President Barack Obama on Thursday announced a plan to impose a new tax on banks to cover an expected $117 billion shortfall in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The tax would apply to 50 financial institutions, which have assets of more than $50 billion, and would constitute a 0.15 percent tax on the TARP liabilities of these institutions.
However, auto companies General Motors and Chrysler, which are not expected to pay back all of their $66 billion of TARP money, will not be subject to the tax. Also exempted from the tax would be mortgage institutions Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are largely responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008.
What do you suppose that businesses do when the government tells them to pay more taxes? Well, they just pass that on to their consumers.
A mother found by the Family Court to be violent, untruthful, lacking moral values and responsible for the psychological and emotional abuse of her children has been given custody of them.
The father, deemed “principled” and with “much to offer his children”, has been effectively banned from seeing his daughters.
[…]The father… is described by a Family Court judge as no threat to his daughters, a successful parent who is “courteous” and “intelligent”.
The same judge found the mother… abandoned her first daughter at two and spurned the child’s subsequent attempts at reconciliation, had displayed “dreadful”, “cruel” and “malicious” behaviour.
But the judge still ruled that because of time spent apart, the children had become estranged from their father and it was in their interests that “the children spend no time with the father”.
Time spent apart? Why would a loving father willingly spend time apart from his own children?
Bill has not seen his daughters since April and has not spent extended time with them since August 2005.
He says the estrangement was largely a result of false allegations of sexual abuse of the children made against him by his former wife.
The custody ruling in the Family Court last month came after a seven-year battle over access to the girls, now aged nine and 11.
It followed a criminal trial in 2007, when Bill, 55, was cleared of the sexual abuse allegations. The trial judge found them totally false and threw the case out.
The ordeal has cost Bill his home, his job and about $450,000 in lost income and legal costs. He has faced court 70 times to clear his name and try for some form of access to his children.
“It has been a nightmare. All I wanted was to be part of my children’s lives – to try to give them a good start in life,” Bill said.
“But I am denied that because of the malicious way in which my ex-wife has acted and because of the credence the legal system has given her lies and falsehoods.
“The family law system needs wholesale change. There appears to be no testing of evidence in court and it seems that often lies and fabrications are immediately accepted as fact.
“It’s a disgrace and, as far as I know, it doesn’t happen in any other legal sphere.”
Bill’s case follows the case of “Steve” last year, in which the court accepted his good character, but banned him from seeing his daughter for seven years because it was believed the mother would “shut down” emotionally if he were allowed to see her.
In another case last year, a father, “Mick”, was jailed for sending a birthday card to his daughter in breach of a court order and was locked up again for taking a walk in a park – near where, unknown to him, his daughter was playing.
False allegations of sexual abuse are standard operating procedure in divorce courts in order to get custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with the children. The legal stakeholders in the divorce racket have every reason to help to the woman to make these false charges, because the father usually fights for custody, which is what keeps them all employed.
Further study
To find out more about the horrors of feminism and unilateral divorce, consider reading something by Stephen Baskerville and something by Jennifer Roback Morse. This podcast by Jennifer Roback Morse explains some of the threats to traditional marriage – it’s my favorite podcast ever. Women need to do a better job of understanding men, and understanding what has to change to make marriage attractive and appealing to men. That may involve changing laws to make these unfair divorce courts stop doing what they are doing.
One last thing. Most of my readers know that I am chaste, and so I have never been married or divorced. My parents are have been married for 40+ years. None of my immediate family is divorced. And none of my Christian friends are divorced. In fact, I have never experienced a divorce even vicariously by being friends with someone who was going through a divorce. And the point of this is to show you how Christians can become sensitive to an issue just by studying it. And this is what marriage-minded Christians need to do.
Christians need to study to understand the many serious problems that divorce causes for men and children. We should understand how marriage acts as a buffer to state power, thus protecting religious liberty. We should know how feminist policies weaken marriage and parenting. And we should understand how a stable marriage benefits children, and ultimately, society. When Christians inform themselves about these issues, it becomes easier to put ourselves second and act to preserve the marriage. Knowledge binds the will.
What would happen if Obama succeeds in passing a law to force insurance companies to accept customers with pre-existing conditions at the same price as everyone else who doesn’t have pre-existing conditions?
Read this IBD editorial by George Mason University economist Walter Williams. (my second favorite economist)
Excerpt:
Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, and Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, have introduced the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act, which would eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions in all insurance markets. That’s an Obama administration priority.
