What the Ronald Reagan 2012 National Address Would Be. We miss you Dutch.
Category Archives: Obama
McDonald’s: ObamaCare will cost us $420,000,000 per year in new costs…
So much for that McChicken only costing a dollar….
Papa John: I must raise pizza prices if ‘Obamacare’ survives – LINK
Cook Medical Scraps Plans to Expand Production in USA Because of ObamaCare Tax: Looking to Go Overseas – LINK
The Affordable Care Act could cost McDonald’s and its franchisees more than $400 million a year in additional health-care expenses, Chief Financial Officer Peter Bensen said on Monday.
McDonald’s estimates that each restaurant will incur between $10,000 and $30,000 in added annual costs, Bensen said in response to an analyst’s question on a conference call to discuss the fast-food giant’s second-quarter results, according to an unedited transcript of the call provided by FactSet. There are about 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S., meaning McDonald’s expects the total cost to the company and its franchisees to be in the range of $140 million to $420 million. McDonald’s owns about 11% of its U.S. restaurants, while the rest are franchised.
Bensen added that the wide range is due to a number of variables, including the number of employees per restaurant and how many are full-time workers. Spokeswomen for McDonald’s added that the final cost will also depend on what percentage of its eligible employees elect to accept health insurance from the chain, as well as any changes McDonald’s might make to its health-care plan. McDonald’s worked with its franchisees to analyze and estimate the potential costs, the spokeswomen said, which could be mitigated by higher menu prices.
Companies have moved ahead with planning for economic and other consequences of the law since a Supreme Court ruling last month upheld the vast majority of President Barack Obama’s controversial health-care law, even as congressional Republicans and that party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, vow to overturn it.
“Now that the Supreme Court has ruled,” Bensen said, “[we are] increasing our conversations and disclosures with franchisees” to educate them about the potential changes and how to minimize their impact.
To put the cost per restaurant into perspective, Bensen noted on the call that the commodity-costs increases it experienced in 2011, for example, added more than $30,000 in overhead to each restaurant that year.
Papa John: I must raise pizza prices if ‘Obamacare’ survives
Cook Medical Scraps Plans to Expand Production in USA Because of ObamaCare Tax: Looking to Go Overseas – LINK
McDonald’s: ObamaCare will cost us $420,000,000 per year – LINK
Get ready to pay more for your Papa John’s pizza if “Obamacare” goes into full effect … a whopping 15 to 20 cents more.
John Schnatter, chief executive of the pizza chain, is bashing President Obama’s healthcare reform law as a policy that will force the company to choose between its customers and its investors.
And if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act rolls out as planned in 2014, Schnatter’s strategy is “of course … to pass that cost on the consumer in order to protect our shareholders’ best interest,” he said in a recent conference call.
Schnatter estimates that the legislation will cost Papa John’s about 11 cents to 14 cents per pizza, which equates to 15 cents to 20 cents per order. An average delivery charge runs $1.75 to $2.50.
The National Restaurant Assn. has criticized the healthcare legislation for having a chilling effect on expansion and hiring in the industry, which tends to be labor-intensive and burdened with thin margins.
Chains such as White Castle and Burger King have predicted surging costs due to the new regulations, which require businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to offer healthcare to such workers and their dependents.
And ObamaCare is designed to make the cost of that insurance rise dramatically.
Cook Medical Scraps Plans to Expand Production in USA Because of ObamaCare Tax: Looking to Go Overseas
When it comes to jobs Obama has proven to be the great destroyer.
Papa John: I must raise pizza prices if ‘Obamacare’ survives – LINK
McDonald’s: ObamaCare will cost us $420,000,000 per year in new costs – LINK
An Indiana company’s decision to scrap expansion plans due to a looming tax on medical devices has renewed pressure on the Senate to consider a House-passed bill repealing the tax.
House Speaker John Boehner, in a written statement, urged the Senate to take up the bill “as soon as possible.”
Companies in the medical device industry for months have been calling on Congress to strip the provision. Amid the complaints, though, several firms have already taken steps to cut back U.S. investment out of concern for the tax’s impact.
Cook Medical, an Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer, last week said it’s nixing plans to open five new plants in the next five years — claiming the tax will cost between $15 million and $30 million a year, cutting into money that would otherwise go toward expanding into new facilities in the Midwest.
“Unfortunately, we have had to shelve these expansion plans and look overseas for that,” Allison Giles, vice president for federal affairs with the company, told FoxNews.com. “It’s a huge amount for us.”
She urged the Senate to take up the repeal bill, even if it has to wait for the post-election lame-duck session.
“We’re hoping that members will look at this, not so much as a health care provision, but as a jobs provision,” she said.
The Affordable Care Act imposed the 2.3 percent tax on medical devices beginning in 2013. It is projected to raise nearly $30 billion over the next decade — the House voted to repeal it last month.
The Obama administration argues that claims the tax will shift jobs overseas are overblown.
