Thursday, August 13, 2015

Under Obamacare, Uninsured Rate Fell to Lowest Level in 50 Years. Why There’s More to That Number.

Uninsured Rate Fell to Lowest Level in 50 Years
Nearly two years after Obamacare’s implementation, a new survey found that the number of uninsured Americans decreased to less than 10 percent of the population in the first three months of 2015, which is the lowest level in the survey’s 50-year history. 
However, experts say the change could be mostly attributed to the Obama administration’s expansion of Medicaid.
According to the survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control, the number of people who were uninsured declined from 36 million in 2014 to 29 million in the first three months of 2015. Among adults between the ages of 18 and 64, the percentage of those who were uninsured dropped from 16.3 percent in 2014 to 13 percent in 2015’s first quarter.
The changes to the rate of uninsured come nearly two years after Obamacare’s implementation, which went into effect October 2013.
While the drop speaks to the mission of the health care law, Ed Haislmaier, a health policy expert, pointed to outside factors that affect the decrease in the number of uninsured Americans.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that though it’s likely the Obama administration was likely “in the ballpark” for the changes in the number of uninsured, the survey had limitations.
Primarily, the government relied on answers from 26,121 respondents as opposed to an actual count, such as the number of people enrolled in health coverage, data that can be provided by health insurance companies.
“They’re trying to say how many people didn’t have coverage and extrapolate from that,” Haislmaier said.
Most notably, though, the survey failed to address an increase to the Medicaid rolls, which stemmed from Medicaid expansion created under Obamacare.
According to Haislmaier, Medicaid enrollment from January 2014 to March 2015 went from approximately 60.9 million to 71 million.

2016 White House hopefuls ready to pitch their plans at the Iowa State Fair

rickperryiowastatefairreuters.jpg
It doesn’t get much more American than the Iowa State Fair – a place where butter is king, hog calling is sport and politicians are tested.
The fair, home to culinary gems like corn in a cup and fierce face-offs in the beard-growing competition kicks off Thursday in Des Moines and has become a perennial stop for presidential candidates looking to test drive their message and electability.
This year, 19 presidential hopefuls from both parties are gearing up to make the annual August pilgrimage, where they’ll be up-close and personal with voters like Bob Hemesath.
“It’s a very relaxed. It’s very open,” Hemesath told FoxNews.com. “It’s not a campaign stump speech. You have the opportunity to shake their hand. It’s a much more open, friendly atmosphere.”
Hemesath, a farmer from northwest Iowa, says he wants candidates to lay out their priorities and goals for the future of Iowa agriculture.
He also wants answers on where they stand on the renewable fuel standard. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced changes to how much corn-based ethanol and other biofuels can be mixed into gas and diesel. The new rules could change how Hemesath, like many others in the largely agricultural state, make a living.
The Iowa State Fair, first held in 1854, has turned into a venue where voters go for answers.
The event has grown both in popularity and political prominence. In 2002, attendance hit one million and since then, has passed the million mark 11 times.
This year, how Republican candidates come off could hold even more importance than in past years, Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, told FoxNews.com. In June, the Iowa Republican Party decided to officially scrap its high-profile presidential straw poll which had traditionally served as a test of a candidate’s popularity.
How a politician performs in Iowa, the crucial first-in-the-nation caucus state, can light a path to the White House or dash D.C. dreams.
This year, the challenge for the 17 Republicans in the running for the 2016 GOP nomination will be to find ways to set themselves apart from the pack. Bystrom says they’ll have to do it by striking just the right cord.
“What happened to the kinder, gentler Mike Huckabee?” she asked, referring to his performance, which some called caustic, at the first Republican presidential primary debate on Aug. 6.

If a corporate CFO acted like Obama, he'd be in jail

There's an old story about Josef Stalin (who was extremely brutal), Nikita Khrushchev (who was merely very brutal), and Leonid Brezhnev (who was a corrupt pretender) that is instructive in the tale of our national debt.  One day Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were in a limousine that suddenly stopped.  The driver told them that the engine wasn't working.  So Stalin had the driver shot and got someone to fix the car.

