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Ferguson Protesters Now Protesting Over Not Getting Paid

By: John Blosser

At least some of the protesters who looted, rioted, burned buildings and overturned police cars in Ferguson, Missouri, last year were promised payment of up to $5,000 per month to join the protests.

However, when the Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), the successor group to the now-bankrupt St. Louis branch of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), stiffed the protesters, they launched a sit-in protest at the headquarters of MORE and created a Twitter page to demand their money, the Washington Times reports.

Former U.S. Rep. Allen B. West noted on his website, "Instead of being thankful for getting off the unemployment line for a few weeks and having a little fun protesting, the paid rioters who tore up Ferguson, MO, are protesting again.

"First of all, can you even imagine getting paid $5,000.00 a month for running around holding a sign and burning down an occasional building? That's around $1,250.00 per week. Try making that at McDonald's or Starbucks."

The Kansas City Star estimates that the Ferguson riots, characterized as a spontaneous eruption of anger over the shooting of unarmed black criminal Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, cost the county $4.2 million.

Millennial Activists United (MAU) posted a letter on their website stating, "On May 14, 2015 many individuals and organizations of the protest movement that began in Ferguson, Missouri, organized a sit-in in the office of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE). The demand was simple: Cut the checks. The protesters say they are unable to pay their bills after taking time to travel to Ferguson.

"Questions have been raised as to how the movement is to sustain when white non-profits are hoarding monies collected of off (sic) black bodies? When we will (sic) hold the industry of black suffering accountable? The people of the community are fed up and the accountability begins here and now," the letter continues.

"There is an insidious strand of racism and white supremacy that exists in this movement. This money is typically in the hands of white people who oversee the types of services that the non-profit provides, while having select token black people to spearhead the conversations within and to the community."

MORE is funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, the Times notes, through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

The OSF, the Times states, paid for activists from various protest groups to travel to Ferguson and take part in the demonstrations.

Akiba Solomon of Colorlines stated, "More than 500 of us have traveled from Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and other cities to support the people of Ferguson and help turn a local moment into a national movement," the Times noted.

"There's absolutely no doubt that part of the reason that Ferguson flared up was because protesters were being paid to be there. That makes you wonder how many are being paid in Baltimore? How many more will be paid in the future?" The Right Scoop asked.

Protesters directed much of their anger against MORE director Jeff Ordower, former Missouri head of ACORN and ACORN's Midwest operations, FrontPage Mag reports.

"The unpaid rent-a-mob operatives complain that MORE stiffed them the same way ACORN did to hired protesters throughout its 40 years of radical left-wing rabble-rousing," FrontPage Mag reports.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Ferguson-Missouri-paid-protesters/2015/05/25/id/646587/

Barack Obama’s Misplaced Priorities [Updated]

by John Hinderaker in Democrats, Federal Budget, Obama administration

 

I noted earlier tonight that today’s votes in the House on partial funding of government operations were political theater. But that doesn’t put them on the same degraded plane as the Obama administration’s barricading of national monuments to keep veterans from visiting them. Glenn Reynolds has the links. A group of veterans from Mississippi knocked down barriers around the World War II memorial that the administration erected to dramatize that the “shutdown” was in effect:

Due to the government shutdown, National Park Service police put up barriers preventing access. According to Leo Shane III, White House and Veterans Affairs reporter for Stars and Stripes, the veterans knocked over those barriers.

Glenn sums up the administration’s disgraceful behavior:

Putting up barriers around open outdoor monuments was dumb shutdown theater and they deserve to have it backfire on them.

Iowahawk gets the last word:

In short: the WH went out of their way to barricade an outdoor WWII memorial to WWII vets as a political stunt. Utterly obscene.

Barack Obama’s problem (one of them, anyway) is that he is so consumed by hatred for Republicans that it clouds his judgment. He is all politics, all the time, as he showed again today in his over the top rant at the White House. Michael Ramirez aptly sums up Obama’s view of the world:

All of which raises some hope that, despite Republican errors, the Democrats may overplay their hand.

