Tag Archives: Socialism

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Daughter of senior EU official raped and murdered by Afghan refugee

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Maria Ladenburger, daughter of prominent EU official
Maria Ladenburger, daughter of prominent EU official, killed by Afghan refugee

The UK Daily Mail has the story about a tragic rape and murder that resulted directly from Angela Merkel’s open-borders immigration policy in Germany.

Excerpt:

A teenage Afghan asylum seeker has been arrested in Germany for the rape and murder of the 19-year-old daughter of a senior EU official.

Medical student Maria Ladenburger, who volunteered at a refugee home in her spare time, was found dead in the university city of Freiburg, near the border with Switzerland in mid October.

Her father is Dr. Clemens Ladenburger, a lawyer who works as the right hand man to the legal director of the European Commission.

It is unclear whether she ever met her murderer before he took her life.

The suspect has confessed to the murder, according to police. He was arrested on Friday and will go before the courts next year.

Maria was drowned after being raped, her body found in the River Dreisam on October 16.

[…]David Müller, head of the police’s Special Commission, said at a press conference: ‘Through interviews and a web-based survey, we were able to reconstruct Maria’s final hours.

‘The 19-year-old student had been at a party. By 2.37am, she left the party. Maria then cycled home, as usual.

‘The young woman had been the victim of a sexual offence and a violent crime.’

[…]Police are now trying to establish if he may also be responsible for the death of another girl in the area.

Carolin G., 27, was raped and murdered at the beginning of November while jogging in Endinge, just 18 miles away from Freiburg.

My parents would have killed me if I had been out at 2:37 AM in the morning, much less leaving a party. I’ve never even BEEN to a party filled with 19-year-olds. When I was 19, I was learning computer science and working two jobs.

Anyway, some people tell me that illegal immigrants and refugees from Muslim countries don’t commit crimes at a rate higher than other people. Is that true?

Breitbart News has the numbers from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Excerpt:

While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

Now a lot of those convictions will be related to immigration… what happens when we take those out?

The sentencing rate is still higher than normal:

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.6 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.

I don’t like it when supporters of open borders and taking in refugees make pious statements in public so they can feel good about themselves.  I think that they being generous with other people’s money, taking risks with other people’s lives. So often, politicians love to be generous with illegal immigrants and Muslim refugees. But they don’t pay the taxes for the education, health care, and increased law enforcement. Private sector employers and their workers pay those taxes.

I am very much in favor of expanding and streamlining immigration processes for skilled immigrants, especially for areas where there is more demand than supply. But I am not in favor of letting in refugees or other unskilled immigrants, especially if they will be eligible to collect benefits paid for by other working taxpayers.

The Daily Signal explains what the cost is:

On average, a nonelderly adult immigrant without a high school diploma entering the U.S. will create a net fiscal cost (benefits received will exceed taxes paid) in both the current generation and second generation. The average net present value of the fiscal cost of such an immigrant is estimated at $231,000, a cost that must be paid by U.S. taxpayers.

[…]Converting a net present value figure into future outlays requires information on the exact distribution of costs over time. That data is not provided by the National Academies.

However, a rough estimate of the future net outlays to be paid by taxpayers (in constant 2012 dollars) for immigrants without a high school diploma appears to be around $640,000 per immigrant over 75 years. The average fiscal loss is around $7,551 per year (in constant 2012 dollars).

Slightly more than 4 million adult immigrants without a high school diploma have entered the U.S. since 2000 and continue to reside here. According to the estimates in the National Academies report, the net present value of the future fiscal costs of those immigrants is $920 billion.

I think we need to draw a distinction between giving voluntarily to charity, and having money forcibly taken by a secular government to give to people whose votes they want to buy. Charity is Biblical. Taxing one group in order to buy the votes of others is socialism.

You can’t be “generous” by forcing a secular government to tax others to pay for your “generosity”. You can’t be “generous” by allowing innocent people to be raped and murdered for your “generosity”.

