves any industry, he accuses those darn illegal immigrants of taking our jobs (“‘Vigilantes’ on the border?”, May 3rd, 2005). There are cultural and safety arguments against illegal immigration, but labor competition?

But if I were to ask Mr. Sowell why he wrote it – and he had time to answer - I am sure I would receive an intelligent and interesting reply, whether I agree with it or not. That confidence, finally, is why Mr. Sowell is the Republican you should read.

My father is a fan of Rush Limbaugh.

Also Sean Hannity, now that he's come on the scene.

And Hugh Hewitt, actually, and also Michael Medved. Come to think of it, Dennis Prager too, and...

Well.

You understand. Perhaps your heart is even going out to me. You are thinking of what my childhood must have been like.

Actually it wasn't bad at all - I'm certainly not about to form a support group - but it's true that by the tender age of 15 I had taken upon myself a daily reading list that included practically every major Republican name with a national opinion column - and I found them all conveniently collected for my daily perusal at Townhall.com, still so far as I know the preeminent clearinghouse on the internet for conservative messages (not that I am looking). Daily columns, cartoons, podcasts, pictures of Ann Coulter back when she was attractive, FOX stuff... It's all there.

Here's the thing: when I eventually went cold turkey on the extremely addictive website, it wasn't because I'd jumped over to the Libertarian position. I didn't do that until years later. No, I quit reading Townhall.com's columnists out of boredom.

I tried to explain this to my dad a couple months back, said: "Listen, maybe it's just that I have a Bachelor's in the English language, for which you paid by the way and I am grateful, or maybe it's that the similarities between all of those articles become more apparent to you when you read as many of them as I did on a daily basis. But they're all the same, Dad. There's little difference in style, still less in formula, and either one of us could very likely guess the opinion of any one of them on any given issue at any time. Really, it's hack work, stuff they pretty obviously churn out when they're not busy doing the real jobs that made their names. If they're not ghost-written they should be, because I could write them easy."

"I don't think you could do what they do," replied my father. No doubt he simply thought his son's ego was once again getting ahead of his actual abilities, which admittedly has been known to occur.

But y'know what? I can write them easy. And just as a writing exercise today before I get started on what I high-falutin'ly refer to as my "serious work", I churned out the following column in about an hour and a half. I plan to "forward" it to my father this week with a pseudonymous byline (at the moment I'm thinking "Christofer Fuller", being my first and last name in their respective German pronunciations, but that may be too obvious).

If you've read conservative columnists of the sort that fill Townhall.com then you know whether or not I successfully capture the right formula. I think it needs slight polishing but it otherwise feels authentic.

How Democrats Can Fix Our Health System

By Christofer Fuller

There’s a fairly easy way to tell whether someone’s offer to help you is truly altruistic or has ulterior motivations: just reject the offer and see if the wannabe do-gooder accepts your answer. For instance, if you’re a woman carrying groceries to your home and a man resolutely demands that he bring them inside for you, it’s time to shout for help.

The Democrats’ recent refusal to listen to the millions of Americans who have made it abundantly clear they want nothing to do with government-mandated health care clearly fails this test. President Obama, Sen. Harry Reid, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi aren’t just determined to present every American with the choice of purchasing health insurance; all of them want to fine you if you make the wrong decision, to the tune o’ $950 if you’re just you and up to $3,800 if you’ve got the the wife and kids. I ask you: what could be the rationale behind making this threat? If the Democratic Party can successfully lead all the horses of America to water, why force the ones that aren’t thirsty to drink?

And for that matter, why insist on American tax dollars funding this expensive program – especially with the national debt as high as it already is – when the Democratic Party itself already has the power to fix our whole system?

All the Democratic Party has to do is enter the health insurance market.

I'm serious. Look: According to our would-be rescuers, the problem is that greedy health insurers are jipping us, right? And also not accepting those of us with preexisting conditions, the jackals! Well then, let the Democratic Party establish its own non-profit insurer – let’s call it the Democratic Health Co., or D.H.C. - devoted to taking on anybody and everybody wanting coverage at rock-bottom rates.

This should be easy. After all, the Party already has a list of 72 million customers (their registered voters) who want the product, right? Most companies would shed blood for a database like that. One e-mail to everybody on the list and D.H.C. could rival BlueCross BlueShield right out of the starting gate.

