The real cost of Obamacare is likely to be vastly higher than stated:

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.

One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

Another gimmick pushes much of the legislation’s costs off the federal budget and onto the private sector by requiring individuals and employers to purchase health insurance. When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending. That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan…

And on and on it goes. They are lying to us. Obama is lying. Reid is lying. Pelosi is lying. Everyone who is pushing for this bill is lying – not only lying, but they know they are lying. And they don’t care. Because its not about justice or love or even good policy – it is about control.

Obama, Pelosi and Reid like being in control – and the price they are ordered to pay for retaining the support of their leftist paymasters is a health care bill. And the leftist paymasters want it so that they can gain control over us – they’ll do it via health care or global warming, but by one means or another, the left is determined that the American people lose power over their own lives. The left is tired of dealing with us and wants us shackled and silenced so that the left may remake society in the left’s ideals.

The left is at war with God and Man, and wants to make a society where God is forbidden and Man is a mere block of wood for social experimentation. This has been the goal of all leftists since the dawn of leftist thinking in the 18th century. That each experiment tried has been insanely stupid and, often, costly in lives is unimportant – the key is that God not be allowed and Man be a willing pawn. Eventually, the left figures they’ll get it right and heaven on Earth will result. And in America, the left just doesn’t want to argue any more – and the figuring on the left is that even if Obamacare costs the Democrats the 2010 and 2012 elections, the fact of Obamacare becoming reality will eventually force Americans on the public dole and thus make them unwilling to vote for any anti-government party – Europe will come to America.

So, expect a raft of lies and a huge amount of skullduggery – and keep faith; we shall have them and we will restore our nation.

• Weekly Recap (2009-11-21) http://bit.ly/4s3wM1 #
• The Threat of a Third Lebanese War http://bit.ly/5R2aX1 #
• Phrase of the Day http://bit.ly/8Uhrli #
• Anthropogenic Global Warming Suffers Crushing Blow http://bit.ly/69dNDV #
• What Obama, Reid and Pelosi Have Accomplished http://bit.ly/7r8naL #
• The Manhattan Declaration http://bit.ly/7V1obx #
• In Terrorist Trial, Democrats Put Party Above Country http://bit.ly/5h3jny #
• Phrase of the Day http://bit.ly/6jCyuY #
• Does the McDonnel Campaign Offer a GOP Roadmap to Victory? http://bit.ly/8sM2ob #
• Lieberman Says “No” http://bit.ly/8VrLEK #
• Nice To See SNL Ripping Obama http://bit.ly/7YTBUL #
• The Bloom is Permanently Off the Obama Rose http://bit.ly/8wnQDO #
• More Data on the Impending Crash http://bit.ly/8013hC # Continue reading →

I know, you’ve probably heard stories of big crowds at the stores for “Black Friday” – but those initial stories are probably put out by people hoping to boost the retail stocks on Monday in order to make a short-term killing off the suckers. The reality is more grim:

Retailers succeeded in enticing deal-hungry shoppers into their stores on Friday, but at the checkout lines many people were sticking to the most deeply discounted items.

That may prove to be a disappointment to executives at the nation’s major chain stores, which have been battered by the recession. Many have been hoping that, once in the stores, consumers would spend a little more freely than they did a year ago.

Ask yourself – what did you do? The Mrs is picking up a new hobby and so I went to a particular store to obtain items she’ll need for it. The first item I actually bought about ten days go – I think it was discounted 30%. That was the biggest-ticket item on the list. Next up were two $89.00 items. One of them I got for $29 as a “door buster” (and I busted that door at the crack of 11:30am…still a dozen of the items left). The other was also listed for $89, and I used the nifty 50% coupon. It was $389.00 plus $89.00 twice, or $567.00 worth of stuff for about $343.00. There is one more item to get, but it wasn’t discounted nor did I have another coupon – so, it’ll sit on the shelf until I do get that discount, or it won’t be purchased at all.

