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Democrats holding up Republican bill that gets tough on sex-trafficking

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Life News reports:

Senate Democrats today continued to block a bill to help human trafficking victims because the measure won’t pay for their abortions.

The legislation passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee without any problems but, now that it’s slated for consideration on the floor of the U.S. Senate, pro-abortion activists are raising a stink about how funds for restitution for human trafficking victims won’t pay for abortions. The objection is offensive to victims of human trafficking and millions of girls and young women around the world who are victimized by it, putting abortion ahead of meeting their needs.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a pro-life Republican, is the lead sponsor of the measure to help human trafficking victims and aides to pro-abortion Democrats apparently missed the fact, during the committee hearing, that Cornyn crafted the bill in a way to help women as opposed to making Americans pay for abortions.

This week, Senate Democrats falsely claimed Republicans snuck in the language in the bill to prevent abortion funding. Challenging them on their assertion Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell offers Democrats a chance to vote on the abortion funding provision if they were that opposed to keeping the provision in the bill. Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid objected.

“It’s unconscionable that Democrats would put politics above such important legislation. The politics have to stop,” Sen. John Thune said in response.

Leading pro-life groups are taking Democrats to task for putting abortion funding ahead of sex trafficking victims.

In the video above, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst explains the situation:

First, thank you all for coming today, and Senator Cornyn thank you very much for working so diligently on this legislation. Again, thank you for being here.

As the mother of three beautiful daughters, and as someone who as a young woman volunteered my time, my energy at a women’s crisis shelter that dealt with many of these forms of abuse, this is important legislation. This legislation is near and dear to my heart. So it is very disheartening to see the partisan politics, the political theatrics that we are seeing this week with this important legislation. Human trafficking cannot be allowed to continue. It shouldn’t exist. And this is essentially modern-day slavery.We have the opportunity to do something about it, and we must do something about it.

Senate Democrats in the Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to bring this bill forward, and as my colleagues have stated the language that is found in this bill is nothing new. This is language that has existed for 39 years. So essentially, what they are saying is, ‘It was hidden, it was hidden.’ It was not hidden. This is language that again has been in existence. We’re maintaining the status quo with this legislation.

So Senate Democrats, either failed to read that bill or again they are just playing partisan politics and political theatrics with an important issue. Again, as a mother, as a grandmother, we cannot allow our children to be victimized. And now that we have the opportunity to do something about it, we must push this issue, and we must bring this bill forward for a vote. I want to emphasize again that Senate Democrats voted unanimously to bring this bill out of committee, and as stated earlier, there were 10 co-sponsors, Democratic co-sponsors of this bill.

So, I am imploring our Senate Democrats to stop the theatrics. Let’s take the opportunity to do something very important for not only our nation’s children, but other children that are being brought into the United States. Let’s enforce these laws, let’s bring forward stiffer penalties, and let’s protect our children. Again, thank you for being here this afternoon.

Democrat legislators vote against bills that say that taxpayer-funding should not be used to fun abortions. If Democrats have to choose between prosecuting sex-traffickers and taxpayer funding of abortion, they’ll take the latter.

Mentoring

Tad Hopp accumulates six figures of college debt, wants taxpayer bailout

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From: theawkwardyeti.com
From: theawkwardyeti.com

Here’s an interesting editorial from a “Christian” left blog. (H/T Acton Institute via Lindsay)

The author, Tad Hopp is graduating a PCUSA seminary – an extremely liberal, left-wing denomination.

He writes:

I graduated college in 2007.

[…] I majored in English, not exactly what most people consider a ‘marketable’ or ‘practical’ degree…

[…]I went to a somewhat expensive private school…

[…]I did what many students in their last year of high school do: I went to the school where I felt I was being called…

[…]I do not regret my four years at my undergraduate institution one bit.

[….]When I graduated college, I owed nearly $50,000 in student loan debt and was unemployed for almost six months before I finally found a low-paying office job.

[…]“Can’t find a job? Well, you should have majored in something more ‘practical’, like economics or business or medicine.” Yeah, that would be great…if those were the subjects where my skills and passions lie. They’re not.

[…]I felt called to go to seminary.

[…]I will graduate seminary with close to six figures worth of student loan debt.