News

Communist Cuba’s violent suppression of dissenters under Fidel Castro

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Communism in action: Cuban government arrests dissenter after a beating
Communism in action: Cuban government arrests dissenter after a beating

My mother was watching CNN on Saturday, and she called to tell me that Sanjay Gupta was talking about the great healthcare in Cuba. Now, I know that CNN hires a lot of Marxists like Gupta and Zakaria, but many people may not realize how far left they are, and how that bias affects what they say on air. Let’s see what Cuba is really like using some evidence for a change.

The Daily Signal has the numbers on Cuba’s treatment of dissidents from a respected source:

As for the dissidents, the Obama administration has abandoned them. Many have told me they feel betrayed by our president, and by extension, by the United States. Guillermo Fariñas, especially, has a reason to feel betrayed, as Obama promised him personally at a meeting in 2013 that he would take no step toward re-establishing relations with Cuba without prior consultations with the opposition. This did not happen.

And dissidents have suffered the consequences. Political arrests have intensified since December of 2014. Throughout 2015, there were more than 8,616 documented political arrests in Cuba.

And in 2016? There already had been over 8,505 political arrests during the first eight months, and they are expected to top 10,000. This represents the highest rate of political arrests in decades and nearly quadruples the tally of political arrests throughout all of 2010 (2,074), early in Obama’s presidency.

These figures come from the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which is recognized by Amnesty International, Freedom House, and other major human rights groups.

Shutting down communication with the outside world to cover up the arrests, the torture, the human rights abuses, the poverty, and the horribly ineffective health care:

And because Cuba’s communist leaders cannot allow Cubans to be in free contact with the outside world, internet connectivity has dropped. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has something called the Measuring the Information Society Report, which is the world’s most reliable source of data and analysis on global access to information and communication.

Last year, the International Telecommunication Union dropped Cuba’s ranking to 129 from 119. This means that Cuba actually has lower internet connectivity than some of the world’s most infamous suppressors of the internet, including Zimbabwe (which is 127), Syria (which is 117), Iran (91), China (82), and Venezuela (72).

What about Cuba’s health care system and economy? Didn’t Castro’s communist reforms make that better?

Investors Business Daily explains:

Before the revolution, Cuba had the 13th-lowest infant mortality rate in the world. It was lower than France, Belgium and West Germany. Today, it ranks about 40th. That still looks respectable, until you consider how it was accomplished: Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. At the first sign of any trouble when a woman is carrying a baby, it is aborted — regardless of the parents’ wishes.

That’s why their infant mortality rate isn’t even worse.

But surely health care for all is a major accomplishment, right?

No. As has been noted in many other places, Cuba has three separate health care systems. One for paying customers from places like the U.S., who go to Cuba for discount treatments of cosmetic surgery and the like.

There’s another for Cuba’s ruling Communist elite, also a good system. This is the health care system visiting journalists are taken to see, and that they later glowingly report on.

But there’s still another system for the rest — the average Cubans. It is abysmal, and even that might understate how bad it is.

“Cubans are not even allowed to visit those (elite) facilities,” according to the Web site The Real Cuba. “Cubans who require medical attention must go to other hospitals, that lack the most minimum requirements needed to take care of their patients.”

It goes on: “In addition, most of these facilities are filthy and patients have to bring their own towels, bed sheets, pillows, or they would have to lay down on dirty bare mattresses stained with blood and other body fluids.”

As for doctors, well, they make an average of about $25 to $35 a month. Many have to work second jobs to make ends meet, using substandard equipment. Drug shortages are rife. As a result, one of Cuba’s ongoing problems is that doctors leave as soon as they can for other countries, where they can make a decent living.

The country has over 30,000 doctors working overseas officially. Why? Out of kindness? No. The Castro regime earns an estimated $2.5 billion a year in hard currency from doctors working elsewhere, which means Cuba’s poor must go without decent care or access to doctors.

As for “universal literacy,” please. Primary and secondary schools are little more than Marxist indoctrination centers, where students are taught only what the state wants them to know. That’s how they keep people quiet.

Then there’s  Cuba’s higher education, in which “universities are training centers for bureaucrats, totally disconnected from the needs of today’s world. To enter the best careers and the best universities, people must be related to the bureaucratic elites, and also demonstrate a deep ideological conviction,” notes Colombian journalist Vanesa Vallejo, of the PanAm Post, a Latin American news site.

