Watching Meet the Press this past Sunday was a remarkable experience. Among the roundtable contributors were Peggy Noonan, Al Sharpton, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn. The show was fairly enjoyable throughout most of the program – including a very civil discussion about women.
Then right before the close of the program, moderator David Gregory asks Al Sharpton about his recreation of the old Selma to Montgomery march (1965). Sharpton launches into a tirade about how we need to do this march again because our government is trying to disenfranchise millions of people.
REV. SHARPTON: The message is that with the new voter ID laws being proposed in over 30 states, the Brennan Institute says it will disenfranchise five million people. There has been no established reason to change the laws. There’s no widespread fraud that has been in any way documented. And we do, do not believe that we should have these millions of peoples disenfranchised. This is–has a disproportionate impact on young people, seniors and minorities. And immigration laws in Alabama are horrendous and we think they violate the civil rights of people. And we sought to dramatize, not just to commemorate 47 years ago, but to continue today to fight those issues.
Incredibly, this ludicrous and partisan comment goes unanswered. David Gregory just nods along and doesn’t even respond, and neither does Peggy Noonan. Gregory switches topics and wraps up the program with a quick analysis of the upcoming primary on Tuesday, March 13.
Watching this unfold made the whole program seem like a set-up. Everything was quite civil earlier on, so when Sharpton made his outrageous remark, no one batted an eye or refuted the absurdity. It allowed the program to pretty much end with Sharpton’s statement out there to the audience.
Therefore, I was jaded enough to not even be surprised when, the following morning (Monday), the Department of Justice announced the following:
The Justice Department’s civil rights division on Monday objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification.
Texas follows South Carolina as the second state in recent months to become embroiled in a court battle with the Justice Department over new photo ID requirements for voters.
Should I even be surprised? Sharpton’s Meet the Press commentary seemed to coincide with the announcement of government decisions effecting voters in an election year. There is absolutely no reason why we should not have fair and free elections by requiring identification at the polls. We already require IDs for so many other things that to somehow cry discrimination when it comes to IDs for our sacred electoral process is nothing more than sheer political poppycock.
New estimates released from the CBO suggest that ObamaCare will cost at least $1.76 TRILLION over ten years — up from the $900 Billion touted by Obama.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
By this time next year, we’ll have the full ten years (2014 – 2023) time frame to get the truest estimate of cost, which is likely to exceed $2 trillion.
Philip Klein, the Washington Examiner correspondent who covered the above information, also released a corollary article that discusses the impact of employer health-care changes and the rising number of Medicare recipients on ObamaCare costs and coverage. And for those who love raw date, the entire CBO report can be accessed here.
Hats off to Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconson) for pressing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the economic and insurance impact of ObamaCare.
Johnson challenged Sebelius over a number of the Obama administration’s claims about the new health care law, namely that it will reduce the deficit and allow individuals to keep their current healthcare plans.
This video clip is worthwhile to watch in its entirety, as Selelius is unable to answer basic facts about the legislation. Thanks to the Washington Free Beacon for providing the information. Let’s just hope Senator Johnson will not be expected to apologize for making her uncomfortable…
As a CPA, it is frustrating to hear Social Security repeatedly being described as a pay-as-you-go (“PAYGO”) system, which gives credence to something that is terribly incorrect. PAYGO is not a system at all; rather it is a method of reporting that hides earned realities, making it totally unacceptable to accounting professions, SEC, and virtually everybody.
The fallacy of calling it PAYGO is that, in reality, the cash includes everything we are getting in, while the cash out doesn’t include the responsibilities due to come. The cash out formula specifically excludes the trillions promised to existing workers in the future, (while their Social Security tax is being collected today). It doesn’t really describe, as part of the expenses being incurred this year, the amount of future retirement benefits being earned and promised.
In contrast, if you give an insurance company today $100,000 to pay you a retirement pension beginning when you retired at the age of 65, the insurance company (logically and legally), the insurance company would report this as an asset offset by a liability to provide $100,000 of payments in the future. The Social Security system, however, reports that as $100,000 of profits in the year received, while the obligation to account for and provide future benefits is incredibly ignored.
When the cash in is received, that money egregiously goes into the government’s general tax revenue account and not in any Social Security Fund (anymore). The Social Security Administration merely collects and records the gross Social Security tax receipts, while the net amount, after deductions, is sent to the IRS. Yet the gross amount recorded is the amount spent by the government, resulting in the staggering deficit we face today. Therefore, it is outrageous for anyone to say that accounting for the system can be done simply by looking at the cash in-cash out.
The biggest problem with this arrangement is that it puts the burden on the wrong people. We have a growing population of retiring taxpayers and the current generation is paying off the obligation the older generation never paid for. It is a Ponzi scheme in which, depending on how you play it, you manipulate who is paying whose obligation. Therefore, the PAYGO method doesn’t work because the government takes 100% of the money they receive and they do not put away; they need it to pay today’s debt to another taxpayer, while today’s payee is stuck holding the bag.
According to the Social Security trustees, in a report released this past fall, unfunded liabilities – those promises made to individuals solely in exchange for amounts they have already paid for – amount to an $18 trillion deficit. Social Security in its present form is unsustainable.
The term PAYGO is used for the lay person; cute semantics – but misleading at best, willfully dishonest at worst. It mischaracterizes the program for the political purpose of allowing politicians to declare that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit, and therefore, should not be overhauled in any major way. But until we agree to start recording Social Security (and Medicare) in budgets in actuarially sound way, we will never be able to honestly and effectively deal with their fiscal crises.
President Obama: Do you think the President of the United States going into re-election wants gas prices to go up higher? Is that — is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense? Look, here’s the bottom line with respect to gas prices: I want gas prices lower because they hurt families.
President Obama made it a priority of his busy day of not producing a workable budget or cutting the deficit to be supportive of the coed student who complained about the cost of her contraception. He calls and apologizes to her for her interaction with Rush Limbaugh. But our Commander-in-Chief has yet to call the family of slain soldier from Virginia, Army Sargeant Timothy John Conrad, who died February 23, following the Koran-burning incident (which Obama apologized on behalf of America for.)
