A gun control perspective

Cancel My Subscription By Michael Walsh January 15, 2013 8:27 A.M. Comments 134 Print Text    You have to love the Left: so convinced are they by the intellectual charlatanism of the “talking cure” that they apply it to all aspects of their lives — and to the lives of those whom they seek to control. Here’s the president, talking about something he obviously knows absolutely nothing about, but talking nonetheless: But what you can count is, is that the things that I’ve said in the past — the belief that we have to have stronger background checks, that we can do a much better job in terms of keeping these magazine clips with high capacity out of the hands of folks who shouldn’t have them, an assault weapons ban that is meaningful — that those are things I continue to believe make sense. Well, it’s better than high-magazine clips, but not by much. If Obama really is planning a series of executive orders infringing upon the Second Amendment, shouldn’t he at least understand what he’s talking about before doing something he might come to regret? Nah — in the post-modern presidency, talk is everything, reality is nothing. If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be governed by the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood thick with theoretical talkers but with precious few empirical doers, well . . . you’re living the dream. As the past four years have shown time and again, the deeply unethical relationship between the White House and the Washington press corps ensures that nary a statement of Obama’s will be subjected to questioning or scrutiny, much less the mockery that attends just about anything a Republican says. That’s because the press corps is drawn from the same socio-economic and philosophical stratum of society as the politicians — they’ve been riding the Freudian-Marxist merry-go-round since they were red-diaper babies, secure in theirWeltanschauung and thoroughly impenetrable to a reality from which they’ve been shielded all their lives. As it prepares for election 2016, the GOP’s first order of business must be to break the Democrat-Media complex by establishing a media messaging machine of its own. Which I’m sure John Boehner will do, right after he finishes rolling over on the debt ceiling and condemning our country to permanent penury. Given that, thanks to the Internet, every man’s a publisher these days, a conservative Media Matters would not be hard to create, just as long as you don’t have Romney’sORCA team running it. In the meantime, I eagerly await the latest strategy position papers from the krack kadres of kampaign konsultants, already preparing their projections for the six crucial precincts in the Cincinnati suburbs that will decide the next election.   by Taboola

This cannot continue

"A parasite has insidiously invaded the body of America." This lead sentence in the article below from Forbes Magazine should not only be taken seriously, but should provoke action by government officials.  Think it will?

Fraud And Disability Equal A Multibillion Dollar Black Hole For Taxpayers

A parasite has insidiously invaded the body of America. It has fed and grown large on nutrients from government handouts and now is enervating its host, our capitalist system.

Since our president entered the White House in January 2009 through September of this year 5.9 million people have been added to the SSDI or Social Security Disability program. That compares with less than 2.5 million jobs created during the same period. According to Social Security Administration data, currently including spouses and children, SSDI rolls have swollen to a bloated 10.9 million. A record one in fourteen workers is now on the SSDI dole. It’s like checking in a hotel and never leaving. Of the 653,877 souls that departed the program in 2011, 36% departed by being gracious enough to die, while 52% reached retirement age and seamlessly switched to other benefits. Only 6% returned to work and 3.6% exited the program due to medical improvement. According to Congressional Research Services this program cost taxpayers $128.9 billion in 2011 and was in deficit to the tune of $25.3 billion. Funded by the 1.8% payroll tax and comprising nearly 18% of all social security spending, at current pace the trust fund may be exhausted by as early as 2015.

I pulled up http://www.ssa.gov/  (then click disability) to look for myself at the so called “Listing of Impairments” and if length is an indicator for program efficacy, then SSDI would be one of the world’s greatest government safety net plans. There is a kaleidoscope of ailments from which to choose. Under Section 12, “Mental Disorders” section of the Disability Evaluation there is, statistically, a qualifying syndrome for all of us, not just in America, but in the entire universe. This one category alone printed out to twelve full pages.

Certainly each of us carries familiarity with subsection 12.04, “Affective Disorders”. It would be tiresome to redact the entire section but some examples are in order. Ever had “decreased energy”, “feelings of guilt or worthlessness”, “difficulty concentrating”, “sleep disturbance”, “anhedonia” (I had to look it up), or psychomotor agitation (I didn’t bother to look it up). If you answered yes to any one of these infirmities and it results in “difficulties maintaining social functioning”, or “marked difficulties maintaining concentration”, or “repeated episodes of decompensation” (I don’t know and don’t care), then bingo you are eligible for disability. If you don’t qualify on my above snippet, don’t despair, there are literally dozens of other possible maladies of the mind listed and most of us, if we want, can fall neatly into one or more of the mental illness baskets.

