The Entitlement Dilemma – Will the Elderly Lose Their Benefits?

As the nation struggles with controlling the federal budget, lawmakers are searching for areas of the budget that can be trimmed.  And while the amount of waste and corruption within the federal government is shocking (see the multiple posts on … Continue reading →

Debt Supercommittee Headed for Gridlock

By August 16th, leaders in both chambers of Congress must appoint three members each to serve on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. At the time of this writing, nine members have been announced, with only Nancy Pelosi’s selections yet to be released. The committee picks do not yield much hope for a bipartisan agreement by November 23, and turning the slim area of ideological convergence into a bipartisan deal with cuts of $1.2 trillion will be a formidable task. Continue reading →

Obama Lying About Taxes in the Wake of S&P Downgrade

Last Friday, Standard & Poors officially downgraded U.S. sovereign debt from its highest rating, AAA, to one notch below it, AA+.  Their report, says that the recent debt deal does not do enough to control the United States’s debt trajectory, … Continue reading →

Watch the Obama Bureaucracy Expand in Real Time: 20 Rules and 350 Pages Per Day!

Every day, the hidden cost of government is expanding as federal regulators impose costly new rules and mandates on American taxpayers and businesses.  Buried within the federal registry are thousands of new rules which will make American businesses spend more time complying with federal regulations and less time meeting the needs of their customers.  The Federal Register 2.0 project exposes the alarming growth of the regulatory regime by allowing taxpayers to see inside the bureaucratic process like never before.

Just today, 12 new rules have been implemented, 11 have been proposed, and 108 notices have been sent, totaling 367 pages of new federal code that must now be complied with.  If regulators continue at last month’s average of 20 regulations a day, every year 235 regulations will be added to the federal register, totaling 4,260 pages.  What’s more, the two hallmark achievements of the Obama administration – ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank – both require thousands more regulations.

While the costs associated with taxation are readily apparent, the insidious extension of the regulatory state imposes an equally onerous cost on citizens.  Last year, the average American worked 74 days to pay off the cost of regulation.  Thanks to the Federal Register 2.0, taxpayers can now see the alarming growth of the regulatory state in real time, as well as create new programs to interact with the federal database in the way that best suits their needs.  As Obama piles on more regulation through his ObamaCare mandates, this new site should be a constant reminder of why the cost of regulation is at an all time high.

Obama’s Pro-Sex Agenda – Subsidize It

The title might be shocking, but it’s nonetheless true.  Yesterday, Katherine Sebelius (Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services appointee) issued a new regulation requiring all insurance plans to cover birth control by January 1, 2013 as a “preventative health measure.”  Sebelius’s announcement proclaims, “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing (medical) literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need.”  Preventive health?  If I were less scrupulous, I might conclude that the Obama administration is defining pregnancy as a disease and that Katherine Sebelius hates children, lending a whole new meaning to her “cost control” rhetoric.  Of course, birth control is only one item among a host of female health needs that must now be covered without a co-pay, so that conclusion would not seem appropriate.

It is typical of liberals to try and hide the true issue whenever discussing policies like this.  The Obama administration is highlighting how the new policy will meet the health needs of women, while ignoring that 80% of insurance plans already cover birth control with co-pays of between $5 – 15 a month.  The real issue here is whether women should have to follow normal insurance procedures to pay for birth control.  Their current co-pays are well below the $15 – $30 average range for insurance co-pays that Americans pay every day for blood pressure medication, drugs to treat renal failure, and everything in between.  So why should woman’s health be elevated above all other health needs?  I’ll leave that for the reader to decide.