Then the limousine stopped a second time, and again they were told that it was broken.  Khrushchev had the driver sent to a labor camp and got someone else to fix and drive the car.

The limo stopped a third time, and do you know what Brezhnev did?  He closed the curtains and pretended the car was still moving.

Brezhnev's approach in a nutshell perfectly characterizes Obama's approach to the national debt.  For 150 days, the debt, as reported by the federal government, has not increased by one penny.
The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Monday, August 10, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday. 
That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 150 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000. 
$18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35. 
On July 30, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent a letter to the leaders of Congress informing them that he was extending a “debt issuance suspension period” through October 30. 
In practice, that means that unless Congress enacts new legislation to increase the limit on the federal debt before then, the Treasury will continue for at least the next eleven weeks to issue Daily Treasury Statements that show the federal debt subject to the limit beginning and ending each day frozen just below that limit.
In other words, if Congress won't lift the debt limit, Obama will keep spending anyway and report phony numbers.  In essence, Congress's right and responsibility to lift the debt ceiling has been taken away from Obama.  And do you know how many Republicans in Congress are complaining about this?  Zero.

I have argued in past columns that congressmen have violated their oath of office by giving up legislative powers they have sworn to protect to Obama.  Republicans don't say a word either because they are afraid of Obama, or they agree with this level of spending.  I suspect some of the former but more of the latter.

And that is the most troubling part.  A person can jump off a building and close his eyes and tell himself he is not falling.  For a time, it will work.  But eventually, it will be a fact that can no longer be denied.  There are laws of physics that we are aware of, but there are also laws of economics.  You cannot forever spend money you do not have.  Eventually there will be a collapse.


In the meantime, Obama commits fraud, openly and brazenly – the kind of fraud that would send a CFO of a publicly traded company to jail.  Imagine if the CFO of Google did this, purposely lying about financial statements.  There would be calls for criminal investigations, stockholder suits, and more.  When Obama does it in a way that affects everyone in the country, it's barely reported, and there is never any criticism of our 18-hole president.




YEAR OF THE OUTSIDER: TRUMP, CARSON SURGE IN IOWA

Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, John Kasich

new poll from CNN/ORC finds Donald Trump dominating likely caucus-goers in Iowa. Somewhat more surprising, though, is that retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has surged into second place, edging out long-time Iowa frontrunner Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The poll, of more than 5oo caucus-goers, found Trump in first with 22 percent, followed by Carson with 14 percent. Walker dropped to third, with just 9 percent support.
Texas 
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
96%
 followed with 8 percent. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee were just behind Cruz with 7 percent each.

More establishment candidates including Florida 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
80%
and Jeb Bush have faded to the back of the crowded field, with just 5 percent support each. They are tied with 
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)
93%
 from Kentucky. The other candidates have 3 percent or less.

The poll is the latest evidence that the the early innings of the 2016 are not strictly just a story about Donald Trump. The larger dynamic is that voters are rejecting  any candidate who is seen as tied to the Washington Republican establishment.
Political pundits may try to dismiss the Trump surge as something unique to his nearly ubiquitous personality, but the rise of candidates including Carson, Fiorina, Cruz and, to some extent Walker, shows an eagerness by voters to break with anything that reeks of Washington or the establishment.
Trump’s edge with voters rests on their belief that he is the best candidate to tackle the economy, foreign policy and illegal immigration. Almost half of caucus-goers, 44 percent, say he is the candidate most likely to change the way Washington works.
Trump is weakest with voters who describe themselves as “very conservative.” Those voters, who historically make up a large share of the caucus, prefer Carson, at 25 percent, followed by Cruz and Walker, each with 15 percent, with Trump in third, with 12 percent support. Among evangelical Christians, though, Trump ties Carson for first, each with 18 percent. Cruz at 12 percent, Huckabee 11 and Walker 10.
The two groups, “very conservative” and evangelicals will likely make up around 60 percent of those attending a caucus.
A caucus operates very differently from a primary election. To be successful in a caucus, a candidate needs very energized supporters, who may have to devote an hour or more to the voting process.
This will give the edge to candidates who are clearly distinct from Republican leadership in Washington. Whether its Trump, Carson or Cruz on the right or Vermont 
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
16%
 on the left, voters are fed-up with Washington.