UPDATE: More on today’s incident at the World War II memorial:

Many elderly veterans, some in wheelchairs, broke through the barriers set up around the memorial, as police, park service employees, and tourists looked on.
“The Germans and the Japanese couldn’t contain us. They weren’t going to let barriers contain them today. They wanted to see their memorial,” says Armstrong.
Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio has a trip scheduled to depart from Toledo next Wednesday, October 9.
“We will make the call this Friday to determine if the flight is still a go, or if we will have to re-schedule,” Armstrong explains.
He says they are considering going ahead with the trip even if the government is still on shutdown, but when he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest.
Armstrong says, “I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.’”
When he asked for her name, he says she did not give it to him and then promptly hung up the phone.

And that woman is classified as an “essential” federal employee! Maybe some more layoffs are in order.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/barack-obamas-misplaced-priorities.php

Shameful Democrats Rush to Defense of Their IRS Political Partners

Jim Martin: “Democrats claim to be the party of the little guy, but they’ve been exposed as the party of the giant lie — big government bullies who will use any means necessary.”

(Alexandria, Virginia) — The 60 Plus Association, the nation’s largest conservative seniors organization and acknowledged alternative to the liberal AARP today scolded Democrats for using the IRS to attack political opponents, and continuing to defend their corrupt and illegal behavior on Capitol Hill. During hearings this week Senate Democrats defended the IRS against charges of criminal wrongdoing and political payback, saying they were merely confused about applying the law in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court case.

This brought a strong rebuke from 60 Plus Chairman and Founder Jim Martin:

”On a day that IRS chief Lois Lerner — head of the most intimidating bureaucracy in the free world — pleads the 5th like a common criminal, Senate Democrats defend the IRS’s indefensible behavior as if it were a mere clerical error. How dumb do they think the American public is? She claims she’s not good at math, but apparently she can count to five.
“Citizens United didn’t make the IRS audit Mitt Romney donors, nor did it make them scrutinize college interns working at conservative organizations. Confusion about Citizens United was not the reason organizations like 60 Plus wound up on an IRS hit list. The depths Democrats will go to help enable and cover-up IRS corruption is truly staggering.
“Will these be the same excuses when the IRS is running Obamacare, and people are denied care because of their political views? Or are Democrats admitting that the bureaucrats who they put in charge of America’s healthcare are just incompetent. Corruption or incompetence, which is it?
“What is especially egregious is that Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) specifically asked the IRS to target the 60 Plus Association prior to the 2012 elections, and now his brother, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) is accusing Republicans of ‘playing politics’ with this issue. Such blatant hypocrisy! Clearly politics is a family business for some Democrats, and they operate a lot like some other questionable family businesses.
“The shades of Watergate continue to hover over this scandal. We recall Nixon’s defenders dismissed that as a ’3rd rate burglary.’ With new revelations coming out by the day and more IRS employees tucking tail, this disgraceful escapade is making Watergate look like a bad hair day by comparison.”

http://60plus.org/shameful-democrats-rush-to-defense-of-their-irs-political-partners/

Social Security Ran $47.8B Deficit in FY 2012

Social Security Ran $47.8B Deficit in FY 2012; Disabled Workers Hit New Record in December: 8,827,795

