AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

THERE'S TIME TO GET CLIMATE POLICY RIGHT
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18724&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
By removing taxpayer subsidies for fuel use and eliminating regulatory barriers to nuclear power and biotechnology, we can decrease CO2 emissions right away, say H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow, and James Franko, a legislative assistant, both with the National Center for Policy Analysis...
WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Trade Issues
IS THE U.S. "THE MOST OPEN MARKET IN THE WORLD"? NOT EVEN CLOSE
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18725&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
Despite claims by U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, the United States has slipped to the 28th most open market in the world, says author Daniel Griswold...
MADABOUTTRADE.WORDPRESS.COM/CATO INSTITUTE

Health Issues
TRULY A TURKEY
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18729&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
Much of the cost of Sen. Reid's health care bill has simply been shifted from the federal budget onto the backs of workers, businesses and state governments, says researcher Michael D. Tanner...
CATO INSTITUTE

Health Issues
THE SENATE HEALTH BILL: HIGHER TAXES FROM HARRY REID
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18728&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
In order to pay for a massive health care bill (H.R. 3590), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has created a host of new taxes that will total $370.2 billion in the next ten years, say observers...
HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Taxes
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR TAX REFORM: PRINCIPLE NINE
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18726&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
Governments that repeatedly take the private sector by surprise with adverse tax policy decisions create expectations of more of the same and discourage long-term commitments, says Robert Carling, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Independent Study...
POLICY

Social Issues
PORTLAND, AMERICA'S ULTIMATE WHITE CITY
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18727&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
"Progressive" towns constantly listed as our best role models also lack racial diversity, says Aaron M. Renn, an urban affairs thinker and writer...
DALLAS MORNING NEWS

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These are extraordinary times, and frankly, from where I sit here in Washington I am worried about our nation's future. The combination of an extreme far left Obama administration and one-party control of Congress has had predictable consequences. Troubling signs are everywhere.

We are now in the midst of one of the greatest expansions of American government in history. And with big government now growing ever bigger, we are also seeing an explosion of political corruption and abuse of power. For the first time in my life, I feel like our government is out of control. And I know that I'm not alone in this concern.

Check out just a few of the lowlights from year one of the Obama administration:
• In a recent court filling in Judicial Watch's "Filegate" litigation, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. In other words, the Obama White House believes it can violate your privacy rights without any legal consequences or accountability!
• President Obama boldly proclaimed that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling virtually all of Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act requests.
• The Obama White House has turned the National Endowment of the Arts (and the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using your tax dollars to persuade "artists" to promote the Obama agenda! According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation.
• President Obama has installed a record number of "czars" in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions).

The list goes on...trillion dollar bailouts, government-run healthcare, banks and car companies, ACORN corruption, attacks on conservative media, illegal alien amnesty, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors " this is the Obama legacy " and we haven't even gotten through the first year of his presidency!
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Kill the Bills. Do Health Reform Right !
By Charles Krauthammer for Real Clear Politics
WASHINGTON -- The United States has the best health care in the world -- but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Worse, they are packed into a monstrous [EXPENSIVE] package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes -- such as the 118 new boards, commissions and programs -- is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.

The result is an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency. Throw a dart at the Senate tome:
-- You'll find mandates with financial penalties -- the amounts picked out of a hat.
-- You'll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third -- numbers picked out of a hat.
-- You'll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies -- percentages picked out of a hat -- that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle- class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way -- one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness and inefficiency.
First, tort reform. This is money -- the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade -- wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits -- resources wasted on patients who don't need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.

In the 4,000-plus pages of the two bills, there is no tort reform. Indeed, the House bill actually penalizes states that dare "limit attorneys' fees or impose caps on damages." Why? Because, as Howard Dean has openly admitted, "Democrats don't want to take on the trial lawyers." What he didn't say -- he didn't need to -- is that they give millions to the Democrats for precisely this kind of protection.

Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn't, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.

And the answer to the resulting high Wisconsin orange prices wouldn't be the establishment of a public option -- a federally run orange-growing company in Wisconsin -- to introduce "competition." It would be to allow Wisconsin residents to buy Florida oranges.