This year is shaping up as the year of the outsider.
Via: Breitbart
Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] EPA chief touts Obama's green agenda amid mine spill

EPA Contractor Behind CO Mine Spill Got $381 Million From Taxpayers

PHOTO: The Animas River flows through the center of Durango, Colo. on Aug. 7, 2015.
Source:  Brian Lewis/The Denver Post/Getty Images
PHOTO: The Animas River flows through the center of Durango, Colo. on Aug. 7, 2015. Source: Brian Lewis/The Denver Post/Getty Images
The EPA may have been trying to hide the identity of the contracting company responsible for causing a major wastewater spill in southern Colorado, but the Wall Street Journal has revealed the company’s identity.
Environmental Restoration (ER) LLC, a Missouri-based firm, was the “contractor whose work caused a mine spill in Colorado that released an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a major river system,” the WSJ was told by a source familiar with the matter. The paper also found government documents to corroborate what their source told them.
So far, the EPA has refused to publicly name the contracting company used to plug abandoned mines in southern Colorado, despite numerous attempts by The Daily Caller News Foundation and other media outlets to obtain the information. It’s unclear why the agency chose not to reveal the contractor’s name.
What is clear, however, is that ER has gotten $381 million in government contracts since October 2007, according to a WSJ review of data from USAspending.gov. About $364 million of that funding came from the EPA, but only $37 million was given to ER for work they had done in Colorado.
When contacted by phone, The DCNF had been informed ER’s offices had closed for the day. The EPA did not return a request for comment on the WSJ’s story revealing the identity of the agency’s contractor.
ER contractors reportedly caused a massive wastewater spill from the Gold King Mine in southern Colorado last week. EPA-supervised workers breached a debris dam while using heavy equipment and unleashed 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into Cement Creek. The toxic plume eventually reached the Animas River where it’s been able to spread even further, forcing Colorado and New Mexico to declare a state of emergency.
The EPA has taken responsibility for the spill and has officials on the ground working with local officials to remedy the situation. Still, local officials and Native Americans are furious with the EPA over the spill, and have not ruled out legal action to make sure the agency remains accountable.
“No agency could be more upset about the incident happening, and more dedicated in doing our job to get this right,” EPA Chief Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a press conference in Durango, Colorado Wednesday. “We couldn’t be more sorry. Our mission is to protect human health and the environment. We will hold ourselves to a higher standard than anyone else.”

[VIDEO] Former President Jimmy Carter Has Liver Cancer Which Has Metastasized To Other Organs

Former President Jimmy Carter has cancer, and it has spread to other parts of his body, he announced Wednesday.
Carter, 90, had a “small mass” removed from his liver during surgery earlier this month. At the time, he received a prognosis for a full recovery.
But he said Wednesday in a brief statement that “recent liver surgery revealed that I have cancer that now is in other parts of my body.”
It was not clear where the cancer originated or where it had spread. Carter’s family, however, has a history of pancreatic cancer, which CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta said could be afflicting the former president. Carter lost his father, brother and two sisters to the disease. His mother had breast cancer, which later moved to her pancreas.