Somehow, if you are classified to be of sound mental composition, perhaps an examination of your Musculoskeletal System (in Section 1) might strike gold. Basically this section is all things “back” related. From my own experience and talking to doctors, virtually every person in their thirties and older will show “bulging” disks or some other form of spinal degeneration. It is quite difficult to medically argue against back pain. Fortunately for claimants, fibromyalgia has recently been added to our list of eligible diseases under SSDI. Often if your head hurts or you have muscle aches of indeterminate origins and doctors can’t specifically diagnose any name disease, they may call it fibromyalgia. Thank goodness SSDI can fill this void, since because of its non-specificity of symptoms, health insurance companies often turn down these highly subjective claims.

The Numbers Prove The Point

The numbers substantiate a shift to these hard to (dis)prove afflictions. Over the past three decade’s awards for mental illness climbed from 16% of total claims to one third by 2010. During the same period “back pain” increased its market share from 13 to 28%. It is a system begging for abuse.  A study by the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) found that for workers with low paying jobs, SSDI including Medicare replaced, on average, 90% of working income. (SSDI recipients get free Medicare after two years of receiving benefits.) In times of tepid job growth, like now for instance, wages are often stagnant, so if there is a choice between working at minimum wage versus doing nothing and earning almost equal amounts, sloth trumps exertion much more often than not. What are other explanations why at this juncture of a theoretically improving economy is our nation weighed down by such a bloated system? Well secondly, the qualification standards have been severely watered down. As evidenced by above statistics “back pain” is questioned much less today. It is not difficult to claim otherwise when a person says they are depressed. Also, more attention is paid to the applicants claims of pain and special trust is placed in the report made by the applicants own physician. Third, once invited into the club, why leave. In 1983, 163 per 1,000 people terminated benefits. Jump ahead to 2011 and that number has collapsed to only 74 per 1,000. In a crummy job market the incentive is to stay put and live off the fat of the government.  A fourth reason is that the labor participation rate, at 63.7%, is at its lowest levels in generations. This translates that of the millions who have thrown in the towel looking for employment, many have elected to enter the SSDI lottery. This leads us to the huge issue of fraud.

The Role Of Fraud

“We know there are individuals who will purposely withhold or fabricate information to collect government benefits they are not entitled to receive”. Those are the words of the Office of the Inspector General from their hearing on “combating disability waste, fraud, and abuse”.  The Senate conducted their own investigation which concluded that fully one quarter of all disability insurance claims decisions were flawed, improperly addressing “insufficient, contradictory, and incomplete evidence, thus increasing the chances of rewarding nondisabled persons.” The study also determined the Social Security Administration (SSA) failed to establish that claimants were properly screened to certify that they satisfied metrics in the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) medical “Listing of Impairments” to meet eligibility requirements that would qualify them for the DI program. The Inspector General’s office identified billions in fraud. The Senate study implies many billions more in abuses. Much of the ongoing program cheating comes from those who continue to collect disability payments but are stealthily employed on the side. Not surprisingly, some of the SSDI wounds are self-inflicted. The SSA loses hundreds of millions continuing to pay those who were honest and notified that they were returning to work.  The agency is supposed to conduct CDR’s or Continuing Disability Reviews to check in and determine the status of the disabled. I know it surprises everyone that there is a huge backlog and SSA is severely understaffed in this area. Probably the biggest area of abuse is those who gingerly slip through the vetting net and shouldn’t be getting disability payments in the first place. The contrived complexity of the SSDI system has spawned a cottage industry of doctors and specialized legal teams to navigate the byzantine multi-tiered documentation process. While the integrity of most lawyers and doctors is beyond reproach there are a few bad apples that make their living gaming the system. Remember what your mother preached, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. This small nugget of wisdom pays off especially when applying for SSDI. Often applicants may be turned down on the first or second attempt to receive benefits. Many times it is only through a court hearing that cases get resolved. Per a study by D. Autor and M. Duggan as many as 40% of all disability awards comes through the appeals process. Some judges gain the reputation of never seeing a claim they didn’t like………never refusing anyone. They also found in one recent year the SSA paid out as much as half a billion dollars to claimants attorneys. It seems to me it is always in the best interest of the lawyer to take a case to trial; it’s a win for him/her no matter what the verdict.

Broken System

As of August past the disability award (not including Medicare) was about $1,111 per month. So the incentive to do some menial dead end job loses appeal when the new job might or might not have health benefits…….certainly not as grand as Medicare.

