Comments by Truth
Page 1 of 54 | Next
Posted on November 19 at 10:33 a.m. (Suggest removal)
At least funny bones are being stimulated by the Obama Administration's $787 billion economic stimulus bill.
To wit, how many Americans does it take to make nine pairs of work boots? According to the White House's recovery.gov site, an $890 shoe order for the Army Corps of Engineers, courtesy of the stimulus package, created nine new jobs at Moore's Shoes & Services in Campbellsville, Kentucky.
The job-for-a-boot plan may not be American productivity at its best. But such stories go a ways toward explaining how the Administration has come up with 640,329 jobs "created/saved" by the American Recovery Act as of October 30.
Jonathan Karl of ABC News deserves credit among Beltway reporters for committing journalism and actually fact-checking White House claims. Head Start in Augusta, Georgia claimed 317 jobs were created by a $790,000 grant. In reality, as Mr. Karl reported this week, the money went toward a one-off pay hike for 317 employees.
Other media outlets and government watchdog groups have also found numerous errors in the stimulus filings. Jobs have been overstated or counted multiple times. One Alabama housing authority claimed that a $540,071 grant would create 7,280 jobs. The Birmingham News reports that only 14 were created. In some cases, Recovery Act funds went to nonexistent Congressional districts, such as the 26th in Louisiana or the 12th in Virginia. Up to $6.4 billion went to imaginary places in America, according to the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
Asked by the New Orleans Times-Picayune why so many recipients would misstate their districts, Ed Pound, the director of communications for the Obama Administration's recovery.gov, said, "Who knows, man, who really knows."
The nonexistence of the jobs and places allegedly stimulated by the Recovery Act doesn't necessarily mean the money was misspent or stolen. But it does indicate that the claims made on its behalf are a political illusion. The true jobs measure of an economic recovery is the unemployment rate, which rose to 10.2% last month. No matter how hard or imaginatively the Administration spins, the reality is that the stimulus has been the economic bust that critics predicted it would be.
Posted on November 19 at 10:29 a.m. (Suggest removal)
The effects of this new breast cancer cost-consciousness are likely to be large. Medicare generally adopts the panel's recommendations when it makes coverage decisions for seniors, and its judgments also play a large role in the private insurance markets. Yes, people could pay for mammography out of pocket. This is fine with us, but it is also emphatically not the world of first-dollar insurance coverage we live in, in which reimbursement decisions deeply influence the practice of medicine.
More important for the future, every Democratic version of ObamaCare makes this task force an arbiter of the benefits that private insurers will be required to cover as they are converted into government contractors. What are now merely recommendations will become de facto rules, and under national health care these kinds of cost analyses will inevitably become more common as government decides where finite tax dollars are allowed to go.
In a rational system, the responsibility for health care ought to reside with patients and their doctors. James Thrall, a Harvard medical professor and chairman of the American College of Radiology, tells us that the breast cancer decision shows the dangers of medicine being reduced to "accounting exercises subject to interpretations and underlying assumptions," and based on costs and large group averages, not individuals.
"I fear that we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people's lives for money," Dr. Thrall continued. He's not overstating the case, as the 12% of women who will develop breast cancer during their lifetimes may now better appreciate.
More spending on "prevention" has long been the cry of health reformers, and President Obama has been especially forceful. In his health speech to Congress in September, the President made a point of emphasizing "routine checkups and preventative care, like mammograms and colonoscopies—because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse."
It turns out that there is, in fact, a reason: Screening for breast cancer will cost the government too much money, even if it saves lives.
Posted on November 19 at 10:28 a.m. (Suggest removal)
A government panel's decision to toss out long-time guidelines for breast cancer screening is causing an uproar, and well it should. This episode is an all-too-instructive preview of the coming political decisions about cost-control and medical treatment that are at the heart of ObamaCare.
As recently as 2002, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force affirmed its recommendation that women 40 and older undergo annual mammograms to check for breast cancer. Since regular mammography became standard practice in the early 1990s, mortality from breast cancer—the second leading cause of cancer death among American women—has dropped by about 30%, after remaining constant for the prior half-century. But this week the 16-member task force ruled that patients under 50 or over 75 without special risk factors no longer need screening.
So what changed? Nothing substantial in the clinical evidence. But the panel—which includes no oncologists and radiologists, who best know the medical literature—did decide to re-analyze the data with health-care spending as a core concern.
The task force concedes that the benefits of early detection are the same for all women. But according to its review, because there are fewer cases of breast cancer in younger women, it takes 1,904 screenings of women in their 40s to save one life and only 1,339 screenings to do the same among women in their 50s. It therefore concludes that the tests for the first group aren't valuable, while also noting that screening younger women results in more false positives that lead to unnecessary (but only in retrospect) follow-up tests or biopsies.
Of course, this calculation doesn't consider that at least 40% of the patient years of life saved by screening are among women under 50. That's a lot of women, even by the terms of the panel's own statistical abstractions. To put it another way, 665 additional mammograms are more expensive in the aggregate. But at the individual level they are immeasurably valuable, especially if you happen to be the woman whose life is saved.