Nor is it “free.” In fact, those who graduate from college must work for a number of years for the government at a substandard wage of $9 a month. They are in effect slave labor. As with most “free” things the socialists offer, the price is very high and nonnegotiable.

In sum, Castro took a healthy country and made it sick. Those who glorify him deserve the scorn they get for propagating such a longstanding lie.

Regarding health care in Cuba, here are a couple of videos that were smuggled out of the actual health care system used by  ordinary Cubas:

And:

So, that’s the truth about Cuba – very different from what the regime itself and its wealthy supporters in Hollywood and the far left mainstream media want you to believe.

I’d really like to read what Mary Anastasia O’Grady has to say about the death of Castro in the Wall Street Journal, and I hope she writes about this story soon. UPDATE: Here it is, finally.

News

Half of Obamacare enrollees are skipping doctor visits to save money

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Can you cover more people for more conditions and have costs go down?
Can you cover more people for more conditions and have costs go down?

(click for larger image)

Obamacare enrollees are covered, but they’re not really covered, because they can’t afford doctor visits.

The Washington Free Beacon explains.

Excerpt:

Half of Obamacare enrollees are skipping doctor visits to save money, according to a report from GfK, a market research group.

Only 33 percent of the general insured population is doing the same, according to the report.

“Even before the news broke that the cost of mid-range health insurance from the Affordable Care Act exchanges will rise about 25%, millions of Obamacare customers were already skipping doctor visits to save money,” the study said. “With mid-level exchange premiums set to rise about 25%, more cutbacks in care seem likely.”

Obamacare enrollees were asked what steps they had taken in the past year to lower their health care costs.

Thirty-six percent of Obamacare enrollees cut back on doctor visits even when they were sick, 22 percent skipped preventive care, 12 percent reduced lab testing, and 12 percent delayed surgery.

“Exchange users with lower incomes (below $25,000 a year) are turning to urgent care facilities and ‘minute clinics’ in huge numbers; 27% have done so in the past year, compared to just 12% of the overall [Affordable Care Act] customer population,” the study says.

“Visiting one of these outlets is often appealing to people who may have not formed lasting relationships with providers, especially as costs can be substantially lower,” the study said.

[…]“As we approach another enrollment period for the ACA, it’s important to understand why the exchanges are failing,” said Brian Blase, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. “The law made insurance way too unattractive for relatively young and healthy people who are largely choosing to pay the individual mandate tax penalty instead of purchasing coverage.”

“Only those who receive giant subsidies are signing up for coverage in significant numbers, and many are gaming the new rules to enroll only when they need expensive medical services,” he said. “This year’s huge premium increases combined with much less choice of plans for Americans across the country demonstrate the law is wrecking the individual market for insurance and needs large scale revision.”

Yes, this is the so-called Obamacare death spiral, which has older sicker people signing up for health care, but young healthy people not signing up because there is no value for them. When only sick people sign up, the costs go up, because the payouts are higher. It’s like having an auto insurance plan that is only used by those with bad driving records. Naturally, the costs will be higher, and the only way to balance it out is to force people who drive safely and don’t make any claims to join anyway, and pay for something they won’t use.

Obama’s solution to this problem of young people not signing up  is to punish them with fines.

CBS News explains:

Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday.

To make matters worse, the penalty for individuals and families who did not have health insurance in 2016 will also nearly double as compared to fees for 2015 tax returns when revisions to the Affordable Care Act go into effect.

According to the IRS, shared responsibility payments will jump to $695 per adult and $347.50 per child, with the family maximum not to exceed $2,085 or 2.5 percent income above the filing threshold. That’s up from $325 per adult and $162.50 per child, with a maximum of $975 per family for the 2015 tax year.

What were the young people thinking when they voted for a deal like this? Well, they weren’t thinking at all – that’s the problem. Their brains don’t work, so they just do whatever is popular. They don’t have enough real life experience to separate the celebrity worship from the economics. And they don’t respect the judgment of those who are older and wiser.