Obamacare and the states

The New Neo Posted on by

So many states are fighting Obamacare in the legal arena because they are already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and they know this law and its demands will push them right over the precipice. That is one of the dirty secrets of passing a mandate like Obamacare during a financial crisis like this one, requiring that the states expand their Medicaid coverage to include those who earn 133% of the poverty level.

This is a first: to establish a universal floor for eligibility that applies to all states. There is an additional new requirement that childless adults be covered in all states; this was not a mandated category before Obamacare and will account for the bulk of the expansion. Florida, for example, estimates that its Medicaid rolls will expand by a whopping 50% at least as a result.

To do this, the bill promises to federally fund that expansion—but only until 2014. After that, the states will have to pay 10%, which may not sound like much but with the high cost of medical care it’s actually a big deal (Medicaid also covers dental benefits and nursing homes, the latter likely to be an even bigger cost in light of the aging boomer cohort).

Here’s how it works

Unlike Medicare, which is solely a federal program, Medicaid is a joint federal-state program. Each state operates its own Medicaid system, but this system must conform to federal guidelines in order for the state to receive matching funds and grants. The matching rate provided to states is determined using a federal matching formula (called Federal Medical Assistance Percentages), which generates payment rates that vary from state to state, depending on each state’s respective poverty level. The wealthiest states only receive a federal match of 50% while poorer states receive a larger match.

Medicaid funding has become a major budgetary issue for many states over the last few years, with states, on average, spending 16.8% of state general funds on the program. If the federal match expenditure is also counted, the program, on average, takes up 22% of each state’s budget.

States must follow federal guidelines and cover certain populations, but they have quite a bit of leeway about the details of how they will do so: for example, managed care vs. fee for service. The states facing financial ruin would like to trim their Medicaid budgets. The prospect of Medicaid cuts at the state level is not a pretty one. But neither is bankruptcy at the state level (not to mention the federal level).

Obamacare takes away the ability of the states to balance their budgets in this way. Obamacare tries to squeeze blood from stones. How can a state cut its budget in the face of these burgeoning requirements? The federal government can laugh at the idea of balancing its own budget—for a while, that is. But states are unable to print money or borrow vast quantities from China, and are therefore more restrained by reality.

One can see this phenomenon as a small fractal of the policies that led us here in the first place. Increased benefits lead to increased debt, and the federal government cannot bail the states out indefinitely. We are running out of “other people’s money” at both state and federal level, and yet not only cannot give up any of our entitlements but instead are actually bent on expanding them. It’s a spiral that, if continued, has no possible end except astronomical taxes or runaway inflation or bankruptcy—perhaps all three in due time.

Yes Nancy, apparently we did have to pass the bill to learn what’s in it

The New Neo Posted on by

And what a learning curve it’s been.

This may come back to haunt the Democrats; I certainly hope so. We’re always told not to sign a contract without reading and studying every word. Well, HCR was one whopping big contract that the Democrats signed by proxy for the American people, on the advice of slick con artists Pelosi and Obama.

Under ordinary circumstances a great deal of time would have been taken for the task of designing a major bill with huge consequences for the public and the economy. But Obama and Pelosi and Reid couldn’t risk taking that time; they didn’t want the voters or the leaders’ Congressional underlings to read it and figure out what might actually happen as a result. So no real debate, no Republican input, and no care was taken. The bill seemed to spring fully-formed from some leftist bureaucratic Zeus’s head.

But all of the deliberation and conferencing that were bypassed for this law aren’t ordinarily entered into merely to create some nicey-nicey bipartisan cover, but to actually iron out legislation that might make sense, be coherent, and do what it’s intended to do. The lengthier and more deliberative process at least has a chance of protecting we the people from those who pass the laws on our supposed behalf. But the focus for this particular bill wasn’t so much on what it would say or what it would actually do to the public or the economy, but on constructing it in such a way as to game the CBO system and get the votes in Congress.