CBO: Obama Wrong About Wealthy Paying Less
Since the Bush tax cuts “the rich” have been paying a larger share of the federal tax pie, but that pie has been shrinking as more wealth flees the country, more of the wealthy expatriate, more jobs leave the country, and more people drop out of the workforce.
[Editor’s Note – The raw CBO report can be found HERE]
President Barack Obama says someone has to pay more taxes if the U.S. is to tame its budget deficit and provide the government he thinks the nation needs. He proposes that the best-off Americans pay more. It’s only fair, he says.
“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back,” he said in a speech in Roanoke, Va., that set off dueling campaign ads. “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.”
His Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, counters that the deficit can be reduced without raising taxes if Washington is tough on spending. He thinks raising taxes on the best-off would be unwise and unfair. “President Obama attacks success, and therefore under President Obama we have less success,” he said.
The contrasting comments underscore philosophical differences over the roles of the individual and society. But the most tangible disagreement is on taxing the rich.
“Who’s right: Obama or Romney? Both. Or neither,” says Joseph Thorndike, a tax historian. “When it comes to taxing the rich, there is no single, objectively correct answer. You can talk all you want about asking rich people to pay ‘their fair’ share,’ but don’t kid yourself. You’re just trying to turn private opinions into public policy.”
“I’m struck” he adds, “how the facts can be used selectively by either side.”
Academic tomes have been written about revamping the tax code so it finances the government while doing less damage to economic growth. But, countless congressional hearings later, the U.S. is no closer to a consensus on “fair share” than when the income tax was born 100 years ago.
The top marginal income-tax rate, the most visible metric, has gone from 7% in 1913 to 92% in the 1950s to 28% with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to 39.6% in the Clinton years to today’s 35%. Mr. Obama wants to raise that; Mr. Romney wants to cut it while eliminating loopholes and deductions to make up the lost revenue.
Over the past three decades, Americans—including most of the rich—have paid less of their incomes to Washington. Top earners have received more of the income and paid more of the taxes; a growing number at the bottom have paid less or, in some cases, nothing.
Whether that is fair is a question of politics and values. Facts can inform the debate. Here are a few salient ones:
The top 5%, top 1% and top 0.1% of Americans have been getting a bigger slice of all the income and paying a growing share of federal taxes.
To measure the tax burden over time, Congressional Budget Office economists look beyond income-tax returns. They add federal income, payroll, excise and corporate taxes and calculate them as a percentage of income, broadly defined to include wages plus the value of government- and employer-provided benefits.
From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the tax code has been tweaked and the economy has had its ups and downs, and the share of federal taxes paid by the top 5% and the top 1% has risen faster than their share of income:
In the 1980s, the top 5% averaged 22.6% of income and paid 28.5% of taxes.
In the 1990s, the top 5% averaged 25.3% of income and paid 34.3% of taxes
In the 2000s, the top 5% averaged 28.4% of the income and paid 40.3% of the taxes.
That doesn’t mean that the best-off are living on less. The top 1% averaged income of $1,530,773 this year (up $174,083 from 2004, when the data series begins) and paid federal taxes of all sorts of $422,915 (up $20,704 from 2004), according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a number-crunching joint venture of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute.
Average tax rates have come down for everyone. On average, the tax bite on the rich is bigger—except for those whose income mainly comes from capital gains and dividends.
Across the earnings spectrum, Americans’ share of income that went to taxes fell in the 1980s, rose in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. This year, taxes and other receipts will cover only two-thirds of federal spending; the government will borrow the rest.
For those in the top 1%, whose incomes are more volatile than others, the average tax bite in 2007 was 28.9%, below the 1995 Clinton-era peak (35.3%) but higher than the 1986 Reagan-era trough (24.6%.)
Most Americans, though, have seen the share of their income that goes to taxes fall steadily. For earners in the middle, the tax bite eased from 18.9% in 1979 to 16.6% in 1999 to 14% in 2007 even before the recession and recession-fighting tax cuts.
The rich do, on average, pay more of their income in taxes than the middle class. So do the super-rich—on average.
The annual Internal Revenue Service scorecard of the top 400 taxpayers—who reported average incomes of $200 million—showed they paid 19.9% of their adjusted gross income in federal income taxes in 2009, well above the rate paid by the middle class. Those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, for instance, paid about 12%. (The IRS tally for the top 400 counts only income reported on tax returns, and only income taxes. Neither the IRS nor CBO calculates figures for the 1% using the broader definitions of income and taxes.)
The fortunate 400, though, paid a lower rate than the not-quite-so-rich, those with incomes over $1.5 million. The main reason: More than 60% of the top 400’s income was from dividends or capital gains in 2009, and those are taxed at a top rate of 15%, lower than many pay on wages.
The share of taxes paid by the bottom 40% of the population has been shrinking along with their share of income.
In 2007, the bottom 40% received 14.9% of the income (including the value of government benefits) and paid 5.9% of all federal taxes. In 1979, they had a bigger share (17.4%) of the income and paid more (9.5%) of the taxes.