By Terence P. Jeffrey

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration.
The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December--up from 8,805,353 in November.
The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185 in December.
In 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an average of 112.556 million full-time workers in the United States, of whom 17.806 million worked full-time for local, state or federal government. That left an average of only 94.750 million full-time private sector workers in the country.
That means that for every 1.67 Americans who worked full-time in the private sector in 2011, there is now 1 person collecting benefits from the Social Security administration.
Despite its fiscal 2012 “net cash flow” deficit, as SSA describes it, the agency was able to book an on-paper “increase” of $64.580 billion in the Social Security Trust Funds. That, SSA says, is because the U.S. Treasury “paid” the trust funds $112.398 in “interest” in fiscal 2012 on the historial surpluses in Social Security taxes that the Treasury siphoned off to cover other spending by the federal government.
As of the end of calendar year 2011, according to SSA, the Social Security Trust Fund equaled approximately $2.678 trillion.
The last time the Social Security program ran a “net cash flow” surplus was in fiscal 2009. In that year, Social Security’s revenues exceeded its benefit and overhead payments by $19.358 billion. In fiscal 2010, Social Security ran a $36.8 billion deficit; and, in fiscal 2011, it ran a $47.975 deficit.
There are two Social Security Trust Funds: the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The OASI Trust Fund covers benefits to retired workers and their families and deceased workers families. The DI Trust fund covers benefits to disabled workers and their families. The trust funds are required by law to hand over all surplus revenues to the Treasury and the Treasury then provides “special issue” non-marketable bonds—essentially electronic IOUs—to the trust funds in return for the cash. These "IOUs" become part of the national debt. When the Treasury pays "interest" that increases the value of the Social Security Trust Funds it does so by increasing the number of IOUs it owes the trust funds.
When the Social Security program runs a net cash flow deficit, as it has in the last three fiscal years, the Treasury needs to borrow cash from the “public” to keep the program funded. As of Dec. 21, the federal government’s debt was $16.336 trillion.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/social-security-ran-478b-deficit-fy-2012-disabled-workers-hit-new-record-december

Reforming Medicare It can be done — by learning from the free market

Reforming Medicare  It can be done — by learning from the free market.

By John C. Goodman

John C. Goodman

The idea behind a “grand bargain” to get the federal budget deficit under control is a simple one: Republicans agree to tax increases, and Democrats agree to spending cuts.

Yet a budget agreement could be a trap for Republicans, just as similar budget deals have been in the past.
There are two problems. First, the tax increases would hit immediately, while the spending cuts would be mainly in the future. That means future Congresses would have an opportunity to renege on the agreement before any serious spending reduction took place. Second, all the serious spending increases foreseen for future years are on health care, and health-care spending cannot be curtailed unless there is fundamental reform. Since the Democrats have signaled they won’t agree to fundamental reform, that means no deal that can be agreed to will be workable — unless even Democrats come to understand that health-care reform is in everybody’s interest.