Let’s take stock of what he’s said so far:

  • he studied English, a language that he already spoke, which has one of the lowest employment rates
  • he was warned by people who knew something about earning and saving money not to study English
  • he went to a school he couldn’t afford to go to, and he graduated with $50,000 in debt
  • he went to seminary, another subject that doesn’t pay, and added another $50,000 or so of debt
  • he says that he doesn’t have to study subjects that lead to a career because he isn’t “passionate” about them
  • he “followed his heart” by going to the school that he had mystical, emotional, intuitions about = “calling”

My advice to Tad at this point would be for him to take the Bible seriously when it says this:

2 Thessalonians 3:10:

10 For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.

And 1 Timothy 5:8:

8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Now, for a Bible-believing Christian, these are inerrant and cannot be denied. But we have to go outside the Bible and learn how the world really works in order to figure out how to achieve those stated goals. Why should anyone hire us? What is working really about?

But even before looking at economics, Tad needs to push away all his friends who tell him to “follow his heart” and stick close by his friends who understand economics, who have jobs already, who have savings already, and so on. Don’t look for advice from dreamers, you look to advice from doers – people who can read the times, run the numbers and who have demonstrated the ability to create plans that work to achieve results that please God. When it comes to planning about the future, look at the past accomplishments. Weaving a happy narrative sounds nice, but judge future predictions based on past performance.

I would recommend that Tad read an economist like Thomas Sowell, especially on work, prices, etc., and realize that work means providing value to others. It then follows that he is obligated by the Bible to NOT “follow his heart”, but to instead do something that offers value to his fellow man. Prices are a way of determining what is most valued by your fellow man. And we know what careers have the highest value:

Petroleum Engineering – Starting Salary: $103,000 / Mid-Career Salary: $160,000
Actuarial Mathematics – Starting Salary: $58,700 / Mid-Career Salary: $120,000
Nuclear Engineering – Starting Salary: $67,600 / Mid-Career Salary: $117,000
Chemical Engineering – Starting Salary: $68,200 / Mid-Career Salary: $115,000
Aerospace Engineering – Starting Salary: $62,800 / Mid-Career Salary: $109,000
Electrical Engineering – Starting Salary: $64,300 / Mid-Career Salary: $106,000
Computer Engineering – Starting Salary: $65,300 / Mid-Career Salary: $106,000
Computer Science – Starting Salary: $59,800 / Mid-Career Salary: $102,000
Physics – Starting Salary: $53,100 / Mid-Career Salary: $101,000
Mechanical Engineering – Starting Salary: $60,900 / Mid-Career Salary: $99,700

English and seminary are dead last on the list – he literally could not have chosen worse than he did. I don’t mind if a woman studies these things, but Tad is a man – he has the Biblical obligation to be the primary provider, as we saw in the verse above.

More Tad:

Is the PCUSA doing anything to address this crisis?

[…]What has our government done to address this issue?

[…]I, like so many in my generation, voted for Obama…

[…]It seems to me that we’ve bought into the lie that student loan debt is brought on by the individual person…

[…]You know what I think might stimulate the economy? Automatically cancelling every single outstanding student loan!

[…]If we can spend $640 billion dollars on defense spending, why can’t we find the money to better support public education?

It’s important to understand that an English degree and a seminary degree do not prepare a person to make statements on economics and government. Tad has never studied these things, has no experience in them. He cannot state what the impact of his suggestions would be to all groups, i.e. – he cannot answer “and then what happens?” for every impacted group. Thinking economically is a valuable skill, but as Tad’s personal life shows, it’s not an area he is really knowledgeable about. But he wants to shift money from defense spending (which he knows nothing about) so that he can have a personal bailout. I personally doubt that taxpayers would be better served by paying for his English degree and liberal seminary degree than they would be if a peace-loving democracy could project power abroad to deter aggression from countries like North Korea, Iran, Russia, China and Syria.

Here is the solution to Tad’s problems:

  • we need to put Tad to work in a minimum wage job and confiscate his entire salary, until his loans are paid off.
  • we need to put Tad on a watch list such that he is never allowed to borrow money from anyone ever again.
  • once Tad’s loans are paid off, he should be taxed on his future earnings at the top tax rate for the rest of his life. The money we tax from him can fund education – that’s what he said he wanted.
  • Tad and his household should all be barred from collecting any money for unemployment, welfare or other social programs.