Paul Ryan Reminds Debbie Wasserman-Schultz What She’s Already Done to Medicare (video)
Paul Ryan Reminds Debbie Wasserman-Schultz What She’s Already Done to Medicare
Romney to Obama: Take your campaign of hate and division back to Chicago…(video)
Romney to Obama: Take your campaign of hate and division back to Chicago…
Biden to Black Americans: Romney gonna put y’all back in chains!
Wow, talk about unhinged. And of course Andrea Saul can’t think of anything imaginative to respond with.
If there is inner city violence come election day, Democrats should blame Biden as his rhetoric is nothing short of unhinged incitement.
Ben Shapiro at Breitbart News:
This morning in Virginia, Vice President Joe Biden dropped some shocking and offensive language in ripping into Mitt Romney’s economic plans. Stooping to a new low, Biden said, “Romney wants to let the—he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules–unchain Wall Street. They gonna put y’all back in chains.”
The southern accent Biden adopts for that last line is deeply disturbing; it’s a clear reference to slavery. The city of Danville, where Biden was speaking, has a black population of 48.6 percent; 19.8 percent of all Virginians are black. Those facts surely did not go unnoticed by Biden. This is race-baiting as its finest. It is despicable.
The Romney campaign responded immediately, demanding an apology from the Obama campaign. “After weeks of slanderous and baseless accusations leveled against Governor Romney, the Obama Campaign has reached a new low,” said Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, in a statement. “The comments made by the Vice President of the United States are not acceptable in our political discourse and demonstrate yet again that the Obama Campaign will say and do anything to win this election. President Obama should tell the American people whether he agrees with Joe Biden’s comments.”
Thus far, such tactics have not worked on the Obama campaign, which seemingly has no shame; last week, they allowed an associated Super PAC to attack Romney as the passive murderer of Joe Soptic’s wife, and refused to condemn such action. With the Obama campaign becoming more and more desperate, their language is becoming more and more extreme. Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s VP pick seems to be shaking up the Democrats’ strategy – and their fallback position appears to be vulgarity and political slander.
New Romney Ad: You Paid Into Medicare; Democrats Took the Money…(video)
Quick and to the point. By the way we have seen the White House counter point to this, and it doesn’t hold up to examination, but if anyone feels lucky and wants to try, just comment below and get ready to lose the debate.
Erskine Bowles: Ryan budget is “sensible…honest, serious” (video)
Erskine Bowles: Ryan budget is “sensible…honest, serious”.
Bowles was President Clinton’s Chief of Staff and was Co-Chair of the Obama Deficit Commission
UPDATE – Bill Clinton: Ryan plan a good plan (video) – LINK
LIAR: Obama Slams Paul Ryan For Not Passing Farm Bill That Passed 2 Weeks Ago (video)
The House passed the Farm Bill two weeks ago, it is Democrats in the Senate who have not acted on the Bill. This is an example of the kind of whopping lies we will see in this campaign.
Rich Lowery Destroys Rachel Maddow on Meet the Press (video)
Democrats will do anything to try and cover up the fact that Democrats have gutted a near broke Medicare system and after 2014 the rationing begins all because of ObamaCare.
Job growth by President from Obama to Truman
As you can see Obama is the only one with a negative jobs number. Notice also that the only two terms where government growth was genuinely slowed was under Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower (the size of government shrank under Eike), and under the second term of Bill Clinton (Thanks to Newt and the Republican Revolution). As government has grown the expansion of jobs has slowed. Also while Obama shows an unemployment of 8.3%, as has been discussed earlier that number is skewed because so many people have given up looking for work and are now not being counted. The real unemployment rate, known as the U6, is over 15%.
Welfare grew by 19% under Obama! Total Obama Stimulus Bills $2.5 TRILLION (with nothing to show for it)…
Cloward-Piven Strategy in motion.
Federal and state welfare assistance has grown almost 19 percent under President Barack Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.
All in all, there are 79 means-tested federal welfare programs, at a cost approaching $1 trillion annually, said Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector.
Rector conducted a comprehensive analysis of spending for government assistance programs, ranging from food, education and childcare programs to housing and medical care.
Since Fiscal Year 2009, federal and state welfare spending has risen from $779.9 billion to $927.2 billion, an increase of 18.8 percent. That fiscal year includes spending from Oct. 1, 2008 to Sept. 30, 2009.
In his report, Rector said the increase in federal means-tested welfare spending during Obama’s first two years in office was two-and-a-half times greater than any previous increase in federal welfare spending in U.S. history, after adjusting for inflation.
Rachel Sheffield, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, told CNSNews.com that this kind of pay out can not be maintained.
“It’s a huge amount of money we’re spending on these programs and our debt is growing,” she said. “It’s not sustainable.”
According to the report, titled “Examining the Means-tested Welfare State,” in FY 2011 the federal government dolled out $717.1 billion on welfare programs, while states spent $210.1 billion.
