Category Archives: Economics

And The Hits Just Keep Coming

Here’s the latest, from AT&T. Bet this will encourage them to hire a lot more people:

AT&T Inc. said it plans to take a non-cash charge of about $1 billion in the first quarter following the passage of the health-care reform bill earlier this week, according to a filing submitted by the company Friday. The telecommunication giant will also evaluate changes to its health care benefits for employees and retirees.

But don’t forget — if you like your plan, you can keep it! As long as the ObamaCare hasn’t wiped it out, of course…

And of course, we can at least count on new jobs for IRS agents.

If You Liked The “Stimulus…”

…you’ll love ObamaCare. Further thoughts here:

In both cases, despite broad public skepticism, the Democrats pushed forward on their bill while the White House intensified its messaging efforts, turning President Obama loose on crowd after friendly crowd in an effort to sell Middle America on a near-trillion-dollar fix whose murky specifics were in flux even as it approached a final vote. Sure enough, in both cases polling found support for the measure slowly creeping up as Congress passed the measure (with virtually no Republican support.) And in the days immediately after each became law, public support even reached scant majorities or pluralities in some places, with many saying that though the bill was imperfect, it sure beat doing nothing at all.

Liberals, covered in the stink of success, are now enjoying that bump. But, as I outline in the piece, if Obamacare’s post-passage public opinion trajectory is anything like that of the stimulus, they shouldn’t get too comfortable. A year out, the popularity of the stimulus falls somewhere between Tiger Woods and John Edwards. — and for similar reasons. The stimulus is widely-perceived to have been a failure because it didn’t keep its promise to stop and reverse job losses. Instead, 49 of 50 states have lost jobs since the stimulus passed.

We’re only a few days out from Obamacare’s passage and already reports are piling in from businesses bracing for tax increases and coverage changes. Wait until it’s been a year.

Maybe they should have read the bill…

A Propellant Depot Architecture

Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing presented their current concepts at a recent NASA in-space servicing workshop. It’s an impressive story of the performance leverage that a depot gives you, even with Constellation. I wonder if the trade includes dry launch in the depot case?

It’s interesting that he shows how they could use a Falcon 9, and an Atlas, but that Delta is unmentioned. Of course, now that ULA has taken over, perhaps Boeing has no institutional bias any more. I assume that this is the story that he’ll be telling at Space Access in a couple weeks, in the panel that we’ll both be on.

I’d like to see more detail on the ops (one of the slides came through as black for me). How do they propose to reuse the GTO/GEO tug? Aerobraking, or impulsively? You might want to check out some of the other papers at the link to Clark Lindsey’s site as well.

Message To Dems

People still don’t like ObamaCare. We’re going to follow your sage advice from yesterday, Mr. President, and “bring it ongo for it.”

And it turns out Nancy Pelosi was right — we had to pass the bill to learn what was in it:

Now that the bill has been safely passed and signed into law, the mainstream press is gradually revealing the scores of delightful provisions tucked away in the 2,700 page abomination: job-killing taxes on businesses, innovation-killing taxes on medical products, suffocating regulations on individual freedoms, wealth-sapping taxes on the middle-class, unprecedented intrusions on personal privacy, unconstitutional mandates on individuals, racially discriminatory preferences for favored groups, a Ponzi-scheme-on-steroids financing mechanism, and spending on a galactic, incomprehensible scale.

Not to mention this:

The health care overhaul will cost U.S. companies billions and make them more likely to drop prescription drug coverage for retirees because of a change in how the government subsidizes those benefits.

In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.

With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.

But “if you like your plan, you’ll be able to keep it.” Right? And just think of all the job creation this will mean. For IRS agents.

Bring it onGo for it,” indeed. For the Democrats, that bill may be the longest suicide note in history.

[Update mid morning]

(Dr.) Paul Hsieh, on the real ObamaCare fraud.

Who Can Blame Them?

The Treasury department sees slim demand for five-year debt.

The socialists may be about to run out of other peoples’ money. Or at least they (and sadly, we) will have to pay a lot more for it.

And as a Californian, this is cheery news:

“Compared to California, I’d rather bet on Iraq,’’ Daher said. “Iraq is a country where there are still bombs going off and people getting murdered, but they are less indebted than the United States. California is likely to have more demands on its resources, and there is no miracle where California is going to have more revenue coming out of the sky. Iraq has prospects for tremendously higher revenues, if they can manage to get their act halfway together, which they seem to be doing.’’

Of course, they don’t have a dysfunctional government.

Greece

…and California. There is only one solution: to cut spending:

That is why, together with Mike Pence and John Campbell, I have offered H.J. Res 79, a Spending Limit Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that would limit spending to one fifth of the economy — our historical spending average since World War II. The limit could only be waived by a declaration of war or by a two-thirds congressional vote.

I hate to put an arbitrary percentage like that in the Constitution, but we have to do something to do get this under control. But it would have to include entitlements, too. There can no longer be such a thing as “non-discretionary” spending.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bruce Bartlett thinks it’s an awful idea, for many reasons (including the one I mentioned). I think that Pence and Hensarling are going to have to go back to the drawing board.

Three Reasons

Health-care deform won’t cut the deficit by one thin dime:

And here’s more from Chris Edwards:

And they’re doing such a bang-up job with TARP:

Barofsky’s report said it is possible the program only benefits half of the three or four million homeowners originally envisioned. Among other data, the program measures trial modifications, a metric Barofsky faulted for being, “essentially meaningless.” The number of permanent modifications could wind up being a small share of the millions of foreclosures filed in this year and during the past two years.

So let’s put them in charge of our health!