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The White House released its latest regulatory agenda for the fall. This current amount contains 3,415 items for consideration. Did you miss the list? Most people did; the White House released the massive agenda on the eve of Thanksgiving. The Daily Caller notes that this latest document dump marked “the fifth time the Obama administration has released its regulatory road map on the eve of a major holiday”. It follows the footsteps of last spring’s agenda, when it was released right before Memorial Day.
The 3,415 regulations “includes 189 rules that cost more than $100 million.” These include several controversial EPA rules and regs, such as the redefinition of the “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. Likewise, several educational proposals, which seem to expand federal reach into education, have raised eyebrows.
Center for Progressive Reform Executive Director Matt Shudtz remarked that “it’s a shame that the Obama administration goes about intentionally releasing such important agendas in stealth at times when Americans are the most distracted, especially when its wide range of rules and regulations touch virtually every American both here and abroad.”
To view the entire list, called the “Unified Agenda for Fall 2014” go here.
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Even though the government is bringing in record revenue, its spending is still outpacing its intake. CNS News did an analysis of Treasury Statements, and revealed that the Department of Treasury is currently operating like a Ponzi scheme:
“The Daily Treasury Statement that was released Wednesday afternoon as Americans were preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving revealed that the U.S. Treasury has been forced to issue $1,040,965,000,000 in new debt since fiscal 2015 started just eight weeks ago in order to raise the money to pay off Treasury securities that were maturing and to cover new deficit spending by the government.
During those eight weeks, Treasury took in $341,591,000,000 in revenues. That was a record for the period between Oct. 1 and Nov. 25. But that record $341,591,000,000 in revenues was not enough to finance ongoing government spending let alone pay off old debt that matured.”
During the 8 weeks since the start of the fiscal year, the Treasury brought in revenue of $341,591,000,000. However, old debt was maturing. In order to cover the old debt plus finance the government, it was forced to issue new debt. There was $942,103,000,000 in old debt. To cover its obligations, the government had to “roll over the old debt into new debt and issue enough additional new debt to cover the new deficit spending”.
CNS News explains how the debt occurred so quickly. “The vast amount of debt that the Treasury must roll over in such a short time frame is driven by the fact the Treasury has put most of the debt into short-term “bills” and mid-term “notes”—on which it can pay lower interest rates—rather than into long-term bonds, which demand significantly higher interest rates….If the Treasury were forced to convert the $1.4 trillion in short-term bills (on which it now pays an average interest rate of 0.056 percent) into 30-year bonds at the average rate it is now paying on such bonds (4.919 percent) the interest on that $1.4 trillion in debt would increase 88-fold.”
If the private company operated in this manner, you can be sure the Securities and Exchange Commission would be after them for fraud. But when its the government, all bets are off.
by | ARTICLES, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
Though Thomas Perez no longer looks like Obama’s pick for Attorney General to replace Eric Holder, it is necessary to keep a critical eye on his activities as Labor Secretary. In particular, Thomas Perez is the leading crusader of a notion called “disparate impact”, a concept which allows for charges of discrimination even when none has actually occurred.
Though the idea of “disparate impact” has been around in the business world for at least a couple of decades , it has been vigorously pushed into other sectors as well, particularly during Obama’s administration. This idea holds that “a defendant can be held liable for discrimination for a race-neutral policy that statistically disadvantages a specific minority group even if that negative “impact” was neither purposeful, foreseen, nor intended. In such cases, defendants can be forced to pay for harm caused not by their own actions, but by economic and statistical realities, even if beyond their control.”
Thomas Perez was particularly lucrative with disparate impact while serving as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, his position prior to joining Obama’s cabinet. National Review Online (NRO) covered some of Perez’s cases in recent years , noting that Perez “has applied that theory vigorously to force large settlements from financial companies even in cases where there was no evidence of actual racial discrimination”. In other words, employers can be sought after for violating the law, whether or not they actually did.
The White House in general, and Perez in particular, like disparate impact theory because it “sets a very low bar for proving discrimination. Under it, prosecutors need not prove intent, merely that minorities have suffered a disparate impact from some action”.
Perez also got involved directly in a court case which challenged “disparate impact” policy in housing, which had been accepted for review by the Supreme Court. While still in his role as Assistant AG, Perez personally flew to Minneapolis to negotiate a settlement, a move noted by the Weekly Standard, as Perez, “made a Supreme Court case disappear”.