As for getting the money to start this ball rolling? Are you kidding? This is the same organization that raised nearly a billion dollars for the last election. For a noble undertaking such as this they could probably raise more.

It would be great to see the D.H.C. really show all of our current money-grubbing insurance providers what it really means to care for others – and best of all, its entry into the market would force those sons of guns to compete by making the same offers! So everybody would end up with affordable health insurance, without having a plan pushed on them they don’t want! Wouldn’t that be great?

If the Democrats only cared enough about me to make a no-strings offer like that, shoot – I’d put ‘em into every local, state, and federal office for which I have a vote.

But they don’t, do they? If I say no, they threaten me.

HELP!

UPDATE: Oh, why not? I just submitted it to a couple of different conservative opinion editors. Total shot in the dark, I know (and if one of them wanted it, I'd have to take down this post in a hurry), but why waste ninety whole minutes of work?

UPDATE 2: My wife agreed that "Fuller" was too obvious, so I chose "Paulson" as my nom de guerre (my father's name is Paul). As the saying goes, "Let's see if he can taste the difference!"

UPDATE 3: Nope, he couldn't.

Jon R. Gabel writes in the New York Times today, saying that we shouldn't fear the cost of health care reform because the CBO has a long history of underestimating the savings from reforms.

In the early 1980s, Congress changed the way Medicare paid hospitals so that payments would no longer be based on costs incurred. ... The Congressional Budget Office predicted that, from 1983 to 1986, this change would slow Medicare hospital spending (which had been rising much faster than the rate of inflation) by $10 billion, and that by 1986 total spending would be $60 billion. Actual spending in 1986 was $49 billion. The savings in 1986 alone were as much as three years of estimated savings.

In the 1990s, the biggest change in Medicare came with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, a compromise between a Republican-controlled Congress and a Democratic administration. ... The actual savings turned out to be 50 percent greater in 1998 and 113 percent greater in 1999 than the budget office forecast.

In the current decade, the major legislative change to the system was the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which added a prescription drug benefit. In assessing how much this new program would cost, the Congressional Budget Office assumed that prices would rise as patients demanded more drugs, and estimated that spending on the drug benefit would be $206 billion.

Actual spending was nearly 40 percent less than that.

I find it interesting though that his savings numbers only extend out a few years. For instance, he talks about how much was saved in 1986, from the 1983 bill, but doesn't talk about hospital spending trends since then. How much has the 1983 bill saved over the past 26 years? He talks about how much money was saved in 1998 and 1999 as a result of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, but he doesn't talk about how much has been saved in the intervening 10 years. Did the trend continue?

Then I saw this graph, of Congressional health care underestimates. (Courtesy of John Goodman, courtesy of the Joint Economic Commitee. You can read the full report.)

It looks like health care costs are underestimated far more than they're overestimated.

Just in case you're case curious, the current projected 10-year U.S. budget deficit is now $9.1 trillion. That's on top of the $11.7 trillion of debt that the U.S. currently owes. The Wall Street Journal has further information on the rather grim news.

CBO predicts that debt held by the public as a share of GDP, which was 40.8% in 2008, will rise to 67.8% in 2019--and then keep climbing after that. CBO says this is "unsustainable," but even this forecast may be optimistic.

Here's why. Many of the current budget assumptions are laughably implausible. Both the White House and CBO predict that Congress will hold federal spending at the rate of inflation over the next decade. This is the same Democratic Congress that awarded a 47% increase in domestic discretionary spending in 2009 when counting stimulus funds. And the appropriations bills now speeding through Congress for 2010 serve up an 8% increase in domestic spending after inflation.

Another doozy is that Nancy Pelosi and friends are going to allow a one-third or more reduction in liberal priorities like Head Start, food stamps and child nutrition after 2011 when the stimulus expires. CBO actually has overall spending falling between 2009 and 2012, which is less likely than an asteroid hitting the Earth.

Federal revenues, which will hit a 40-year low of 14.9% of GDP this year, are expected to rise to 19.6% of GDP by 2014 and then 20.2% by 2019--which the CBO concedes is "high by historical standards." This implies some enormous tax increases.