The 79 federal programs include:
— 12 programs providing food aid;
— 12 programs funding social services;
— 12 educational assistance programs;
— 11 housing assistance programs;
— 10 programs providing cash assistance;
— 9 vocational training programs;
— 7 medical assistance programs;
— 3 energy and utility assistance programs; and,
— 3 child care and child development programs.
Left-leaning economists often argue that the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was too small and that more stimulus is needed to get the economy going again. The real amount of fiscal stimulus pumped into the economy, however, may be much higher.
Tom Firey of the libertarian Cato Institute estimates that the U.S. has dumped at least $2.5 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy since 2008.
“If you sum it all up, we’ve pumped an awful lot of fiscal stimulus into the economy since this recession started. Far more than anyone wants to acknowledge,” Firey told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
“I’ve been watching the debate over stimulus measure since ARRA, since early 2009 … and it seems like each time a measure was passed, it was like nothing had preceded it and nothing would come after it,” he continued. “And so I started tracking them.”
Firey tracked fifteen pieces of legislation that were passed since 2008, including the 2009 stimulus bill, unemployment insurance extensions and the payroll tax cuts.
Some of the bills tracked by Firey were measures explicitly aimed at stimulating the economy, like the 2009 stimulus bill, by borrowing money to spend now, while paying it back down the road.
Other bills, like the bills extending unemployment insurance, were not explicitly intended to be stimulus measures, but Firey argues that they were in effect stimulus measures because they borrowed and spent money now, rather than redirecting money the government already has.
Hitler Finds Out Paul Ryan is the VP Pick (video)
Hitler Finds Out Paul Ryan is the VP Pick
Oh this is a really good one 🙂
Paul Ryan takes President Obama to school on ObamaCare and budgeting (video)
Paul Ryan takes President Obama to school on ObamaCare and budgeting
Paul Ryan Takes Chris Matthews “To School” On Deficits and Taxes (video)
Paul Ryan Takes Chris Matthews “To School” On Deficits and Taxes
Immigration Officials Describe Border Chaos Resulting From Obama Admin’s Amnesty Policy (video)
CBO: ObamaCare Will Leave 30 Million Uninsured
And we have been saying this since when?????
A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022.
One of the main arguments the Obama administration made for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would provide coverage for the uninsured.
Currently, according to CBO, there are 53 million uninsured persons in the United States, including uninsured illegal aliens. The CBO estimates that in 2022–8 years after the Affordable Care Act has been fully implemented–30 million people will remain uninsured.
Moreover, under Obamacare, 8 percent of legal U.S. residents will remain without health insurance in 2022, according to CBO.
The report was done to assess the fiscal impact of the Supreme Court June Obamacare decision.
“CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] now estimate that the ACA, in comparison with prior law before the enactment of the ACA, will reduce the number of nonelderly people without health insurance coverage by 14 million in 2014 and by 29 million or 30 million in the latter part of the coming decade, leaving 30 million nonelderly residents uninsured by the end of the period,” the report said.
“Before the Supreme Court’s decision, the latter number had been 27 million,” states the report.
President of Poland: Obama Betrayed Us
It is true. In order to suck up to Putin for nothing in return, Obama scrapped a missile defense deal with Poland that our government had already promised. On top of that Obama has mistreated Poland at every opportunity.
I wrote about this on my old college blog back in 2009:
Obama Throws Allies Under the Bus: Scraps Missile Defense for Poland and Czech Republic. UPDATE – Poles and Czech’s say they have been betrayed! – LINK
Obama Lied about Reason to Renege on Eastern European Missile Shield – LINK
This week, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski accused the Obama Administration of betrayal, saying, “Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a [missile defense] shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change of president.… We paid a high political price. We do not want to make the same mistake again. We must have a missile system as an element of our defences.”
In 2009, President Obama cancelled the deal the U.S. had with Poland and the Czech Republic to build an interceptor site and radar that would provide protection of the U.S. homeland and allies from rogue ballistic missiles. Polish and Czech leaders took on the task of educating their populations of the necessity of defending their populations from Iranian missiles, of collaborating with the U.S. to do this, of having American soldiers on their territory, and—the hardest of all—that the blowback from Russia over the sites was worth it.
It is an American tradition—and not a uniquely Republican or Democratic one—to resolutely stand with America’s friends and confront, if necessary, those who threaten them. It was President John F. Kennedy who said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
The last several years, starting with the abandonment of the missile defense site, President Obama has taken the U.S. down a path that takes a sudden departure from this policy.
Obama’s EPA crushing coal-fired power plants, electricity bills rise…
RELATED:
Candidate Joe Kennedy III Calls for End To “Cheap Oil” – LINK
Gas Prices Under President Obama – LINK
EPA Official on Video: We Are “Crucifying” Oil And Gas Companies – LINK
Under Obama, Price of Gas Has Jumped 83 Percent, Ground Beef 24 Percent, Bacon 22 Percent – LINK
Obama Green Energy Program Cost $9.8 million Per Job – LINK
15th Green Energy Company Funded by Obama Goes Under – LINK
On Oil Obama Says One Thing & Does Another – LINK
GAO: Recoverable American oil in a single location equal to the entire world oil reserves – LINK
With the country focused on this week’s high drama at the Supreme Court, President Obama’s EPA quietly released long-delayed regulations to apply global warming rules never authorized by Congress to new coal-fired power plants.
