We'll revive and strengthen all of American manufacturing. These have been a disastrous eight years for our manufacturers. We've lost nearly 4 million good-paying jobs, including hundreds of thousands in Michigan, and more than 36,000 manufacturers have closed their doors. We can't afford to continue down this path. Manufacturing supports one in six American jobs - jobs that pay more and offer better benefits than other jobs - and we all have a stake in saving them.

With some of the highest electricity prices in the country, California and New York have hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs. California-based Google houses its massive server farms in states like North Carolina and Oregon, which have lower electricity costs.

Whew. Glad that’s over. President Obama yesterday pronounced that the stock market is set to rebound:

On the other hand, what you're now seeing is profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it.

Of course, he is referring to P/E ratio.

Our way is inherently more fair.  In a perfect world, no-one would ever have to pay for another's medical treatments.  After all, no matter how much money you make, it is not your fault if I have cancer.  But, the public does not see it that way. 

Instead, liberals are successfully advancing the notion that healthcare is a right, and that people should be guaranteed medical care, even if their inability to pay means that someone else must pay for them.  And they are winning that debate by presenting an either/or argument:  either we choose the status quo, with 15% of the population uninsured, or "universal coverage" which is another term for socialized medicine.

We must reject this false choice and present a better way.  But how?

The first thing to consider is, can the free market do for us what we wish?  The answer is:  no.

A strictly market-based system, even were we to fix the tax bias towards employer-provided insurance, even if we did away with all the mandates, even if we eliminated malpractice suits entirely, is still going to leave large numbers without insurance.  Insurers today (rightly) charge very high premiums for chronically ill or high-risk patients.  And insurers also flat-out refuse to sell insurance to some high-risk patients.  They are acting rationally, as profit-maximizing entities.  But their behavior is a market failure, in that what benefits them as insurance companies out to earn a profit, and what benefits society as a whole, are not at all in synch.

Liberals see this market failure, and propose to simply do away with the entire notion of risk by basically banning the insurance companies and replacing them with the warm teat of the nanny state.  We'll all pay what we can afford, and we'll all receive equal treatment.  The problem is, nobody has any reason to temper consumption of health care services.  When things are free, people demand a lot of them.  This is why in Britain or Canada, and in the US with Medicare patients, usage of scarce resources must be rationed.  Conservatives recognize that rationing care is not beneficial to society, and is not appreciably more fair as a means of allocating health treatment resources than is wealth.

So, we must find a third way to address the problem of the uninsured; one that can remedy the known market failure spelled out above, while not giving in to the fleeting allure of socialized medicine and what follows it; rationing.  And this is what I proposed in my last post; a change in regulations governing the insurance markets that would reduce the number of uninsured while retaining or instituting free market incentives to keep costs under control.

Part of the reason there are so many uninsured in America is because of existing regulations.  It is well known that the healthy and the wealthy are already supporting the sick and the poor via implicit subsidy.  Insurance rates are higher for all as hospitals, forbidden by regulation from denying treatment to those who will not pay, must jack up rates to paying customers to cover the nonpaying ones.  People paying for insurance, either directly or through an employer, therefore subsidize the uninsured.

This leads to a classic vicious cycle, whereby high insurance rates yield large numbers of people unable to afford insurance, which leads to more uninsured people needing health treatment, which leads to higher insurance rates, and then still more unable to afford insurance.  And on and on it goes. 

To break this cycle, we need more people to buy insurance.  And the best way to get more people to buy insurance is by controlling the price of the policies to make them more affordable.  Since the free market cannot do this by itself, we need to intervene in the market by instituting guaranteed-issue, and by capping rates insurers may charge. 

And then, like France, we will need straight out cash transfers to allow the truly poor to buy a policy at all.

The net result of these policy changes will be that prices for people who had been previously "priced out" of the insurance market will be lowered to whatever we cap the rates at.  People who were previously denied insurance will also be able to buy policies at the capped rate.  Poor people will receive subsidies, and therefore be able to buy a policy at market rates. 

