Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Barack Obama’s claim to save or create 150000 jobs falsified by FactCheck.org

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Obama claim that his socialist policies that attack “greedy corporations” and “the rich” are actually increasing employment rates. Now, that seems to be impossible for rational people to believe, and FactCheck.org confirms that intuition. It is not possible for socialist policies such as card check, higher taxes, increased spending, more regulation, etc. to create more jobs than are lost from the changes.

Obama’s claim was:

At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.”

That’s what he learned to believe at Harvard in his marxist rap sessions with the radical students and professors.

But how does the world really work?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week.

So what 150,000 jobs was Obama talking about?

It turns out the president’s claim is really an estimate of what his economic advisers think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence of its actual effects.

But how does the White House respond to the falsification of their propaganda by reality?

We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.”

So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.

This is the result of voting by people who know more about the lives of celebrities than they know about economics. Imagine how surprised these Democrat voters are to find out that the 1 hour spent voting was not enough time to have thought anything through. Some of them thought that Obama was better on pro-life issues and government spending than McCain for example.

Remember, Democrats caused this recession and Republicans tried to stop it.

Polemics

Why Democrat policies discourage men from marrying, part 3

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This article is the third of a three-part series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage and child-rearing. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

How no-fault divorce discourages men from marrying

This time we’ll look at my favorite argument against marriage. Today’s article is from Dr. Stephen Baskerville, author of the amazing book “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family”. I own two copies, one for me and one to lend out.

Let’s get a look at the problem posed to marriage by the Democrat policy of no-fault divorce:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

When I was a student in graduate school, I used to hate going out the door and leaving my pet parrot behind with my brother. I did not believe then, and do not now, that anyone in the world is capable of taking care of my bird except me. I felt awful leaving the house, and I would call home between classes just to check on him. That is how parents feel.

I could go on and on about the way that I have bonded with that little creature. And this is basically why marriage is a virtual impossibility to me, given the divorce laws enacted by Democrats and their special interest groups, (trial lawyers, feminists, academic elites, etc.). I do not think I could survive being separated from my children for years by lawyers and courts.

To justify this, the divorce machinery has generated hysteria against parents so inflammatory that few dare question it: child abuse, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support”–all propagated by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, with federal funding. The accused parent loses his children and is abandoned by friends, family members, parishioners, and co-workers–all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

Each of these figures is largely a hoax. There is no evidence of large numbers of fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Divorce courts separate parents from their children, with false accusations as a rationalization.

Child abuse and domestic violence have no precise definition. They are not adjudicated as assault, and accused parents do not enjoy the constitutional protections of criminal defendants. Allegations are “confirmed” not by juries but by judges or social workers. Domestic “violence” need not be violent or even physical. Official definitions include “extreme jealousy” and “constant criticizing.”

Child abuse is itself the creation of welfare bureaucracies. An intact family is the safest place for women and children, since child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes from which the father has been removed. Britain’s Family Education Trust reports that children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family. Domestic violence too is far more likely with the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet trumped-up accusations are rampant in divorce courts, usually to eliminate fathers. Elaine Epstein of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases, a trend documented in the Illinois Bar Journal, Yale Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and others.

The principal impediment to child abuse is thus the father. “The presence of the father placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes a study in Adolescent and Family Health. By eliminating fathers, officials pose as the solution to the problem they themselves create. Appalling as it sounds, we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

And it’s not just the separation, the legal fees, the false allegations and the criminal record. It’s the fact that I would be driven into poverty by the courts.

The “deadbeat dad” is another creation of divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have voluntarily abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as one attorney writes, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Originally justified to recover welfare costs, child support has become an entitlement for all mothers, regardless of their behavior, and a subsidy on middle-class divorce. It allows the mother–simply by divorcing–to confiscate her husband’s income. It is tax-free to the recipient, and nonpayment means incarceration without trial. The Journal of Socio-Economics notes that child support serves as an “economic incentive for middle-class women to seek divorce.” Economist Robert Willis calculates that one-fifth to one-third of child support payments are used for children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent.