So, any of you out there pay full price for an item yesterday? I don’t think too many people were out there buying the full priced items – my bet is that while the volume of items sold was probably pretty good yesterday, the amount of money spent was significantly less than last year. And that is going to kill retail profits for the year. But, in the nature of modern times, I do expect an “I heard good news stories about Black Friday” stock run-up on Monday to counterbalance the really serious news out of Dubai. This is because there are two sorts of people in the stock market these days – sharks who are fleecing the suckers, and suckers who are hoping against hope that everything is back to normal.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

It can’t be for the health care:

Hundreds of patients died needlessly at NHS hospital due to appalling care

Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

This is entirely unsurprising. Why? Because their is no upside in government run health care in providing high quality care. All you get when you do that is more hassles – more people to treat, more procedures to do, more tests to make…it really eats in to your time and as you don’t get paid any more if you do it, what is the point? And so, the natural result of government run health care is poor care – and there is no way to fix it.

Doesn’t matter how much money you pour in to it. Doesn’t matter how many commissions you create to deal with the problems of poor care. Doesn’t matter how much public outrage there is. You can’t fix a government bureaucracy – they are impervious to facts, logic and basic human decency. The only thing they do well is perpetuate themselves – anything else they do is, at best, mediocre and it only happened because they dare not have no results at all (unless you get on a really sweet government agency like the Inter-agency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group where there can be no measurable results).

We turn our health care over to such people and in short order we’ll all just have bad care – except for the politically connected and the well off; they’ll continue to have first class care because the rich can just buy the talent and the health system makes certain they do provide good care for those who can jeopardize the annual budget.

Is this what the liberals want? I don’t think so – and that means we have to go with their innate desire to control others. There is really no other explanation for it. Unless, that is, they are just plain and simple stupid.

Because Democrats are relying on this group, ya know?

The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress banned the government from providing money to the group.

The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.

And who gets to decide what was authorized prior to Congressional action? Yep, you got it – Democrats in the Obama Administration. And who is going to be providing oversight on the Democrats in the Obama Administration? Democrats in Congress, of course. What does this mean? There will be an endless supply of money to ACORN.

Unless, that is, you guys out there want to think that Obama, Holder and Congress would never in a million years deceive the American people…

The trigger for the next collapse is out there – I thought it would be the Chinese or US bubbles making it all come crashing down, but it could end up being this Dubai mess:

Dubai’s debt woes may worsen to become a “major sovereign default” that roils developing nations and cuts off capital flows to emerging markets, Bank of America Corp. said.

“One cannot rule out — as a tail risk — a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s,” Bank of America strategists Benoit Anne and Daniel Tenengauzer wrote in a report.

A default would lead to a “sudden stop of capital flows into emerging markets” and be a “major step back” in the recovery from the global financial crisis, they wrote.

Of course the real problem is that there hasn’t been any recovery at all, anywhere. What the bankers and bureaucrats have been calling “recovery” has actually just been smoke and mirrors as central banks have printed money and used it to prop up stock prices and other asset bubbles. This sort of thing is only sustainable if a lot of wealth is being created to back up the government paper – but that isn’t happening.

We’ve moved a lot of money around, we’ve allowed some very rich people to cover their positions so that no matter what happens, they’ll end up rich. That’s all, folks. Just wait, now, for the crash. Maybe we’ll dodge the bullet right now, but we’re eventually going to have to go through the second half of this crash – delayed and made worse by efforts to stop it.

Geesh:

The Sun recently found that the three local governments receiving most of the money sent to the valley to buy, fix and resell foreclosed houses had been able to close deals on only five houses to date even though the program is nearly halfway into its 18-month time frame.

The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department-funded project is aimed putting brakes on the decline of neighborhoods, and the plan locally had been to buy hundreds of homes.

And they’ve got excuses, of course. But if you have $140,000.00 you can buy a large house with a nice pool here in Las Vegas. If you’re going after distressed houses – those needing repairs – you can probably have them for $50,000.00 or less. Lets say 20% of the $60 million was legitimate overhead. For the remaining $40 million, HUD should have got – making a generous allotment of $200,000 per house (purchase and repair) – about 200 houses. They got 5.

And the liberals want to try more of this. We need no more proof of the ultimate triumph of ideology over reality in liberal thinking.

The scandal spreads – eventually, I expect a very large portion of the left’s leadership will be found culpable to at least some extent:

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

A very large number of people have been lying about climate change and the higher up the food chain the worse the lies and the greater the personal culpability. Do not for a moment think that people are incapable of such a breath taking scale of lies – people are quite capable of it and have done it, repeatedly, throughout history (though much more commonly since leftist thought first started to infect our public debates).

