Restoring Honor 2010

Live Feed from the "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C.  Figured we might as well see what all the hubub is about.

Economic Info for the Month of July

All is well....

Man...economic news isn't good:

• Yesterday, the news came out that existing home sales dropped 27% for the month of July.  In order to stabilize the residential markets, jobs have to return and prices have to stabilize. The Obama administration has gotten in the way of both processes. Thanks to ill-advised taxpayer-subsidized interventions, prices have remained unrealistically high, and no one wants to buy until they pay the right amount for the value of their investment. And until we quit penalizing capital and introducing massive ambiguities into regulatory regimes and expanding them, jobs won’t get created and new buyers won’t materialize anyway.
• Today, the Commerce Department noted that new home sales dropped 12% for the month of July; down 37% from last year. Expect more deflation in housing markets this year as sales dive to new lows
• Although the Commerce Department predicted a 3% growth, durable goods orders rose, but only slightly thanks to transportation industry by 0.3%.  Meanwhile the rest of the industry dropped 3.8% last month.  In other words, absent artificial stimulation, we had no growth at all in Q2. Depending on the final revision, due on Friday, we could be anywhere from -0.3% to -3.4% excluding Porkulus in Q2. Recovery Summer, my ass.
• Thanks to last year's Cash for Clunkers, used car prices have JUMPED 10% overall due to a lower supply in inventory.  As predicted last year, the people most hurt by the price increases are those who can least afford them. The used-car market usually attracts people who need transportation on a budget, who cannot afford to buy new. By destroying a quarter’s worth of trade-ins in three weeks and permanently taking them off the market, the Obama administration has forced an artificial inflation by supply restriction. Moreover, they did so by subsidizing new-car sales that would have occurred anyway, eating up three billion dollars in taxpayer money. In other words, the White House spent $3 billion to make used cars more expensive for working-class families. Nice work.

Keep in mind that our entire economic recovery has been in the hands of a Democratic Administration and Congress with little to no experience in running a business in the private sector.  In the examples above, each have been directly affected by the laws passed since 2009 under their watch.  Businesses are sitting on 2 Trillion just to collect interest instead of spending to hire and expand because of the policies passed by the current party in power. Nobody knows what's to come of the new legislations that have been passed. I mean this with the utmost respect.....Wake the fuck up people.

Bye Bye Student Health Insurance, another victim in the wake of Healthcare Reform

After the University of North Carolina issues with health insurance, you'd think that colleges would be set with health coverage for their students. Well, due to a surprise in the new Healthcare bill: (via QandO)

Colleges and universities say that some rules in the new health law could keep them from offering low-cost, limited-benefit student insurance policies, and they’re seeking federal authority to continue offering them.

Their request drew immediate fire from critics, however, who say that student health plans should be held to the same standards that other insurance is.
Among other things, the colleges want clarification that they won’t have to offer the policies to non-students.
Without a number of changes, it may be impossible to continue to offer student health plans, says a letter that the American Council on Education sent Aug. 12 to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, signed by 12 other trade associations that represent colleges.
Additionally, the colleges say that some provisions of the law don’t apply to their policies, including those that require insurers to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on medical care and that bar them from setting annual coverage caps.

Universities usually offer some form of health insurance to students, but those policies fit the needs of young adults, who generally don’t access the health care system nearly as much as older adults. They have smaller networks, as students generally stay within a small geographic area. Premiums are lower because of the low risk, but also because some comprehensive services don’t get fully covered, usually those accessed by people in middle age or older. In short, the policies are tailored to the clientele, which is why pricing can be more efficient.
 
With the new Healthcare Bill, policies can no longer be tailored to clientele, nor can consumers make choices that best fit their lives. All policies must look mainly alike, thanks to the top-down command “reforms” in Healthcare, which mandate coverages regardless of risk or need. So, a comprehensive policy designed to cover Americans in their 50s would be useless for just about anyone who attends college in their youth, and would be more expensive than they are likely to afford.
 
Universities can either offer policies that are so expensive that only a few can afford to buy them, which creates all sorts of problems in managing a risk pool, or they can simply get out of the health-insurance business altogether. Businesses have chosen to opt out thus far, so there's no reason to believe that the Universities wouldn't do the same.

Democrats are running against themselves!?

Let me start off by saying:  I'm glad the first day of school comes once a year.

Let's start today with the Democrats.....or should I say, the ones distancing themselves from the Democratic agenda as of late:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called them her “majority makers” – the moderate to conservative Democrats in right-leaning districts whose election in 2006 made her Speaker.

And now many of them – and other Democrats in competitive districts -- are fighting for their political lives in a harsh environment and have found it necessary to distance themselves from their leaders and Democratic policies.
After Democrats won a special election in Pennsylvania earlier this year in which the GOP nominee tried to tie the Democrat, Mark Critz, to Pelosi and Obama, the Speaker said, “What we learn from this election and I think hopefully Republicans saw clearly, is nationalizing the election, talking about Speaker Pelosi and President Obama was not as appealing to the public there than Mark Critz talking to them about their jobs.”
Will that also hold true for Democrats talking about Pelosi and Obama in a negative way?

In case you are in disbelief, here are the campaign ads. First, Bobby Bright, D-Ala:



Next, Jason Altmire, D-Penn:



Mike McIntyre, D-NC:



Glenn Nye, D-Va:



Joe Donnelley, D-Ind with 2 ads.:





This is a just a mess.

Whew....LONG WEEK!!!

Too bad it's going to be much longer.  Summer's almost over and school will begin for the little one, so I'm in parent mode until next wednesday.  I have no special guest posters on my site just yet, but feel free to check out some of the links to the left of blogs I regularly visit.  Hotair.com is the absolute best.  Enjoy until I return!