Consider that Medicare has a list of about 7,500 separate tasks that it pays physicians to perform. For each task there is a price that varies by location and other factors. Of the 800,000 practicing physicians in this country, not all are signed up with Medicare, and no doctor will be a candidate to perform every task on Medicare’s list. Still, Medicare is potentially setting about 6 billion prices at any one time.
Is there any chance that Medicare can make the right decisions on all these transactions? In a word: No.
What does it mean when Medicare makes the wrong decisions? It often means that doctors face perverse incentives to provide care that is more costly, more risky, and less appropriate than the care they should be providing. It also means that the skill sets of our entire supply of doctors will become skewed, as medical students and even practicing doctors respond to the fact that Medicare is overpaying for some skills and underpaying for others.
What could we do differently? Former Medicare trustee Thomas Saving and I have a few proposals.
Pay market prices. All over the country there are retail establishments that are offering primary-care services to cash-paying patients. Walk-in clinics, doc-in-the-box clinics, and free-standing (that is, not connected with a hospital) emergency-care clinics post prices and usually deliver high-quality care. Many follow evidence-based protocols, keep records electronically, and order prescriptions electronically.
Medicare should immediately allow enrollees to obtain care at almost all of these places — paying the posted, market prices, not Medicare’s fee schedule. Since these prices are way below what Medicare would have paid at a physician’s office or hospital emergency room, this reform would lower Medicare’s costs even as it makes primary care more accessible.
Pay no more than market prices. Medicare does something no one would ever do in a normal market: It pays different providers within the same area different fees for performing the same service. For example, Medicare typically pays two or three times as much for a service performed at a hospital as it pays for that same service at a physician’s office. Why be so wasteful?
Let’s suppose that a MinuteClinic offers a flu shot for $40. Then that is all Medicare should pay — whether the shot is given by a doctor or a nurse, whether at a MinuteClinic, in a doctor’s office, at a community health center, or at a hospital.
Contract selectively. Almost every hospital in Dallas, where I live, takes Medicare patients and bills the taxpayers for the services it performs. Yet some hospitals are billing Medicare twice as much as other hospitals for such standard services as knee replacements.
Medicare should contract with low-cost, high-quality facilities. If patients for some reason prefer to go to a more expensive hospital for their surgery, they should be free to do so. But let them pay the extra cost out of their own pockets, rather than out of the taxpayer’s pocket.
Liberate paramedical personnel. One way to expand the supply of low-cost medical care is through the increased use of nurses and physician assistants to perform tasks that do not require a physician’s level of expertise. The current system discourages the creative use of paramedical personnel, however. The reason: When a task is performed by a nurse rather than a physician, Medicare automatically reduces its fee.
A better approach would be to allow doctors to profit when they find ways of reducing the cost of a procedure without reducing quality. This is the natural outcome in a free market, where firms that reduce customer costs benefit both themselves and the customers. We should always be willing to allow innovators to benefit when they reduce the cost to taxpayers. Doctors who want to practice medicine in a different way should be allowed to do so, so long as the cost to Medicare goes down and the quality of care patients receive does not suffer. The principle: Doctors should be encouraged to earn more income by saving Medicare money.
Encourage bundling. One of the obstacles to offering patients a package surgery price, covering all services, is that surgery typically involves several entities that are financially independent of one another — for example, the hospital, the surgeon, and the anesthetist. In a normal market, independent entities come together all the time, jointly produce a good or service, and agree on how to divide the revenue from the exercise. This should be happening in medicine as well. Providers should be encouraged to offer package prices for bundled services, and Medicare should be willing to pay the package price whenever it is expected to be lower than what the taxpayers would otherwise have paid.
Encourage medical tourism. You don’t actually have to go offshore to participate in the market for medical tourism. There is a flourishing market for it onshore. Canadians, for example, routinely come to the United States for surgical procedures (because of long waits in their own country), and they usually pay a package price, agreed to in advance, for all the services they receive. American seniors could be in this market as well, and they would be if Medicare allowed them to share in the savings achieved by traveling to a high-quality but lower-cost facility in another locale.
In each of these cases, and in others we could think of, the principle is the same: Let markets do what only markets can do well.
— John C. Goodman is president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a research fellow with The Independent Institute, and the author of Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334326/reforming-medicare-john-c-goodman

American Character Is at Stake

By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

Since 1960, entitlement programs have come to dominate the federal budget. Worse, says Nicholas Eberstadt in a conversation with WSJ's Gary Rosen, they have undermined our national character.

Are Entitlements Corrupting Us? No

• They're part of the civic compact, writes William A. Galston

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.

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Bloomberg News

Our national character 'may be sacrificed long before the credibility of the U.S. economy,' says Nicholas Eberstadt

A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.

In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government's total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.

Government data on public transfers can be used to divide entitlement spending into six baskets: income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and all the others. Broadly speaking, the first two baskets concern entitlements based on poverty or income status; the second two, entitlements attendant on aging or old-age status; and the next, entitlements based on employment status. These entitlements account for about 90% of total government transfers to individuals, and the first four categories comprise about five-sixths of all such spending. These four bear closest consideration.

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Poverty- or income-related entitlements—transfers of money, goods or services, including health-care services—accounted for over $650 billion in government outlays in 2010. Between 1960 and 2010, inflation-adjusted transfers for these objectives increased by over 30-fold, or by over 7% a year. Significantly, however, income and benefit transfers associated with traditional safety-net programs comprised only about a third of entitlements granted on income status, with two-thirds of those allocations absorbed by the health-care guarantees offered through the Medicaid program.