Perhaps Obama passed on Perez to become the next Attorney General because he needed Perez’s talent for disparate impact to become more pervasive in labor law. As Labor Secretary, he has the ability to oversee all hiring and regulatory practices. Perez has already been charged with funding “union front groups known as work centers as an example of his bias”. As a “leader of the George Soros-funded Casa de Maryland illegal alien advocacy group, Perez lobbied for in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students, driver’s licenses and tax-subsidized day labor centers.”
Perez successfully used disparate impact in the financial and housing sectors and now seems keen to expand its use in the labor world as well. He has indicated a key goal of “leveling the playing field” in labor, though it can certainly be argued-after 6 years of Obama – that the playing field is already tipped in favor of labor. Perez will certainly try to achieve his “leveling” through the use of disparate impact, because the burden to show lack of discrimination falls on the employer – meaning guilty until proven innocent. Perez has the ability to do significant damage in his role as Labor Secretary, which is perhaps why Obama wanted to keep him exactly where he is.
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Tens of thousands of Lerner emails have been found by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). This past Friday, TIGTA announced to congressional staffers that they were located “among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system.”, and that it “took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes”. TIGTA has estimated it could contain nearly 30,000 emails.
The emails date back to 2009 – 2011, an important time frame for the IRS scandal. This covers specifically the era during which Lois Lerner, as head of the IRS exempt-organizations division, engaged in targeting of conservative and Tea Party organizations which sought tax-exempt status ahead of the 2012 Presidential elections. Lerner claimed her computer crashed in Spring 2011, and the IRS declared those emails “lost”.
Washington Examiner noted that this past June, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before Congress that the disaster recovery tapes — the ones recovered — only hold data for about six months, and “even if the IRS had sought the emails within the six-month period, it would have been a complicated and difficult process to produce them from the tapes.”
On the contrary, TIGTA has examined 744 tapes so far, and they are not finished, but have found an estimated 250 emails on the various tapes. Besides the estimated 30,000 of Lerner’s emails, TIGTA surmised that it is likely more missing emails will be recovered from the slew of other IRS workers who also experienced computer crashes.
The IRS issued a statement as a response to the TIGTA find, stating, “the IRS welcomes TIGTA’s independent review and expert forensic analysis. Commissioner Koskinen has said for some time he would be pleased if additional Lois Lerner emails from this time frame could be found.”
This is a ridiculous statement, as it was revealed just a couple of weeks ago from court documents pertaining to an IRS lawsuit over the matter, that the IRS hadn’t even bothered to look for the emails. In the document, the IRS wrote that they have not searched IRS servers because “the servers would not result in the recovery of any information.” The IRS further claimed no search was performed on the back-up tapes, because there was “no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering” any lost emails.
Rep. Darrell Issa, who is overseeing the process, spoke about the IRS’s behavior upon hearing of the TIGTA find. “This discovery also underscores the lack of cooperation Congress has received from the IRS. The agency first failed to disclose the loss to Congress and then tried to declare Lerner’s emails gone and lost forever. Once again it appears the IRS hasn’t been straight with Congress and the American people.”
Issa also stated that the “The Oversight Committee will be looking for information about her mindset and who she was communicating with outside the IRS during a critical period of time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups”, once the emails have gone through the proper redacting process by TIGTA to make sure taxpayer information remains protected. It is expected to take several more weeks before the tapes are ready for presentation to Congress.
It appears that the IRS was playing a huge game of chicken and just lost. They were betting that the public and Congress and TIGTA would not expend the time and money to bother combing through the disaster recovery tapes, and that we would just take their word for it that the emails were lost. More obfuscation from the “most transparent Administration ever”.
by | BLOG
On the heels of the Gruber scandal, more misinformation has been admitted in regard to Obamacare. Bloomberg has reported that “the Obama administration said it erroneously calculated the number of people with health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, incorrectly adding 380,000 dental subscribers to raise the total above 7 million.”
Health and Human Services clarified the total number of Obamacare plans as 6.7 million, a decrease of about 5-6%. “The new count puts enrollment short of a 2013 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, adopted last year as a goal by the Obama administration, that 7 million people would be enrolled this year. Federal officials said in September they had 7.3 million people enrolled in coverage through new government-run insurance exchanges. They didn’t distinguish between medical and dental plans, breaking from previous practice without notice.”