That Obama’s EPA would release a rule to destroy coal-fired electricity while the president gives stump speeches about an “all of the above” energy policy is an insult to the American people.
This rule will effectively block any new coal-fired power plants from being built in America, and a second round of related rules – expected after the election, of course – will shut down existing coal-fired power plants.
The result will be steeply higher electricity prices, lost jobs, and lower standards of living. Remarkably, this is all done in the name of global warming, but even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admits it will have no discernible impact on global temperatures. Obama’s EPA is crippling the U.S. economy not to accomplish anything, but just to enjoy a nice, warm, green feeling of self-satisfaction.
Four years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama explained his anti-coal energy policy in an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle. Obama said: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad.” He went on to explain: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”
Indeed Obama attempted to make good on his campaign promise to bankrupt the coal industry and make electricity prices skyrocket the legitimate way – by proposing cap-and-trade legislation in Congress. It was jammed through the House but crashed and burned in the Senate, where many Democrats understood such an energy rationing plan to be political suicide.
They were right.
The American people decisively rejected energy taxes and rationing in the 2010 election, with dozens of Democrats losing because of their support for cap-and-trade. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin survived and won his Senate seat by literally shooting a bullet through in the bill in a television ad.
But the day after the 2010 election President Obama said
: “Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way. It was a means, not an end. And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”
With Tuesday’s EPA action to bankrupt coal, he found his “other means” to address the “problem” of affordable electricity.
As I demonstrated in my book “Democracy Denied”, under Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the power to make these decisions resides in Congress, not the EPA.
The House has already acted to fix the structural problem that allows bureaucrats to implement economy-changing rules without congressional approval when they passed the REINS Act last year, a bill that would require prior-approval from Congress for major new regulations.
The Senate has refused to act on the legislation.
Fortunately, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) has already promised to introduce a resolution of disapproval that will put every senator on the record on this global warming power grab. Because the resolution is privileged under the Congressional Review Act, Harry Reid cannot prevent it from coming to the floor and it cannot be filibustered.
Whatever the result of that Senate vote is, it will ultimately be up to the American people to hold Congress and the president accountable for the actions taken by rogue EPA bureaucrats this week.
Nothing less than America’s economic future is at stake.
Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity and the author of “Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him.”
Rationing Begins: 16 States Limit Drug Prescriptions for Medicaid Patients
Sarah Palin told you so….
Sixteen states have set a limit on the number of prescription drugs they will cover for Medicaid patients, according to Kaiser Health News.
Seven of those states, according to Kaiser Health News, have enacted or tightened those limits in just the last two years.
Medicaid is a federal program that is carried out in partnership with state governments. It forms an important element of President Barack Obama’s health-care plan because under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act–AKA Obamcare–a larger number of people will be covered by Medicaid, as the income cap is raised for the program.
With both the expanded Medicaid program and the federal subsidy for health-care premiums that will be available to people earning up to 400 percent of the poverty level, a larger percentage of the population will be wholly or partially dependent on the government for their health care under Obamacare than are now.
In Alabama, Medicaid patients are now limited to one brand-name drug, and HIV and psychiatric drugs are excluded.
Illinois has limited Medicaid patients to just four prescription drugs as a cost-cutting move, and patients who need more than four must get permission from the state.
Speaking on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Monday, Phil Galewitz, staff writer for Kaiser Health News, said the move “only hurts a limited number of patients.”
“Drugs make up a fair amount of costs for Medicaid. A lot of states have said a lot of drugs are available in generics where they cost less, so they see this sort of another move to push patients to take generics instead of brand,” Galewitz said.
“It only hurts a limited number of patients, ‘cause obviously it hurts patients who are taking multiple brand name drugs in the case of Alabama, Illinois. Some of the states are putting the limits on all drugs. It’s another place to cut. It doesn’t hurt everybody, but it could hurt some,” he added.
Galewitz said the move also puts doctors and patients in a “difficult position.”
“Some doctors I talked to would work with patients with asthma and diabetes, and sometimes it’s tricky to get the right drugs and the right dosage to figure out how to control some of this disease, and just when they get it right, now the state is telling them that, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get all this coverage. You may have to switch to a generic or find another way,’” he said.
Arkansas, California, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia have all placed caps on the number of prescription drugs Medicaid patients can get.
Muslim Brotherhood has Three Battalions Fighting in Syria
… and odds are the Obama Administration is arming them. The Obama Administration already helped the Brotherhood take over Egypt where they are already killing Christians and oppressing women and have promised war with Israel, and the Obama Administration helped the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has formed three armed battalions “for self-defense and to defend the oppressed,” the group’s spokesman said Sunday.