Now we discover embarrassments involving who may get subsidized and how much they will have to pay anyway (Althouse thinks Americans will “freak out” when they find out), who is exempt from paying the individual mandate penalty (hint: maybe Muslims), how the bill will hurt large corporations such as Caterpillar and Deere and AT & T and make them lay people off, and how much uncertainty the whole thing will add to the economy (economies don’t like uncertainty).

The WSJ says it warned the Democrats:

Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”…

What’s more, now that the CEOs are objecting, the Democrats would like them to shut up about it:

Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet …

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

This highlights the abysmal economic ignorance of the Democrats in Congress, as well as that of our very own president. They don’t seem to recognize that there is a financial reality that cannot be stopped by spin and words (although spin and words can get bad legislation passed by “hiding the decline”), that once this bill is actually let loose on our gasping and choking economy there will be actual real consequences in the actual real world, and that these things will not be hidden or blocked by Obama going out on the road again to tell us, as he pisses on our leg, that in fact that wetness we’re feeling is just the gentle touch of a soothing rain.

[NOTE: You might call the revelations of these unintended economic consequences a kind of poetic justice—as in Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings“:

…
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!]

Venus Williams…

The New Neo Posted on by

…wears the strangest tennis outfit I’ve ever seen in my life.

venuswilliams-3.jpg

This is a good example of a fashion principle I’ve noticed: if a woman isn’t naturally a girly-girly sort, ruffles or bows or glitter will not make it so. Much better to stick to something more streamlined and classic, which can be feminine without looking like you’re trying too hard.

The common denominator

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a comment from a piece at PJ:

I hope the Jews who voted for this POTUS are just tickled by this guy’s hopey changey for Israel. James Baker in 1992: F**k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway; the Obami in 2010: F**k the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway.

The common denominator?: F**k the Jews.

Remember Honduras? Obama does, and he hasn’t given up trying to destabilize the country

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama has not given up practicing on Honduras, working on his techniques to destabilize it and support a leftist thug if at all possible.

You got to hand it to him: he’s consistent.

What appeared at the outset to be a possible aberration has become a pattern. What initially seemed a surprise is a surprise no longer. Obama supported Zelaya not just because he is a fellow-leftist, but in order to stand for the principle that, once a person is elected, he’s allowed to do anything he wants.

Here’s the picture in Honduras, according to the intrepid Mary O’Grady, who has covered the story from the start for the WSJ and will not let it go:

Four months after a presidential election, reports from Honduras suggest the Obama administration remains obsessed with repairing its foreign-policy image by regaining the upper hand. The display of raw colonialist hubris is so pronounced that locals now refer to U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens as “the proconsul.”

Washington’s bullying is two-pronged. First is a maniacal determination to punish those involved in removing Mr. Zelaya. Second is an attempt to force Honduras to allow Mr. Zelaya, who now lives in the Dominican Republic, to return without facing any repercussions for the illegal actions that provoked his removal. Both goals are damaging the bilateral relationship, polarizing the nation and raising the risk of a resurgence of political violence.

The U.S., as represented by Mr. Llorens, has been at the center of the Zelaya crisis all along. People familiar with events leading up to Mr. Zelaya’s arrest on June 28 say that had the U.S. ambassador not worked behind the scenes to block a congressional vote to remove the president a few days earlier, the dramatic deportation would never have happened.

The State Department denies this allegation. But numerous sources maintain that Mr. Llorens’ interference allowed Mr. Zelaya to push ahead with an unconstitutional referendum. Fearing he would use violence””as he had before””to trample the rule of law, the Supreme Court took action. Mr. Zelaya was arrested, shipped off to San José, and removed from power by a vote of Congress the same day.

Honduras had defied Uncle Sam and the U.S., led by Mr. Llorens, decided that it had to be taught a lesson. It took out the brass knuckles and tried hard to unseat interim president Roberto Micheletti in the interest of restoring Mr. Zelaya to the office.