For their part, entitlements for older Americans—Medicare, Social Security and other pension payments—worked out to even more by 2010, about $1.2 trillion. In real terms, these transfers multiplied by a factor of about 12 over that period—or an average growth of more than 5% a year. But in purely arithmetic terms, the most astonishing growth of entitlements has been for health-care guarantees based on claims of age (Medicare) or income (Medicaid). Until the mid-1960s, no such entitlements existed; by 2010, these two programs were absorbing more than $900 billion annually.

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

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This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time: Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

From the founding of our nation until quite recently, the U.S. and its citizens were regarded, at home and abroad, as exceptional in a number of deep and important respects. One of these was their fierce and principled independence, which informed not only the design of the political experiment that is the U.S. Constitution but also their approach to everyday affairs.

The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American "individualism" about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation—the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements—a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

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The Saturday Essay

• Conventional Wisdom (8/25/12)
• The Panic Over Fukushima (8/18/12)
• Can Syria's Christians Survive? (8/11/12)
• Decoding the Science of Sleep (8/4/12)
• Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem (7/28/12)
• The Customer as a God (7/21/12)
• The Big War Over a Small Fruit (7/14/12)

The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality. Although many Americans in earlier times were poor, even people in fairly desperate circumstances were known to refuse help or handouts as an affront to their dignity and independence. People who subsisted on public resources were known as "paupers," and provision for them was a local undertaking. Neither beneficiaries nor recipients held the condition of pauperism in high regard.

Overcoming America's historic cultural resistance to government entitlements has been a long and formidable endeavor. But as we know today, this resistance did not ultimately prove an insurmountable obstacle to establishing mass public entitlements and normalizing the entitlement lifestyle. The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. From cradle to grave, a treasure chest of government-supplied benefits is there for the taking for every American citizen—and exercising one's legal rights to these many blandishments is now part of the American way of life.

As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. Citizens have become ever more broad-minded about the propriety of tapping new sources of finance for supporting their appetite for more entitlements. The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today's entitlement-seeking population.

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Among policy makers in Washington today, it is very close to received wisdom that America's national hunger for entitlement benefits has placed the country on a financially untenable trajectory, with the federal budget generating ultimately unbearable expenditures and levels of public debt. The bipartisan 2010 Bowles/Simpson Commission put this view plainly: "Our nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path."

The prospect of careening along an unsustainable economic road is deeply disturbing. But another possibility is even more frightening—namely, that the present course may in fact be sustainable for far longer than most people today might imagine.

The U.S. is a very wealthy society. If it so chooses, it has vast resources to squander. And internationally, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency; there remains great scope for financial abuse of that privilege.

Such devices might well postpone the day of fiscal judgment: not so the day of reckoning for American character, which may be sacrificed long before the credibility of the U.S. economy. Some would argue that it is an asset already wasting away before our very eyes.

—Mr. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Excerpted from "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic," forthcoming from the Templeton Press. To read the complete essay, go to www.templetonpress.org.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444914904577619671931313542.html

The $6,400 Myth

Breaking down a false Obama Medicare claim.

One of President Obama's regular attacks on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform is that it would force seniors to pay $6,400 a year more for health care. But merely because he keeps repeating this doesn't mean it's in the same area code of accurate.

The claim is based on a now out-of-date Congressional Budget Office estimate of the gap between the cost of health care a decade from now, in 2022, and the size of the House budget's premium-support subsidy for a typical 65-year-old in 2022.

Editorial board member Joe Rago critiques the latest Obama Medicare ad.
 

In other words, the $6,400 has no relevance for any senior today. None. But it also is unlikely to have any relevance for any senior ever because CBO concedes that its number is highly uncertain and "will depend on the evolution of the health care and health insurance systems over time, which is hard to predict." That's for sure.

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Republican Vice Presidential candidate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) speaks during the Victory Rally in Florida at Town Square, Lake Sumter Landing on August 18, 2012 in The Villages, Florida.

The more fundamental problem is that the CBO analysis has nothing to do with the current Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan plan. Nada. Over the last year Mr. Ryan has made major adjustments to his original proposal as he sought a compromise with Democrats. In its most up-to-date analysis, CBO admits that it "does not have the capability at this time to estimate such effects" in the new version. That is, it does not have the tools to make its $6,400 exaggeration again.