Mulham Al-Droubi told Saudi owned daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat that the battalions were created three months ago and are deployed across Syria, but “especially in areas with intense fighting.” He said they operated under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, which functions as a regular army but is composed of semi-independent units.
This was the first public acknowledgment of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood taking part in fighting on the ground. The precise number of combatants in the battalions is unknown.
The reports bolster expert opinions that the opposition forces include significant Islamist elements.
Droubi refused to tell the daily who was arming the forces, but noted that Syrians were capable of defending themselves and that no foreign fighters had entered the country.
British daily The Telegraph reported Friday that the Muslim Brotherhood “militia” was called “Armed men of the Muslim Brotherhood” and was formed in order to unite dispersed fighters on the ground. Hossam Abu-Habel, the son of a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood member in the 1950s, told the daily that he raises $40,000-$50,000 a month to provide weapons and other aid to Islamist fighters in the Homs region.
The Telegraph reported that a split has occurred between the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which conducts fighting on the ground, and the Syrian National Council (SNC), the political opposition in exile. The FSA has now established a political wing and receives funding from Saudi Arabia, while SNC is funded by Qatar.
An Islamic militiaman fighting in Aleppo told The Telegraph that he would be offended if associated with the Free Syrian Army.
GM Bailout: Obama Administration ordered the termination of retiree benefits for 20,000 non-union workers while topping off union benefits (video)
Welcome to Chicago….err I mean Detroit…..err I mean Washington; where if you don’t want to be punished you had better pay “the man”. This is unspeakable cruelty and where was the elite media?
UPDATE – Michelle Malkin tells the story:
UPDATE II – Retired Delphi Employees Spaek Out! http://www.whymrpresidentwhy.com/
UPDATE III – New ad tells story of how Obama screwed non-union GM employees:
Matt Boyle at The Daily Caller:
Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.
The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.
The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.
Delphi, a 13-year old company that is independent of General Motors, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.
The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.
Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan.
“As a result of the Delphi Corporation bankruptcy, for example, Delphi and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation were forced to terminate Delphi’s pension plans, which means there are Delphi retirees who unfortunately will collect less than their full pension benefits,” Feldman testified on July 11, 2012.
The emails TheDC has obtained show that the Treasury Department, not the independent PBGC, was running the show.
Under 29 U.S.C. §1342, the PBGC is the only government entity that is legally empowered to initiate termination of a pension or make any official movements toward doing so.
NOTE – READ THE EMAILS HERE – LINK.
UPDATE IV – ‘Highly confidential’ internal Treasury documents show Obama admin’s involvement in Delphi pension scandal – LINK
Detroit becomes dumping ground for the dead
Detroit has been run by Democrats for decades. Their wealth destroying policies oversaw Detroit’s decline from the highest per capita income in the country to next to 67th.
Related:
Progressivism Unrestrained: 1 in 3 residences abandoned in Detroit.
Profiles in Unrestrained Progressivism: Detroit
Detroit Public Schools Graduation Rate 26%
Democrat Conyers Pleads Guilty to Feds for Taking Bribes.
Progressivism Unrestrained: Detroit building “train to nowhere”
Democrats Loot Detroit for Half a Billion, Elite Media Doesn’t Care…
From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.
They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit’s vast urban wilderness — a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.
Abandoned and neglected parts of the city are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the dead — at least a dozen bodies in 12 months’ time. And authorities acknowledge there’s little they can do.
“You can shoot a person, dump a body and it may just go unsolved” because of the time it may take for the corpse to be found, officer John Garner said.
The bodies have been purposely hidden or discarded in alleys, fields, vacant houses, abandoned garages and even a canal. Seven of the victims are believed to have been slain outside Detroit and then dumped within the city.
It’s a pattern made possible by more than four decades of urban decay and suburban flight. White residents started moving to burgeoning suburbs in the 1950s, then stepped up their exodus after a deadly 1967 race riot. Detroit’s black middle class followed over the next two decades, leaving block after block of empty homes.
Over time, tens of thousands of houses deteriorated. Some collapsed, others were demolished. Empty lots gave way to block-long fields.
Jacob Kudla and Jourdan Bobbish were found July 27 in a field off Lyford Street, a lonely road that borders an industrial area and a small municipal airport. The teens from suburban Westland, 18 and 17, respectively, had been visiting Kudla’s uncle in Detroit when they disappeared July 22.
Their corpses were found by someone walking along the desolate block. The closest house, about 100 yards (91.4 meters) away, belongs to 74-year-old Ella Dunn.
Over the last 24 years, she has watched nearly all her neighbors move out. Now she constantly hears people dumping tires, furniture and trash.
“They drive down and push stuff out,” she said.
A nearby parking lot resembles a small landfill for junk — a coloring book based on Bible characters, a yellow toilet, furniture, shoes and five boats.
“Detroit is a dumping ground for a lot of stuff,” said Margaret Dewar, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. “There is no one to watch. There is no capacity to enforce laws about dumping. There is a perception you can dump and no one will report it.”
