(Editor’s Note:  As has been well-pointed out, so much of the healthcare reform debate has revolved around HOW government should accomplish it, very few people are asking IF it is the government’s role at all.   It is not.   This is yet another usurpation of state’s rights by the federal government to intrude and commandeer an industry it has no right to take over.)

“We think it’s critical that power shifts to the American consumer and away from government, employers and insurers, as evidence shows medical care prices come down when patients pay directly. Government should offer tax relief, such as refundable tax credits, to encourage private health insurance purchasing — especially for low-income families. Similar ideas, like those in the Patients’ Choice Act … are important for Americans to consider. We would do well also to consider creative ideas such as changing federal payments to state-based medicaid plans to individual vouchers or expanding health savings accounts, as has been done in South Carolina.”  (Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford University Medical Center, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford).

Read more: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/16/hooray-for-evan-bayh/#ixzz0fkBEeTpo

Check out the graph tracking the US’ annual budget below.  It shows where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re projected to be through the next decade.  The CBO is the Congressional Budget Office and functions as an independent entity whose purpose is to provide some semblance of accountability in the budgetary process.  The last budget surplus was in 2001.  After that, and all through the Bush years, the deficits began mounting.  Clearly, neither party can boast of their having been fiscally responsible.   But watch how the marble has rolled off the table in the past 12 months and how sharply–and alarmingly–the financial scenario worsens. 

If you had a team of experts handling your money and this was their track record, you would fire them.  Well, America, it is your money.  No wonder a Rasmussen Poll released last week states that 63% of Americans favor the standing guard in Congress being voted out come November.  This madness must be stopped. 

~Dan Blanchard

What is the Federal government’s solution to any crisis, real or contrived?  To throw money at it.  Your money.  Bucket loads of money.  Obscene amounts of money.   Money that they cannot afford because they do not have it to spend.  Take 30 seconds of your time and watch the visualization of a job crisis (and each job lost represents a hurting family in America) as it has swept across the US…inclusive of the “Stimulus.”  (Click on blue link below)

Updated 02.05.10, The Geography of a Recession

Click on the “We the People” title/link for an audio intro to a special series, “We the People,” hosted by our friend in freedom, Jim Coyle, beginning this Sunday, February 7th from 1 – 2pm on AM 970, WGTK.

“We the People”

http://elections.jeffersoncountyclerk.org/

AN ECONOMIC TIME BOMB

Weather-wise it has been a very cold January, and politically the Scott Brown Senate victory has chilled Washington even further Democrats.  But if the Democratic economic policies continue nevertheless, this year will be nothing like the bitter economic January we will be living in a year from now, says Pete du Pont, Chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis and a former Governor of Delaware.

Government spending has already hugely increased, and so has the size and scope of government, but next year there will also be substantial tax increases for a great many Americans.  The first reason will be the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, explains du Pont:

• The top personal income tax rate will rise next Jan. 1 to 39.6%  from 35%, a hike of nearly one-eighth.
• The dividend tax rate will rise to 39.6%, more than 2½ times the current 15%.
• And the capital gains tax rate will rise by a third, to 20% from 15%.
• If the House health care bill had passed, all three of these rates would have risen to 45%.

The estate tax, which fell to zero this year under the Bush tax cuts, will return in 2011 — or sooner, if Congress acts to restore it.  Another likely tax increase will be on the income of private equity and hedge-fund managers, from the capital gains rate of 15 percent to the new higher income tax rates.  It has already been passed by the House and is supported by the Obama administration, as is an additional 10-year, $90 billion tax on banks aimed at “rolling back bonuses for top earners.”  It would affect some 50 banks, insurance companies, and large broker-dealers.

Meanwhile a number of last year’s tax deductions have disappeared due to the failure of Congress to extend them into this year, says du Pont:

• The tax deduction for state and local sales taxes is one.
• The deduction for college tuition and fees is another.
• The 50% write-off for small businesses for capital purchases–equipment, machinery or building a new plant–has disappeared as well, which will have a negative effect upon the construction of new business operation facilities.

Source: Pete du Pont, “An Economic Time Bomb,” Online Journal, January 26, 2010.

(Editor’s Note: In a faltering economy, with 26 million Americans out of work, we simply CANNOT impose a greater burden on families.  It is impossible to tax and spend our way into prosperity–Dan Blanchard)

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704375604575023413871397430.html

“To say that voters were not enamored with Republican spending during the Bush administration is an understatement. In a relatively short time the Obama administration, along with a Democratic Congress, has made Bush look like a miser. They have expanded the federal budget by $1 trillion; tripled the deficit; is on track to add $1 trillion per year to the national debt for the foreseeable future; accelerated spending on social entitlement programs and proposed another trillion dollar takeover of the healthcare industry all the while holding a cap and trade tax in its hip pocket. “We are fed up!” is the message voters delivered last November and again in Massachusetts on Tuesday. To put it plainly, Americans are looking for responsible government.”  (Joseph Phillips: full article linked below)

http://townhall.com/columnists/JosephCPhillips/2010/01/25/the_wisdom_of_massachusetts_voters

There is an issue that affects everyone equally and profoundly so.  Whether you are “rich” or “poor” or “middle class” (whatever that means these days.)   It is a frightening reality that doesn’t care if your are black or white or Hispanic.   It touches your life whether you are married or single.  It offers no mercy to men or women.   Not even our children.   Especially not to our children.   It is a multi-tentacled monster with a ravenous and, it seems, an unquenchable appetite.  And we feed it.  Willingly.  Every day.   It is simply–DEBT.

It is THIS gargantuan issue that makes so much of political arguments akin to rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic so it looks its very best even as it is being submerged.   And it is neither a Democratic or Republican issue.  We’re debating about chairs and umbrellas even as we’re sinking??  Yep.

We’ve spent so many months addressing the question of HOW to accomplish a government mandated healthcare reform package that no one is asking IF we should do it or HOW we would even accomplish it.     America can’t afford it.  She is broke.  As a nation, we have over $107 TRILLION of unfunded liabilities.  (See number on the linked Debt Clock, lower right hand corner.)   What does that mean, you ask?   Simply that the US cannot even afford to do what it’s ALREADY promised to do: for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Prescription Drug Program (ill-advisedly signed by George W. Bush)  and  other big-price-tag “entitlement” programs.  This is the real issue and the one that transcends and trumps all others.

It’s not unlike the family who discovers it’s $2000 in the red for the umpteenth straight month and decides it needs to book an expensive vacation, buy a new car and purchase a large HD TV as a “stimulus” to turn their “economy” around even as they’re about to lose their house!   And we’re not alarmed?  And this is not just ALL OVER  the major news feeds?

This is the real issue and the one that transcends and trumps all others.   Check it out for yourself.   (It’s the Congressional Budget Office’s own “Clock”)…

http://www.usdebtclock.org/