The recommendation to cut off all screening in women over 75 is equally as myopic. The committee notes that the benefits of screening "occur only several years after the actual screening test, whereas the percentage of women who survive long enough to benefit decreases with age." It adds that "women of this age are at much greater risk for dying of other conditions that would not be affected by breast cancer screening." In other words, grandma is probably going to die anyway, so why waste the money to reduce the chances that she dies of a leading cause of death among elderly women?
Posted on November 19 at 10:20 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"Funding the bill is proving troublesome. Mr. Reid decided to pare back a proposed tax on high-value insurance plans, bowing to liberal and union complaints that the measure would hit middle-class families. Under his proposal, the tax would fall on plans valued at more than $23,000 for couples, up from $21,000 in legislation written by the Senate Finance Committee. The tax was estimated to raise $149 billion over ten years, far less than earlier envisioned.
To help make up for the lost revenue, Mr. Reid inserted a provision that would raise Medicare payroll taxes on couples with income of more than $250,000 a year. For those families, the levy would be raised to 1.95%, up from 1.45%. Overall, the proposal would bring in $54 billion over ten years. Mr. Reid is also proposing a new tax on elective cosmetic surgery, generating $5 billion."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12586353...
Don't forget hip replacement is called cosmetic surgery. So is artifical limbs. Minnesota business who make medical equpiment will see huge tax increases as well.
Time to stand up and kill this bill. If Amy and Al vote for this it will be time to send them packing....
Posted on November 19 at 10:10 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Now throw in Obama-care and we have the perfect storm. Why do you think they keep calling it a crisis?
Posted on November 19 at 10:07 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 17, 2009 at 4:22 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.
As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"
Posted on November 19 at 10:07 a.m. (Suggest removal)
This needs to be read again. Thanks NoDFL
Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 17, 2009 at 4:20 p.m. (Suggest removal)
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.
According to Discover the Networks.org:
Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation...
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.
If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.
The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.
If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a good paying construction job.
Posted on November 19 at 9:03 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"We will continue to applaud and support Congressman Walz and his colleagues as they fight for fair and effective health insurance reform. Now it is time the pass the fight for reform to the Senate. Americans cannot afford to have Congress pass up this opportunity to reshape and improve our health care system."
This is just one of many reasons why I will not vote for Mr. Waltz.
Posted on November 15 at 11:34 a.m. (Suggest removal)
First Sunman why all the hate? I have read a lot of post from both sides and none of them are as out of line as yours. I feel since the Tribune will not stand up and tell you that you are out of line I will. You sound like a kid on the school yard. My dad is tougher than yours. Really what do you bring to any of the conversation you try to post on? You try to sound intelligent but you appear to have no real education nor do you even try to bring in facts to back up your flawed arguments. You insult not just posters but anyone you feel has wronged you. I think I would be right to say you were pick on as a kid and you believe the world owes you something. You feel that you are a tough guy when you hide behind your key board and attack the world. You say to yourself to justicy your lack of self esteem that “Life is safer here in my parent’s basement”. I have no need for facts or to listen to others for I am the only smart one here. This site has had many good discussions and I don’t post very often nor do I claim to be as smart as some but I do not judge people based on what they support. I watched as you called people racist and members of the KKK because they questions a policy that would take over 1/6 of the U.S. economy. I watch as you attack people because they misspelled something or missed typed. You say some of the most bazaar things and maybe it is all about getting a reaction and you are getting it from me. I hope this makes you feel better about yourself.
So you say 6 out of the 8 years the Republican controlled the whole darn thing. While they did have a slight majority they never had the super majority that the Democrats now have. What you fail to mention is the Democrats have 60 Senators a filibuster proof majority and yet they can not get healthcare done. The house can pass anything they want without a single Republican vote. Never in those 6 year you talk about did President Bush have this. He was forced to work on solutions that had the support of both sides. Funny thing you always fail to mention is how many times did the Democrats vote for the very things that you now claim have caused the problems. Democrats had to vote for tax cuts for them to pass. They had to vote for supreme court nominees for them to pass and be confirmed. No Child Left Behind was Ted Kennedy’s bill he help Bush write it and got the Democrats in the Senate to vote for it. Now like all politicians when it become evident that they could win back power by becoming the anti-Bush party they ran and block ever thing they could. Every once in a while they over stepped like when they tried to block the funding for our troops. So I think it is safe to say you are misleading at best, lying at your worst.
Page 1 of 54 | Next
Posted on November 19 at 11:20 a.m. (Suggest removal)
On a controversial issue that threatened to derail the House-passed bill, Reid would allow the new government insurance plan to cover abortions and would let companies that receive federal funds offer insurance plans that include abortion coverage. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Senate-gir...
Can this plan get any worse? Who gives you the right to take my tax dollars to pay for abortions?
On Affordable Health Care for America Act is fair