Andrew Klavan: A Young Person's Guide to the United States Constitution

It's the little things they don't emphasize...this video lays out the basics of the Constitution so anyone can understand it

DEMOCRATS AND GOP BATTLE OVER BUSH TAX CUTS

Neil Boortz on Fox News explaining the effects of tax cuts in an economy in his subtle way:



In case you're wondering: 70% of economist favor extending Bush Tax Cuts.  Link to Wall Street Journal article here as the source. Go figure.

Video: “I’m willing to take a chance on something different”

Change?

Very Positive step towards Housing Reform by the Obama Team: Cut Out the Community Organizers

The Washington Post reports today that community organizers find themselves on the outside without a seat at the table where the new policies will develop for housing reform — and that they’re not keeping quiet about the betrayal:

Affordable-housing advocates raised concerns Thursday that the Obama administration is excluding consumer and community groups from playing prominent roles in a government-sponsored conference next week that will kick off efforts to overhaul national housing policy.

After the administration announced the 12 panelists for Tuesday’s conference, the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition said consumer and community groups had been “muscled out” by financial companies, economists and academics without a sense of how housing policy plays out in communities.
“Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it’s not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury’s think tank on housing,” said NCRC chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.

Inflating housing bubbles by forcing or incentivizing overreliance on subprime loans clearly hasn’t worked out well for most communities; we now have a foreclosure crisis, thanks to people overextending themselves on overvalued homes. The government interventions of the past twelve years have created crisis and instability, and it doesn’t take a community organizer to see that.

Cutting out the community organizers could mean one of two outcomes. Either Obama is serious about recalibrating HUD’s mission towards low-income rentals and away from distorting lending markets to push ownership where the economics simply don’t support it, or this process is just a beard to continue the status quo by claiming that the White House did its due diligence in checking out all of the possibilities.

A Little on the Economy and Jobless Claims

Great video about the number of jobs lost under the Pelosi-Reid Congress since 2007:



By the way:

• Initial jobless claims today jumped to their highest level in almost 6 months.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development have begun issuing emergency $50,000 loans at zero interest to unemployed homeowners in an attempt to stall foreclosures, using $1 billion of Porkulus funds for the effort and $2 billion from the same source for indirect aid through state governments.
• foreclosure seizures have increased by 6% over last year
• Home foreclosures are spreading in areas that didn't have problems before, like in the Northwest and Midwest
• The US bailout of financial institutions, and in particular AIG, wound up rescuing foreign firms, according to a new report from the Congressional Oversight Panel.
• That $26.1 Billion Jobs package for public servants?  There's already waste and abuse, reported a day after its passage.  States that don't need the money are recieving it.

But this is the "Recovery Summer"!!

Hispanics Fire Back at Harry Reid

Yesterday Harry Reid said this:
“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican,” said Reid. “Do I need to say more?”
Seriously, this has been the issue for African Americans for how long? Nice to see the Democrats play the race card (i.e. if you are minority, you must vote Democrat). We have got to get past these political stereotypes and learn about the issues.
Dr. Manny Alvarez speaks out against Harry Reid’s prejudiced (NOT RACIST) comments about voters of Hispanic descent:

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism

More from Milton Friedman about the principles of Libertarianism. Just felt like I had to share this four part series.

Milton Friedman - Socialism vs. Capitalism

This guy pretty much said it. I've found a new hero.



I just realized that I'm a pure capitalist and not the current definition as defined by the progressives of today.  If it exists, I'm a Constitutional Libertarian Capitalist.  I'll define this later.

More From Black Conservatives

Some more from the Black Conservative press conference.  The first two address racism within the Tea Party movement and the last addresses the 14th Amendment.

Michael P. Fleischer: Why I'm Not Hiring (Rehash on How Businesses Work)

