Who really wins if health care reform passes?

According to CNN, “[Obama] framed the vote as a choice between a victory for the insurers or ‘victory for the American people.’ ” This isn’t the case.

According to Reuters, the current health care bill will still require that all Americans buy health insurance. The choice is gone. The American people will be dependent on the insurance companies for treatment, and when they opt not to pay, the suffering patients will be forced to file for bankruptcy. The option of health care independence, of the health savings account, is vanquished.

Worse, because the demand for insurance is inelastic, the price of insurance will drastically increase. Those that cannot afford insurance will either be fined into oblivion or scooped into Medicare, the failing program that will not cover many key treatments.

So who really wins if this reform passes?  The insurance companies will have an unlimited supply of customers. Obama has it backwards. The American people lose if this bill passes. The insurance companies are the victors.

Predicting the Effects of Expansionary Monetary Policy on an Economy in Recession

The Obama Administration has enacted both of Keyne’s creeds: Expansionary Monetary Policy and Deficit Spending. This article will focus on the former.

Expansionary monetary policy is enacted to lower interest rates in times of deflation. This encourages investment, and ideally improves the economy and brings it out of recession. However, this Keynesian analysis is limited. After the economy recovers due to a particularly large session of EMP, hyperinflation occurs. Hyperinflaiton is inflation to the point where interest rates rise as if deflation were occuring. This is due to the fact that interest rates must necessarily be above that of the inflation rate, or banks face immediate deficits.

This increased interest rate necessarily passes the inflationary burden onto businesses. This pushes them into deficits of their own, and many businesses have to lay off workers in order to restore their profits. This is the harmful effect of hyperinflation, which can occur if enough EMP is enacted at once.

Though hyperinflation is destined to occur to this recession, there are other harmful effects of EMP that happen every time expansionary monetary policy is implemented. Any time interest rates are artificially lowered, more loans are taken out and less money is saved. This often leads to a “boom”, like the one of 2002 to 2006. However, when the market over invests poorly as a result of this policy, the result is always the same: the economy lurches into recession. Savings have been consumed and most people have spent and invested themselves into large loans. The recession then ensues.

What then, occurs when, as we are now, we implement EMP during a recession? Such an event causes a double-dip recession. The economy spends itself even more up to a point, and then the economy collapses in debt again. This has happened more than once since it happened in the Great Depression.

Expansionary monetary policy is necessarily a harmful policy to implement on society in mass quantities at any time. The proper solution is to let the market painfully recover from its government-stimulated overinvestment. Haste makes waste.

Obama avoids blaim for new unemployment

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment has risen to 9.8%, despite Obama’s entire team “working every single day… to accomplish” lower unemployment.

In a speech today, Obama avoided taking blaim or apologizing for the continuously rising unemployment, simply claiming that he’s still working to find new options and giving a little sentiment for those unemployed. Barack Obama attributes the fact that the unemployment rate has  gotten to only 9.8 because of his Keynesian initiatives.

I’m sure that after over eight months in office, the president with all the Congressional majority he needs should have been infinitely capable of saving the economy from the 10 percent figure, which is double what unemployment was just 9 short months ago. The president  needs to be capable of admitting that he made mistakes and that blame must be assessed.

Obama’s great stimulus, originally glorified as quick and effective recovery, is turning out to not be as such. The Real Gross Domestic Product has fallen and there have been no signs of recovery. The Keynesian belief that saving is inherently a flaw in the free market is crumbling, and it is growing evermore evident that the glorified Keynesian deficit spending cannot effectively be managed by government.

Dignity, honor, and respect are generally good qualities in a president, and not admitting failure shows one’s pride, but to not even apologize for a slow recovery seems heartless. If America is to have an honorable president, he shouldn’t be afraid to say he’s sorry.

The March on Washington

It appears that my proposal to the teaparty movement was successful. Tens of thousands of protesters, according to Fox News, marched on Washington to protest government expansion. It is officially the largest fiscally-conservative protest that has ever been brought to Washington DC. If not the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time, it is the most promising. Activism always leaves a mark, and hopefully this time it will be enough.

Unfortunately, and perhaps intentionally, Obama wasn’t in town for the event, according to the LA Times. Barack Obama was rallying support in Minneapolis for his healthcare overhaul and the government health insurance program while the TEA Party’s rally was under way. Humorously enough, more protesters came to Washington than supporters to Minneapolis.

Given this and the fact that polls have been overwhelmingly against the bill, Congress may not have the guts to pass Obama’s healthcare overhaul. Things are brightening up.

Obama can no longer claim to be non-partisan

Obama’s efforts at reform were never really non-partisan. While unification behind Obama as a man was once bipartisan, the revelation of his policies ended this trend.