The downside is that to make up this revenue shortfall, insurers will have to charge people at the bottom of the risk scale more for their insurance.  Sort of like good drivers have to pay more for auto insurance to make up for the bad drivers.  Not a lot more, as there are a lot of healthy people out there.  But still... more is more, and that will rightly rankle some. 

And so, what will we end up with?  Well, unlike in France, those who can afford to pay the full price for a policy based on the risk they pose will have to (if they want insurance).  And unlike the French system, wealthy people won't be paying an uncapped percentage of their income to pay for other people's illnesses.  They too will have capped rates, and if they are healthy, they will pay as much as a healthy, middle-class person.

But, like France, we would end up with a system where, at least for those on the extremes-- the poor and the sick-- what one pays for health insurance is defined more by what one earns than by what one's health requires. 

Is this totally fair?  Absolutely not.  Again, it's not your fault if I get sick.  It's not your fault if I am old, or if I am poor.  It is not fair to ask you to pay one cent for my health treatments.

But reform is coming, whether we like it or not.  And "totally fair" is not one of the choices on the menu.

The alternatives we face are two.  We can embrace policies that deliberately shift some of the payment burden, even if unfairly, such that the wealthy and the well subsidize the sick and the poor.  Or we can embrace the more radical socialized medicine that liberals are proposing.  

The choice, to me, is clear.

Don’t be duped, like the taxpayers were when we were sold on the $700B bank bailout, a package that was supposed to relieve banks of “troubled assets,” but which instead resulted in government ownership of most of the country’s largest banks.

Visit the site below and sign the petition opposing the so-called stimulus.

You can fight back today by visiting www.NoStimulus.com and joining the growing army of taxpayers saying NO by signing Americans for Prosperity’s petition to stop this disastrous trillion-dollar debt scheme, known as the “Stimulus Package.”

It is critical that we send a loud and clear message to DC politicians that ordinary citizens simply cannot afford the crushing burden and devastating consequences of this initiative.

Please act now to make your voice heard -- and encourage your friends and family to do the same -- by signing AFP’s petition at www.NoStimulus.com.

* $819B equals more than $2,500.00 per man, woman and child in this country. It equals $5,500.00 per taxpayer. What could you do with $5,500.00?

Olmert had concluded, late in life, that it is either land for peace, with all its risks, or endless war for Israel.

 

"In the end, we will have to withdraw from the lion's share of the territories, and for the territories we leave in our hands, we will have to give compensation in the form of territories within the state of Israel at a ratio that is more or less 1:1."

Yet, after that interview, he launched the December blitz and invaded Gaza, killing and wounding 5,000 Palestinians, making of the Strip a zone of permanent hatred and making Hamas, whom he sought to dethrone and undeniably wounded, even stronger.

What Buchanan doesn't mention is that Olmert didn't just talk about the strategy.  He implemented it, unilaterally pulling out troops from Gaza in 2005.  And how did the strategy work?  Not well:

 

 

 Graph showing the number of Qassam rockets shot from Gaza into israel by month. years 2002 - 2007. 

 

 

One would think that results like these would lead a statesman to conclude that his policy wasn't working. 

 

Changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. (1)

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. (2)

 Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. (1)

Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today. (1)

Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW. (1)

As conservatives continue to stave off economy-killing cap-and-trade schemes plotted by liberals to uselessly reduce CO2 emissions, the fabled “consensus” around global warming continues to unravel.  Here a prominent Australian scientist, literally the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting modelused by the Australian government, sets out the reasons for his conversion to the dark side.

A clean environment is important.  But CO2 is not a pollutant, and reducing CO2 won’t help the environment.  If we want to help “save the world” we should spend money on clean water, eradicating disease like malaria and AIDS, and promoting development.  We shouldn’t be wasting money on liberal flights of fancy like regulation of cow flatulence or lawnmower emissions.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

David Evans | July 18, 2008

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

Dr David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

I am a freedom-fry eating American. I bought all of the rhetoric about keeping government out of health care... and for the most part I still do. But when I started dating a gal who lived in France for 9 years and who was very, very happy with the health care she received, I started to look into it.

