Calling John Galt

This is getting expensive:

The deficits projected for the next decade and beyond are unprecedented. According to an assessment released in March by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the president’s budget implies that deficits will average 5.2% of GDP over the next decade and will be 5.5% of GDP in 2019. Without the president’s proposals, the budget office forecasts a 2019 deficit of only 2% of GDP.

You can read the Bloomberg article for yourself:

Cardiologists Crying Foul Over Obama Medicare Cuts

I want to draw your attention to these excerpts:

Obama and his allies in Congress are pushing to extend coverage to the 46 million Americans without health insurance, at a potential cost of $1 trillion over a decade. The separate Medicare proposal, announced July 1, slashes projected spending for care by cardiologists and oncologists by more than 10 percent each, while paying family doctors 8 percent more and nurses an additional 7 percent.

The cuts would be “impossible” for some small-town cardiologists who rely on Medicare patients, said Zia Roshandel, a heart doctor in Culpeper, Virginia. The town of 10,000 people is about 60 miles southwest of Washington.

Roshandel and two partners see perhaps 50 patients a day at his practice, the local hospital and a community clinic for the indigent, the 40-year-old said in a telephone interview. Medicare accounts for two-thirds of their clientele, he said.

Already squeezed by government and private insurers, Roshandel said he has cut office hours, forgone paychecks and shifted his 12 workers to a high-deductible insurance plan over the past two years. The latest proposal would push him out of private practice altogether, most likely to a hospital in a larger community less reliant on Medicare, he said.

And here’s the rub of single-government-payer. One-size-fits-all is doomed to fail, because there is no universal intelligence or bureaucrat that can properly allocate resources with the same efficiencies as a free market. In this case, the doctor will have to pick up and leave his patients behind, because the system rewards his being part of a larger collective practice in a bigger community.

That also ignores the other conundrum of the healthcare debate: if you do succeed in shifting resources to preventative care, you simply create a larger population of people who will eventually succumb to heart disease and cancer. Unless you decide to ration, restricting access to only the young…

Biden claims success. Claims credit. Claims leadership.

Couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Unemployment is an a 26 year high at 9.7%. If only I could use “It isn’t as bad as it could have been” whenever things go wrong.

What we aren’t hearing is an actual plan to reverse the unemployment rate… Here are a number of ideas:

1. Lower corporate income taxes (encourage them to bring oversees profits back into the US with lower taxes)
2. Simplify the regulation associated with starting a business (That means the Federal Government and the States)
3. Wipe out the tax code – no one understands it, it can by arbitrarily applied, and it acts as a brake on businesses

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might not want to make enemies with his local newspaper.

Reid told the advertising manager of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he was rooting for the paper to die. (Actually, the direct quote was “I hope you go out of business.”)

They might start digging around into his past, like this doozy about taxes being voluntary.

Maybe Harry just has problems with any entity that asks questions he doesn’t like.

A woman applying for a job in a Florida lemon grove seemed to be far too qualified for the job.

The foreman frowned and said, “I have to ask you this: Have you had any actual experience in picking lemons?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I have!” she replied. “I’ve been divorced three times and I voted for Obama.”

Video here.

So good to see that they are focusing on the important things:

If you’re planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you’d best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.

The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that’s been recalled by its manufacturer.

“Those who resell recalled children’s products are not only breaking the law, they are putting children’s lives at risk,” said Inez Tenenbaum, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.