First, he revealed his plans at economic stimulus. From the very beginning, there was a great opposition to this package. Economists debated the potential effectiveness of the bill, and many believed it would do more harm than good. Nontheless, Obama pushed it through, and the only criticism of the bill was that it wasn’t read.

Then came talk of another stimulus, which still appeared in the public eye as non-partisan despite its support and opposition being down party lines.

More recently, on the new healthcare reform proposal: According to CNN, Democrats are considering a loophole that would only require a 50% vote for this bill to pass, because they can’t even get all of their own party to support it. The Dems are officially unwilling to negotiate their bills and are trying to abuse their temporary majority by ramming tyranny down our throats.

The good news, though, is that the Democrats might not take this option, and may drop their public option initiative in order to pass their healthcare reform. Says Obama, “[the] public option… is not the entirety of healthcare reform”. So, even should this healthcare overhaul pass, we may be able to undo it given time.

Nontheless, anyone that even mentions that Obama or his policies are bipartisan are either not watching the news or entirely incompetant.

Recession Update: Economy Worsens

CNN made a decieving headline today: “Jobless rate down for first time in a year”. What is perhaps comical is that the only “jobless rate” that was down was the number of jobs being lost (“only” 247,000 jobs were lost in July). What the headline implied was that the unemployment rate had decreased, when in reality,  unemployment is still on the rise. Indeed, we are in the middle of the deflationary spiral. The same CNN article acknowledges that the national unemployment rate will likely increase to the double digits.

While it may be a little early to call Obama’s economic policy a failure (seeing as most of those “shovel-ready” projects will not begin until the end of next year), there certainly has been little to no recovery. In the middle of July, when the markets usually boom due to the spending of savings on family vacations, the only good news was that fewer jobs were lost than the month before and the unemployment rate fell 0.1%.

Obama’s manipulation of the the banking industry doesn’t appear to have done too much help, either. According to Fox Business, due to continued real-estate deflation and instability, banks are continuing to experience significant losses. Of course, Obama’s solution to this problem is another bailout, this time of the real-estate industry. Based off of our experience of past bailouts, the real-estate bailout will likely shift the instability elsewhere, while keeping the real problem in place.

Confidence in Washington Falling Considerably

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, thirteen states now have double digit unemployment rates. As a result of the lack of improvement, many Americans are now questioning Washington’s ability to combat this problem. In fact, a new Fox News Poll indicates that a majority of Americans doubt that the Obama Administration has any clear plan for fixing the economy. The poll results also indicate that 73% of Americans doubt that Congress has such a plan either.

As of Healthcare, the poll indicates that most Americans don’t believe that major health care reform can occur without increasing taxes and the budget deficit. In fact, 64% of Americans would rather have their ailments treated by private health insitutions than by the federal government. Further, only 3% of Americans consider thier current healthcare quality poor.

What was perhaps most interesting about this poll was the last question:  “Do you think members of Congress should be required to read and know the details of legislation before they can vote on it — even if the bill is thousands of pages long?” The bipartisan answer was a resounding 92% yes.

So what does this all mean? It means that America has lost confidence in Washington. America has even lost confidence in Obama. Change has failed. Hope has backfired. What do we have left?

Cap and Trade Bill Passes the House

Though it was only by 7 votes, the cap and trade scheme has finally been approved.

Let’s look at the facts. Cap and Trade has not significantly reduced Carbon emissions in any country that it has been enacted in. It has never created more jobs than it has lost, and it has never amounted to more than a tax on a harmless gas. All the taxes assessed by Cap and Trade will inevitably be passes onto the consumer. Gas prices will skyrocket again, and the cost of virtually everything will increase.

Despite this fact, Barack Obama believes that this bill will actually create jobs. Says Obama, “This is a jobs bill”. According to CNN, Obama believes that this bill will actually create “millions of new jobs” [1]. Perhaps Obama needs a quick economics lesson: When the cost of everything increases and wages remain the same, aggregate demand is less, because consumers cannot afford to buy as much as before.

What Obama thinks though is that this bill will cause some sort of quick change to a cleaner United States, because as the costs of “dirty” products increase, the public is more likely to buy less “dirty” products. However, it is not that simple.

Those “dirty” products include gasoline, oil, natural gas, and coal. These products are currently the main contributors to the power grid in the United States. There is no true “green” alternative source of energy. Biofuels and biodiesels are not profitable without massive amounts of subsidies. Solar energyand Wind energy combined constitute less than half of 1 percent of energy production and are impractical to expand to even 5 percent. Hydroelectricity can not expand much more either, as there can only be so many dams on a river while maintaining high energy efficiency.

So, ultimately, this Cap and Trade Program is a massive energy tax. As energy costs increase for all americans in the face of a recession, how is the little guy that Obama was going to protect going to make his next house payment?

This bill has not yet passed the Senate, so there is still hope for the American economy.

[1]  http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/26/house.energy/index.html