Straight from the Wall Street Journal Opinion page

Why I'm Not Hiring
When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally's pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits.
By MICHAEL P. FLEISCHER
With unemployment just under 10% and companies sitting on their cash, you would think that sooner or later job growth would take off. I think it's going to be later—much later. Here's why.
Meet Sally (not her real name; details changed to preserve privacy). Sally is a terrific employee, and she happens to be the median person in terms of base pay among the 83 people at my little company in New Jersey, where we provide audio systems for use in educational, commercial and industrial settings. She's been with us for over 15 years. She's a high school graduate with some specialized training. She makes $59,000 a year—on paper. In reality, she makes only $44,000 a year because $15,000 is taken from her thanks to various deductions and taxes, all of which form the steep, sad slope between gross and net pay.
Before that money hits her bank, it is reduced by the $2,376 she pays as her share of the medical and dental insurance that my company provides. And then the government takes its due. She pays $126 for state unemployment insurance, $149 for disability insurance and $856 for Medicare. That's the small stuff. New Jersey takes $1,893 in income taxes. The federal government gets $3,661 for Social Security and another $6,250 for income tax withholding. The roughly $13,000 taken from her by various government entities means that some 22% of her gross pay goes to Washington or Trenton. She's lucky she doesn't live in New York City, where the toll would be even higher.
Employing Sally costs plenty too. My company has to write checks for $74,000 so Sally can receive her nominal $59,000 in base pay. Health insurance is a big, added cost: While Sally pays nearly $2,400 for coverage, my company pays the rest—$9,561 for employee/spouse medical and dental. We also provide company-paid life and other insurance premiums amounting to $153. Altogether, company-paid benefits add $9,714 to the cost of employing Sally.
Then the federal and state governments want a little something extra. They take $56 for federal unemployment coverage, $149 for disability insurance, $300 for workers' comp and $505 for state unemployment insurance. Finally, the feds make me pay $856 for Sally's Medicare and $3,661 for her Social Security.
When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally's pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits. Bottom line: Governments impose a 33% surtax on Sally's job each year.
Because my company has been conscripted by the government and forced to serve as a tax collector, we have lost control of a big chunk of our cost structure. Tax increases, whether cloaked as changes in unemployment or disability insurance, Medicare increases or in any other form can dramatically alter our financial situation. With government spending and deficits growing as fast as they have been, you know that more tax increases are coming—for my company, and even for Sally too.
Companies have also been pressed into serving as providers of health insurance. In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare.
Every year, we negotiate a renewal to our health coverage. This year, our provider demanded a 28% increase in premiums—for a lesser plan. This is in part a tax increase that the federal government has co-opted insurance providers to collect. We had never faced an increase anywhere near this large; in each of the last two years, the increase was under 10%.
To offset tax increases and steepening rises in health-insurance premiums, my company needs sustainably higher profits and sales—something unlikely in this "summer of recovery." We can't pass the additional costs onto our customers, because the market is too tight and we'd lose sales. Only governments can raise prices repeatedly and pretend there will be no consequences.
And even if the economic outlook were more encouraging, increasing revenues is always uncertain and expensive. As much as I might want to hire new salespeople, engineers and marketing staff in an effort to grow, I would be increasing my company's vulnerability to government decisions to raise taxes, to policies that make health insurance more expensive, and to the difficulties of this economic environment.
A life in business is filled with uncertainties, but I can be quite sure that every time I hire someone my obligations to the government go up. From where I sit, the government's message is unmistakable: Creating a new job carries a punishing price.


Mr. Fleischer is president of Bogen Communications Inc. in Ramsey, N.J.

For every dime taken directly out of business, it's another dime taken from you.  This will be one of the hardest lessons that most of us will have to learn because we've been conditioned to dislike the system.  It used to be that you get rewarded for doing the right things, but the current administration (and the last) have put out the message that bad behavior trumps all others. 

This is the wake up call.

The U.S. Constitution Page is Up

It's finally done.  I have put up the U.S. Constituition in it's entirety, followed by the 27 Amendments to the Constitution.   I explain my reasons for doing so, but some things for you to know:

• The dates when each Amendment was ratified has been included for historical reference
• Any Amendment following the Bill of Rights (first ten) has a link to the history behind them
• I've pointed out parts of the Constitution that have been overridden by other parts, just so you can see which will take more precedence over the other

This is for your reference.  You will always have a way to check mine, or the opinions of others with this very important document and whether it stands against it.

Schwarzenegger's learned an Important lesson AFTER 7 YEARS

This is just a shame. He had seven years to make this happen for his state, and instead, he's passed laws that punished business through tax and regulation in order to pay for California's bureaucracy and social programs. His message is mixed too, he claims that taxation is the sole problem, but gives examples of overregulation.



The key point here made by Schwarzenegger (and good for him for recognizing it) is that if it takes California eight months to approve a business for opening while only 30 days in Colorado and 22 days in Texas, businesses will invest first in those states and put California far down their list — especially when considering the high taxes California also imposes along with its regulatory burdens.
Take this seriously, our Federal Administration is headed down the same path as California.

Project in the Works! The U.S. Constitution

I'm about to put up a seperate page just for the U.S. Constitution.  Coming very soon

Conservative Black Leaders at Press Conference 8/4/2010

Two reporters engage in a heated exchange with black conservative leaders at a press conference at the National Press Club on August 4, 2010 challenging the NAACP on its charges of racism within the tea party. This will not do much to change the minds of most, but it may be enough to get them to think.

Keeping up with the Promises From the Healthcare Debate

Not posting anything today, so I'll leave you something from the page of one of my trusted sources

Via (Ed Morrissey at Hotair)

Today, we welcome a guest post from Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard and Townhall’s political editor Guy Benson, bringing us up to date on the status of promises made in connection with ObamaCare.

Two years ago, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit were kind enough to allow us to write here on “The Comprehensive Case Against Barack Obama” —a lengthy analysis pitting candidate Obama’s rhetoric against his actual record, past statements and long-time associations. We felt certain at the time, and still do, that his campaign was at its core a savvy marketing machine designed, in part, to deliberately mislead voters about the candidate’s true beliefs and experience. Revisiting our presentation two years later, we take no joy in saying that the administration has largely vindicated our concerns.

One of those concerns is health care reform. On March 21, after more than a year of contentious debate, Congressional Democrats finally passed their health care reform bill without a single Republican vote in either house. The president has challenged Republicans to run against his unpopular health care law—implying that they don’t have the political courage to do so. He may be right on that point; he may not—but the facts show that (a) many of the highest-profile selling points employed by the Left to drag Obamacare across the finish line were either incorrect or intentional distortions, (b) the consequences of not repealing this law are dire, and (c) the public’s enduring hostility toward Obamacare demonstrates a political appetite for repeal.

Recent polls reflect America’s zeal for repeal, as does an August ballot referendum in Missouri rebuking the individual mandate, which succeeded by a margin of 71-29. Throughout the lengthy public debate, President Obama and his surrogates consistently ridiculed and denounced critics of the bill as bad-faith, fear-mongering propaganda merchants.

The facts now prove there was plenty to fear in good faith.

Promise #1: If you are satisfied with your existing health care arrangement, you can keep it.

