Pity the poor Democrats. Here they were counting on scaring seniors about GOP plans to “destroy” Medicare when Rep. Paul Ryan teams up with a prominent Senate Democrat to offer a compromise reform.
From the White House on down, Democrats were wringing their hands this week about the bi-partisan Medicare reform plan offered up by Ryan and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
Their plan would shift Medicare from an open-ended health benefit to one in which the government provides a set amount of money for insurance. Seniors could choose from a variety of private, approved plans, as well as the traditional government-run Medicare.
The subsidy would be based on the second cheapest plan in an area, and if seniors wanted more expansive coverage, they’d have to pay the difference out of their own pockets. The reform would also cap the growth in Medicare.
[…]As one Democratic congressional aide told the New York Times, “this plan gives bipartisan political cover to Ryan and other Republicans against whom we have been waging a very successful political offensive.”
[…]While we prefer Ryan’s original proposal to his current one, it’s to his credit that he realized the political need to produce a bi-partisan compromise. Wyden, too, deserves credit for his willingness to buck his party and sacrifice short-term political gain for much needed long-term reforms.
I took a look at Wyden’s ACU ratings, and he has a 9.23 out 100. I have no idea how Ryan got this guy on board. It’s magic.
Barely half of Americans – a record low – are currently married, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.
Just 51% of adult Americans are married, compared with 72% in 1960.
The median age of first marriage has also hit a new high, of 26.5 for brides and 28.7 for grooms.
Pew said the number of adults co-habitating, single-person households and single parents had meanwhile increased in recent decades.
The study found that 20% of adults today aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59% in 1960.
It is unclear whether they are delaying matrimony or abandoning it altogether.
The analysis also found the number of new marriages in the US had declined by five percentage points between 2009-10.
This may not necessarily have been caused by the economic downturn, since a similar trend has continued in Europe regardless of business cycles.
Pew, a nonpartisan think tank and polling organisation, found the percentage of those Americans who have been married at least once had declined as well – 72% in 2010, from 85% in 1960.
If the trend persists, in a few years less than half of Americans will be married, Pew said.
I think that there are many causes for this problem. One of them has to be that the recession has hit men harder than women, and it is harder for a man to contemplate marriage when he isn’t the provider. A second reason is that the expansion of government makes it less important for women to men to fit the provider role, and men sink to those expectations and concentrate on other things that women want. A third reason is the men are performing poorly in school and earning fewer degrees, probably for the reasons that Christina Hoff Sommers explained in “The War Against Boys” – i.e. – feminism in the schools. A fourth reason would be the decline of prestige associated with marriage – men marry more when they get respect from their wives and society as a whole for doing something challenging and difficult. A fifth reason would be feminism’s drive to push premarital sex as something natural and normal to women – if women offer premarital sex to men as a form of recreation, then men have a big disincentive not to marry – they can already get the sex without having to commit for life to one woman. Furthermore, I don’t think that men feel comfortable about marrying a woman with a lot of previous sex partners – men know, and research confirms, that the higher number of prior sex partners is a huge risk of divorce. A sixth reason is that men’s incomes are taxed more and more, so that the government has more and more authority to interfere with his leadership – e.g. – a man cannot afford to select a private school or a religious school because the government takes the money and he is left with a politicized, failing public school that doesn’t accomplish the goals he wants for his children. A seventh reason would be that divorce is very bad for men’s finances – men have to pay alimony and child support, too.
I was chatting about this post over with ECM, and he said that the easy availability of pornography was another cause for the decline of marriage.
This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts, for sure. Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.
You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.
The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course. The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.
See, this is why we need to vote for lower and lower taxes. The more money that you give the government to spend, the more likely they are going to waste it buying votes and rewarding their supporters and fundraisers. Do you think that a private company could waste money like this, and stay afloat? No way – they have competitors to worry about. If they waste money, then they will go out of business. However, the government can just spend the money with abandon – it just gets added to the national debt. Eventually, the young people, who vote for for Obama in droves, will have to pay the money back. This will be hard for them to do given the fact that many of them are growing up without two parents supporting them, and often without a good education. What a mess. Leave the money in the hands of the private sector schools and private sector job creators – they actually have to care about pleasing customers and reducing wasteful spending.
Let’s do a quick review of more instances of stimulus spending.
WINTERY KNIGHT 