The left is ideology – it is, indeed, the triumph of ideology. Once someone subscribes to it all critical thinking is suppressed and all independent thought forbidden. The rewards for obedience are many – comradeship; special privileges; help in careers; praise – while the punishment for apostasy is complete exile coupled with slander. The leftists who have renounced their faith in the past – most notably people like Whittaker Chambers – have found that their friends of yesterday are the quite vile enemies of today. So, once in leftists tend to stay in and go along with ever more enormous lies.

This one, though, may play a key role in unraveling the left and giving us our opening to completely remove the left from any influence on American politics.

The story:

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.

‘I dreamed myself away,’ he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.

Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Mr Houben described the moment as ‘my second birth’. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.

The Culture of Death will be dismayed by this.

Honestly, people, we must always err on the side of life. Those who are insistent upon killing or allowing to die people we might perceive as being “brain dead” or what have you are making assertions of impossible knowledge. If someone’s heart is beating and his other vital signs are normal, then that person is alive – and for all we know is thinking deeply about his current condition while we think he’s vegetative.

We must not kill the innocent – or allow the suffering to die. We know a great deal about our brains, but even in that are our knowledge is still limited – and we know nothing of the mind which uses the brain to manipulate things in the natural world. We’re making judgments based on partial knowledge – and for entirely ideological reasons. Because some people want to think that a human being is just the accidental result of blind, materialist-determinist evolution, they will insist we kill those humans they believe are not up to snuff.

With stories like this, any person of good will must come down hard on the side of life – if someone is to die, then they will die…with more or less suffering, but entirely outside of our control. Our duty is to do as well as we can by the suffering and then leave the rest in the hands of the Author of Life.

Various proposals are making the rounds to increase taxes to pay for the campaign in Afghanistan and, once again, to institute some sort of draft – this last bit the product of a curious bit of leftist thought that if we have a conscript army, we’d be more wary about going to war (in response to this, I offer WWI, WWI, Korea and Vietnam – all fought with conscript armies and, in my view, made longer and less successful by that very fact). What are we to make of this?

That the left is up to its usual, dishonest tricks. The left doesn’t care about paying for government and certainly doesn’t want larval leftists taken out of ACORN and put in to uniform where they might learn things such as discipline, independent thought and personal honor. No, this is all just a gambit to get the war lost and over with as soon as possible. Once again, the left sees an American defeat in war as the preferred option.

On the face of it, none of us could have the slightest argument with an increase in taxes to pay for war – but, if we are to make paying for the war out of current accounts the paradigm, then we have to admit that mere taxation, alone, won’t do the trick. In the end, we’ll also have to cut non-defense spending. This would not only mean no health care reform, but deep cuts in non-defense, discretionary spending. My candidates for the axe are Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Agency for International Development, Agricultural Marketing Service, AMTRAK, Appalachian Regional Commission, US Access Board, Bonneville Power Administration, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Industry and Security, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, Department of Commerce, Commission of Fine Arts, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Community Planning and Development, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Corporation for National and Community Service, Council of Economic Advisers, Council on Environmental Quality, Denali Commission, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Domestic Policy Council, Office of Economic Adjustment, Economic Development Administration, Endangered Species Committee, Energy Department, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Consulting Group, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Federal Executive Boards, Federal Inter-agency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Transit Administration, Foreign Agricultural Service, Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Innovation and Improvement Office, Inter-agency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group, Inter-agency Council on Homelessness, Japan-United States Friendship Commission, Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, National Bi-partisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, National Economic Council, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Indian Gaming Commission, Rural Development, Surface Transportation Board and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission. Bet none of you had heard of most of those agencies.

Once the left gets serious about getting our spending under control by massively cutting these organizations, then we can sign on for tax increases. Heck, if the liberals would agree to the elimination of a random one of three of the above agencies, I’d agree to a 25% increase in my income taxes – I’d come out ahead just in the increased liberty and economic growth which would result from having that many government busy bodies no longer bothering people and wasting taxpayer money. Remember, most of these agencies grew up haphazardly – piled one on top of another by Congresses and Presidents making political hay by using the creation of a new agency or department as a means of pretending to be taking action.

Reform doesn’t necessarily mean adding something new – it can be re forming the government; making it back in to what it was before. A bit of weed whacking on the federal agencies would go a long ways towards getting our government under control as well as freeing up funds for other activities considered more pressing at the moment. But the left doesn’t want that – they just want to force us on the right to provide more funds for the insatiable maw of Big Government, and they will hold our troops in Afghanistan hostage until we agree.