But neither bill lifts the prohibition on interstate competition for health insurance. Because this would obviate the need -- the excuse -- for the public option, which the left wing of the Democratic Party sees (correctly) as the royal road to fully socialized medicine.

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues -- the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget.

This reform is the most difficult to enact, for two reasons. The unions oppose it. And the Obama campaign savaged the idea when John McCain proposed it during last year's election.

Insuring the uninsured [who want and need insurance] is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method -- a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18645&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
THE PUBLIC'S BEST OPTION: LESS GOVERNMENT, MORE CHOICE
Consumers benefit from choice and competition. The key to both is not more government regulation and control, but less. More competition among health insurers is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are far better ways to get there than a public option, says columnist Jeff Jacoby.

Tear down the barriers to buying health insurance across state lines:
• Under federal law, states are permitted to regulate "the business of insurance" as they see fit, and most of them have seen fit to allow the sale only of insurance policies licensed by their own state insurance commissions.
• As a consequence, there is no competitive national market for health insurance; there are 50 state markets instead, most of which are dominated by a handful of insurers.

Repeal mandatory benefits that make health insurance needlessly expensive:
• Compounding the lack of interstate competition is the way states drive up the cost of health insurance by making certain types of coverage compulsory.
• Consumers and insurers should be free to work out for themselves just how comprehensive or limited a policy should be.
• But state mandates prevent such flexibility by requiring insurance companies to sell a fixed array of benefits that many customers may not want.
• Individuals seeking plain-vanilla health insurance -- a policy that will cover them, say, in case of major surgery or catastrophic illness -- may find themselves forced to pay for a policy that also covers acupuncture, in vitro fertilization, alcoholism therapy and a dozen additional treatments.
• When compulsion takes the place of competition, the result is invariably less choice at higher cost.

De-link health insurance from employment:
• Nothing distorts America's health insurance market like the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance.
• Until that preference is removed, tens of millions of Americans will continue to rely on their employers' health plan instead of buying health insurance for themselves, they way they buy every other type of insurance.
• Fix the tax code, and no longer could insurance companies routinely bypass employees and deal only with their employers.
• Instead there would be intensive competition for individual customers -- and the lower premiums such competition would yield.

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18642&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
REPUBLICAN HEALTH PLAN WOULD REDUCE PREMIUMS, CUT DEFICIT
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.

The Republican plan does not call for a government insurance plan but rather attempts to reform the system by creating high-risk insurance pools, allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines and instituting medical malpractice reforms.

According to CBO, the GOP bill would:
• Lower costs, particularly for small businesses that have trouble finding affordable health care policies for their employees.
• Decrease rates by 7 percent to 10 percent for this group, and by 5 percent to 8 percent for the individual market, where it can also be difficult to find affordable policies.
• Have the smallest economic impact on the large group market that serves people working for large businesses that have access to the cheapest coverage; those premiums would decline by up to 3 percent.

The analysis, however, shows the Republican plan would do little to expand coverage:
• The CBO found that under the Republican plan, insurance coverage would increase by about 3 million and that the percentage of insured non-elderly adults would remain at about 83 percent after ten years.
• The House bill would increase coverage to an additional 36 million people, raising the number of insured to 96 percent.

How much will the Republican bill cost?
• The CBO put the price tag for the GOP plan at $61 billion, a fraction of the $1.05 trillion cost estimate it gave to the House bill that lawmakers are set to vote on this weekend.
• And the CBO found that the Republican provision to reform medical malpractice liability would result in $41 billion in savings and increase revenues by $13 billion by reducing the cost of private health insurance plans.

(BTW: Where did the word "Coveter's" come from? It seems to be big with you.)

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=covet&x=26&y=10
Main Entry: cov·et
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1 : to wish for earnestly : crave possession or enjoyment of : long for
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2 : to desire (another's possession or attribute) inordinately or culpably
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intransitive verb : to feel or cherish inordinate desire or craving for another's possession or attributes
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The Ten Commandments, Exodus 20:1 " 20:14

And God spoke all these words, saying:
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Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house; thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.

I am convinced that the primary motivation of Obama and his followers is that they covet whatever any of their fellow humans have that is more than they have. That is why they want to redistribute wealth and stifle the opportunities of others for accumulating wealth.