Category Archives: Business

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

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So, the White House pressured Solyndra to time its layoffs for political reasons:

Yes, very odd, isn’t it? Actually, it’s so transparently obvious that even Joe Biden could piece together this mystery: Team Obama knew their party was already headed for a world of hurt on election day and wanted to mitigate the damange to the greatest extent possible. Plus, by dropping this ugly news on November 3rd, the entire news media would be suitably distracted by the (important) task of breaking down just how devastating the previous night’s GOP tidal wave had been. From the White House’s perspective, it was a win/win strategy. They could escape or delay electoral consequences for their own abysmal failures, then try to slip the entire development past the American people. So they applied enormous pressure and dangled a $40 million carrot in front of Solyndra’s CEO to “persuade” him to play ball. Lo and behold, he did.

A month later, Solyndra partially defaulted on its loan — which, it’s worth noting, the White House knew from day one was a wildly risky taxpayer-funded gamble — thus violating its terms. They were duly “punished” for this violation with a generous restructuring of their loan guarantee, which authorized politically-connected private financiers like Obama donor George Kaiser* to recoup the first $75 million if (or, more accurately, when) the company went belly-up. This it is precisely what happened in early September of 2011. This arrangement may have violated the law, but legal concerns were shrugged off. The big question: Regarding the politicized layoff notification delay ploy, who knew what, and when?

But remember, the Obama administration has no scandals.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Problem With ObamaCare

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…isn’t just that it’s unconstitutional:

The key problem is the overall concept —- which begins from the premise that our system of health-care financing will only keep costs under control if the government becomes an even greater force in the health sector than it is now and proceeds to create a system that will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

But other than that, it’s great.