Letter to Editor PREDICTED COLORADO EPA SPILL One Week Before Catastrophe=> So EPA Could Secure Control of Area (Updated)

epa spill
Last Wednesday, a small EPA-supervised work crew inspecting the Gold King mine accidentally knocked a hole in a waste pit, releasing at least three million gallons of acidic liquid laden with toxic heavy metals. (ABC)

This letter to editor, posted below, was published in The Silverton Standard and The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist, one week before EPA mine spill. The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. If the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development for the mining industry in the area. The Obama EPA is vehemently opposed to mining and development.
The EPA pushed for nearly 25 years, to apply its Superfund program to the Gold King mine. If a leak occurred the EPA would then receive superfund status. That is exactly what happened.
The EPA today admitted they misjudged the pressure in the gold mine before the spill – just as this editorial predicted.
The letter was included in their print edition on July 30, 2015. The spill occurred one week later.
editorial colorado epa

UPDATE: Via Ace of Spades – The Silverton Standard confirmed today this letter was indeed published a week before the EPA spill.
Via: The Gateway Pundit
Continue Reading....

Senate committee seeks email facts from Clinton’s tech company

[VIDEO] Gowdy Heard About Hillary’s Huge Trouble, And His Response Is One She’ll Hate…

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, responded to the news that Hillary Clinton plans to turn over her email server to the Justice Department, in response to an investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information by the former secretary of state. (VIDEO)
The move by the Bureau comes following the reports that the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General discovered four classified documents, to date, among those released by Clinton–two of which are “top secret,” the highest security classification.
As reported by Western Journalism, Clinton stated during a press conference in March: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
Clinton’s campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said that “She directed her team to give her e-mail server that was used during her tenure as secretary to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her e-mails already provided to the State Department.” Merrill added: “She pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
Fox News’ Bill Hemmer asked Gowdy on Wednesday morning if he expected full cooperation from Clinton now. “It’s hard not to laugh when I hear that,” Gowdy responded. “I know he’s in the business of being paid to say absurd things, but if that really was his intent and her intent, why did they set up this unprecedented email arrangement?”
“Why did she keep the emails for 20 months after she left the Department of State?” the congressman continued. “She did not turn them over then. Why did she delete emails after 20 months? Did all of the sudden she decide after 20 months, ‘This is too burdensome for me to keep a bunch of emails on my server, so let me not only delete them, but wipe the server clean.’
“If she were interested in cooperation, she would not have done any of the things she has done to date. This is not about cooperation. This is not about convenience. It’s about control. She wanted to control access to the public record. And she also got away with it, but she didn’t,” said Gowdy.
Hemmer asked Gowdy if Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information fit the same category as that for which Gen. David Petraeus was prosecuted and convicted.
“The same rules ought to apply irrespective of their station in life. So I am going to have to count on the [FBI] and [its director] Jim Comey, who has a reputation for evenhandedness and fairness. The same folks who investigated and prosecuted Gen. Petraeus are looking into the current allegations with respect to classified information. If the facts are the same, I would expect the result to be the same,” he replied.
Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano believes Clinton’s breach is far more serious than Petraeus’. He said: “In his case it was ‘confidential’ materials, which is the lowest level of classification. In her case it is ‘top secret’, which is the highest level of classification.” In the case of Petraeus, the documents were in his home, while Clinton’s were on her personal server, making them vulnerable to hacking.
Gowdy released a statement Tuesday highlighting the severity of the former secretary of state’s actions.“This is a serious national security issue, and the seriousness of it should transcend normal, partisan politics.”

OBAMA CAN’T COUNT TO FOUR PERCENT

Jeb Bush kicked off his campaign in June on a positive, aspirational, pro-growth note, saying, “There is not a reason in the world why we cannot grow at a rate of 4 percent a year.” That thought has some substantial history behind it.

Most immediately, it goes back to a board meeting of the George W. Bush Institute in 2010, at which executive director James Glassman raised for discussion the subject of a pro-growth economics agenda. Board member Jeb Bush proposed the 4% goal then.

Glassman had the good sense to turn that discussion into a full-length book, in a project spearheaded by the gifted Amity Shlaes (who is also one of the contributors to the volume).The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs was published in 2012 by Random House. It comprises 21 chapters written by 26 authors, including Economics Nobel Prize winners Robert Lucas, Vernon Smith, Edward Prescott, Gary Becker, and Myron Scholes, as well as serious economists such as Robert Litan, Kevin Hassett, David Malpass, Eric Hanushek, Pia Orrenius, Peter Klein, W. Michael Cox, Steven Gjerstad, Maria Minniti, Nick Schulz, and Madeline Zavodny.

