Let the Obmacare plague begin

Recently former South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, told an audience in Franklin, Tennessee, in reference to Obamacare, “Folks, we can’t allow this plague to come onto the American people.”

Today the Kaiser Family Foundation released a study detailing exactly what will happen to the American people when the Obamacare “plague” fully goes into effect January 1, 2014.  Here is some of what the data from 17 states that have made the information public shows:

A 25-year-old making $25,000 a year in Baltimore faces a premium for good health insurance through the new Obamacare marketplace (exchange) of $80 a month.  (GASP!)

A Baltimore family of two 40-year-old adults with two children with a total income of $60,000 would pay $164 a month.  (YIKES!)

While the premiums will be different in each state, Kaiser found that overall the premiums are “lower than expected”. 

On October 1^st the American people will be able to go into the insurance marketplace and see what coverage, premiums and subsidies the Obamacare plague has for them.  I can’t wait. 

Let the plague begin.

What I learned on my flight to D.C.

Very seldom do I get to read a hard copy of The Wall Street Journal (and I never read it online because it is hidden behind a paywall). 

But on my 6:15AM flight to D.C. I did read the paper and thought I would share with you some of the interesting news.  Unless you pick up today’s paper, you’ll just have to take my word that this information is accurate since providing links to the stories won’t do you any good.

1.  Asset-based business loans are booming with $620 billion in such loans on the books today, up 25 percent since 2010.  Bank loans to small businesses stand at $584 billion, down from $713 billion in 2008.   But much of these new asset-based loans are coming from hedge funds and the recipient businesses are finding a dark side.  “It’s like financing that never goes away,” says Gary Rabin, chief executive of Advanced Cell Techonolgy.

2. Former SC Senator Jim DeMint is turning the once conservative “think tank” Heritage Foundation into a very conservative “political party” to the chagrin of Republican office holders.  Says the Heritage Action Chief Executive Mike Needham, “There’s a huge swath of the American people who feel totally unrepresented in Washington, and you have two political parties that are equally part of the problem.  We need to have a political party that steps up and says, ‘Look, it’s true, the fix is in in Washington and it might be difficult, but we’re going to be the party for you.”  Republican S.C. Congressman Mick Mulvaney is one of those critics of DeMint’s Heritage organization.  Regarding the recent battle over the farm bill Mulvaney is quoted as saying about Heritage, “We went into battle thinking they were on our side, and we find out they’re shooting at us.”

3. The U.S. economy improvement is being championed by Wall Street Journal columnists in big headlines.
Gerald Seib in his column, “Reasons to Hope Better Economic Times Lie Ahead”, gives “five reasons for long-term optimism”.
David Malpass, who served as assistant Treasury secretary to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary of state to President George H.W. Bush, shouts in the heading of his column, “The Economy is Showing Signs of Life”.

4. After its successful launch of the small screen iPad mini now wants to explore going bigger with nearly 13 inch iPad screen.  I’ll just stick with my old 9.7 inch screen iPad.  See, I can be conservative and resist change.

Now onto the New York Times for the flight to Detroit.

Looking for an "oops"

July was officially the hottest month for the United State’s 48 contiguous states—3.3 degrees above the average.  Those high temperatures also contributed to the country’s warmest 12-month period every recorded.

Jake Crouch of the National Climatic Data Center says that it’s more than just daytime highs that scientists are looking at.  He says that “we have also seen very warm nighttime temperatures, and that is part of a long-term trend we’ve seen across the contiguous U.S. over the past several decades.  The hotter days increase the amount of moisture the lower atmosphere can hold, and this means it doesn’t cool off as much at night anymore.”

Republican U.S. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri wrote in the Springfield News-Leader:

At the end of July, all of Missouri’s counties were designated a state of “severe” to “exceptional” drought — representing the worst level of drought possible. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently added 218 counties from 12 drought-stricken states to its list of natural disaster areas, bringing the overall total to 1,584 counties in 32 states — more than half of all the counties nationwide.   

According to the USDA’s crop report, half of the nation’s corn crop is now in rated in the worst condition, of “poor” to “very poor,” with Missouri topping the list as one of the hardest hit states.  Meanwhile, approximately 73 percent of the domestic cattle inventory nationwide is located in an area that has been impacted by this drought, and 59 percent of America’s and 99 percent of Missouri’s pasture and rangeland is in “poor” to “very poor” condition, compared to 38 percent a year ago.



