FACTOID #29
Two parts (A & B below)

A. Moody’s Investor Service warned that the four biggest triple-A countries – the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, and Germany – have moved “substantially” closer to losing their top ratings due to their growing debt.

Source: Barron’s, 3/22/10.

 

B. U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7% reached in February, three Obama administration economic officials said today.

The proportion of Americans who can’t find work is likely to “remain elevated for an extended period,” Treasury Secretary Timithy Geitner, White House budget director Peter Orszag and Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a joint statement. The officials said unemployment may even rise “slightly” over the next few months as discouraged workers start job-hunting again.

Source: Bloomberg.com, 3/17/10.

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FACTOID #27

 

And if you take a look at the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) analysis – analysis from your chief actuary – I think it’s very revealing.  This bill (the current health care bill) does not control costs.  This bill does not reduce deficits.  Instead, this bill adds a new health-care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.

First a little bit about CBO.  Their job is to score ($$) what is placed in front of them.  And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is full of gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors.  The bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.  Now, what’s the true 10 year cost of this bill in 10 years?  That’s $2.3 trillion dollars.  The Senate Budget Committee chairman (Democrat Kent Conrad) said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.

Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does (is treat) Medicare like a piggy bank.  It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare’s insolvency, but to spend on this new government program.

FACTOID #26

From January 2000 to January 2010 – first under Pres. Bush after Sept 11 (mostly Homeland Security), then under Pres. Obama – the number of non-postal employees in the federal government grew 15 percent to 2.18 million. The increase would mean less if the private sector had grown as well. But over the same period, private sector employment decreased by 3 percent.

Jobs with Uncle Sam aren’t just more numerous than they used to be, they’re better. Wages and benefits for federal civilian workers were more than double the average total compensation in the private sector: $119,982 versus $59,909. In the treacherous period between December 2007 and mid-2009, the number of federal employees earning more than $100,000 doubled. Much of this was due to locked-in raises for workers who were rising through the ranks.

FACTOID #25

There has been no global warming for 15 years, a key scientist admitted yesterday in a major U-turn.  Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.

The admission comes as new research casts serious doubt on temperature records collected around the world and used to support the global warming theory.  Researchers said yesterday that warming recorded by weather stations was often caused by local factors rather than global change.

Last month the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was “speculation” lifted from a 1999 magazine article.

FACTOID #23

Among the astonishing things about the ObamaCare debate – or lack thereof – is that Washington is inundated with warnings about the destructiveness of this plan, and it doesn’t matter. The agency that runs Medicare rung the latest alarm bell on Friday (1/8/10), and good luck finding any media mention.

Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports that under his analysis national health spending will rise under the bills by $222 billion over the next 10 years. Even that estimate exists only on paper, as Mr. Foster has the honesty to admit. Because “most of the coverage provisions would be in effect for only six of the 10 years of the budget period, the costs estimates do not represent a full 10-year cost for the proposed legislation,” he writes. The report is punctuated by phrases like “unrealistic” and “doubtful.”

He says many providers will be forced to stop accepting (Medicare and Medicaid) patients who are insured by the government, as apposed to those who have private coverage “with relatively attractive payment rates.”

On Christmas eve, when most Americans’ minds were on other things, the Treasure Dept. announced that it was removing the $400 billion cap from what the administration believes will be necessary to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solvent.  This action confirms that the decade-long congressional failure to more closely regulate these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSE’s) will rank for U. S. taxpayers as one of the worst policy disasters in our history.

Fannie and Freddie’s congressional sponsors – some of whom are now leading the administrations’s efforts to “reform” the financial system – have a lot to answer for.  Rep. Barney Frank, chmn. Of the House Financial Services Committee, sponsored legislation, adopted in 2008 that establishes a new regulatory structure for the GSE’s.  But by then it was too late.  The GSE’s had begun buying risky loans in 1993 to meet the “affordable housing” requirements established under Congressional direction by the (Clinton) Dept. of Housing and Urban Development.

FACTOID #21

Making Schools Safe for Exploitation

Scant attention has been paid to the problems associated with Kevin Jennings, Obama’s Safe Schools Czar. Jennings is the guy who gave advice to a fifteen-year-old high school student about how to protect himself when he was having sex with an adult man. Mr. Jennings was told that the boy met the man in a bus-station restroom, and it seems that the best he could do was to tell the boy, "I hope you knew to use a condom."

This is the same guy who has expressed admiration for Harry Hay, a notorious and extremely prominent supporter of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Jennings is quoted as saying, "One of the people that's always inspired me is Harry Hay." In case you aren't familiar with NAMBLA, they are a group of adult men who have developed an organization dedicated to seducing young boys to have sex with grown men. The stated goal on their website is "to end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships by building understanding and support for such relationships and educating the general public on the benevolent nature of man/boy love." The term they use for their disgusting behavior is "intergenerational sex."

FACTOID #20

Despite a massive budget deficit, House Democrats pressed ahead Thursday with a huge spending measure combining major spending boosts for domestic agencies and foreign aid with more than 5,000 back-home (pork) projects sought by lawmakers.

The 1,088-page, $1.1 trillion measure would provide $447 billion in operating budgets for 10 Cabinet departments, with increases averaging almost 10 percent. There would be more than $600 billion in payments for federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Approval of the House-Senate compromise bill would send it to the Senate before it could go to President Barack Obama.

The generosity comes on top of an infusion of cash to domestic agencies in February's economic stimulus bill and a $410 billion measure in March that also bestowed budget increases well above inflation.

"There is no question that the era of big government has returned to Washington, D.C.," said Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. "This package of spending bills ... simply spends too much money and makes a mockery of our legislative process.”

FACTOID #18

Health Costs and History

Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009.  We are told a new health-care entitlement will reduce red ink over 10 years.  To believe that fantastic claim, you have to ignore everything we know a bout Washington and the history of government health-care programs.

Let’s examine the record of Congressional forecasters in predicting costs.  Start with Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for the poor.  The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that its first-year costs would be $238 million.  Instead it hit more than $1 billion, and costs have kept climbing.  Medicaid now costs 37 times more than it did when it was launched – after adjusting for inflation.  Its current cost is $251 billion, up 24.7% or $50 billion in fiscal 2009 alone.

Medicare has a similar record.  In 1965, Congressional budgeters predicted it would cost $12 billion in 1990.  Its actual cost that year was $90 billion.  Whoops.  The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion but wound up costing $67 billion.

The lesson here is that spending on federal benefit programs grows relentlessly once they are established.  This history won’t stop Democrats bent on ramming their entitlement into law.  But every Member who votes for it is guaranteeing larger deficits and higher taxes into the future.  Count on it.

Source:  Wall St. Journal