I wonder whether President Obama and his congressional supporters would go a step further and protect not just patients, but everyone against pre-existing condition exclusions by insurance companies. Let’s look at the benefits of such a law.
A person might save quite a bit of money on fire insurance. He could wait until his home is ablaze and then walk into Nationwide and say, “Sell me a fire insurance policy so I can have my house repaired.” The Nationwide salesman says, “That’s lunacy!” But the person replies, “Congress says you cannot deny me insurance because of a pre-existing condition.”
This mandate against insurance company discrimination would not only apply to home insurance, but auto insurance and life insurance as well. Instead of a wife wasting money on costly life insurance premiums, she could spend that money on jewelry, cosmetics and massages and then wait until her husband kicked the bucket to buy life insurance on him.
Insurance companies don’t stay in business and prosper by being stupid. If Congress were to enact a law eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, what might be expected?
Yeah, that’s why Walter Williams is awesome. And you must read the rest to see how it would apply to medical insurance. Everything sounds good to those who do not ask the most important question in economics: “and then what happens?” And that question cannot be answered with “then I feel good about myself and people like me because I care about the poor”. That question needs to be asked for the forgotten man. The nameless man who is hog-tied into supplying the wealth that gets redistributed by demagogues desperately seeking adulation from the covetous masses.
The problem is that people don’t understand how insurance works. If you have to pay guaranteed claims from people with pre-existing conditions, then the premiums of all those people who don’t have pre-existing conditions will be increased to pay for those claims. Think. Beyond. Stage. One.
The Cato Institute
Consider this podcast from the libertarian Cato Institute, which explains a little more from the point of view of the medical insurance company.
Here a summary of what happens after stage one, to the forgotten man. Medical care costs money to produce. Forcing medical insurance companies to sell care for a pre-existing condition far below the actual cost of providing it will force insurers to drop coverage for those pre-existing conditions. (Or they may drop the doctors who treat those conditions from their network). That is worse for the people with pre-existing conditions. And this is how economic ignorance hurts the very people that the secular leftist do-gooders are trying to help.
Believe me when I tell you that this happens all the time with leftist economic policies. It’s the law of unintended consequences. They think they are helping their preferred victims, they feel better about themselves, but they actually hurt the very people they are trying to help. And by “help” I mean they steal someone else’s money/product/liberty and transfer it to their preferred victims in order to buy votes.
National Review
Now, take a look at this article that ECM sent me from National Review, which talks about Obama’s promise that you will be able to keep the medical coverage you have. Is Obama telling the truth? Can pigs really fly just by sheer belief and pixie dust?
Excerpt:
Obamacare would forbid insurers from basing rates on the individual health of their customers in any community. It also would force issuers to cover people who refuse to buy insurance until they get sick. These and Obamacare’s other complexities and contradictions would make insurance pricier, as would a $149.1 billion, 40 percent excise tax on high-value “Cadillac plans.” Thus, some employers would save money by paying fines after de-insuring employees. Workers who cherish their health plans then would find themselves dumped into the government-run Health Insurance Exchange.
“Some smaller employers would be inclined to terminate their existing coverage,” explained a December 10 memorandum by Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard S. Foster. He added: “The per-worker penalties assessed on non-participating employers are very low compared to prevailing health insurance costs. As a result, the penalties would not be a significant deterrent to dropping or foregoing coverage. We estimate such actions would collectively reduce the number of people with employer-sponsored health coverage by about 17 million.”
Even more ominously, Obamacare would require employers to provide federally approved coverage. Obama considers “meaningful” plans those at least as generous as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
“Obama’s definition of ‘meaningful’ coverage could eliminate the health plans that now cover as many as half of the 159 million Americans with employer-sponsored insurance, plus more than half of the roughly 18 million Americans in the individual market,” says Cato Institute policy analyst Michael Cannon. “This could compel close to 90 million Americans to switch to more comprehensive health plans with higher premiums, whether they value the added coverage or not.”
It’s not just elective abortions that we’re going to be paying for whether we want them or not. In some countries with socialized health care you can pay for breast enlargements (UK), sex changes (Canada), in vitro fertilization (Canada), etc. And these elective surgeries take up money from the other vital services. Obama can make it such that every plan has to offer those coverages.
So, those who don’t use such elective services end up encouraging them, even if they have moral objections to those services. When the government subsidizes something, more people choose it. Won’t Planned Parenthood be pleased with all that new revenue? I’m sure they’ll think of something to do with all that money. Maybe a nice political donation?
WINTERY KNIGHT 