We all know what’s going on.  Scientists like James Hansen of NASA have been warning us about extreme weather events as a result of the increased levels of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the atmosphere.  Climate change has been going on for some time and it is getting worse. 

South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, infamous for his resistance to Congress taking measures to address climate change, is notorious for his 2010 tweet that ridiculed the notion of a warming planet.  When Washington was hit with a severe snowstorm that February causing the House to cancel all votes for a week, Mr. DeMint tweeted:

 “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle’.”

Mr. DeMint was seen earlier today with his cell phone in hand asking a page how to spell “oops”.  (Just wishful thinking.)

ACTION ALERT!!!

Access to Capital vote on Tuesday
Tell Graham and DeMint to do it the right way

The U.S. Senate will vote tomorrow (March 20^th) on legislation to create another path for small businesses to access capital.  The Small Business Chamber has supported the idea of allowing limited investments in small businesses with relatively low caps on total investments sought.  This is called “crowdfunding”.  In exchange for limited investment caps, the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) normal requirements would be reduced to eliminate much of the cost and time for compliance that prohibits most small businesses from accessing investment capital.

However, “crowdfunding” legislation done properly is a careful balance between reducing investor risk through low investment caps and thus lowering SEC oversight.  We have worked with a bi-partisan group of Senators to achieve this balance.   Unfortunately, the U.S. House has passed and sent to the Senate legislation (JOBS Act) that includes a “crowdfunding” provision that throws this careful balance out the window and will bring the greed and fraud on Wall Street that gave us the Great Recession to Main Street investments.  

Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has characterizes the vote tomorrow this way.  ““There's a right way to get capital in the hands of small businesses and a wrong way.  If we take the wrong path and fall off of a cliff, we are going to ruin our chances to get this done.” 

Please contact S.C. Senators Graham and DeMint quickly.  Below are two easy ways to do this.  Your message should be twofold:

Vote YES for cloture on Reed-Landrieu-Levin’s Substitute Amendment to the JOBS Act.

If Reed-Landrieu-Levin fails, Vote NO for cloture on the House Bill (H.R. 3606)

The first vote would substitute the Senate INVEST Act that includes our crowdfunding provision for the JOBS Act.  The latter vote will insure more debate and amendments to the JOBS Act so that we “don’t fall off of a cliff”.

Send your message to our Senators in an email letter provided by the American Sustainable Business Council.  Click here to send email.

Or call both our Senators and give the above message.

Senator Jim DeMint 
202-224-6121

Senator  Lindsey Graham 
202-224-5972

Thanks for your help.

Individual-Mandate Hypocrisy

Why aren’t conservatives complaining about this South Carolina insurance law?

By Eliot Spitzer

Slate

Sept. 30, 2011

The “individual mandate” in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act has provoked incredible enthusiasm among the act’s supporters and towering rage in its opponents. The obligation either to purchase insurance or to pay a fine whose proceeds would be used to offset the cost of care to the uninsured is viewed either as an essential part of the architecture of health care reform or as an affront to liberty. In few places has the attack on the individual mandate been more vociferous than in South Carolina, where both new Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Jim DeMint are leading members of the Tea Party movement. They view the individual mandate as inimical to our Constitution and the worst manifestation of government excess.

So it may surprise you to know that South Carolina has its own individual mandate—structured exactly like the federal health care mandate, but for auto insurance. Unlike virtually all other states, which require every driver to carry liability insurance, South Carolina has a more complex system. Under South Carolina state law, in effect for more than a decade, a car owner in the state must either have liability insurance or obtain an “uninsured motorist registration.” The fee for the uninsured registration is $550 and is deposited into the “uninsured drivers fund.” The website of the South Carolina Department of Insurance explains that the $550 fee is used to “offset the costs of uninsured motorist coverage.” (Some portion is also used for consumer education programs.) The “uninsured motorist coverage” is a cost borne by drivers who have their own liability insurance but also need additional insurance to provide for coverage in the event they have an accident caused by a driver who does not have liability insurance—the “uninsured driver.”  By statute—SC Code section 38-77-155—funds from the uninsured drivers fund are distributed to insurers who offer this uninsured motorist coverage. Bottom line: South Carolina forcibly transfers money from drivers who refuse to buy insurance to drivers who do buy insurance to cover the costs of risk created by the drivers who don’t buy insurance.