Over and over again, the president and his ideological allies assured Americans satisfied with their current plan/doctor/coverage that nothing would change if the bill became law:



He told the AMA: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

Critics of the bill predicted this pledge would expire almost immediately. They were right. As government mandates for plans— “important consumer protections” as Obama called them— pile up, premiums will rise and the composition of even allegedly “grandfathered” plans will change.

A former Medicare/Medicaid official wrote that insurers and doctors are already shifting business models in anticipation of dramatic changes. CBS News featured a small business in Pennsylvania to demonstrate how provisions within Obamacare incentivize employers to drop their employee’s health coverage, and how other elements of the law discourage hiring—thus undermining the nation’s employment recovery. Companies with 25-49 workers are relatively unscathed by the new law, whereas businesses with 50 or more employees face stringent new mandates. Under this system, employers with, say 48 workers, would have compelling reasons to avoid hiring any more full-time workers.

Even more devastating, draft regulation guidelines issued by the federal government itself predict that between half and two-thirds of Americans’ current private plans will lose grandfathered (i.e., “protected”) status by 2013. As the Daily Caller reports, “for plans that do not fall under the grandfathered status, employers would have to find a plan that complies with the health care bill.” More than one million part-time and lower-wage workers are already feeling the squeeze, as popular “mini-med” affordable limited-benefit plans will be banned by the feds starting this fall.

And, if none of this worries you, keep in mind that the same Congress assuring you that no matter how much changes, your personal health care will remain the same may have accidentally stripped themselves of their own health care.

Bottom line: Despite what the president told us repeatedly, it’s quite possible you will not be permitted to keep your health care plan– no matter how much you may like it. Supporters of health care reform argue that government mandates for certain kinds of coverage will only change health care plans for the better, making them more comprehensive, so no one will be negatively impacted. This argument ignores the loss of both choice and money inflicted by government mandates, but even if it were true, that wasn’t the promise, was it?

Promise #2: Reform will lower America’s health care spending.

Remember all that talk about “bending the cost curve down”? Obamacare supporters often spoke about the urgent need to lower the country’s out-of-control spending on health care. They often cited statistics suggesting that the U.S. spent exorbitant amounts of money on care; far more than other industrialized nations. Obamacare, they told us, would finally bring spiraling costs under control.

On March 4, 2010, President Obama committed to the premise that, “My proposal will bring down the cost of health care for millions: Families, businesses, and the federal government.” Conservatives weren’t so sure. Hadn’t Congressional Budget Director Doug Elmendorf warned Congress that, if anything, the legislation would actually bend the cost curve up?

Approximately a month after the vote went through, a damning report prepared by the government’s very own Medicare Actuary exposed the truth: Obamacare will actually increase the nation’s health care tab. In the first ten years of the program, spending will increase about 1 percent or roughly $310 billion.

Bottom line: Obamacare supporters were wrong when they told the country the legislation would lower the nation’s health care costs. Ten years after its passage, health care will represent a larger percentage of GDP than the current projection.

Obamacare proponents like Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic argued that the uptick in spending over 10 years didn’t matter because the long-term trend does bend the curve down. But the Actuary’s report says the savings liberals are counting on in part to cause this long-term bend “may be unrealistic.”

Promise #3: Reform will lower Americans’ health care premiums.

People on all sides of the debate seemed to agree on one thing: Higher premiums were a major bummer. So, President Obama announced his plan would reduce them. The new health care market “will lower rates,” he said, “it’s estimated by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you’re currently getting.” During a stump speech in Cleveland, he went even further, claiming that premiums could fall by as much as 3,000 percent (a spokesman later clarified he meant $3,000). Gaffes aside, the message was rates would head south under Obamacare. But CBS, the Washington Post, and the CBO argued in 2009 that kind of reduction was unlikely.

Even early on in the public debate, opponents of the plan harbored serious doubts about this claim. Could the government really force insurance companies to lower premiums without risking a collapse of the private market? Federally mandated bargain-basement premium rates would inevitably lead to insurance companies cutting costs through layoffs, offering lower quality care, going bankrupt, or all the above. President Obama insisted that the demise of private insurance was no longer his or the Left’s long-term goal, going so far as to claim that his bill would actually strengthen the private market by opening it up to millions of new consumers. But the question remained: How would the government add patients, add mandates to health plans, and not raise costs to average Americans?

Were Congressional Democrats convinced by their own party’s talking point? Nope. Less than a month after their March triumph, Senate Democrats were so concerned over the prospect of dramatic premium hikes, they began scrambling to regulate premium rates. (Video of Harkin’s committee hearing is unavailable on CSPAN or YouTube, but it can be seen here, on the committee’s website.)

Democrats’ price-control bluster has only intensified as reality sets in. The original bill did not use explicit price-control mechanisms because, of course, premiums were supposed to fall because of the original bill. But the CBO and media fact-checkers agreed that higher premiums were likely on their way.

Obama himself conceded people might be paying more for health insurance before his bill passed, during a Blair House exchange with Sen. Lamar Alexander, but that it was only because they’d be getting better insurance. Politifact awarded the president a generous “Half-True” in this exchange, but added, “Bottom line, people won’t be paying more for the same thing. They’ll be paying more for better plans.” One can argue that paying more for more product is something worth doing, but one can’t argue it satisfies Obama’s promise.

In their defense, if only some real-life scenario had been available to Democrats to help them envision how top-down health insurance price controls would play out, may have made more responsible decisions. Oh, wait. If only there had been some trusted, liberal source who could have delivered the message— like an Edwards and Clinton speechwriter who can’t afford health care in a state with allegedly “universal” health care.

Bottom Line: Contrary to the president’s commitments, your premiums could increase under Obamacare. Why? Just count the reasons. Or ask Dick Durbin.



