Tag Archives: Government Spending

Podcasts

Why Obama’s public option health care plan is a bad deal for young adults

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This podcast explains how Obama’s health care reform bill would require young people to buy insurance, while simultaneously preventing medical insurers from reducing their premium amounts in accordance with the lower health risks of young people.

The MP3 file is here.

The guest being interviewed is Aaron Yelowitz.

Bio excerpt:

  • Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Economics, 1994.
  • B.A., High Honors, University of California, Santa Barbara, Business Economics, 1990.
  • Department of Economics, University of Kentucky, Associate Professor, July 1, 2001-present.
  • Associate Editor, Journal of Public Economics, January 2004-present.

And you can read the paper that is being discussed in the podcast.

Excerpt from the abstract:

One of the most interesting questions about the health care overhaul now moving through Congress is how it would affect young adults. That legislation would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would impose price controls on health insurance (“community rating”) that would limit insurers’ ability to offer lower premiums to low-risk enrollees.

Those provisions would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. According to the Urban Institute, many young people could see their premiums double, whereas premiums for older adults could be cut in half.

[…]The irony is that Barack Obama won the presidency with 66 percent of the vote among adults aged 18 to 29. That’s a larger share than any presidential candidate has won in decades. Yet his health care overhaul could impose its greatest burdens on young adults.

This reminds me of young unmarried women voting overwhelmingly against marriage and family by electing big government socialists like Obama. This is not to even mention the 10.2% unemployment rate, which is worse for younger workers, as well as the massive national debt that will have to be paid for by young people. Why is that young people are so ignorant of economics that they vote against their own best interests?

Note: The Obama health care plan is also a bad deal for elderly patients on Medicare, since he is cutting 500 billion dollars from Medicare.

News

Feds give $888,000 to Chicago public schools to teach Arabic language

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Story here from the Chicago Sun-Times. (H/T Verum Serum)

Excerpt:

The Chicago public schools will expand its Arabic-language program to three more high schools, thanks to a three-year, $888,000 federal grant announced this morning.

[…]Already, Arabic is offered at three Chicago high schools — Lincoln Park, Roosevelt and Lindblom.

It’s also offered at seven Chicago elementary schools — Durkin Park, Agassiz, Belding, LaSalle Language Academy II, Marquette Tech and Volta.

In all, about 2,000 students take Arabic in Chicago’s schools.

The new federal grant, on top of $1.6 million in state and federal funds the schools already have gotten, will fund the expansion to three additional high schools that have yet to be identified.

Wasteful government spending is the reason why we have 10.2% unemployment. Democrats think that massive federal grants to public schools stimulate the economy. On the other hand, George W. Bush cut taxes by 2.2 trillion, and unemployment dipped down below 5%.

News

Why Obama’s government spending failed to keep unemployment below 8%

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stimulus-vs-unemployment-october-dots

This article from the National Review is awesome. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The odds that the stimulus package would “create or save” millions of jobs, per the administration’s promises, were never good. The government is borrowing enormous amounts of money to pay for the stimulus. That money should be funding job creation in the private sector. Instead, it is going to shore up insolvent spendthrift state governments, to expand Medicaid and unemployment benefits, and to lay the groundwork for an aid-dependent green-energy sector that is going to drain the nation’s resources for years to come.

[…]If we divide the number of dollars spent by the number of jobs the White House claims were saved or created, the result is a cost of $160,000 per job.

[…]America’s private sector is resilient, and it will bounce back. Laying too much of the blame at Obama’s feet risks setting him up to take the credit for the comeback when things inevitably improve. Republicans’ arguments should focus on the long term. Obama’s decision to double-down on the nation’s bad housing bet risks reinflating the real-estate bubble. The new taxes associated with his health-care and energy bills will dampen growth and weaken the recovery. The debt he is piling up has unnerved our creditors, and his spending sprees are distorting the allocation of resources in our economy.

[…]The president just signed yet another extension of unemployment benefits, stretching the eligibility period to nearly two years in some states. The bill funds the additional benefits by extending a payroll tax on employers that was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. In other words, the administration is simultaneously providing incentives for workers not to work and for employers not to hire them.

I wrote before about how government spending cannot create jobs.