AFL/CIO Gives $206.7 Million to Obama, Gets 40% of All ObamaCare Waivers
This is is AFL/CIO Union President Richard Trumka. He said that government should take over all private business, who speaks in front of communist revolutionary groups, and has a long history of violence. Trumka brags that he talks to the White House every day and visits twice a week (video). Trumka also says that the best way to create jobs is to raise taxes. Keep in mind that each ObamaCare waiver results in a massive tax cut.
Waivers for Favors
When President Obama was campaigning in 2008, he spoke often of his desire to limit the influence of lobbyists in Washington. There’s only one problem: the more government involves itself in the private sector, the more private businesses needs to hire lobbyists to make sure that new laws and regulations don’t put them out of business. Inevitably, the next step involves campaign contributions to key lawmakers, protection money that ensures that the law favors those with the right political connections.
In the case of Obamacare, this phenomenon shows up in manifold ways. Roy Poses highlights the story of how Dr. Elias Zerhouni, former head of the National Institutes of Health, had leveraged his position into lucrative corporate packages. Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner has been tracking a long list of Washington officials and staffers who are taking advantage of “The Great Health-Care Cashout.”
Then came the news last week the Department of Health and Human Services has granted over 700 waivers [Note – this number is up to 1,200 last we checked – Political Arena Editor] to Obamacare’s obtuse rule that businesses drop “mini-med” plans in favor of more expensive, comprehensive coverage. Many businesses, such as McDonald’s, were faced with dropping their health coverage entirely, rather than face the prohibitive expense of complying with the new law. So rather than repealing the regulation, HHS has taken it upon itself to grant waivers arbitrarily to those whom it deems fit.
The Casablanca-style shocker is that, of the more than 2 million workers who will benefit from the HHS waivers, 40 percent belong to labor unions [as of 2011] “Waivers for Favors,” as Michelle Malkin memorably put it:
The Teamsters Union, which hailed Obama last March for “enacting historic health care reform, providing health insurance to millions of Americans who don’t have it and controlling costs for millions more who do,” obtained waivers for 17 different locals.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which celebrated the passage of Obamacare as “an achievement that will rank among the highest in our national experience,” secured waivers for 28 different affiliates.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — which exulted after the health-care law’s passage that “finally, affordable and comprehensive health care coverage will be available for millions of working Americans” — saw eight of its affiliates win shelter from the Obamacare wrecking ball.
The Communications Workers of America, which sent its workers to lobby for Obamacare on Capitol Hill as part of the Health Care for America Now front group funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros, snagged a waiver that will spare a hefty 19,000 of its members from the onerous federal mandate.
And the Service Employees International Union, which poured $60 million into Democratic/Obama coffers in 2008 and millions more into the campaign for the federal health-care takeover, added four new affiliates to the waiver list: SEIU Local 2000 Health and Welfare Fund, representing 161 enrollees; SEIU 32BJ North Health Benefit Fund, representing 7,020 enrollees; SEIU Local 300, Civil Service Forum Employees Welfare Fund, representing 2,000 enrollees; and SEIU Health & Welfare Fund, representing 1,620 enrollees.
That’s in addition to three other previous SEIU waiver winners: Local 25 SEIU in Chicago with 31,000 enrollees; Local 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund with 4,544 enrollees; and SEIU Local 1 Cleveland Welfare Fund with 520 enrollees. This brings the total number of Obamacare-promoting SEIU Obamacare refugees to an estimated 45,000 workers represented by seven SEIU locals.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor unions represent less than 7 percent of the private sector workforce, compared to 40 percent of HHS’ waivers. Does anyone seriously believe that HHS is handing these waivers out based on merit and need, rather than political self-interest?
Sweden’s Conservative Economic Recovery Continues
Related: Sweden turns to Reagan’s economic reforms and it’s working – LINK
Matt Kibbe at Forbes:
With Most Of Europe Still On Its Back, Sweden Tries Policies That Actually Work.
While the rest of Europe and the United States have gone on massive spending sprees fueled by government borrowing and tax hikes, Sweden took a different approach. In the Spring 2012 Economic and Budget Policy Guidelines, the Swedish Government and its Finance Minister, Anders Borg, have laid out a plan that is focused on lowering taxes. Their rationale? “When individuals and families get to keep more their income, their independence and their opportunities to shape their own lives also increase.”
Borg also wants to lower the corporate tax rate as a way of meeting the government’s goal of “full employment”. The government has already cut property taxes and other luxury taxes on the rich to lure investors and entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The government has also slashed spending across the board, including on the welfare programs that used to be Sweden’s claim to fame. They’ve also installed caps on annual government expenditures: real and enforceable limits that the Swedes believe are pivotal to economic stability. They explain in their Policy Guidelines that “the expenditure ceiling is the Government’s most important tool for meeting the surplus.” Imagine that, a government that stays within its limits. So why didn’t Sweden hop on the stimulus bandwagon like the U.S. and much of Europe?