That’s the only bailout Tad should get. It would actually be in his best interest that he encounter real life as quickly as possible, because the longer he waits, the harder it’s going to be for him to recover to independence. He needs to stop his crazy retreat from adult responsibilities, and start working and saving now. I would say that at this point, marriage and parenting is out of the question for him (in another post, he comes out as gay, so that also complicates things). And he can thank the politics of the secular left for marriage and family being less affordable now, thanks to laws like Obamacare, which raised the cost of health care by thousands of dollars. I found it interesting that he actually did work at some point but he mocked the job as a “dead-end job” – as if it was beneath him.

I know some of you will be thinking, “but God called him things and so of course God is going to bail him out with $100,000 for his student loans”. But the thing is, God doesn’t usually work like that. First, I don’t accept that he is a Christian at all. Second, just because you have feelings that your plan will work, that isn’t a calling. The truth is that you certainly can assess the feasibility of things that you feel “called” to do, and if the plan looks crazy, then don’t do it. If you find yourself at odds with wise, practical people when explaining your calling to them, then you’re probably doing it wrong.

News

We have single-payer health care already in the VA system – is it working?

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VA health care wait times
VA health care wait times

This is health care policy expert Sally Pipes, writing in Investors Business Daily.

She writes:

A new report from the Government Accountability Office has confirmed that the Department of Veterans Affairs can’t take care of those it’s supposed to serve.

The GAO has placed the VA’s health system on the “high risk” list of federal programs that are vulnerable to “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” The agency is still struggling to recover from an 8-month-old internal audit that revealed that returning soldiers had to wait more than 90 days for care. Some patients died while waiting.

The GAO’s findings apply far beyond the VA. The agency’s problems — which include long wait-times and out-of-control costs — demonstrate what happens in any government-run, single-payer health care system.

The VA’s failings ought to give pause to the liberal politicians and policy analysts who would love to introduce single-payer health care for all Americans. But they don’t seem to have heeded the GAO report. Within a week of its release, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., called for “Medicare for All.”

Champions of socialized medicine used to point to the VA as proof that single-payer worked. In 2011, economist Paul Krugman called it “a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform.” In a 2009 debate with me, Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt said that there’s an example of a single-payer system in the U.S. that works — the VA.

The VA offers lessons about health reform — just not the ones single-payer’s proponents have in mind.

Defenders of government-run health care claim that it will control costs by cutting out middlemen such as insurance companies. The evidence shows otherwise. According to the GAO, the VA budget more than doubled between 2002 and 2013 even as enrollment increased by less than a third.

Single-payer’s “guarantee” of access to high-quality care is a myth, too.

“Despite these substantial budget increases,” the GAO report says, “for more than a decade there have been numerous reports … of VA facilities failing to provide timely health care.”

Over the last decade, more than 63,000 veterans have been unable to get a doctor’s appointment. At least 40 veterans have died because of long waits.

Things aren’t likely to get better anytime soon. The VA has yet to act on more than 100 GAO recommendations for improving care.

Last summer, lawmakers allocated $10 billion to a program intended to reduce wait times by permitting veterans to see private doctors outside the VA system. So far, the agency has only authorized 31,000 vets to seek private care — out of a possible 8.5 million.

That has to change — 88% of veterans say that they want the ability to choose where they receive their care.

However, there is one military person who is getting health care – convicted traitor Bradley Manning. He’s getting sex-change surgery while he is in jail for leaking national security secrets to our enemies. He won’t have to wait at all for his health care. This is what happens when you take money out of your wallet, give it to the government, and then hope that when you get sick, someone in the government will decide that you are worthy of treatment. Which you aren’t, unless they want your vote.

It’s not just the VA health care system – government-run health care doesn’t work in other places:

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service, for instance, is notorious for denying patients everything from certain cancer medications to hip replacements.

The program is also financially unsustainable. According to its own medical director, Bruce Keogh, “if the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not fit for the future.”

In Canada’s single-payer system, the average wait time between referral from a general practitioner and the actual receipt of treatment by a specialist was more than four months in 2014. That’s nearly double the wait time of two decades ago.

The Canadian system is the one that Democrats want to emulate – but Canada’s rich left-wing politicians come here when they want care. They don’t want to wait in line. Why should we want to wait in line? We need to prefer consumer-driven health care over government-controlled health care.