The SSDI program is a microcosm of what ills the job market in America. When our president took office 40% of the population received some sort of government assistance. That number now stands at over 55%. There is an alphabet soup of welfare programs that create disincentive to seek gainful employment. Zerohedge.com published an excellent chart demonstrating when you add in all the free government goodies that a single mother with one child with gross income of $29,000 receives, that she effectively ends up with $57,327 in net income and benefits. She is better off than the mom with gross income of $69,000 who after taxes has a net income and benefits of $57,045. Some of the giveaways include SNAP Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as Food Stamps. If boredom sets in, look up CHIP or TANF. There is also Medicaid and the Housing Choice Voucher Program.  Have a look for yourself.  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-tragedy-americas-welfare-state Zerohedge.com published another chart on 11/22/12 demonstrating that a single parent family of three earning minimum wage ($14,500) per year has more disposable income than the family making $60,000 per year. The Wall Street Journal last week published some of the exchanges between Speaker Boehner and the President where the President kept repeating that he did not think the country had a spending problem. My translation is that he has no intentions of reducing any of the runaway programs that insidiously degrade our economic structure. The new tax increases on the “rich” are projected to bring $600 billion in revenues to the Treasury Department over the next decade. Deficits are projected to be $6.8 Trillion or elven times as much.

While there is certainly intransigence on both sides of the isle, the President as chief of state needs to rise above and be a leader. If not addressed in a meaningful way, our profligacy will one day in the not too distant future destroy our country. The Federal Reserve’s rigged artificially low interest rates are the only firewall standing between us and bankruptcy. Imagine if short term rates were 5% and the 10 year treasury was sitting at 7%.  Imagine servicing our $16 trillion debt at these rates. The time to act is now.

Good education

Now this program discussed in the video accompanying this post from Powerline is a tremendous force for changing the political culture in America from its current dependency bent to one of self-reliance through an understanding of how capitalism and free markets work.  What the Bush Institute is doing here is nitty-gritty work with youth designed to slowly but relentlessly overcome the misguided propaganda efforts going on in schools across the country by liberal teachers and professors as well as media.

Phonies and hypocrits

This quote from an Obama speech in 2006 when he was in the US Senate, and the post below it from the Powerline Blog are all anyone needs to understand where democrats are coming from and who they are.  Where they are coming from is very obvious to anyone.  Democrats do not want to make any spending cuts whatsoever, none, zero.  A compelling case can be made that not only do democrats not want any spending cuts, but they want spending increases.  Otherwise why would they push for, and get, higher taxes on producers, and refuse to even talk about cuts.  As to the question of who democrats are: how about hypocritical demagogues.

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government cannot pay its own bills.

It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, 'the buck stops here.'

"Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better."

— Sen. Barack H. Obama, March 2006

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: DEBT LIMIT EDITION

(From the Powerline blog)

Yesterday four Democratic senators–Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Patty Murray and Chuck Schumer–wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to take all “lawful steps” to increase the debt limit, with or without the Republicans. Byron York points out that all four of these Democrats voted against increasing the debt limit in 2006. At that time, the Democrats pretended to be outraged by the deficits of the Bush administration, which were less than one-half the size of the deficits the Democrats have run up under Obama. In 2006–ancient history, apparently–the Democrats had no concern about the parade of horribles they are now trotting out.

The senators wrote:

As you know, Republican leaders are threatening to bring on an economic catastrophe unless Democrats make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Defaulting on America’s legal obligations would undermine the American economy and spread global economic havoc. In the event that Republicans make good on their threat by failing to act, or by moving unilaterally to pass a debt limit extension only as part of unbalanced or unreasonable legislation we believe you must be willing to take any lawful steps to ensure that America does not break its promises and trigger a global economic crisis–without Congressional approval, if necessary.

For all these reasons, we support your view that extension of the debt limit is not something for which Democrats should have to negotiate. At the same time, as a separate matter, we agree about the importance of developing a broad, bipartisan agreement on fiscal policy that strengthens our economy and reduces our long-term budget deficit.

As you have said, any such agreement must treat all Americans fairly and include not just responsible spending cuts but additional revenue from the wealthy and the elimination of wasteful tax breaks.

We therefore hope that you will continue to insist that the entire budget be on the table, and that any agreement be fully balanced and fair.

John Hinderaker's comments on this letter:

"It would be a wonderful thing if the entire budget were on the table, but that isn’t what the Democrats have in mind. Still, the Democrats’ evident concern about the debt limit, manifested not just by this letter but by the trillion-dollar coin and other half-baked ideas that are being taken seriously by Democrats, suggests that more of the budget might be on the table than we once thought possible.

Why are they talking about default? Default is constitutionally prohibited by the 14th Amendment. The federal government’s cash flow is more than ample to pay all interest on the national debt and to retire bonds as they mature. Other spending would have to be cut, to be sure; but default will not, and cannot, happen.