The $550 fee is a rough approximation of the cash needed to insure that those who have not purchased insurance pay their fair share to the system. Eliminating free riders—those who create risk but don’t pay for it—is the worthy objective of South Carolina’s uninsured motorist registration.

South Carolina even has an enforcement mechanism to make sure people abide by this structure: Any driver stopped by a police officer who can’t produce an insurance certificate or a certificate of “uninsured registration” is charged the $550. In other words, if they stop you and catch you, they make sure you buy into the system.  

Make no mistake, this structure is precisely what the health care act requires: Either be insured or pay a fine—a fine calibrated to subsidize the costs and risks you create by participating without insurance. And also understand: This makes perfect sense. Eliminating “free riders” is the only way to make an insurance system work. Everybody from the Heritage Foundation to Newt Gingrich to Mitt Romney to President Obama has come to this same conclusion.

Opponents of the individual mandate in the health care reform bill have tried to deal with the auto insurance analogy before. Senator DeMint and others have attempted, valiantly, to distinguish auto insurance by arguing that driving is a voluntary act and, therefore, that those who chose not to drive are not forced to buy insurance. But this is, as lawyers say, a distinction without a difference. The core logic in each case is identical: If you create risk and costs to other individuals and society at large by your activity, and yet you refuse to pay for those costs and risks, so that others are being forced to cover your free-riding, then it is fair to require you to share part of the burden. The fact that one can theoretically opt out of driving has no impact on this argument. Opponents refuse to acknowledge the logic of the individual health-insurance mandate despite their embrace of it in the case of auto insurance. (Their other argument about the constitutional authority of Congress to impose the health mandate, which I view as being equally lacking in merit, will nonetheless have to be resolved by the Supreme Court, most probably this term.)

The only escape hatch for Senator DeMint and others would be if they were truly willing to let people “opt out” of the health care system. Then only those who “opted in” could be forced to participate—as with auto insurance. But what would that mean? That if somebody came to an emergency room with a heart attack and that person could not pay cash on the barrel, didn’t have insurance to cover, or hadn’t paid the equivalent of the “uninsured registration fee”—we would really throw them out on the street and say, Sorry, no care for you? Having listened to the audience reaction at the recent Republican presidential debate, where death seemed to be a popular means to resolve social ills, there clearly may be a few fringe voices who have that view. But I don’t believe there is a significant number of people who truly want us to deny critical or emergency care to the sick based on the absence of payment. Indeed, federal law requires that care be provided.  

Since opting out is neither morally nor legally possible, we must create a system that then requires everybody to participate in covering some portion of the costs. That is what South Carolina has done for auto insurance and what the nation must do for health care.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2011/09/south_carolina_and_the_individual_mandate_why_aren_t_conservativ.html 

GOP debate in Columbia

Of all the upcoming GOP Presidential debates, the most important will be the one today in Columbia, SC.  The national media isn’t even mentioning this 6-candidate event both mainly because it is not really a traditional debate.  But the difference is what makes it more important.

Each candidate—Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachman, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain—is scheduled to appear on stage alone and be grilled by Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Steve King. 

The typical debate is typically a showcase for well-rehearsed applause lines.  But not this afternoon.  I trust that Mr. DeMint will be digging into issues to truly find that “conservative”, small-government candidate.  The responses will provide valuable insight into each candidate’s qualifications to be President and fodder for their primary and general election opponents.

I’ll be with the 400 guests invited to attend and will be listening for how each would create the jobs we desperately need. 

I expect that we’ll hear more about how shrinking government will unleash a massive growth in jobs even though as Paul Krugman points out the today in his New York Time’s, this economic philosophy is failing.

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers. And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

And we’ll probably here from the candidates that it is government regulations and taxes that are standing in the way businesses hiring.

But this isn’t what McClatchy Newspapers recently found when they randomly sampled small business owners around the country and reported the results under this heading:  Regulations, taxes aren’t killing small business, owners say”.

None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.

I’ll report back tomorrow on what I hear this afternoon.  You can watch for yourself on CNN, one of the digital SC-ETV channels and a live stream feed.