Promise #4: Obamacare will not lead to a doctor shortage, or escalate the primary-care physician shortfall.

Implicit in the president’s if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can-keep-him schitck was the assumption that his plan certainly wouldn’t negatively impact Americans’ access to doctors. The administration dismissed admonitions of the impending doctor shortage their bill would exacerbate. No worries, they cooed, primary care physicans would come out of the woodwork once all of the bill’s wonderful elements were implemented. After all, Obama had secured the backing of the AMA for his endeavor, right? What could go wrong? Quite a lot, actually.

As a result of the new law, the Associated Press advises Americans to “beat the crowd and find a doctor” because the “landmark health care overhaul…promises extra strain” on the already-dwindling ranks of primary care physicians. Inauspiciously, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Workforce Studies estimates a shortage of 160,000 doctors within 15 years. America’s medical schools “can’t keep up,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “A nurse may soon be your doctor” because of the shortage, explains USA Today.

Obamacare proponent Ezra Klein conceded this point in a post arguing against fears of a doctor shortage. He euphemized such a possibility as a “hiccup” in a growing system and predicted, “Increased need for basic care could lead to more use of nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, and things like Minute Clinics.”

There’s also considerable evidence that Obamacare will overwhelm cramped emergency rooms and slammed hospitals. How might this deepening shortage affect Americans? Just ask a Canadian.

Bottom Line: Thanks to Obamacare, America’s doctor shortfall will accelerate and it will become more difficult to get quality, timely care from a doctor.

Promise #5: There will be no government rationing of medical care.

Democrats’ most furious pushback against anti-Obamacare arguments resulted from predictions of government-mandated rationing. The White House website’s “reality check” feature devotes two full pages to “debunking” so-called right-wing smears about rationing. The president himself assailed his opponents on this point.

Speaking in New Hampshire, he dismissed concerns over rationing, “that somehow some government bureaucrat out there will be saying, well, you can’t have this test or you can’t have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that this is not a good way to use our health care dollars.” Those fears, he said, were unfounded. “So I just want to be very clear about this. I recognize there is an underlying fear here that people somehow won’t get the care they need. You will have not only the care you need, but also the care that right now is being denied to you.”

What worried many skeptics was the equal clarity expressed by liberal Democrat and former cabinet secretary Robert Reich, who in 2007 candidly laid out the underlying need for government rationing within any government-run health care framework:



Does Secretary Reich fall under into the category of smear merchant? What about Obama’s own Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag? After his boss’ plan was signed into law, Orzag publicly marveled at the government’s new powers to hit “aggressive” health care cost-cutting goals—largely without the inconvenience of Congressional oversight. His unedited remarks belie the president’s words in New Hampshire:



In addition to Orszag’s remarks, consider President Obama’s appointment to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services, arguably one of the most influential health care posts in the entire new federal bureaucracy. The president has selected Harvard professor Donald Berwick, who the American Spectator’s Philip Klein nicknamed “Obama’s rationing man.” Berwick is an unapologetic fan of Britain’s National Health Services, notorious for cutting effective (but expensive) medical treatments, and subjecting patients to sub-standard care and neglect.

“I am a romantic about the [British system]; I love it,” Berwick told a British audience in 2008. He also co-authored an academic paper urging “rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest” to “reduce per capita costs.”

The Obama administration gave Berwick a recess appointment in July, which means he will get no public hearing. The disingenuous rationale for this appointment was that Republicans were holding the nomination up, but as ABC News reported at the time, “Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick’s nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick’s past statements about health care rationing and his praise for the British health care system.”

It is precisely because the administration no longer wants to address what Obama once called a “legitimate concern” that Berwick will not have to face the Senate.

There was also that whole Guide to Death pamphlet issued by the VA— a joint venture of sorts with the Hemlock Society—which might have led to “legitimate concern” about bean-counters meddling in personal medical decisions.

Bottom Line: Whether dressed up as “comparative effectiveness research” or described bluntly by Mr. Reich or Berwick, government rationing is a frightening and unavoidable byproduct of government-administered and –regulated health care.

Promise #6: “The firm pledge” – Ninety-five percent of Americans will not see any form of tax increase because of Obamacare (or anything else).

It doesn’t get any less ambiguous than this Obama promise: “I can make a firm pledge,” he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2009. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”



Candidate Obama repeated this vow so often on the campaign trail, anyone who even loosely followed the 2008 presidential campaign could likely repeat it in his sleep. Once a behemoth new entitlement was on the table, some dishonest, rumor-peddling cynics began to wonder if the president would be forced to abandon his central campaign pledge to pay for it. Such an admission, naturally, might have caused some angst among voters and fomented more opposition to the bill. “But of course we’ll honor our tax pledge!” the White House insisted.

Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, the president was adamant: “I can still keep [the $250,000 tax] promise because as I’ve said, about two-thirds of what we’ve proposed would be from money that’s already in the health care system but just being spent badly. And as I said before, this is not me making wild assertions.”

He was even more frank speaking with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.



Now the federal government itself is arguing in court challenges to its constitutionality that the individual mandate is a tax after all, to which all Americans will be subject. The New York Times:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

We also now know that in its current and future attempts to pay for Obamacare, the federal government will raise taxes on millions of Americans, violate “the firm pledge” repeatedly, and force the American public to become even more intimately acquainted with the Internal Revenue Service.

There are at least 18 new taxes embedded into the new law, many of which don’t detonate until after the president’s 2012 re-election campaign. All of those taxes must just target the rich, right? Wrong. The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation breaks the bad news: Millions of middle class families will get “socked” with a $3.9 billion tax hike in the years ahead thanks to Obamacare.