Prior to, the administration had separated medical from dental when accounting for enrollment figures. Last May, 8 million persons were reported to have signed up for health plans, while dental enrollments were 1.1 million.
Over time, enrollment dropped for various reasons. As Bloomberg reported, by “September, the numbers became less transparent. The Medicare agency’s administrator, Marilyn Tavenner, released a new enrollment figure, obtained from insurance companies participating in the exchanges: 7.3 million people were “enrolled in the health insurance marketplace coverage,” she said at a hearing by the Republican-led Oversight committee.”
This same blurring of numbers and parsing of words was seen as recently as November 10. Sylvia Burwell, the HHS Secretary announced updated Obamacare numbers: 7.1 million in October, stating, “That’s the number of people currently enrolled and paying in the marketplace.” These numbers also included dental plans, which again was not disclosed until a few days ago.
“The error was brought to light by Republican investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, using data they obtained from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services”, which was admitted by HHS when asked about the data.
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Is Executive Amnesty is inexplicably tied to Obamacare?
On Monday of last week, the New York Times reported that Health and Human Secretary, Sylvia Burwell, projected 9.1 million enrollees in Obamacare by the end of the year. This is in stark contrast to the original projections by the Congressional Budget Office, which “had estimated that 13 million people would be enrolled next year, with the total rising to 24 million in 2016”.
The New York Times also noted that, “in the past, the White House has used the budget office numbers as a benchmark for success under the Affordable Care Act.”
Currently, enrollment stands at 7.1 million, down from the 8 million touted last year by Obama. This reduction stems from persons who failed to pay premiums or could not prove their identity and therefore considered ineligible.
Additionally, HHS curiously forecasted that “most of the new marketplace enrollment for 2015 is likely to come from the ranks of the uninsured,” and less likely from persons who had already been paying for their own insurance without the marketplace.
If enrollment is lagging so badly behind expectations, how could Obama possibly salvage numbers for Obamacare so that it could show a modicum of “success under the Affordable Care Act”?
Answer: Executive Amnesty.
Early estimates have put those who might benefit from Obama’s amnesty plan to be 3-5 million, a number that would neatly fit the amount necessary to bolster the fledgling Obamacare, which was Obama’s signature policy.
Now, if one goes to the healthcare.gov website, and hovers over the “Get Answers” tab, it opens up a tab which includes the section, “Coverage For…” Guess who is first on the list? Immigrants. Immigrants are listed ahead of “Young adults, Self-employed people, Unemployed people, People with disabilities, People with job-based coverage, Military veterans, American Indians & Alaska Natives, Pregnant women, Same-sex married couples, Retirees, and Incarcerated people.” (in that order). So if a immigrant was granted amnesty, the government made it very easy for him or her to get started.
Within the section under “Immigrants”, the website lists 17 types of immigrant status that makes one eligible for Obamacare. Furthermore, six more types of status are eligible if one has applied for a particular immigrant program, and yet another five more status types are able to enroll in Obamacare if they are coupled with employment authorization. That makes 28 types of immigrants who are eligible for an Obamacare plan already.
Now, to be fair, the website explicitly states at the bottom of the page: “Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible to buy health coverage through the Marketplace. They’re not eligible for premium tax credits or other savings on Marketplace plans.”
However, that’s where Obama’s 10-point Executive Amnesty plan comes in. Under this plan, “President Barack Obama is on the verge of granting executive amnesty and work permits to five million illegal immigrants, including the illegal immigrant parents of children who are American citizens OR previously received executive amnesty under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012.”
Now, the first thing to note about the relationship between amnesty and Obamacare is the part about DACA. On healthcare.gov, it states that “Deferred Action Status” is eligible for Obamacare, but also notes specifically on that same bullet point that “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is not an eligible immigration status for applying for health insurance”. Now, if Obama implements his Executive Amnesty plan, those currently claiming DACA status will be able to suddenly attain Obamacare — allowing potentially many, many new subscribers here.
Another analysis from HotAir goes further in depth:
“One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.
That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.
Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.”
Hence, if Executive Amnesty goes through, the warning on the healthcare.gov website regarding undocumented immigrants is no longer applicable to those who would receive protections; thus, they would be eligible to purchase an Obamacare plan.