The reason CBO can't model the 2013 House budget and the Romney-Ryan plan is that they harness markets with competitive bidding. Congress's budget gnomes can't handle these dynamic forces.
So how would Ryan 2.0 work in practice? Traditional Medicare and all private insurers in a region would make bids to cover seniors and compete for their business by offering the best value and prices. Then the government would give everyone a subsidy equal to the second-lowest bid.

If seniors chose that No. 2 option, whether it was Medicare or another plan, they'd break even and pay nothing extra out of pocket. If they picked the cheapest plan, they'd keep whatever was left over after the government subsidy—that is, they'd get a cash refund. If they instead picked the third-cheapest option, the fourth-cheapest, etc., they'd pay the difference above the government subsidy.

That structure ensures that seniors would have at least two choices (and likely far more) that they are guaranteed to do better than they do now. The amount of the premium-support subsidy would also be tied to underlying health-care costs, so it would not shift costs to beneficiaries, as Democrats also falsely claim. The very reasonable Romney-Ryan policy bet is that costs could nonetheless fall over time because seniors would have the incentive to switch to the most competitively priced Medicare plan.

The latest real-world reason to expect that would happen comes from a new paper by the Harvard economists Zirui Song, David Cutler and Michael Chernew. The researchers—Mr. Cutler used to be an Obama health adviser—looked at Medicare Advantage, the program that currently gives one of four seniors private alternatives (and that ObamaCare deliberately undermines).

The Advantage insurers make bids today against a benchmark set by traditional Medicare spending, and the Harvard trio find that the second lowest bid in 2009 came in 9% below the normal program on average. Medicare costs $717 per person per month, but the cheapest private plan could provide the same coverage for 87 cents on the government dollar. The second cheapest could do it for 91 cents.

Messrs. Song, Cutler and Chernew are alarmed because they say their results imply—broadly speaking—that seniors in traditional Medicare would have to pay $64 a month more if they kept that coverage. (Note: That totals $768 a year, not $6,400.) But a better way of reading the data is that seniors would migrate to more cost-effective options, saving both themselves and taxpayers a bundle.

None of these facts are likely to deter Democrats from their distorted claims. But the truth is that the Ryan-Romney reform isn't anywhere close to Mr. Obama's cartoon version.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577595350022637244.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Obama versus Romney, a choice not of how to fix the fiscal mess but if to fix it

Obama versus Romney, a choice not of how to fix the fiscal mess but if to fix it – President No versus Governor Yes

Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

With a little short of a week to go before the Republican convention, the campaign has taken a startling turn. Cautious, bland Mitt Romney didn’t just pick a running mate when he tapped Paul Ryan. He bet his entire campaign on grabbing the forbidden third rails of American politics: Social Security and Medicare. At this moment, it looks as though the bet could pay off, big time.


When Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan stood together at the U.S.S. Wisconsin dockside, the Democratic Party apparatus watching on TV thought that Santa Claus had arrived in summer. One of the truisms of American campaigns is that no one – and certainly not a Republican – can survive proposing fixes to vastly underfunded Social Security and Medicare. So in selecting Ryan, Mr. Romney didn’t simply touch one electrified rail or the other. He grabbed them both at the same time, as well as the live wire of cutting domestic discretionary spending.


Ever since that day, the Democrats have been attacking Ryan 24/7. They took a baseball bat to the congressman’s reputation – and they had practice. For months they had been smashing Mr. Romney with every incredible charge they could concoct (“felon”; “lady killer,” literally). But they overdid it, and this part of their campaign is becoming a national joke. 


And it seems to have had close to zero impact, as least of the kind the Democrats expected. Instead of driving down the GOP ticket’s numbers, the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls have remained exactly where they have been for weeks, in close to a tie, with the lead in each poll going back and forth and the candidate who is ahead in one, trailing in the other.