But the Americans had scores to settle. The U.S had already yanked dozens of visas from officials and the business community as punishment for noncompliance with its pro-Zelaya policy. Then, just days before President Porfirio Lobo’s inauguration in January, Hondurans estimate it pulled at least 50 more from Micheletti supporters. The visas have not been returned, and locals say Mr. Llorens continues to foster a climate of intimidation with his visa-pulling power.

He hasn’t stopped there. In early March he organized a meeting of Liberal Party Zelaya supporters and the party’s former presidential candidate, Elvin Santos, at the U.S. Embassy. Some 48 hours later the party’s zelayistas and its Santos faction voted to remove Mr. Micheletti as party head. Rigoberto Espinal Iré­as, a legal adviser to the independent public prosecutor’s office, complained that the “meeting generated much bad feeling in Honduran civil society” because it was “perceived to have the purpose of intervening in Honduran national politics.”

Now more trouble is brewing: Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, according to press reports, has said that Mr. Lobo made a promise, in front of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Funes, that Mr. Zelaya could return “without fear of political persecution.” Mr. Lobo subsequently announced that Mr. Zelaya is free to enter the country. In exchange, it is expected that foreign aid flows to Honduras will resume. But the minister of security maintains that if Mr. Zelaya returns he will be arrested.

All the newspapers in the United States should be covering this on their front pages. But they are not; and when they did cover the Honduras story they got it exactly (and purposely, I believe) wrong.

In this topsy-turvy world, the people of Honduras continue to resist the muscle of Chicago politics represented by the Obama administration (I am tempted to call it a “regime,” but I will desist for now). Let’s hope the people of Honduras are the ultimate victors. And I’ll say the same for the people of the United States.

Those crazy intellectuals

The New Neo Posted on by

By now we all have probably noticed the strange phenomenon of people who are highly accomplished in their own fields but who fail to exercise even a modicum of common sense when opining outside them. I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell’s wonderful Intellectuals and Society, which explores this curious circumstance with his usual thoroughness and insight (even though Sowell himself could be called an intellectual, which makes it rather ironic).

In light of the recent strategic arms control treaty between Russia and the US, the following hit home with me:

Bertrand Russell, for example, was both a public intellectual and a leading authority within a rigorous field. But the Bertrand Russell who is relevant here is not the author of landmark treatises on mathematics but the Bertrand Russell who advocated “unilateral disarmament” for Britain in the 1930s while Hitler was re-arming Germany. Russell’s advocacy of disarmament extended all the way to “disbanding the army and navy and air force”—again, with Hitler re-arming not far away. The Noam Chomsky who is relevant here is not the linguistics scholar but the Noam Chomsky of similarly extravagant political announcements…

Visiting the United States in 1933, George Bernard Shaw said, “You Americans are so fearful of dictators. Dictatorship is the only way in which government can accomplish anything. See what a mess democracy has led to. Why are you afraid of dictatorship?” Leaving London for a vacation in South Africa in 1935, Shaw declared, “It is nice to go for a holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in Europe.” While Hitler’s anti-Jewish actions eventually alienated Shaw, the famous playwright remained partial to the Soviet dictatorship. In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact, Shaw said: “Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming. And every one except myself is frightened out of his or her wits!” A week later, the Second World War began, with Hitler invading Poland from the west, followed by Stalin invading from the east.

It goes on, but I think you get the idea. The stupidity of supposedly smart men (and women!) can be simply stunning. And that stupidity is not random; it tends to almost always go in the same direction, that of failing to understand the workings of the totalitarian and tyrannical mindset.

Looking back: who is Obama?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another blast from the trying-to-figure-Obama-out past, this time from Spengler (David P. Goldman), who wrote the following on February 28, 2008:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point…

Be afraid ”“ be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

Holds up pretty well, I think.

But enough of the past. Moving right along, we come to the future. How will this play out? Spengler didn’t know in February of 2008, and we still don’t know in March of 2010 (actually, we can never know the future—until it becomes the past, and even then our knowledge remains incomplete).

