The White House has a suggestion for you if you get an e-mail from someone or read something on the web about the Obama health care reform “that seems fishy”: report them. They’ve set up a special e-mail address you can forward it to where the administration will… um… well, they’re not saying what they’ll do with it. And that’s got Senator Cornyn of Texas concerned:
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is taking issue with a Tuesday posting on the official White House blog in which the Obama administration asks supporters to report back when they receive “an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy” to an official e-mail address: flag@whitehouse.gov.
“I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests,” Cornyn writes today in a harshly worded letter to President Barack Obama in which he asks the president to immediately halt the effort.
Oh, I’m aware of a precedent for a government asking their citizens to report political speech they didn’t like but it wasn’t a president at the top. I find it astonishing that no one at the White House sees that, I might add.
This whole thing where suddenly, after 8 years of “speaking truth to power” and “making your voices heard” to the administration and to Congress being considered the height of patriotism, the Democrats and the general Left in this country are calling citizens registering their dissent “mobs” and “rioters” is just bizarre. Their opinion of the average citizen is clearly pretty low when they figure Americans can’t figure out where they stand on an issue and speak out on it without some kind of corporate sponsorship and a ride home on a bus. Knock it off, Mr. President.
August 5th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Medicine, Politics |
3 comments
From US News & World Report:
U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, two of the leading Democratic co-sponsors of H.R. 2454—the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, better known as the cap-and-trade bill—asked the United States Energy Information Administration to analyze their bill’s impact on energy prices and the U.S. economy.
According to a draft of the report released Tuesday night that has already found its way into the media and is circulating through Washington, Waxman and Markey may now wish they hadn’t.
You can say that again. The report is said to show that for all years out to 2030, which is far as any of the models go, the cap-and-trade legislation championed by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress will increase energy prices. Not increase in the short term and then come down – increase all the way out. That means all energy costs for all Americans – whether they fall into that evil higher-than-$280K $250K $200K income range or not – will be required to pay more for their energy needs and the requirement is generated solely by this legislation, not by the market. Legislation that requires you to pay more, especially when the payment is going to wind up in government coffers, is a tax regardless of what you call it. That tax will apply to every American and that includes the middle and poorer classes who can ill afford such a hike.
And it gets worse as it goes along, not better:
Allowing that the “allocation of free allowances to regulated electricity and natural gas distribution companies” will lessen the impact of the legislation on energy prices in the initial phase, through 2025, the EIA draft report says that the “average impacts on electricity prices in 2030 are projected to be substantially greater, reflecting both higher allowance prices and the phase-out of the free allocation of allowances to distributors between 2025 and 2030.”
In plain English, that means the price of energy will go up a lot after 2025, solely because of what the cap-and-trade bill requires.
If you’re paying more for gasoline in your car, electricity in your home, and gas in your furnace and water heater then you’re not paying for other things which means demand for goods and services will fall. That pushes the GDP down and in case you didn’t read my last post, it’s already down. This will do little more than push it further. That’s just what we need in an economy already reeling.
All of the talk to the contrary, the real point of all of this is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the US, not by improved technology but by cutting our economic activity. That this will reduce your standard of living and that of your descendants is of no concern to the proponents of this bill.
It’s a bad idea and now even government studies prove it.
August 5th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Economy, Energy, Politics |
no comments
Casey B. Mulligan is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and, by all reports, knows his stuff. He knows it well enough that the New York Times published an article from Mulligan in today’s paper titled, “Chump Change in the Latest G.D.P. Report.” In it, Mulligan squarely rebuts the spin that the latest GDP report proves the stimulus package is working. To the contrary, he says:
On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its advance estimate of real G.D.P. for the second quarter of 2009. Although some say it provides some of the first evidence of the stimulus law’s efficacy, a close inspection of the results shows that the government sector’s contribution to real G.D.P. growth so far has been trivial at best.
…
Some advocates were quick to congratulate the stimulus law that was passed in February, claiming that “The marked improvement in this quarter relative to last is largely due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).”
A closer inspection of the B.E.A.’s estimates gives no support for this claim.
Mulligan breaks down the reported changes in GDP by spending category from Q1 to Q2 of this year and graphically shows that the increases in the spending categories allegedly targeted by the “stimulus” bill – federal nondefense and State & Local goverment – have seen trivial increases.
For the all hurried, frenzied action and the calls of crisis that we heard and all of the promises made, we were supposed to be expecting a significant improvement and that hasn’t happened. Which, I might add, is what many of the opponents of that stimulus package said was going to happen. The approach used in that bill was the wrong one and throwing more money into it isn’t going to suddenly make it the right one.
Read all of Professor Mulligan’s article for more detail.
August 5th, 2009
Posted by
ricjames |
Economy, Politics |
no comments
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