There are also some “costly” new IRS mandates. The head of the IRS has warned taxpayers failure to comply with the government’s new universal mandate to purchase approved coverage may result in the confiscation of tax refunds. If that sounds like a lot of bureaucratic work, you’re right: The feds are contemplating hiring thousands of new IRS agents to track and enforce compliance on a national scale.

The federal government’s own National Taxpayer Advocate Service argued in July that Obamacare has it doing work it’s not remotely trained, qualified, or funded for and that the health care law “may impose significant burdens on businesses, charities, and government agencies.”

So, how’s that ‘firm pledge’ holding up, Mr. Outgoing White House budget director? It’s been downgraded to a presidential “preference,” eh? It was fun while it lasted.

Bottom Line: Hold on to your wallets.

Promise #7: Health care reform won’t add “a single dime” to the deficit—and will actually cut it.

Remember that unambiguous, crystal-clear presidential promise from item number six? Here’s another one, delivered to a joint session of Congress and a nationally televised audience: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. (Applause.) I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”

Right-wing paranoiacs really didn’t believe this one, but the Democrats had an ace in the hole. Leading up the vote—voila!—Pelosi & Co engineered a final CBO score that magically validated the president’s famous words. Go crazy, America! Your massive new entitlement program will reduce the deficit by $130 Billion over ten years!

A number of Debbie Downers made valiant attempts to expose the folly. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin crunched the un-manipulated numbers for the New York Times and found that the “real arithmetic” was nowhere near deficit-reducing or –neutral. The truth: Obamacare would bloat the deficit by $563 Billion. The advertised ten-year price tag of $900+ Billion was risible. In reality it sat much closer to $2.5 Trillion, as the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Financial Services Committee inadvertently admitted.



So how did Democrats manage to gerry-rig the CBO’s scoring system to produce superficially solvent math? Rep. Paul Ryan meticulously decimated their “smoke and mirrors” gimmickry at the Blair House summit, thoroughly explaining to the president’s face precisely how his administration and party were misleading the country. The clip is worth your time, and informative to the last drop:



In fairness, here’s Obamacare proponent Ezra Klein’s rebuttal to Ryan, which is worth a read for a pretty frank but ultimately unconvincing defense of tricky government accounting. But even in rebutting Ryan, Klein concedes, “The 10-year cost of the bill is really only counting six years of operation. This was a deceptive effort to keep the bill’s price tag under $1 trillion, even as the bill’s price tag was really quite a bit more.”

In short, the Democrats’ bogus score relied on:

(a) Double-counting unrealistic, never-gonna-happen Medicare cuts to the tune of $500 Billion.
(b) Pretending the $200B+ “Doc Fix” was a separate, unrelated issue—it has since passed the Senate. For those who think treating “doc fix” as an unrelated issue was fair, they may want to ponder why the expensive measure was included in an early version of the House bill until Democrats needed a better CBO score, at which point it was removed.
(c) Shoehorning 10 years’ of tax revenues into just six years of “benefits.”
(d) Double-counting social security tax revenue.
(e) Totally ignoring billions in requisite “discretionary” spending for Obamacare’s implementation.

On the eve of the health care vote, a CBO letter to Rep. Paul Ryan confirmed that, without such gimmickry, the health care bill would add $260 billion over 10 years to instead of reducing it by $138. Both the CMS and the CBO have objected to the double-counting of Medicare savings as paying for Obamacare and shoring up Medicare, but the administration continues to use the misleading metric, even this week.

Passage of the “Doc Fix” alone, coupled with this little wrinkle, has already driven Obamacare into the red. Finally, the current director of CBO has decisively torpedoed the entire “cost savings” charade. Revisiting a previous devastating critique that nearly derailed the process in 2009, Elmendorf has concluded that Obamacare will not “bend the cost curve” of health care spending down.

Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path would almost certainly require a significant reduction in the growth of federal health spending relative to current law (including this year’s health legislation).

Too little, too late. It’s now the law of the land.

Bottom Line: The president’s bill won’t add a single dime to the deficit. It will pile trillions upon trillions of dimes atop an already mountainous debt.

Promise #8: Health care reform will help businesses—employers and employees, alike.

The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation offers a good list of concerns conservatives had about the effect the health care reform bill might have on businesses. Here’s the story of just one, wholesome Midwestern company rethinking its employer-provided health insurance in the wake of Obamacare. White Castle, maker of the nation’s beloved fast-food sliders, provides employees with health care coverage that covers 70-89 percent of their costs. This would seem to make the company one of the good actors, according to the administration’s standards. But health care reform is discouraging this good behavior instead of encouraging it. They will consider dropping their health care and leaving employees to government exchanges.

They’re not the only ones. That’s why the International Franchise Association opposed the law, saying it will “impose tremendous burdens on America’s restaurants and hurt our industry’s ability to create and sustain jobs.”

Small business owners and the self-employed get hit again with a new, onerous tax burden meant to close a tax reporting “loophole” to pay for the health care that’s allegedly going to do nothing but help them. The federal government’s IRS ombudsman took issue with a new requirement that every business and non-profit file a 1099 form for anyone from whom they buy $600 or more in goods or services annually. This would require that each business owner keep a tally of goods he bought from Staples to make sure his ink cartridges don’t hit $600, and would affect up to 40 million businesses, many of them sole proprietorships.

Some House Democrats have since realized the folly of this anti-business imposition, and have offered a bill to repeal this part of Obamacare, but are balking at the loss of revenue. They say realizing you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Let’s hope they’re right, as even Democrats begin to relinquish the farce that this bill can be all things to all people and all paid for, all at the same time.