CBO assumes that some 28 million middle-class tax filers will get hit by the alternative minimum tax, something Democrats say they won't let happen. CBO also assumes that all the Bush tax cuts disappear--not merely those for the rich, but those for lower and middle income families as well. So either the deficit is going to be about $1.3 trillion higher than Washington thinks, or out goes Mr. Obama's campaign promise of not taxing those who make less than $250,000.

What would the deficit projections look like it the CBO forecasts matched Congress's behavior? Even more depressing. The Concord Coalition publishes a "plausible baseline" that uses more realistic assumptions. They project the 10-year deficit as $14.4 trillion.

If we continue on the spending path that we're on, we'll more than double the national debt in only a decade.

One more thing. These numbers are what the budget looks like before passing a healthcare bill that's forecasted to add another $1 trillion to the deficit all by itself.

Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, debunks some of the claims surrounding peak oil, in an op-ed at the New York Times. Here's a few of the highlights:

On the claim that oil companies are extracting increasing amounts of water instead of oil:

But this is hardly a concern -- the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.

On the claim that we're only discovering one new barrel of oil for every 3 or 4 that we pump:

When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don't report that additional recoverable oil as "newly discovered," the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent -- another 2.5 trillion barrels -- in an economically viable way.

Russ Roberts reminds me about the difference between health care and health insurance -- especially as it pertains to the elderly.

It's the wrong question because when you're 65 the problem isn't getting insurance. It's paying for health care. But the public debate has become so obsessed with health care insurance we've forgotten what the real issues are.

When you turn 65, the high cost of insurance isn't the problem. The problem is that you're old. A lot more things are going to go wrong. Yes insurance is going to be costly. But that's because so many things are more likely to break in your body. The high cost of insurance at that point is just a result of the problem. It's not the problem itself.

It's like saying that if you drive your car in a demolition derby, it's hard to get coverage for collision damage. No kidding.

What's needed isn't more insurance for the elderly but more savings. Providing savings through insurance is just a way to disguise what's really going on. It's not insurance, it's a subsidy for the savings that weren't done before or it's a wealth transfer from people with high incomes to people with low savings.

Does this make you sad, or is it just me? I think there's something incredibly barbaric and degrading about destroying a perfectly good piece of machinery. A well maintained engine can run for more than a hundred thousand miles. It seems almost sacreligious to just destroy it out of hand.

To receive government reimbursement, auto dealers who offer rebates on new cars in exchange for so-called clunkers must agree to "kill" the old models, using a method the government outlines in great detail in its 136-page manual for dealers: Drain the engine of oil and replace it with two quarts of a sodium-silicate solution.

"The heat of the operating engine then dehydrates the solution leaving solid sodium silicate distributed throughout the engine's oiled surfaces and moving parts," says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration publication. "These solids quickly abrade the bearings causing the engine to seize while damaging the moving parts of the engine and coating all of the oil passages."

Over the weekend, half a dozen mechanics gathered around three clunkers marked for death at Jim Clark Motors in Lawrence, Kan. As Loris Brubeck Jr., the dealership's president, held a stopwatch, the sodium-silicate solution took two minutes flat to kill a 2002 Ford Windstar, and just a few seconds more to kill a 1999 Jeep. But a 1988 Dodge van lasted more than six minutes.

"Sometimes those old engines, they're the hardest to kill," says Mr. Brubeck.

I can't get over what an incredibly wasteful program this is.

Cash for Bonkers - John Hood - The Corner on National Review Online

Automobiles represent a significant share of the nation's capital stock. Even used cars often have years of life left in them, years during which owners can use them to get to work, perform work, or transport themselves and their families for education, recreation, or consumption.

"Clunkers" don't play much of a role in the lives of upper- and middle-income Americans, I suppose, but they play a major role in the auto market for low-income Americans. What the federal government is now doing is using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the large-scale destruction of functional cars that would otherwise exchange hands one or more times in the used car market. This will make it harder for poor folks to purchase cars in the future. It's an income transfer up the income distribution, at the behest of so-called progressives.

Barack Obama's Clunkernomics by Rich Lowry on National Review Online

The fundamental mistake is to think that the government can magically induce economic activity with no countervailing downside. The Clunkers program is really just shifting around sales, creating the illusion of a demand for cars conjured out of nowhere. To the extent the program has enticed people to speed up or delay their purchases to take advantage of the rebate, it has borrowed demand from earlier this year or the future for a burst of sales in the summer of 2009.