But we certainly should know more about whether either of the following two possibilities occurs within the next three years (perhaps even sooner):

“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country.

Obama is certainly well on his way to destroying himself in terms of public opinion. But he has also shown that he has contempt for public opinion; although he prefers that it be with him, he has no problem acting against it if he has the power to do so. And right now he’s got that power.

Suicide bombers on Moscow subway

The New Neo Posted on by

Now we read the terrible news that two female suicide bombers have killed 38 people and wounded another 65 in two separate blasts on the Moscow subway.

We should not be surprised by any of this. It is actually more of a surprise that it doesn’t happen more often. Bill Roggio has some information about who may have done it that fits in with my own first (and relatively uninformed) thought—Chechnians:

The FSB believes the attacks were carried out by the ‘Black Widows,’ members of the Caucasus Emirate’s female suicide bomber cadre. The chief of the FSB said the heads of two women have been recovered at the blast sites. The Black Widows are typically wives or daughters of family members killed during the wars against the Russians in Chechnya.

Here’s some background from Roggio:

A cell associated with Sayeed Buryatsky, the slain ideologue of Caucasus Emirate [formerly Chechnya], may have carried out today’s attack. On March 2, Russian security forces killed Buryatsky and five other terrorists during a raid in Ingushetia. Buryatsky was the mufti for the Caucasus Emirate.

During an interview this February with the pro-terrorist Kavkaz Center, Umarov [the current leader of the al Qaeda-linked Caucasus Emirate] threatened to conduct attacks using the Riyad-us-Saliheen [martyr operations] in the heart of Russia. He also reiterated that the Riyad-us-Saliheen was back in action…

“Blood will no longer be limited to our (Caucasus) cities and towns,” Umarov continued. “The war is coming to their cities. If Russians think the war only happens on television, somewhere far away in the Caucasus where it can’t reach them, inshaAllah (God willing), we plan to show them that the war will return to their homes.”

But the world being what it is, and this being Russia in particular, nothing is certain—except that a great many innocent people died today at the hands of terrorists bent on sowing fear and chaos in Russia.

Did you know that Iran will back down?

The New Neo Posted on by

You heard it here first—from Valerie Jarrett, Obama aide and foreign policy expert extraordinaire:

[NOTE: Jarrett has an interesting history. A lawyer, most of her experience has been as a mover and shaker in local Chicago democratic politics, and she was an early friend, supporter, and booster of Obama. But she was born in 1956 in Iran, where her American-citizen father was a doctor who ran a hospital there “as part of a program where American doctors and agricultural experts sought to help jump-start developing countries’ health and farming efforts.” She lived there for the first five years of her life, and learned Persian as well as French when she was a child.

Long ago I noted that Barack Obama seemed to value such experiences of foreign residence in childhood above the foreign policy credentials of so-called “experts.” Remember when he said:

Ironically, this is an area””foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world…So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa”“knowing the leaders is not important”“what I know is the people. . . .”

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college…

So Valerie Jarrett’s early childhood experience of Iran would fit right in with Obama’s theory of what constitutes foreign policy expertise.]

Let’s revisit Obama and Alinsky

The New Neo Posted on by

There were many troubling influences in Obama’s life that were revealed during the 2008 campaign—Reverend Wright, Rezko, Ayers, Alinsky—that conflicted with his calm and reasonable-seeming demeanor and the moderate way he positioned himself. Those of us who looked deeply were disturbed by what we saw.

But our warnings got little or no traction. Most people weren’t paying attention to the details. Obama’s smooth surface disarmed them, and they took it for the whole.

Now even a good many of those who were seduced by the con and voted for Obama are feeling uneasy about him. And those who saw him earlier as a committed leftist, and attempted to warn, have the dubious distinction of being able to claim “I told you so.” Fat lot of good that does now.