But the unread chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Jason 
Obama Can’t Count to Four Percent | The American Spectator
Furman, snarled in response to Bush’s 4% growth target on CNBC on August 7, “I haven’t seen any serious economist say that is within the realm of possibility.” The 4% growth target is a sensitive subject for the chairman of Obama’s CEA. Growth under President Obama has averaged 2% for the now nearly seven years he has been in office, even though the recession ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

That 2% growth record under Obama is the worst of any president since the Great Depression, worse than Jimmy Carter, worse than George W. Bush. The difference between 4% annual growth and 2%, compounded over decades, is the difference between America and Argentina, or the leading country in the developed world, and the Third World.

Furman’s comment was particularly bizarre because on June 19, Larry Kudlow explained the precedents for Bush’s 4% growth target in detail in National Review Online. “Following the Kennedy tax cuts, the economy averaged 5.2 percent yearly growth between 1963 and 1969. After the Reagan tax rates fully went into effect, alongside Paul Volcker’s conquering of inflation, the economy grew at 4.5 percent annually between 1982 and 1989,” 

Kudlowreported. “And between 1994 and 1999, the Bill Clinton/Newt Gingrich economy increased 4.3 percent annually, after welfare reform, NAFTA trade, and cap-gains tax relief,” he added.

Kudlow also noted that during the entire 60 year period from 1947 to 2007, U.S. economic growth averaged 3.4%. So maybe focusing federal policies more on what is pro-growth, we can reach 4% after all.

Reagan campaigned explicitly on a four-point economic recovery program in 1980, which once elected he then implemented in 1981 and 1982. Those points were 1) slash marginal income tax rates, 2) deregulation, 3) cut federal spending, and 4) stick to monetary policies that maintain a stable dollar. That is what produced the 4.5% annual growth noted above.
What has President Obama done? Just the opposite. What the Republicans are arguing, Mr. Chief Obama Economist Furman, is that those anti-growth Obama policies are why this president has gotten less than half the growth produced by Reagan’s pro-growth policies, and the worst economic growth of any president since the Great Depression.

Furman himself also said on CNBC on August 9, “The debate we should be having is not targets no economist thinks we can hit but are we doing everything we possibly can to strengthen our economy.” That would be no economist besides at least the half dozen Nobel Prize winners and more than a dozen additional “serious” economists in Glassman’s book. That’s just for starters, if you add Kudlow, Art Laffer, Steve Forbes, and Steve Moore to that list.

And no, Jason, we are NOT doing everything we can to strengthen our economy when we hold up the Keystone Pipeline for a decade, raise marginal tax rates on capital gains by nearly 60%, raise marginal tax rates on dividends by nearly 60%, raise marginal tax rates for Medicare payroll taxes on employers by over 60%, raise top marginal income tax rates primarily on savers, investors, small business, and top professionals by over 20%, maintain the highest top marginal corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, maintain the third highest top marginal capital gains tax rate in the industrialized world, impose EPA regs that will cause electricity rates and energy costs to skyrocket, impose health insurance employer mandate regulations that force employers to reduce millions of full time workers to part-time, 29-hour-per-week jobs, and impose banking regulations that force small to medium banks and financial institutions that finance small businesses out of business.

So-called “Progressives” Jason Furman tend to talk to themselves, or only those that agree with them all the time, like crazy people talking to themselves in the bathroom mirror. But given the above established facts, Furman’s statements are effectively an admission that the Democrats have no idea how to restore traditional, booming, American economic growth. (This article is not an endorsement of Jeb Bush’s candidacy. My own favorites are Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.).

If Mr. Furman can’t read more broadly than the party propaganda published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, then he needs to get off the public dole, and maybe start to pay the taxpayers back for what he and his bud Barack have done to the American people these last seven years.
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