The car-buying guide Edmunds.com reports that as many as 100,000 buyers delayed their purchases, waiting for the Clunkers program. And some of the roughly 60,000 trade-ins that take place in any month anyway were rushed to gobble up the rebate. "We have crammed three or four months of normal activity into just a few days," Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl writes in the Wall Street Journal.

The Clunkers program demands that the old cars be disabled. In a ritual repeated in dealership lots across America, sodium silicate is being poured into car engines to kill them. Many of these cars have value and could be sold on the used market. They are being destroyed senselessly in a diktat reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt's slaughter of livestock during the New Deal. Decades later, we still haven't learned that the wanton destruction of goods is scandalously wasteful economic policy.

Gwen Ottinger - When 'Clunkers' Are Greener - washingtonpost.com

But these consumption-promoting policies are not necessarily a boon to the environment.

First, even when new cars and appliances are more efficient than the ones they replace, the act of replacing them entails environmental costs not accounted for in the stimulus programs. Building a new car, washing machine or refrigerator takes energy and resources: The manufacture of steel, aluminum and plastics are energy-intensive processes, and some of the materials used in durable goods, especially plastics, use non-renewable fossil fuels as feedstocks as well as energy sources. Disposing of old products, a step required by most incentive and rebate programs, also has environmental costs: It takes additional energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes.

Policies that encourage purchases of energy-efficient products may also increase, rather than decrease, energy use by confusing efficiency with consumption. For example, Energy Star refrigerators, which now qualify for rebates in many states, are certified to be 10 to 20 percent more efficient than "standard" models. Yet the Energy Star rating is awarded overwhelmingly to refrigerators far larger than would have been the norm two decades ago, and smaller models of refrigerator, which use less energy simply because they have a smaller volume of air to cool, were not even included in the Energy Star program until 2002. Consumers who wish to benefit from environmentally friendly stimulus money, then, are pushed toward purchasing "efficient" but relatively large models rather than being encouraged to opt for the smallest refrigerator, with the smallest energy demands, that meets their needs.

Beyond these concrete environmental drawbacks, product-replacement policies also send a message that old things are dirty and inefficient, while new ones are necessarily green and efficient. Under the Cash for Clunkers program, for example, old cars must be traded in for new ones. Yet plenty of used cars exceed the required 22 mpg: The Toyota Prius hybrid, on the market since 2001, gets upward of 40 mpg, and even a 15-year-old Honda Civic gets 28. By assuming that only new products can be environmentally friendly, these policies lead us to discount the environmental gains that could be made through well-established and low-tech means, such as smaller refrigerators. They also reinforce the idea that all products, even "durable goods," quickly become obsolete -- a notion that leads to overwhelming amounts of environment-despoiling waste.

More Cash for Clunkers III - John Stossel's Take

Another unintended consequence of the Cash for Clunkers program is that poor people who can't afford new cars - or expensive used cars -- will be crushed along with all those clunkers. If you can only afford $500 - $1,000 for a car, you'll find many of these vehicles are now unavailable. They have been sent to the junk yard thanks to this program.

The Blogger News Network points out that junk yards that demolish the clunkers aren't allowed to pull engines and other parts before they're crushed, making parts for older cars harder and more expensive to get.

"Cash for Clunkers" benefits New Car Dealerships primarily, by increasing sales, and the upper and middle class possibly, by giving them an extra few hundred dollars. But it's not good news at all for lower income people. We can't afford a new car, and we won't be able to continue fixing our older cars at an affordable price, if we can find the parts at all. This isn't good.

In fact, the Obama administration knew they were taking away our options to keep our vehicles running. They want our cars off the road, and they really don't care how it affects those of us with very little money. The little guy isn't a priority. Obama pretended to champion the little guy in order to get their vote, but it's becoming more and more obvious that special interests - those that have received the bailout money and those industries he is choosing to socialize - are what he really champions. Politics as usual.

The Capital Times published an article on the shortage of child day care in Dane County. It's not until the 11th paragraph that they finally reveal that the state government is to blame.