Promise #9: Obamacare will not allow for funding of abortions with taxpayer money.

At his address to the joint session of Congress in September 2009, President Obama attempted to “clear up” what he called a “misunderstanding.”

“Under our plan,” he said. “No federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.

Pro-life activists were accused of lying for pointing out that a “segregation of funds” would not prevent funding of abortions through federally subsidized plans because money is fungible. Pro-life Democrats balked at the idea of the federal government funding abortions on Indian reservations and in community health centers, endangering the passage of the bill. A last-minute Executive Order allegedly preventing federal funding of abortion only affirmed the inadequate language in the original bill, but garnered enough pro-life Democrats to win bill passage.

In July 2010, the Congressional Research Service found that Obamacare did indeed allow federal funding for abortions through high-risk pools created and entirely funded by the federal government. The Executive Order doesn’t prevent abortion funding through high-risk pools.

When New Mexico’s high-risk pool made it possible to get an abortion on demand, the public outcry caused the federal government to set stricter guidelines, allowing abortions only in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The rules in Pennsylvania also seem to allow for federally funded abortions, though the administration and the state claim the problematic language is just a “placeholder.” Pro-life activists also have concerns about Maryland.

Bottom Line: Were it not for watchful pro-life activists and the wide unpopularity of federally funding abortions, the bill would already be paying for them in at least one state.

Promise #10: Obamacare will not only satisfy each of the promises above, but satisfy all of them at the same time with virtually no downsides.

In defense of the administration, it did start lowering expectations shortly after passage. On Obama’s post-passage p.r. push, he gave a speech in Iowa that included this decidedly un-lofty section:

“Now, it’s going to take about four years to implement this entire plan — because we’ve got to do it responsibly and we need to do it right. So I just want to be clear: that means that health care costs won’t go down overnight; not all the changes are going to be in place; there are still going to be aspects of the health care system that are very frustrating over the next several years.”

With all due respect to the president, we weren’t pitched “This’ll take four years of frustration but it won’t be as bad as Republicans say it is” for $2.5 trillion. We were pitched perfection. Every substantive criticism was met with charges of “fear-mongering.” We were pitched a bill that expanded coverage and increased subsidies without increasing the deficit, mandated new levels of coverage without taxing citizens, that changed everything unless you didn’t want anything to change, that cut costs without rationing, and that enacted 2,500 pages of law without any unintended negative consequences.

Instead we have a bill that’s already been uncertain on whether it covers Congress, is missing deadlines and confusing doctors and patients, is threatening to throw the sickest off its high-risk rolls to save money, raises questions about covering children with and without preexisting conditions, and may take decades for the federal government to figure out. No wonder proponents got a little testy, right after passage, about actually providing verifiable results of all they’d promised.

At the risk of using the “overheated rhetoric” and “fear-mongering” I know the president hates, it’d be fitting if Americans exercised their Berwickian right to comparative research and subjected Obamacare to its own death panel. All Obama’s promises have expiration dates. Why not his policies?

Thanks to Ed and Allah for letting us hang out with Hot Air readers once again, and special thanks to Phil Klein of the American Spectator, whose extensive health care reporting and knowledge (cited throughout) added so much to this effort.

Court Rules Prop 8 Unconstitutional

It's about time.  I never thought this was something that should have been put to public vote because it was a matter of equal rights.



From Fox News:

Missouri Taking the Mandate to a Vote

Time takes notice as the first state takes the Healthcare mandate head on:

Opponents of Prop C — those who support the insurance mandate — have been frustrated by the lack of a vigorous campaign to defeat it. Apart from a mass mailing by the Missouri Hospital Association, no organized effort existed until a few weeks ago when three 19-year-olds started a Facebook campaign. “I’ve had to spend about $500 out of my own pocket making signs,” lamented Caleb-Michael Files, the Subway sandwich-shop manager and full-time college student who launched the Facebook effort. He wonders why Missouri is spending money on a referendum likely to stir up an expensive court case. “The law is the law,” he says. Missouri lieutenant governor Peter Kinder is one of several state officials across the country who have already filed suit challenging the federal law. (Another of those, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, gained a small victory in his fight against the law on Monday, when a federal judge ruled that the state does indeed have standing to bring the suit.)

Prop C is a gimme for the GOP base. In polls, Republicans strongly oppose Obamacare — and Tuesday’s primaries are far more interesting on the GOP side, practically guaranteeing a turnout heavily skewed against health care reform. Republicans barely need to raise more money to get out the vote.

Here’s the actual text of the proposition together with real-time polling results.  This is more of a political message, denying the government of Missouri the power to penalize citizens for failing to buy health insurance, but that’ll be irrelevant if/when a federal court decides that the mandate in Healthcare is constitutional.  In my opinion, the commerce clause doesn't hold for an individual choosing not to become active in the market.  The clause only covers voluntary activity and shouldn't punish you for opting not to participate. 
 
We'll know by morning the exact percentages on Prop C.

Update:  With all districts reported in the Amendment passes at 71.1%

Chart of the Day

The Joint Economic Committee went through the trouble of depicting the infinite number of bureaucracies and agencies as a result of Healthcare Reform:

No one can figure out exactly how many new agencies ObamaCare will spawn once it comes into effect. In fact, the Congressional Research Office can’t figure it out either. The language of the bill leaves open the possibility of an infinite string of new agencies and bureaucracies. (From Politico):

Don’t bother trying to count up the number of agencies, boards and commissions created under the new health care law. Estimating the number is “impossible,” a recent Congressional Research Service report says, and a true count “unknowable.”

