Category Archives: Political Commentary

ObamaCare Costs

Continue to grow.

This is an illustration of a pet peeve, though. I hate misleading scaling of graphs and bar charts. Because they chose to use $900 as a baseline, it makes it appear that the estimates have increased by more than an order of magnitude over two years, when in fact they have only doubled. It seems to me that doubling is bad enough without playing games with graphics.

The US Economy

…is not doing fine:

Earlier this year, the Obama White House predicted the economy would grow 3% in 2012. Today’s GDP report shows that ain’t going to happen. The Commerce Department said the economy grew at an anemic 1.5% annual rate from April through June, after a revised 2.0% in the first quarter. It now seems likely the economy will be lucky to grow at 2% for the entire year. And that’s after growing just 1.8% last year.

Check out the comparison between the Reagan recovery and the Obama “recovery.”

At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Obama built that.

Sequestration Impacts On NASA

I missed the talk, but at the conference yesterday morning, NASA’s chief of staff, apparently said not to worry about it:

“If you talk to the leadership in the administration or Congress, most people believe it’s not going to happen,” said NASA chief of staff David Radzanowski in response to a question on the subject after his keynote address at the NewSpace 2012 Conference in Santa Clara, California, Thursday morning. “They’re confident because the alternative is not good policy.”

Phew. Well that’s a relief. Because as we all know, nothing ever happens in Washington that results in bad policy.

“You Didn’t Build That”

The policy consequences.

As Glenn says:

The key policy implication is that if he can convince enough people that you didn’t earn your success, he’ll face less opposition when he tries to take the fruits of your success for himself. And that’s what this whole “you didn’t build it” thing is about. I’m not taking your property away — it was really mine all along!

Yup.