Yet even as the polls have not changed, the Democratic campaign has paid a price. The president’s previously impregnable personal approval numbers have hit an air pocket of late. Any man who would put his stamp on all those attack ads can’t be the prophet of hope and change voters so adored four years ago.


Here is the irony. If the Romney-Ryan ticket prevails in November despite what some are calling the dirtiest campaign in modern history, these down-in-the-gutter tactics may prove the essential predicate to the new president’s ability to get results. There will be no question that Mr. Romney has gone to the people about reforming spending and entitlements.  


Some say the Romney-Ryan budget numbers don’t add up. Yet voters know that no actual plan is more than concept car at this point. There will be endless rounds of economic and financial modeling at OMB and CEA. Both houses of Congress will be involved in designing and building the production model. The current picking apart of the Ryan Plan in the media is irrelevant to where a Romney administration might go next year.


What matters now is basic intent, not spreadsheets. When it comes to the fiscal future of the U.S. government, the distinction between the two tickets is not how but if -- not how to fix the problem but if to fix it at all.


Here is the simple, sad fact: In four years in office, the Obama administration has not presented a single serious plan for addressing the fiscal crisis of the U.S government. Indeed, the president’s speeches suggest that we could see a dramatic increase in federal spending after Election Day.


Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that the nation’s debt burden is our biggest single national security threat. And many serious economists like Harvard’s Robert Barro are telling us that all these public sector expenditures are draining the nation’s job creating vitality.


 At this moment, then, in the week before Republican delegates convene to nominate Mitt Romney for president, our choice on fiscal matters is very simple: a president who will acknowledge virtually no need to cut spending, close the deficit or do anything about the massive unfunded liabilities in our major entitlement systems, versus a challenger who, if elected, will carry into office a mandate such as no president has ever had to reform the federal establishment’s entire fiscal posture. For a couple of weeks, the race has been interesting. Now it is getting exciting.

 http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/45a634eb-40fd-4d3f-bbb3-ebb50f7f9cb4

The choice, Part Two

by Paul Mirengoff in 2012 Presidential Election, Medicare

The stark choice between the competing visions presented in this year’s presidential election manifests itself most plainly in the Medicare debate. President Obama wants to rely on the federal government to impose price controls and other forms of micromanagement to contain costs while delivering good service. The Romney-Ryan ticket wants to rely on a more traditionally American mechanism – competition.

The Romney-Ryan approach is already proving its efficacy in the prescription drug portion of Medicare. Thanks in no small part to reliance on consumer choice, and the resulting competition, costs have been contained – monthly premiums are stable and costs are 30 percent below initial estimates.

Additional evidence that competition works comes via a column by Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post. He points to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was performed by three Harvard economists, one of whom, David Cutler, prominently supports Obamacare.

The study finds that Medicare Advantage, a voucher-like program that promotes consumer choice, costs less than traditional Medicare. From 2006 to 2009, it cost 11 percent less on average.

This finding should surprise, if anyone, only the most ardent socialist. When people are able to shop for low-cost, high-quality offerings, providers have an incentive to improve services and lower costs. By contrast, under the fee-for-service approach of traditional Medicare, providers have an incentive to perform unneeded tests and procedures.

Obamacare purports to deal with this problem by cutting reimbursement rates. However, as Samuelson explains, reimbursement reductions don’t improve delivery systems; if anything, they increase the incentive to increase the volume of services, creating more waste. As for the other cost containment mechanisms in Obamacare, they are mostly “fluff,” as Samuelson shows.
Samuelson concludes:

Voucher plans are not right-wing, extremist ideas. They enjoy support in both parties. Ryan would permit continuation of fee-for-service; if it’s more efficient and effective, it would survive. If not, its decline would be no great loss. The Ryan plan’s greatest defect may be that it doesn’t start for a decade. We can’t wait that long.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/the-choice-part-two.php 

Picking Ryan – Romney Shows He’s Got Serious Policies and Great Political Instincts

Picking Ryan – Romney Shows He’s Got Serious Policies and Great Political Instincts

By Clark S. Judge: Managing Director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

On Saturday Mitt Romney proved he is a serious man and will be a serious president. He also demonstrated that he is a shrewd political strategist.