The revelation of Obama’s background as a community organizer, and especially his ties to the work of Saul Alinsky (including the fact that he taught workshops in Alinsky’s methods and concepts), had sounded a particularly harsh and jarring bell for people who took the trouble to understand what these things signified. Now that we all look back with clearer hindsight, and read articles such as this Ryan Lizza profile of Obama that originally appeared in March of 2007 in TNR, that bell rings with an almost deafening clang:

The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power. Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!”

Galluzzo shared with me the manual he uses to train new organizers, which is little different from the version he used to train Obama in the ’80s. It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: “power analysis,” “elements of a power organization,” “the path to power.” Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. But Galluzzo’s manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. “We are not virtuous by not wanting power,” it says. “We are really cowards for not wanting power,” because “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.”

There’s a great deal of talk about whether Obama is an idealogue or a pragmatist, or whether he is a pawn of others. I have never felt the latter was true, although there probably have been powerful mentors and supporters pushing him along. But I have long seen him as both a true-believer ideologue and a tactical pragmatist who takes whatever position he needs to if and when it suits his ends, and abandons it with impunity when it no longer does. Here’s Alinsky again:

At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation”–making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”

“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent,” encouraging class hatred, sequentially stirring up anger at doctors and Wall Street and insurers and whomever might happen to be the targeted scapegoat of the hour, Obama’s demagoguery follows the Alinsky rules he studied and taught so carefully.

It’s only a little over a year into his presidency, and the person we see today barely contains any remnants of the campaign facade, because it is no longer necessary. Obama has shed that old skin like a snake molting, and he’s left it to shrivel on the ground where it lies, unneeded.

Sculpture for our times

The New Neo Posted on by

The Anchoress ponders a new sculpture by Antony Gormley called “Event Horizon,” which has appeared as street art in New York City. It features:

…a naked fiberglass-and-metal naked man at random spots in the city.

From March 26 to August 15, New Yorkers will be encountering this form—made from body casts of the artist—amid their daily meanderings. As morning fog lifts, his eerie-but-beautiful silhouette will be visible. Those texting as they walk may bang into him. Visually tracking a pigeon in flight, he’ll be encountered on a rooftop.

The Anchoress is a contemplative sort, and she muses on the different meanings the viewer might project onto the sculpture:

Some will find reassurance in it: as if appearance of eerie, random naked men are exactly suited to the day, when it seems anything at all can happen.

Some will see these forms and think, “angels watching.” Or even, “herald angels.” And feel reassured.

The paranoid will see them and think: big brother. He’s everywhere and he’s watching.

Some believers will see an advance team: harbingers of the Second Coming.

The race-fixated will see a statement about the melding of melanin in humanity.

The cynics will think: humanity has become form without purpose.

Good art provokes and gets you thinking, and I believe Gormley’s exhibit is going to shake to wakefulness a city that has lately been lulled into a sort of drugged slumber: Here is man, in your midst: what does he mean to you?

I’m not sure what I’d see in this installment of the “eerie, random, naked” man on the roof if I saw it in person:

nysculpture.jpg

But what comes to my mind from the photo is a classical reference (hey, I’m funny that way) from my studies of art history: the Kouros figure, an ancient form of early Greek art. Here’s a typical one (there isn’t all that much variation within the genre):

kouros.jpg

So to me the reference is to the muted (and perhaps dying—Kouros figures were often used in funerary art) influence of classical thought and art in our lives.

Or perhaps to their revival. Who knows what the future has in store?

One of my favorite pieces of New York street sculpture (technically, two) was by Julian Opie, and it (they) appeared in downtown Manhattan at Chambers Street, on the steps of the old Tweed Courthouse (named, by the way, for the famously corrupt Boss Tweed). When I saw it in person, my reaction was wondrous delight:

The work was installed in October of 2004 and visible for only a year; so alas, if you go there looking for it now you will no longer see it. Not everyone liked it at the time. Most of the people interviewed for this article were of the opinion that it was eerie and strange. To me, though, it was magical, and transmitted the idea of movement rather than stasis, activity rather than watchful waiting, playfulness rather than solemnity, light rather than dark. Your mileage may differ.