State governments also generate revenue from child support, giving them a financial incentive to make it onerous and to encourage divorce. Federal taxpayers subsidize this family destruction scheme with about $3 billion annually. Officials have admitted that the arrearages are far beyond the parents’ ability to pay.

Government’s divorce apparatus has become a machine for destroying families, seizing children, and incarcerating parents without trial. It is the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.

So, the creation of no-fault divorce, an intrusion by the state on private contracts, makes marriage impossible for rational men. The stakes are just too high to be taking chances.

You can hear Dr. Baskerville on the radio with Dennis Prager and Milt Rosenberg in podcasts linked here.A more complete version of the article can be found here in Touchstone Magazine. I highly recommend the more complete version. If you are a single man, or you have male children, you really need to read it. Dr. Baskerville wrote recently about marriage and the Christian church here.

This series on Democrat’s opposition to marriage and family is now complete. If you absolutely, positively have to have more on marriage, then you can read one of my most popular posts about an ideal marriage I know about, or some guest posts from my very happily married friend Andrew on marriage, here and here.

Commentary

Barack Obama wants to control whether you can pay for your own medical care

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Yes, privatized health care is such a bad, bad thing. Health care is so much better in Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam.

Really? Here is a post that begs to differ by Betsy McCaughey on National Review. (H/T Commenter ECM)

Here is a dose of reality, for those who voted for the Democrats:

President Obama pledges to provide health insurance for 46 million uninsured people and, at the same time, restrain the nation’s total health spending. Covering the uninsured is a worthy goal, but it will not save money: Once they are covered, they will use 70 percent more health services overall than before, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

So where will the promised savings come from? The truth is that Americans who already have insurance will get less care.

Well, I know this will come as shock to Democrats who based their vote for Obama on Michael Moore movies depicting health care in Cuba, but government-run heath care means skyrocketing costs and waiting lists for treatment.

Health spending is higher in the U.S. than in Europe not because the American medical profession is less efficient, but because Americans have higher incomes: “The more people have, the more of it they tend to spend on health care,” wrote David Blumenthal, a Harvard Medical School professor. Blumenthal was recently chosen by Pres. Barack Obama to be national coordinator of health information technology, a key position. In his academic writings, Blumenthal has long advocated government limits on how much health care you can get.

Patients will be dissatisfied, he admits. “Government controls on health care spending are associated with longer waits for elective procedures and reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices,” he conceded in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2001.

You need to understand that people who voted Democrat did so from a position of total ignorance about how the world actually works. They think money grows on trees. They think that “greed” is the only reason why the world isn’t a utopia of equalized of outcomes, regardless of individual choices. Unfortunately, government-run health care is a done deal in the USA.

Legislators slipped the framework for top-down government controls into the stimulus package passed in February. One provision called for computer technology that will “guide” doctors’ decisions about what care is “cost-effective.” Beginning in 2014, Medicare and other federal programs will impose financial penalties on doctors and hospitals who are not “meaningful users” of this system. Private insurers historically have followed Medicare’s lead.

That’s right. Your doctor will be coerced by the federal government to prevent you from spending your own money on your own health care. Instead, the government has decided that your money would be better spent on more valuable things like sex changes, because those are for a Democract special interest group, and you’re not in that group. You’re just a taxpayer, not a victim. No health care for you!

How much leeway will your doctor have to order tests and treatments? It’s hard to say, because the government can make the standard of compliance “more stringent” over time. Blumenthal says his job is not about “just putting machinery in offices.” In fact, it’s about control. In a New England Journal of Medicine article published April 9, just after his appointment to the Obama administration was announced, Blumenthal explained that if electronic technology is to save money, doctors will have to take advantage of “clinical decision support,” a term of art for computers telling doctors what to do. He predicted that “many physicians and hospitals may rebel, petitioning Congress to change the law or just resigning themselves to . . . penalties.”

