Obamacare

Interested in learning more about President Obama’s plan for restructuring US healthcare?  National Review’s Peter Ferrara explains it all for you.

California Representative Tom McClintock on the floor speaking in opposition to Cap and Trade legislation last Friday:

When you discuss the folly of the Hoover Administration – how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930’s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on over 20,000 imported products.

Waxman Markey is our generation’s Smoot Hawley. In fact, it’s worse because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the planet’s climate is constantly changing and that long term global warming has been going on since the last ice age. Let’s ignore the fact that within recorded history we know of periods when the earth’s climate has been much warmer than it is today and others when it has been much cooler. Let’s ignore the thousands of climate scientists and meteorologists who have concluded that human-produced greenhouse gases are a negligible factor in global warming or climate change.

Ignore all of that and still we are left with one lousy sense of timing. In the most serious recession since the Great Depression – why would members of this house want to repeat the same mistakes that produced that Great Depression? Watching how California has just wrecked its economy and destroyed its finances, why would they want to do the same thing to our nation?

Read the rest of McClintock’s remarks, and do whatever you can to prevent this utopian fantasy of a bill from becoming law.

The rush to pass cap-and-trade legislation to forestall catastrophic global warming reminds me of The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline, a faux scientific paper describing a molecule so incredibly soluble that it dissolves in anticipation of being mixed with water.

In 1948, the late science fiction author Isaac Asimov worried that writing popular fiction had impaired his ability to pen academic prose appropriate to an upcoming biochemistry doctoral thesis, so for practice he invented thiotimoline, a molecule that projected into the future and could therefore react to events before they happened.

We’re told each and every day that all scientists agree that global warming is a clear and present danger to the entire world.  How then to explain the northern hemisphere’s record low late-spring temperatures following the unusually cold winter just past?   Perhaps Dr. Asimov was onto something:  Earth’s atmosphere, like thiotimoline, could be reacting in anticipation of President Obama, Al Gore and the rest of the eco-bandwagon enacting the mother of all energy taxes.

I can think of no other scientific explanation that aligns actual climatologic data with the cap-and-trade solution to the crisis.  Liberals would never dramatically hike taxes on working families and others–taxes guaranteed to suppress economic activity during the worst recession in generations—based solely on counterfactual computer models and the desire to grow government.

Would they?

The always trenchant Mark Steyn explains it to you at National Review Online.

The California Healthcare Institute has just published an informative interview with Proteus Biomedical co-founder and CEO Andrew Thompson discussing the future of medicine.  Read it and learn why Walmart is one of the most innovative healthcare companies in the US today.

Hat tip to Iowahawk and KSFO’s Tom Benner for this inspired and prescient parody from last fall.

From Rasmussen Reports today:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of 0. That’s the highest level of strong disapproval and the lowest overall rating yet recorded.

**Chart updated on 6/5/2009 at 15:30 PDT: Rasmussen did not poll on Mother’s Day, so day earlier approval carried forward in place of zero inferred by Excel in original graphic

They’re back.  Bloomberg reports:

June 4 (Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. raised its forecast for U.S. benchmark oil by 31 percent to $85 a barrel for the end of 2009 and predicted further gains next year as demand recovers and supplies shrink.

“As the financial crisis eases, an energy shortage lies ahead,” Goldman analysts Jeffrey Currie in London and David Greely in New York said in a report e-mailed today. The bank set a 12-month price target of $90 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate crude, up from $70, and introduced a forecast of $95 for the end of 2010.

Oil posted its biggest monthly gain in a decade in May, and this month traded above $69 a barrel for the first time since November on speculation a global economic recovery will trigger a rebound in demand. A decline in the value of the dollar has also drawn investors to crude and other commodities as an inflation hedge. .

Why would “supplies shrink” as demand recovers?  It certainly can’t help that your federal government is doing everything it can to restrict supply.  Check out the conclusion of my prescient November 8, 2008 article, What We Didn’t Learn in Economics 101:

In a sane world, our political representatives would take the current declining price environment as a window-of-opportunity to remove the shackles from oil exploration and production, thereby allowing producers to begin the long lead-time capital investments required to shift the oil supply curve to the right. Given the current Democratic advantage in Congress, the more likely legislative impulse will be to mutter darkly about the need to prevent future Wall Street greed from pushing oil prices up, while doing nothing at all to permit supply to increase.

One day the world economy will recover, the oil demand curve will shift rightward into the steep part of the supply curve and gasoline prices will once again soar at a stratospheric rate. I bet that when that day arrives our president and congressional representatives will act on the confident assumption that we slept through Econ 101.

Liberals control every lever of power in Washington.  It’s Obama’s economy now.  Or is it?  Predictably, as socialism takes hold things are getting worse not better.  A villain is needed to distract attention.  Sadly for this purpose, Dubya and Cheney are gone.  The last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, had a powerful foil in House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  But all Team Obama has mustered so far is a talk show host.  Rush Limbaugh has a big audience, but absolutely no power, so it’s time to dig deeper.  Who else can the Left demonize?

Ronald Reagan.

Liberal economist Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times, takes us to the source of the current financial crisis, leapfrogging many elephants — the Basel II Accord, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act and associated redlining hearings — to assert that President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 free market reforms caused our current woes.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Krugman would have us believe that Reagan didn’t just sow the seeds of the current debacle, but “made crisis inevitable.”  I guess President Reagan was so uniquely powerful that nobody in the intervening 27 years, not even President Clinton, could defuse the Gipper’s slow-acting deregulatory time bomb.

Let’s glance at the other side of the ledger.  If Reagan made the current recession “inevitable” then I suppose Krugman will have to credit Reaganomics with the 123% increase in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product between 1982 and 2008.  No?   How about just the explosive economic growth during the 80s and 90s?

Krugman implies that 1980s economic growth occurred despite Reagan, but the current recession, occurring 20 years after Reagan left office, is the inevitable result of his free-market policies.

Someone at the DNC needs to come up with a more credible villain.

Chinese college students certainly have Obamanomics figured out.  The Times of London reports:

Mr Geithner, in China on his first visit as US Treasury Secretary, sought to allay concerns that Washington’s growing budget deficit would fan inflation which, in turn, would undermine the dollar and US bonds.

“Chinese assets are very safe,” Mr Geithner said, answering a question after his opening address at Peking University this morning.

His answer was greeted with laughter by the students, who question the wisdom of China spending huge amounts of money on US bonds instead of improving domestic living standards.