The reasons for the uncertainty are many, according to CRS’s Curtis W. Copeland, the author of the report “New Entities Created Pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
The provisions of the law that create the new entities vary dramatically in specificity.
The law says a lot about some of them and a little about many, and merely mentions a few. Some have been authorized without any instructions on who is to appoint whom, when that might happen and who will pay.
Those agencies created without specific appointment or appropriations procedures will have to wait indefinitely for staff and funding before they can function, according to Copeland’s report.

Like Nancy Pelosi once argued, the CRS report says that we can’t know what’s in ObamaCare until the government rolls it out.

That should be a big, big problem. Congress just authorized a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, one that can expand on its own and make determinations far outside of the boundaries Democrats promised during the Healthcare reform debate. It is equally true that the claims made on the cost of administering Healthcare reform had no real basis in fact. Who could possibly guess how much this would cost if we have no idea on how big it's going to get?

Oh, from what I understand, the graphic shows only a chunk of the bureaucracy....

PETE STARK: Why you NEED to know who you're voting for

Democrat Pete Stark of San Fransico in a townhall meeting....I can't believe we have elected officials who have no knowledge of the Constitution, of the laws they voted for, or the danger they pose to their constituents. Become active voters and arm yourselves with knowledge before choosing your candidate.

Juicy Parts: 3:24, 4:13, 5:20, 6:58. DO BETTER PEOPLE!!

Economic Info for the Month of June

From the NAR: Pending Home Sales ease in Post Tax Credit Market:

The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator, declined 2.6 percent to 75.7 based on contracts signed in June from an upwardly revised level of 77.7 in May [revised from 77.6], and is 18.6 percent below June 2009 when it was 93.0. The data reflects contracts and not closings, which normally occur with a lag time of one or two months.

Manufacturing fell 1.2%, which followed a 1.8% decrease in May. New orders, shipments, and unfilled orders all fell, while inventories rose. From the Commerce Department:

New orders for manufactured goods in June, down two consecutive months, decreased $5.1 billion or 1.2 percent to $406.4 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. This followed a 1.8 percent May decrease. Excluding transportation, new orders decreased 1.1 percent. Shipments, also down two consecutive months, decreased $3.5 billion or 0.8 percent to $411.2 billion. This followed a 1.8 percent May decrease. Unfilled orders, down slightly following two consecutive monthly increases, decreased $0.3 billion to $802.8 billion. This followed a 0.3 percent May increase. The unfilled orders-to-shipments ratio was 5.60, down from 5.61 in May. Inventories, down two consecutive months, decreased $0.5 billion or 0.1 percent to $520.0 billion. This followed a 0.4 percent May decrease. The inventories-to-shipments ratio was unchanged at 1.26.

Private sector wages fell, while overall wages remained stagnant:

Personal income increased $3.0 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $5.1 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, in June, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased $2.9 billion, or less than 0.1 percent. In May, personal income increased $40.5 billion, or 0.3 percent, DPI increased $36.9 billion, or 0.3 percent, and PCE increased $8.6 billion, or 0.1 percent, based on revised estimates.

Real disposable income increased 0.2 percent in June, compared with an increase of 0.4 percent in May. Real PCE increased 0.1 percent, compared with an increase of 0.2 percent.

Things were worse for the private sector:
 
Private wage and salary disbursements decreased $5.2 billion in June, in contrast to an increase of $19.2 billion in May. Goods-producing industries’ payrolls decreased $8.9 billion, in contrast to an increase of $10.4 billion; manufacturing payrolls decreased $6.0 billion, in contrast to an increase of $7.8 billion. Services-producing industries’ payrolls increased $3.7 billion, compared with an increase of $8.8 billion. Government wage and salary disbursements decreased $0.6 billion, in contrast to an increase of $7.0 billion. The decline in the number of temporary workers for Census 2010 subtracted $3.4 billion at an annual rate from federal civilian payrolls in June; the hiring of additional temporary workers had added $5.7 billion at an annual rate in May. …

Proprietors’ income decreased $4.4 billion in June, in contrast to an increase of $2.2 billion in May.

This follows on the last unemployment report from June (July’s report is due on Friday), which showed a gain of 83,000 private-sector jobs — not enough to keep up with population growth — while 225,000 temporary Census workers lost their jobs. More of the latter were shed in July, which means that the numbers will probably look poor on Friday anyway. However, the drop in private-sector compensation belies the idea that the jobs market expanded in any meaningful way in June. And that means bad news for the government as well:
 
Personal current taxes decreased $2.0 billion in June, in contrast to an increase of $3.6 billion in May. Disposable personal income (DPI) — personal income less personal current taxes — increased $5.1 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, in June, compared with an increase of $36.9 billion, or 0.3 percent, in May.
 
By almost all measures, the economy has slowed considerably from what was already an anemic pace. Moreover, wage earners are losing ground. Small wonder, then, that demand and consumption have stalled and started to decline.

Policing for Profit - The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

In the US, Americans arrested for crimes are considered innocent until the state proves them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. They may be surprised to discover that their property gets held to a different standard — and has for the last few decades. Civil forfeiture of property to government has become a billion-dollar business, and it’s only getting bigger, as Bob Ewing from Institute for Justice explains at Big Government:

Atlas Shrugged Monologue - Money is the Root of All Evil

An exerpt from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", the monologue of Francisco d'Aconia speaking of the root of all evil....money. Setting the scene, he's speaking to a group of people that can be described as the modern progressive of today.  Mind you, this book was written in 1957. It's a bit long, but worth the read.

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he's the typical product of money."


Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."