The primary reason it's so hard to find care for infants is because of a state mandated caregiver-child ratio that requires one provider for every four babies or toddlers under age 2. Ratios increase according to the age of the child. For example, the ratio is 1 caregiver for every 13 children for 4- and 5-year-olds. So, the staffing costs for infants can be more than triple what they are for older children.

Most child care centers don't offer infant care, in part because of financial reasons. "Not to sound cold, but they don't make money on infants because the ratio is so small," says Jody Bartnick, the executive director of Community Coordinated Child Care, a children's advocacy organization commonly referred to as 4-C. Stricter regulations add costs, she said. Infant rooms require their own sink, their own refrigerator and other equipment.

And when those costs are passed on to consumers, they are significant for most household budgets.

4-C numbers show that the average weekly cost of infant care in Dane County as of March 2008 was $245 in a family child care center and $275 at a group center. For preschool care, the number drops to about $220 at both types of centers. At those rates, child care can cost between $11,000 and $14,000 a year -- compared with about $7,300 for in-state tuition at UW-Madison.

In the name of making day care safer, they've actually made day care nearly impossible to get. And, when you can get it, it's astronomically expensive. For an area that prides itself on its progressivism, this sounds pretty regressive to me.

Of course, they'll redeem themselves by attempting to raise my taxes so they can turn around and subsidize child care for someone else. The obvious solution -- deregulate the market -- would never occur to them.

You're doing a heckuva job, Jimmy Doyle.

For the past two years, I've been slowly trying to figure out my opinion about U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. military. There are a lot of very bad people in the world. The thuggish mullahs of Iran and the even more thuggish dictator of North Korea jump immediately to mind. But one shouldn't forget about the thugs in Africa (Robert Mugabe and the like), the thugs in Latin America (Hugo Chavez and friends), or the thugs in Europe (Vladimir Putin).

But what should the American response be? Is it our responsibility to throw them out and make the world a better place? Is it our responsibility to protect our friends (Israel, South Korea, Japan, etc) or should we only be concerned with the countries and individuals that pose a legitimate threat to our homeland? How big should the U.S. military be and how should we use it?

I still don't know what my opinion is. It vacillates between "nuke 'em all" and "let the world take care of itself", depending on the day and how recently I've read about foreign atrocities. So I was interested to read Jerry Pournelle's take on the question:

The British at one time had a naval policy of having a fleet able to defeat the next two fleets in the world; but at that time Britain had an Empire and relied on it for a number of things. The US is not an empire, and we don't seem to be learning how to be one. The question becomes.; how large a force does the US need to defend our legitimate foreign policy goals We already spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. This may be excessive, depending on what we think we must do with that military.

I'm not at all convinced that we need NATO now that the USSR is gone. I am not sure what good it does us to have pledges from Germany to go to war if someone attacks us. I am thoroughly unaware of why we might need the Georgian army to help us if we are invaded. I can see that our commitment to them is valuable to them, but I am not certain I understand the value to the US of the US guarantee to Germany and potentially to Georgia.

I know that such guarantees are hideously expensive. And I'm inclined to make the snotty Europeans bear the cost of their own military defense. Overall, I think I favor downsizing the American military and getting out of Germany, South Korea, Japan, etc. But I'm not sure what the long term consequences of that would be. In 50 years, would we be facing a threat from a much larger and more expansionist Chinese or Russian military? It gives me pause.

Update (5:39PM): Via NRO, I see that, unless things change, China may not be too worrisome in the future.

China's Population Policy, and Ours - John Derbyshire - The Corner on National Review Online

China is not far behind Japan on the path to the demographic cliff edge. Fertility figures are no more dependable than any other Chinese statistics, but there seems to be general agreement that the current TFR is in the 1.7 to 1.8 range, somewhere between Sweden and Belgium in the international rankings.

For China, still a poor country with a huge peasant population, this is starting to throw up problems. With the one-child policy entering its fourth decade, the typical Chinese in his prime productive years now has two elderly parents to support. Elderly, and likely penniless, since those parents left their productive years without ever having had the opportunity to accumulate much.

The Mainstreaming of Demographic Alarmism (Cont.) - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online

On page 5 of my notoriously "alarmist" book, I asked, "Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century?", and answered no: It will get old before it's got rich.

These opinions make me even more likely to take an isolationist approach.