Anders Borg explains, “Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus… Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.” We have now seen that attempts at austerity within the Eurozone have met a similar fate: none of it was serious. As spending increases have been squandered, spending cuts have been a charade, failing to target the big government programs at the core of the debt crisis. So Anders Borg and the Swedish Government have undertaken an economic and budget plan that slashes taxes and (actually) caps government spending. If you told Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesians back at the onset of the financial crisis that Sweden’s finance minister was planning such action, they would have surely laughed in your face and cynically predicted doom and gloom for the Scandinavian nation. However, in reality, a place Keynesians seem to be unfamiliar with, it’s become clear that what Sweden is doing is working. And it’s working better than even Minister Borg expected.
Despite slow projected growth for 2012, Sweden is expecting annual GDP growth of over 3 percent starting next year, projected out through 2016 by which time their unemployment is expected to slide down to just about 5 percent. During this time the Swedish gross debt is expected to drop from 37.7 percent/GDP to 22.5 percent/GDP as a result of government surpluses. For comparison, US gross debt to GDP is well over 100 percent and climbing. All this success must be on the backs of the working class right? Wrong. Wages are slated to rise in Sweden by nearly 4 percent annually through 2016.
Obama Administration Sues To Stop Military From Voting (video)
The Obama Administration is suing to make it harder for the military to vote in the key swing state of Ohio. This is not a surprise. Al Gore in 2000 sued Florida to get military ballots thrown out. Another trick is that counties ran by Democrats will deliberately mail out requested absentee ballots for military personnel late so that they cannot make it back on time. They always say “oops we made a mistake”. It is a mistake they make every election year.
Military ballots mailed late… – LINK
Dearborn Overseas Primary Ballots Coming in Despite Late Sendout: Dearborn is one of 70 municipalities included in a federal lawsuit for sending absentee ballots out past the June 23 deadline – LINK.
California counties miss deadline to send ballots to overseas, military voters – LINK.
Election clerks once again miss federal absentee ballot deadline: More than three dozen local election clerks appear to have missed a federally mandated deadline for sending out absentee ballots to military voters – LINK.
Labor Dept. Waives 60-Day Jobs Notice To Help Obama Get Good Press…
That’s right…. SCREW THOSE DEFENSE WORKERS! They probably voted for McCain anyways…..
This is cruel.
Politics: An administration that doesn’t want layoff notices required by law going out days before the November election is telling defense contractors they don’t have to send them for the cuts required by sequestration.
As the heads of major defense contractors Lockheed Martin, EADS North America, Pratt & Whitney and Williams-Pyro testified recently before the House Armed Services Committee, they are bound by law to give employees 60 days’ notice if their jobs are going to be terminated as a result of sequestration cuts scheduled for Jan. 2.
Federal law under the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) Act required employers to give workers a minimum of 60 days notice before potential mass layoffs.
That means layoff warning notices could go out to hundreds of thousands of workers just days before the presidential election, a prospect President Obama and his administration do not relish.
Some $500 billion in defense-spending reductions are scheduled to kick in beginning Jan. 2.
These cuts come on top of $487 billion in Defense Department cuts recently approved and threaten to not only to put our national security in jeopardy but also gut the skilled workforce in the aerospace industry.
Robert Stevens, chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, told lawmakers that his company alone is looking at laying off roughly 10,000 employees from its 120,000 workforce.
The layoffs would be the result of cuts to its largest programs, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship.
To avoid the electoral consequences of these cuts, the Department of Labor (DOL) is informing defense contractors that since sequestration hasn’t actually happened yet, and some in Congress are trying to find ways around it, it might be nice if they didn’t obey federal law and send out the pink slips just this once.
Otherwise, outraged voters might give President Obama a pink slip a few days later.
86% of Romney Elite Media Coverage Negative; Obama Coverage “Gushing” With Approval…
Their coverage of McCain/Palin was not even this negative.
Lets talk about Sarah Palin for just a moment. People now realize that Sarah Palin has been correct on issue after issue. She was right about ObamaCare, she was right about how radical the Obama Administration would be, she was also right when she predicted the rise of food prices very early on. Even the Wall Street Journal trashed Palin for the food prediction, but time after time she has been shown correct. The result is that more and more people doubt the elite media and truly understand just how vicious a partisan attack machine it has become.
Media bias has gone from bad to ridiculous.
During Mitt Romney’s overseas visit earlier this week, 86 percent of the coverage on ABC, CBS and NBC “emphasized Romney’s perceived gaffes,” according to a content analysis of 21 major news stories by the Media Research Center, which also compared Mr. Romney’s trip to a similar excursion made by President Obama in 2008.
The results: The broadcast networks committed 53 minutes of almost entirely negative coverage to Mr. Romney, and 92 minutes of “gushing” to Mr. Obama.
“The near unanimous negativity of their coverage is as outrageous as it is transparent,” observes the center’s founder Brent Bozell. “It’s impossible to look at the fawning coverage of Obama’s trip in 2008 compared to the sliming Romney has taken in 2012 and not see a clear agenda on the part of the liberal media.”
mmm
Political Arena 