As it stands now, a large number of legal immigrants are already using Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. In a report released just this past week from the Center for Immigration Studies, “immigrants have accounted for 42 percent of the growth in Medicaid enrollment since Obamacare began being implemented in 2011”. Furthermore, “The high rate and significant growth in Medicaid associated with immigrants is mainly the result of a legal immigration system that admits large numbers of immigrants with relatively low-levels of education, many of whom end up poor and uninsured.”
2011-2013 have proven to be successful for immigrant-related Obamacare signups; therefore, the likelihood for immigrants who receive amnesty to sign up for an Obamacare plan or product seems relatively high. As a very rough estimate number, if Obama was to grant amnesty to 5 million immigrants, (a middle estimate figure) and assuming the signup rate for Obamacare just among those immigrants is 42% (to stay on trend), then 2.1 million immigrants would sign up.
If HHS is predicting 9.1 million enrolled by the end of the year, and then potentially another 2.1 million can be also factored in, the White House is getting closer to the originally projected figures. Remember, “in the past, the White House has used the budget office numbers as a benchmark for success under the Affordable Care Act”, and the CBO had predicted 13 million by the end of this year, so adding immigrants newly eligible through Executive Amnesty will certainly help to salvage Obamacare numbers.
With the news this morning that Obama will announce Executive Action on immigration this coming Friday, it seems all the more likely that Executive Amnesty is tied to Obamacare. The White House has been mum about how many people have enrolled in the past few days of open enrollment season, suggesting that the number is low. An independent site, acasignups.net, back this assertion.
At this point, no one in the Administration even cares about the cost anymore. It’s all about saving the legislation from abomination, no matter the pricetag or method. That’s probably why the CBO has not even bothered to score the impact of Obamacare on the deficit since 2012 — before Obamacare even began to be fully implemented! Of course, it’s not like anyone really believes either by now that Obamacare won’t add to the deficit.
Therefore, if the numbers so far this year are not meeting even lowered expectations for enrollment, then it is imperative to get the numbers up NOW. That is why Obama has decided to act on Amnesty so soon after Obamacare signups just began again — so stay tuned for Friday, and pay attention to how the Executive action affects immigration and Obamacare.
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In case anyone wasn’t sure about the White House denials regarding its ties to Jonathan Gruber, here we have video of Obama heaping praise upon him:
“You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice.”
This seems to directly contrast Obama’s statement to Ed Henry yesterday, where he “just learned” about Jonathan Gruber (probably from the TV), like every other major story. President Obama said, “I just heard about this. I get well briefed before I come out here. The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I’ve completely disagreed with in terms of the voters, is no reflection on the actual process that was run. We had a year-long debate, Ed, I mean, go back and look at your stories. The one thing we can’t say is that we did not have a lengthy debate about health care in the United States of America. or that it was not adequately covered. I think it is fair to say that there was not a provision in the health care laws that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent.”
Gruber was also not merely “some advisor who never worked on our staff”. We know now there was a cozy relationship with Gruber. Gruber “visited the White House more than a dozen times, according to official visitor logs. One of those meetings took place in the Oval Office with Obama. Additionally, according to contracts issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, Gruber was paid $400,000 for his work on the president’s signature health care law.”
Additionally, Gruber was paid large sums of taxpayer money, totaling nearly $4 million of the last several years — half of it directly related to Obamacare work. Though he wasn’t paid directly by the White House (probably how Obama technically justified the “staff” comment to himself), he was paid by Health and Human Services as well as 8 states so far to work on Obamacare and, prior to, by HHS for other consulting work
Though Obama continues to try to distance himself from Gruber and his remarks, the ties just keep surfacing.
by | ARTICLES, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES
With all the revelations surrounding Jonathan Gruber and the behind-the-scenes Obamacare manoeuvring, Charles Krauthammer weighs in with a solid, sobering analysis. Krauthammer explains, “It’s refreshing that “the most transparent administration in history,” as this administration fancies itself, should finally display candor about its signature act of social change. Inadvertently, of course. But now we know what lay behind Obama’s smooth reassurances — the arrogance of an academic liberalism, so perfectly embodied in the Gruber Confession, that rules in the name of a citizenry it mocks, disdains and deliberately, contemptuously deceives.
The whole piece should be read in its entirety. And you know that Gruber’s remarks have hit a nerve with the White House, as they and the Democrats continue to try to run from their ties to him. Gruber exposed their thought process and tactics.