Yes, I know this is hard for your People-magazine-reading Democrats to believe, but socialism leads to a loss of liberty. Yes! Isn’t that crazy? If you voted for Obama, you voted for fascism! You voted for the values of the state, as expressed by the ruling elite, to be imposed on the individuals who actually provide the state with capital for their schemes. Surprise!

Government controls on health expenditures will reduce the availability of medical technology, such as MRIs, and cause waits for treatment. Blumenthal says it’s “debatable” whether the timely care Americans currently receive is worth the added price. Ask a cancer patient about waiting, and you’ll get a different answer. Delays lower your chance of survival. For example, women in the U.S are more likely to have regular mammograms than are women elsewhere, according to data from the Commonwealth Fund. Their breast cancer is detected sooner. They are also treated faster and have higher survival rates than women in any other developed country, according to the CONCORD study published in 2008 in Lancet Oncology. These statistics include all American women, not just those with insurance.

Treating cancer is costly. Nancy-Ann De Parle, newly appointed director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said on March 23, “we have to get to a system of keeping people well, rather than treating the sickness.” That would make sense if all disease were preventable. But many cancers and other diseases are linked to genetics or unknown causes. De Parle’s pronouncement echoes the chilling explanation offered by Sir Michael Rawlins, head of Britain’s National Institute of Clinical Effectiveness (NICE), for his nation’s low cancer survival rates. The British National Health Service, he is quoted as saying in the NEJM last November, has to be fair to all patients, “not just the patients with macular degeneration or breast cancer or renal cancer. If we spend a lot of money on a few patients, we have less money to spend on everyone else.”

Isn’t that great? You pay into the system based on the amount of money you earn, and then left-wing activists with degrees in Marxist Studies decide when, or even IF, you will be treated. That is what we have in this country now. And we got it by our incredible ignorance about the way the world works.

And do you know what else gets reduced or eliminated in government-run health care?

Also, built into the U.S. health-care tab is research for cures. Five hospitals in the U.S. do more clinical trials than any entire country in Europe, including the U.K., the McKinsey Global Institute reported in December. If someone in your family has an incurable disease, you start each day hoping for a breakthrough. Yet in his writings, Blumenthal identifies innovation as a culprit driving up health spending.

The health provisions in the stimulus legislation were rushed through without discussion. “Speed is essential,” Blumenthal wrote in the NEJM last November. “Bill Clinton waited for nine months to introduce his Health Security Act in 1993, which allowed his opposition to mobilize and defeat him.” This time, he added, a “savvy health advisor” will warn the president, “Hurry up, we’re almost out of time for health reform.”

Now ask yourself. What is the point of producing wealth in a country where your money is confiscated to pay for other people who live risky lives and never pay anything into the system. Is work worth it? Is prudent living worth it? Only the suckers produce wealth and live clean, in Obama’s socialist utopia. Ignorance of economics is going to mean death for many Americans. And Democrats don’t care. They want everyone to be “equal”, regardless of individual choices.

UPDATE: John Lott posts that Obama thinks that US taxpayers should give up 63 billion dollars to pay for health care abroad.

Excerpt from MSNBC:

The Obama administration wants the United States to spend $63 billion over the next six years to fight global diseases and provide more aid for prenatal and postnatal care, children’s health and fighting tropical diseases.

“We cannot fix every problem,” Obama said in a written statement Tuesday. “But we have a responsibility to protect the health of our people, while saving lives, reducing suffering, and supporting the health and dignity of people everywhere. America can make a significant difference in meeting these challenges and that is why my administration is committed to act.”

That is more than 10% the total cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in one fell swoop! At least we got good strategic value for the money spent on the wars! What can we expect from this? Obama’s enormous ego to become even more inflated while he spends other people’s money?