number of federal employees, year by year, since 1940

 

A fine chart from DR

The Truth About the Health Care Bill- From the Left's View

Some myth busting from the Left, courtesy of FDL:

The bill will make health care affordable for middle class Americans.	The bill will impose a financial hardship on middle class Americans who will be forced to buy a product that they can’t afford to use. A family of four making $66,370 will be forced to pay $5,243 per year for insurance. After basic necessities, this leaves them with $8,307 in discretionary income — out of which they would have to cover clothing, credit card and other debt, child care and education costs, in addition to $5,882 in annual out-of-pocket medical expenses for which families will be responsible.
5. This plan is similar to the Massachusetts plan, which makes health care affordable.	Many Massachusetts residents forgo health care because they can’t afford it. A 2009 study by the state of Massachusetts found that: 21% of residents forgo medical treatment because they can’t afford it, including 12% of children 18% have health insurance but can’t afford to use it
6. This bill provide health care to 31 million people who are currently uninsured.	This bill will mandate that millions of people who are currently uninsured must purchase insurance from private companies, or the IRS will collect up to 2% of their annual income in penalties. Some will be assisted with government subsidies.
7. You can keep the insurance you have if you like it.	The excise tax will result in employers switching to plans with higher co-pays and fewer covered services. Older, less healthy employees with employer-based health care will be forced to pay much more in out-of-pocket expenses than they do now.

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The Fear of Honest Accounting

Washington Examiner: ... Democratic leaders in Congress have used every government accounting and budget gimmick at their disposal to deceive Americans for the last year about the true costs of Obamacare. These Washington politicians have no business lecturing CEOs on honesty in accounting. ...On Capitol Hill and in the White House on Monday, Democrats were fuming over a series of announcements that started Friday from Fortune 500 firms saying their bottom lines will take huge negative hits because of changes in tax law mandated by Obamacare. That hit in turn means lower profit projections. Caterpillar estimates, for example, that Obamacare will cost it $100 million; John Deere faces expenses of $150 million; 3M, $90 million; AK Steel, $31 million; Valero, $20 million. And then there's AT&T, which is marking its balance sheet down by a whopping $1 billion. All in all, the Wall Street Journal estimated a $14 billion haircut for these corporations.








Under post-Enron accounting rules, the corporations were required to revise their projections to account for the effect of Obamacare on their bottom lines. The effect is negative because Democrats, in their zeal to raise revenues and improve Obamacare's claimed effect on the federal deficit outlook, took away a tax break these companies needed in order to supply prescription drugs to their retirees.

Read more at the Washington Examiner:

Political Folly

From the Newsweek Blog no less...

...In Gallup's new poll, Americans by narrow margins agree that the new health-care law will improve coverage (44–40 percent) and the "overall health of Americans" (40–35 percent). In a way, it's astonishing that sizable minorities could disagree with those two statements, since everyone agrees the law will provide medical coverage to 32 million more Americans.


But that's where support, however ambivalent, ends. Americans think the law will harm the U.S. economy (44–34 percent), the overall quality of health care in the U.S. (55–29 percent), and the federal balance sheet (61–23 percent).



It's almost as bad when you ask voters how the law will affect them personally. There is lots of doubt and some considerable belief (or hope) that the new law won't affect them at all. But respondents who said the measure would affect them generally fear what that change would be. They think the measure would adversely affect "the health-care coverage you and your family receive" (34–24 percent); "the quality of health care you and your family receive" (35–21 percent); and the "costs you and your family pay for health care: (50–21 percent).... (more)

Federal Deficit

H/T Sense of Events
Read the rest, here.

The Spending 'Freeze' That Isn't

From the WSJ:

Since 2008, the ratio of federal spending-to-GDP has risen by about 14%. From 2008 to 2009 we saw the greatest annual increase in spending in the last 30 years. In the name of stimulating job growth, the share of federal spending is now 24% of the economy, up from 21% in the last year of the Bush administration.

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Martin Kozlowski

My analysis of data from 1950 to the present shows that periods with high tax-to-GDP ratios exhibit much slower economic growth than lower tax ratio periods. The GDP growth in high tax years (defined as years during which the ratio of tax-to-GDP was above 18%, the 60-year average) was about 1.5 percentage points lower than the growth rate in low-tax years...more

U.S. Loan Effort Is Seen as Adding to Housing Woes

Raising more false hopes... from the NY Times. You know things are bad
when you're getting bad press from Mother Times...

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect
 homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a
disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts 
now contend it has done more harm than good. (more)

Obama's 3 Million Dollar Tax Hike

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers had this to say about deficit reduction:
But the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers admitted that health reform and a growing economy isn’t enough to bring down the deficit. She did mention one other place that revenue could come from: letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

James Pethokoukis at the Reuters Blog says that Since Obama already wants to get rid of the income and capital gains tax cuts for wealthier Americans that expire at the end of 2010, clearly what Romer is referring to is the rest of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. Letting all the 2001 cuts — rate reductions, child tax credit marriage penalty relief — expire would raise tax revenues by $2.5 trillion through 2019. (more)

And the whole "tax the rich" scheme is nothing but a bunch of fertilizer. If you think you won't be affected by a tax on the "wealthiest of Americans" you've got a rude awakening coming. Its really quite simple: 80% of Americans work for those considered "rich". Many of these are the "mom and pop" shops that employ 100's of people and larger companies that employ 1,000s.

A tax on the rich will impact small and big alike and and business will respond by raising prices and/or cutting jobs or not expanding/hiring. The greatest impact will be on "small" business.

70% of jobs in this country are created by small business.

It ain't rocket surgery or brain science folks...

Another Day Another Lie- Part 2

And its being reported by ABC (after other outlets began the story) which is perhaps even bigger news than Obama is lying....


A series of media reports have surfaced in the past week or so, uncovering examples of significant overcounting of stimulus-tied jobs in California, Massachusetts, Texas, Wisconsin, as well several states.

For example: The Boston Globe reviewed the 12,000-plus jobs claimed to have been created or saved by $4 billion in direct stimulus spending in Massachusetts. In one case, a state college reported having added 160 new work-study jobs tied to just $77,181 in stimulus funds. A spokesman for the school, Bridgewater State College, told the Globe that the actual number of jobs was "almost nothing."
The Globe described the Bay State's stimulus job figures as "wildly exaggerated."

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review found a sanitation department in Douglas County, Wis., that admitted to a typo that resulted in an estimate of 100 jobs saved or created, when the actual number was five.

According to USA Today, the Texas recipient of a $26,174 roofing contract reported erroneously that 450 jobs were created or saved when, in fact, six were.... (more)

and as a follow up:

The Obama administration, under fire for inflating job growth from the $787 billion stimulus plan, slashed over 60,000 jobs from its most recent report on the program because the reporting outlets had submitted "unrealistic data," according to a document obtained by ABC News. (more)

Because of unrealistic data or because a Republican caught on and started asking questions...