Best known, of course, for his advocacy of (and eventual fall over) health care rationing, Sir* Donald Berwick has modestly decided to run for Governor of Massachusetts: “As a doctor, an educator, an innovator and someone who has dedicated his professional career to making things work better and to helping people – I am ready to lead,” the Newton Democrat said in a statement announcing | Read More »
Postulated: If you wish to see more of something, you subsidize it; if you wish to see less of something, you tax it. I assume that we are all on board with this, yes? – After all, this has been a major point used to justify sin taxes for, well, my entire life. In other words… “tax it out of existence” is a sentiment that | Read More »
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Michael Ramlet to discuss a new poll from Morning Consult, the nation’s opinion on Obamacare and what are the most popular tax reform proposals.
Read More »My first response to this was “Cry me a river”… Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting. The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers | Read More »
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform does not think much of the Heritage Foundation’s recent projection of the total cost of amnesty. Heritage figured a taxpayer cost of about $6 trillion over the next 50 years. Norquist takes many issues with this figure, including some that aren’t really problems with the report itself – for example, he criticizes the way other people have presented its conclusions | Read More »
The Fundamental Problem of Economics states that people with infinite demands will attempt to meet those demands with limited resources. This predictably fails. The best we can hope for is what is called a Pareto Optimal solution where you pretty much do the best you can with what you have. Much of the debate between boosters of command economies and free market economies centers on how a society works towards getting more to dole out and a Pareto Optimal distribution of what they have.
The socialists in Venezuela solve this problem by rationing. They ration food. The socialists in America solve this problem by rationing. They ration donated organs available for transplant. This can lead to heart-breaking and intractable dilemmas in which there is no answer that maximizes everybody’s happiness. In just such a dilemma, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius learned just how hard a job it was to be queen.
Read More »Well, it’s not like they have many options left at this point: Scarred by years of Republican attacks over Obamacare, with more in store next year, Democrats have settled on an unlikely strategy for the 2014 midterms: Bring it on. Party strategists believe that embracing the polarizing law — especially its more popular elements — is smarter politics than fleeing from it in the House | Read More »
There’s something that I am quite happy to point out about the Obamacare jam (H/T: Hot Air) that Democrats are finding themselves in right now… Conservative groups are preparing to use the deepening public distrust of the Internal Revenue Service to discredit the Affordable Care Act, and the Democrats who support it, in the 2014 election cycle. Now that the IRS has admitted to unfairly | Read More »
A few weeks ago, Apple executives were called on the Congressional carpet for… well, it’s not really clear, actually. Congress was very angry at them for failing to haul international profits back to the United States so they could be taxed at confiscatory anti-growth American rates. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) countered by pointing out that everyone tries to legally minimize their tax liability. Accountants who failed to | Read More »
Guess the GOP’s doomed, then. President Obama often tells audiences that he has waged his last campaign. But that’s not exactly true. The White House is gearing up for a massive campaign this summer that will cover all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. And the president’s legacy may hinge on whether it succeeds or fails. The Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” has been through more | Read More »
Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Republican Party?
Read More »We are all — all of us — attracted to shiny objects. Oftentimes we fixate on the shiny object and never see past the shine to what the object actually is or what it can actually do for us or whether it is even a distraction. The IRS scandal is the latest shiny object on which the GOP will fixate. But if, instead of fixating, | Read More »
So… what, exactly, does Barack Obama “preside” over? He claims to have learned about the IRS scandal by watching the evening news last Friday. He’s got no idea what those crazy rogue operatives in the State Department and intelligence community were doing when the Benghazi consulate was attacked, or during the crucial news cycles that followed. He’s got nothing to do with the economy – | Read More »
In the face of criticism from Democrats about his incompetent implementation of ObamaCare, President Obama co-opted Mother’s Day in his latest campaign to sell ObamaCare. Obama used a Mother’s Day-themed event to kick off another campaign-style effort to get people to sign up for the so-called Affordable Care Act. In a statement dripping with condescension Obama tried to blame misinformation for his health care troubles: | Read More »
Leading Democrats have criticized the president’s implementation of ObamaCare: The Democrats’ majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, said last week that he agreed with Democrat Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, a Democrat architect of the law, who said about the ObamaCare implementation, “I just see a huge train wreck coming down.” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden expressed concern about what’s going to happen with young people if | Read More »
![[RS]](/t/img/logo-footer.jpg){kind=logo}