In picking Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan to be his running mate, Romney bet both his election and his administration on a central task, reducing the national deficit and debt while restoring economic growth.

We all know the debt story, but it is worth a moment of overall recall.

With a GDP of $15 trillion, the U.S. in July carried $15.9 trillion in official debt and (as of trustees’ April reports) unfunded liabilities of $38.6 trillion in Medicare liabilities and $8.6 trillion in Social Security.

The real Medicare numbers may be higher. The trustees (who include the president’s Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner) have warned that the numbers include savings from Obamacare (rationing, deep cuts in pay to doctors) that are fantasies. By some counts, when you take away these make believe savings, the Medicare debt doubles.

But then again, thanks to the Supreme Court, the Medicare numbers may come down little, too. Obamacare commandeered $700 billion in Medicare dollars and sent them to the states to cover the new Medicaid costs that the 2,700-page law mandated. In its Obamacare decision, the high court threw out the mandate. Rather than gut public safety and education, many if not all states are likely to opt out of the federal program, declining those crushingly expensive dollars.

In any event, the total officially acknowledged U.S. debt is $63.1 trillion, more than four times the size of our economy. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said these IOUs constitute our biggest national security threat.

Meanwhile the unfunded Social Security liability means that the young people who told pollsters some years ago that they believed more in UFOs than that they would ever receive a dollar from the program were right.

And the unfunded Medicare liability means that Medicare is on the way to becoming just like Medicaid – with doctors refusing to take the program’s patients and official restrictions on coverage so extreme that researchers have found that there is no consistent difference in medical outcomes between those with Medicaid coverage and no coverage at all (http://tinyurl.com/9pn3rrv ).

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration and its allies are utterly unwilling to acknowledge that anything must be done except tax the “rich” a little more. As I discovered in a Google search that took less than a minute, even if the tax rate on everyone from Warren Buffet and Bill Gates to the two-income family whose combined earnings equal $250,001 were taxed at 100 percent – entirely confiscated -- it would raise only between $1 and 2.5 trillion as of 2009, according to the Tax Foundation (http://tinyurl.com/cul8ywm), barely a dent in the government’s combined obligations.

In other words, the administration is unwilling to acknowledge that the nation has a debt crisis. Pulling us out of the debt and deficit quicksand is not the president’s priority. Nor, considering his obsession with raising taxes, particularly on capital gains, is economic recovery. By the looks of his policies, only redistribution of wealth is.

In picking Paul Ryan, Governor Romney has signaled in a way that no one can doubt that as president he intends to turn the government around. He will, as his campaign now puts it, lead an American comeback.

Why is this a shrewd political strategy? Democrats clearly don’t think so.

But the case has been made – and with the Ryan choice Romney has embraced it – that alarm over spending and debt has driven the swing vote in American politics for nearly a decade, and possibly even longer. The Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 were not out of revulsion to the war in Iraq or in response to the Mr. Obama’s undoubted charisma and rhetorical sheen. They were primarily a rejection of the increases in spending and deficits of the GOP Congresses of the first half of the first decade.

So Mr. Obama’s spending – a string of trillion dollar bailout and stimulus programs – was exactly the wrong political move, driving these voters back to the GOP, which, nevertheless, they didn’t fully trust. So in 2010 they voted Republican, but only provisionally. They wanted proof that the party wouldn’t revert to its 2001-2005 big spending ways. In picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Governor Romney has given that proof.

Over recent months, pollsters and pundits have debated whether the 2012 electorate would look more like 2008’s or 2010’s. This nerdy controversy is one reason for the enormous spread in the poll results (regularly running 11 percent between polls with supposed 3 to 4 percent margins or error). Make different assumptions, you get different outcomes.

Mitt Romney has just taken a huge step to insuring that the 2012 election is a replay of 2010.

 

http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/05eb250b-16a6-4055-9f6d-cf19f6499209