The net effect of this regulation is that premiums will increase, on everyone, regardless of whether you use birth control.  The quarter of the nation that is Catholic is even morally opposed to contraceptive, which they will now be inadvertently subsidizing via higher insurance premiums.  And that’s the question Katherine Sebelius never addresses: why should some Americans pay for the birth control of others?  But in typical liberal fashion, if Republicans ever try to raise this as an issue, it will indicate that we are anti-women, that we like stone age policies which ban all contraceptives, and probably that we are both male chauvinists and racists.  These things are all categorically false, distractions from the fact that liberal social engineers are doing their best to destroy America’s social mores and family values by subsidizing sex.  Republicans are not against birth control, we are for individual responsibility and the idea that if you want birth control, you should have to pay for it independent of government manipulation.  As it stands, people who don’t purchase birth control, for moral or practical reasons, will be funding the sexual behavior of those people who do purchase it.  Or as I like to call it: Obama helping the little man.

Visualizing the Debt: U.S. Liabilities Surpass Empire State Building

Visualizing the amount of debt the U.S. is currently taking on is almost impossible for most people to grasp.  Taxpayers react with outrage at the thought of property tax increases measured in the thousands of dollars, but support a federal government whose annual activities cost trillions of dollars.  Because when politicians rant about the debt problem by discussing Obama’s project $1.7 TRILLION deficit, people’s eyes glaze over as the big numbers wash over them.  Trillion, billion, what does it matter, the numbers are too large to comprehend because the average person won’t even make $10 million in their lifetime, let alone a billion dollars.  And that’s why this image is so compelling, vividly showing people exactly the stakes involved in the ongoing debt fight.  Because as it stands, the unfunded liabilities taken on by the federal government through Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare total $114.5 trillion, a mountain of 100 dollar bills that would dominate the New York sky line.

Now if that doesn’t convey the true gravity of the situation, I’m not sure what will.  Check out the entire dramatic visualization here.

Spenditol: Curing Washington’s Spending Addiction

The Concerned Women for America recently put out this video to highlight the effects government spending has on America’s women, who are increasingly the ones in charge of family finances.

Medicaid and Medicare – The Largest Criminal Organization in History

It’s not always easy to describe the costs of overbearing government programs, to explain why regulations on wealthy businessmen actually kill American jobs, or why free trade is beneficial.  Regulatory costs, comparative advantage, crowd-out effects – these topics don’t make it to the dinner table conversation.  But one thing every American can understand: fraud and theft.  When you think fraud, Enron comes to mind, or Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme.  But in reality, the largest case of fraud in history is the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  Bernie Madoff stole $65 billion over the course of thirty years and Enron’s accounting fraud cost its shareholders some $11 billion when it collapsed.  Yet both of those combined pale in comparison to the scope of the fraud committed within Medicaid and Medicare, totaling a stunning $70 billion in improper payments in 2010 alone.  That’s more than any other criminal syndicate in the world and makes Al Capone look like a church mouse.

According to the CMS, the reason it has been almost impossible to prevent fraud within Medicaid and Medicare is the size of those programs.  When government tries to provide medical coverage to everyone, ordinary taxpayers lose billions, while unscrupulous doctors and bureaucrats cash in big.  In just one example of Medicaid staff openly assisting in fraudulent behavior, James O’Keefe released his latest video sting yesterday, in which disguised members of his staff posed as Russian drug dealers.  The video shows multiple Medicaid officials instructing what appeared to be wealthy drug-lords how to defraud the federal government and claim benefits they were clearly not entitled to.  What’s worse, state officials also instructed the undercover filmmakers how to obtain abortions using federal funds via Planned Parenthood for their under-age sisters, who they admitted to prostituting out on the street.  This is what happens when unaccountable bureaucrats are given billions of taxpayer dollars.  And that’s only part 1 of O’Keefe’s video, which hints that worse is still to come.

If you just measure crime using raw dollar amounts, the CMS is the largest criminal syndicate in known history.  It’s officials and participants have participated in more fraudulent activity than Enron, Bernie Madoff, Al Capone, and the entire Russian mafia combined.  $70 billion dollars amounts to the entire budgets of multiple federal agencies and departments, combined, and would be enough to purchase fourteen hundred Gulfstream Jets.  That amount of theft of hard-earned taxpayer dollars is unacceptable and should have every citizen demanding greater accountability in government.  And yet those same bureaucrats are demanding more money, higher taxes, more destructive regulations … when will it end?