• Category Archives News and Politics

  • The Health-Care Spending Claim That Made Obamacare Possible Was a Lie

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    One of the key arguments that President Obama used to get his health care law though Congress, control of soaring health care costs, turns out to have been bogus.

    Here is the way Obama put the argument in a September 9, 2009, speech about health care to a joint session of Congress:

    Then there’s the problem of rising cost….insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages….our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined….

    Now, these are the facts. Nobody disputes them.

    Obama’s voice saying “these are the facts. Nobody disputes them,” is almost enough to set off sound effects akin to those that accompany Pinocchio’s growing nose in the Disney movie.

    Sure enough, now that the data are in, the emerging consensus is that health care costs, rather than “skyrocketing,” have been moderating, even flat-lining. And they were beginning to do so well before Congress passed ObamaCare in March 2010.

    There have been a trickling of academic papers and journal articles tracking the trend, but the news hasn’t really yet made it fully into the political discussion.

    A January 2012 article in the journal Health Affairs reported that “U.S. health spending grew more slowly in 2009 and 2010—at rates of 3.8 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively—than in any other years during the fifty-one-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts.” That article, by economists and statisticians who work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says, rather than controlling costs, ObamaCare actually increased health spending by one or two tenths of a percentage point in 2010.

    Full article: http://reason.com/ar … ding-claim-that-made


    News and Politics 📎and tagged

  • Gazillions — that’s the number of times our government has spied on Americans since 9/11

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Gazillions. That’s the number of times the federal government has spied on Americans since 9/11 through the use of drones, legal search warrants, illegal search warrants, federal agent-written search warrants and just plain government spying. This is according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who, when he asked the government to tell him what it was doing to violate our privacy, was given a classified briefing. The senator — one of just a few in the U.S. Senate who believes that the Constitution means what it says — was required by federal law to agree not to reveal what spies and bureaucrats told him during the briefing.

    The rules for classified briefings of members of Congress on areas of government behavior that the government wants to keep from its employers — the American people — are a real Catch-22. Those rules allow representatives and senators to interrogate government officials about government behavior that they are afraid to reveal, and they require those officials to answer honestly and completely. But the rules keep the interrogations secret, and they expressly prohibit members of Congress from telling anyone what they have learned.

    So Paul and his colleagues who joined in the secret briefing now know the terrible truth about the government watching us, but they cannot reveal what they know. Paul — who is the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the greatest congressional defender of limited government in our era — when asked what he learned at these secret briefings and aware that he could be prosecuted for telling the truth, chose a fictitious word to describe the vast number of violations of privacy at the hands of federal agents: “gazillions.” Paul’s personal courage in using a word like gazillions to convey an oblique message of truth in the face of an unjust law that commanded his silence reminded me of St. Thomas More’s silence in the face of an unjust law that commanded his assent to the king’s headship of the church.

    The feds are no happier with the senator’s personal courage than the king was with St. Thomas More’s, but there is not much they can do about it. If you check out your dog-eared dictionary, you will find that if it is listed at all, it gets a mention as slang. Yet most of us hearing or seeing that word understand it to mean some huge — perhaps even incalculable — number.

    The point here is terrifying. If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can it do things to us to which we have not consented? And when it does these things — like send a drone over your back yard to learn who is coming to your Saturday barbeque or to see what fertilizer you are using in your vegetable garden or to take a peek into your living room or bedroom — and when the laws the government has written prevent our elected representatives from telling us what it is doing, we are at the doorsteps of tyranny. The government gave Paul the distinct impression that it was afraid of our exercise of our personal freedoms, and thus it needs to watch us as we do so. This is the same government whose stated principal purpose is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and thus personal freedom.

    Full article: http://www.fox19.com … lly-created-al-qaeda


    News and Politics

  • The Biggest New Spying Program You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    What if a government spy agency had power to copy and data mine information about ordinary Americans from any government database? This could include records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records. Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward. What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?

    What if it wasn’t just collection but also sharing? Anything that was reasonably believed to be necessary to “protect the safety or security of persons, property or organizations” or “protect against or prevent a crime or threat to national security” could be shared. Imagine the dissemination was essentially unlimited, not just to federal, state, local or foreign governments but also to individuals or entities that are not part of the government.

    It has already happened.

    This full frontal assault on our privacy wasn’t passed through an Act of Congress or international treaty but through deceptively titled “guidelines” to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

    Full article: http://www.aclu.org/ … probably-never-heard


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