A little gentle Socratic method.
Category Archives: Business
More Health-Care Unconstitutionality
The Medicare mandates violate the General Welfare clause.
[Update a few minutes later]
ObamaCare criminalizes medicine. Yeah, HillaryCare tried to do that, too. But that time there were enough Dems smart enough to keep it from happening. No such luck last year.
[Update a while later]
Well, Queen Nancy warned us that we had to pass the bill to see what was in it. But it was important. Who had time to read it?
A Good Place To Start Trimming The Federal Budget
America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can’t read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
Definitely another bubble about to pop.
The Lost DREAM Opportunity
In the piece in which Victor Davis Hanson defended himself against Jeffrey Sachs’ nasty ad hominem smears, he also discussed the DREAM act and immigration issues. Here are some excellent thoughts from a “Patriotic Hispanic” along those lines. And more from Mickey Kaus on the continued false consciousness (or mendacity) of the radical Hispanic community.
He’s At It Again
Fresh from his previous escapade into unreality, Loren Thompson has another ignorant (or perhaps he’s just lying — not sure which is worse) post at Forbes about space:
The federal government is planning to spend $19 billion on NASA’s civil space program next year, and yet the agency’s signature mission — human exploration of space — seems to be in its death throes. The Obama Administration has canceled plans it inherited to send astronauts back to the Moon, the Space Shuttle is about to retire, and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology. You’d think that with the nation in the midst of an identity crisis, the White House could have come up with something a little more inspiring.
Congress has stepped in to stop the administration from destroying the human space flight industrial base, but it doesn’t really have a vision of what NASA should be aiming to achieve. So here’s a vision: send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway. Mars is the only other earth-like planet in the known universe. It has water, it may contain life, and it could eventually sustain a human colony. By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding. And in the process, maybe it can help America get its sense of purpose back.
Emphasis mine.
Let’s ignore the silliness about Apollo to Mars. What in the world is he talking about? Who has gotten a “handout”? If he’s referring to Elon Musk, he has been delivering specified milestones on a fixed price, at a very low cost to the taxpayer relative to most other NASA human spaceflight activities. Why is that a “handout” but billions of dollars in cost-plus payments to Lockheed Martin (among others), who fund his Lexington Institute (among others) is not? And if he is referring to Elon, who are the others (note he used the plural)? How about Boeing and CST, out of Houston? Is that a “rich California businessman”?
And what does he mean by “updating old technology”? Does mean like building rockets and capsules based on Apollo designs, and thirty-year-old Shuttle hardware, and then planning to use the horrifically expensive results for the next half century, as Mike Griffin planned with Constellation? Is he completely bereft of a sense of irony and hypocrisy?
Why does anyone take people like him seriously?
Me, Too
What Santa wants for Christmas.
Actually the Worst.Congress.Evah did give me a Christmas present yesterday — they (finally) adjourned. I wish though, that I’d gotten it for my birthday, in January 2009.
Me, Neither
“Why I don’t want an iPad for Christmas.” I’m pretty sure my next phone will be a Droid, and if I get a tablet, it will be as well.
Politifact?
…or PolitiFiction?
In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact’s seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.
…As long as the press corps is nominating “lies of the year,” ours goes to the formal legislative title of ObamaCare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For a bill that in reality will raise health costs and reduce patient choice, the name recalls Mary McCarthy’s famous line about every word being a lie, including “the” and “and.”
I’ll go with politifiction.
[Update a while later]
Pere Suderman isn’t impressed, either:
If you had to rank the biggest political lie of 2010, what would it be? The utter horse-hockey that we’ve somehow proven that the stimulus created a zillion-billion long-term jobs and acted like a fiscal-policy Powerbar for the economy? The president’s oft-repeated and flatly untrue statement that under the health care overhaul, if you like your doctor or your health plan, you can keep it? The contrived justifications for describing ObamaCare as indisputably “fiscally responsible” despite a hotly contested and thoroughly gamed budgetary scoring process? How about the administration’s repeated but totally false claim that the CBO backs up its Medicare accounting, when in fact the CBO has said that the administration’s numbers constitute a form of “double counting”?
Say what you will about the rest of its accomplishments (or lack thereof), but the White House has proven a remarkably consistent and high-quality bullshit factory this year. The way they churn this stuff out, you might think they’d be up for an award! No such luck…
PolitiFiction.
Abolish The FCC?
I agree that it has outlived its usefulness. But when was the last time we actually got rid of a government agency? The Interstate Commerce Commission, almost three decades ago?
Don’t Strangle The Baby In The Cradle
Dave Huntsman has an interesting comment at this article about merging ESMD and SOMD:
Many (not all) in the ‘Code M world’ – including the relevant NASA centers, and some managers at NASA Headquarters – are viscerally opposed to the establishment of a competitive, American-led creation of new commercial space industries. Some literally see them as competition to the old Apollo way of doing things, which they consider sacrosanct. Others have been told – falsely – that expansion of American industry into economically-sustainable space industries that lead the world somehow means the death of human spaceflight and exploration. Not only is that not the case, sustainable human space exploration – space exploration with humans we can actually afford to keep doing – is in the long run dependent on the creation of economically sustainable space industries to support them, particularly for routine operations.
As Elon Musk has said, if you don’t do things that pay the bills you won’t achieve the ultimate objective of humanity’s expansion into space. The cutting edge far exploration items – to asteroids, Mars, etc. – are always cost sinks; after all, even Thomas Jefferson failed in his effort to get Lewis’ and Clark’s explorations to pay for themselves in the nearer-term, and he didn’t have to build rockets to go up the Missouri. That is why it is absolutely incumbent that NON-cutting edge far exploration items, such as LEO trucking and taxi services, followed by space servicing and refueling services, absolutely require economic viability and the development of sustainable industries. That will be threatened if these cost-sharing partnerships with industry is lumped in with the NASA Code M organization, whose very history has never been intended to work for anything other than those human space programs that NASA totally funds, owns, and operates.
Let’s consider re-creating Code M for the shuttle transition, space station, and NASA exploration (beyond Earth) functions. But in my view it would be a violation of our direction via Law and National Space Policy to subsume innovative commercial space development and partnerships to some of the same folks who are working so furiously behind the scenes to prevent sustainable space from ever happening. The Apollo-style Code M organization needs to be separate from innovative commercial space development partnerships.
I hope that Charlie and Lori understand the nature of the saboteurs that persist in the bureaucracy at the centers and HQ.