The senators telegraph here what they are really afraid of: the House may pass legislation that extends the debt limit along with spending cuts–cuts that will no doubt seem reasonable, not “unreasonable” or “unbalanced,” to voters. I believed that the Republicans wouldn’t be able to get much in exchange for increasing the debt limit because the threat not to do so lacks credibility, but this letter suggests that the Democrats are more worried than I thought.

This is a puzzler. What “lawful steps” could Obama take “without Congressional approval” that would permit racking up more debt? Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive “Power…To borrow Money on the credit of the United States.” Obama has no such authority. Are the senators urging Obama to violate the Constitution? Or perhaps to pursue the trillion-dollar platinum coin gambit? It is impossible to say.

Sure. They want it for nothing, just like Obama wanted tax increases for nothing. The Dems say they are willing to negotiate, they just don’t want the GOP to have any bargaining power:

I think the strategy is to wait until the Democrats take the House, and then strike a “broad, bipartisan agreement” on higher taxes and spending. In the meantime, the Democrats intend to obstruct any change whatsoever in our rapidly-deteriorating fiscal landscape.

Those would be cuts to the defense budget.

But wait! Didn’t Obama just get higher income and investment taxes on everyone earning over $250,000, precisely the higher taxes on the “rich” he has always said he wanted? The Democrats’ greed is never satisfied."

Who is the real Obama?

Happening upon interesting tidbits of irony on the internet is always fun, and here is one for the books.

Ace links to “The Source of Barack Obama’s Power to Trick Us” by Matt Stoller whom Ace identifies as a “lefty”. The article is like being dissected by a golden scalpel. “He is brilliant – at being deceptive”.

But there is another narrative, a real narrative about Barack Obama and his administration.  Obama is the ultimate cynic, a dishonest, highly reactionary social and corporate ladder climbing con artist.  Obama is the guy who calls a female reporter “sweety”, who plays poker with the guys, and who thinks that his senior advisor’s decision to cash out after making a “modest” salary of $172,000 at the White House is just natural.  He’s the guy who used the rationale that he’s a father of two girls as to why he doesn’t want young women to have access to Plan B.  He was in favor of gay marriage in 1996, flip flopped for political reasons, and then pretended to change his mind as a matter of conscience.  He runs on populism with a worse record than George W. Bush on income inequality.  His narcissism, and the post-modern ironic sense of self-awareness of how his narrative is put together and tended, is his defining character trait.  It’s not just that he’s a liar.  Lyndon Johnson was a liar, but LBJ lied us into a war in Vietnam as well as a war on poverty.  FDR lied all the time, for good and ill.  Obama’s entire edifice is based on lying , and almost entirely to help sustain his image, with almost no interest in sound policy-making.  Obama understands the threat of climate change, but like the exceptional con artist he is, what happens to others he does not know, or what happens in the future, is irrelevant to him.  He understands banking, and war, and women’s issues, and corruption and Citizens United.  Like a great con artist, he has studied his mark, the American voter, and specifically the Democratic voter, and he undersands which buttons to push.

Ouch. If Matt Stoller really does speak from the political left – this is devastating.

There are two ways, at least, of explaining this guy Obama.  One is that he is an ideologue who truly believes in the Marxist doctrines and is willing to go to any lengths to politically realize them through his office.  The second is what is described above, that he is nothing more than an opportunistic grifter who gets his kicks by manipulating groups of people to no particular end other than to keep himself and his cronies in power and enjoy all the attendant perqs (Airforce One, etc.).  Personally, I'm never sure what he is or what he's trying to accomplish other than preen and strut about enjoying the attention and adulation his office affords him.  Perhaps his second four years in office will tell us which of these Obamas is the real one.  I do know one thing for certain, he's the wrong guy, the wrong personality, to serve as POTUS.

The education solution from an entrepreneur

The K-16 educational system in the US is badly broken and just about everyone knows it.  An entrepreneur has identified the problem and come up with a solution that appears to work. A quote from this article from Reason Magazine follows and the link to the link to the full piece is here.

Khan, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi American, first put together a couple of video tutorials in 2004 to help his young cousins learn math. The videos proved so popular on YouTube that two years later he launched the nonprofit Khan Academy to offer free online lectures and tutorials that are now used by more than 6 million students each month. More than 3,000 individual videos, covering mathematics, physics, history, economics, and other subjects, have drawn more than 200 million views, generating significant funding from both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Khan Academy is one of the best-known names in online education and has grown to include not just tutorials but complete course syllabi and a platform to track student progress.

The inauguration

Says it all:

They're Lining Up Early For The Inauguration