Did you know that in France they openly ridicule the English "socialized medicine." But at the same time, they have universal coverage?

Did you know that in the US, some 40% of people report satisfaction with their health care? In France it is 60%. And we know what whiners the French are.

One of the common approaches for conservative and libertarian "puritans" is to ignore successful “universal coverage” countries like France and Germany, which do have some theoretically unappealing aspects, and to focus the debate on countries like Canada and England. It's an easy argument, almost a straw-man. But this sort of thing fails to advance the conservative side of the debate. 

Everyone knows that England and Canada have lousy single-payer systems. But people also know that America can do better than Canada, and they just don’t believe that Democrats are that stupid (although in truth, they may be). To win the debate, Conservatives need to champion our own comprehensive plan; one that will address the Democrats’ talking points by “triangulating;” using Conservative means to solve the Democrats’ issues, thus depriving them of the urgency they require to enact their ill advised reforms.

Any conservative reform would include the staples of this past campaign; decouple insurance from employment by voiding the employer deduction and making it a personal deduction. And also, get rid of mandates by allowing interstate competition. 

Why is coverage cheaper in Idaho than in Massachusetts? Because of mandates like the ones Sowell outlined in his article. Obama argued that such a reform would just cause the insurance companies to locate in one state, like the credit card companies. McCain failed to say: who cares? More people are able to get credit that way, which benefits consumers. And more people will be able to buy health insurance if they can buy plans from companies with cheaper policies that are unburdened by mandates. 

These issues are well trodden ground for conservatives, and they form a basis for any reform. 

But a related issue that conservatives often fail to address is that of the uninsured. Democrats have been pummeling conservatives over the 45 million uninsured, and in spite of the problems with this number (transience due to frictional unemployment, not to mention the presence of illegal aliens amongst that number), conservatives have been unable to convince Americans that the vast number of uninsured is not a “problem” that we need single-payer health care to “fix.” We are losing the debate over just this issue. We need to deprive the Democrats of it by enacting policies that will lead to fewer uninsured, without resorting to single-payer coverage, and the rationed, one-size-fits-all care that goes with it, on Americans.

To lower the amount of uninsured, we first need to lower costs, which the above should take care of. And decoupling insurance from employment will also help, by reducing the amount of people who have no health insurance because they have no job.

But we also need some government involvement here to fix some market failures as well. Here, we can emulate the French, who have a system where people have absolute freedom of choice as far as doctors, hospitals, and treatments, but also a system of tightly regulated private insurers.

The first government intervention conservatives should support is “guaranteed issue;” if you want to sell insurance to anyone, you have to offer it to everyone. Failure to have guaranteed issue will lead insurers to "cherry-pick” and offer coverage only to low-risk insurance buyers (as they do now). And here is where conservatives might need to deviate from orthodoxy a bit. We also need a cap on rates. 

Auto insurance in Massachusetts, where I live, is a requirement for motorists. So we have guaranteed issue. But a lot of bad drivers cannot afford market rates, so there are caps on rates, set by regulators. This results in good drivers subsidizing bad drivers. Now, this is unfair because people usually choose to drive recklessly (bad drivers are usually young men with, shall we say, a surfeit of testosterone). 

But in health care markets, people normally cannot help it if they are sick. No, there is no logical reason why you should have to pay for my health care, nor I, yours. But politics often involves some sacrifice. Ronald Reagan once said (and I paraphrase) that he would rather “get 80% of what I want than go charging off a cliff with banner held high holding out for 100%.” 

Conservatives need to support caps on rates, and let the healthy subsidize the sick. Otherwise insurers will price people with pre-existing conditions out of the market. We need more people to elect to buy health insurance in order to drive down that frighteningly large number of uninsured, and we cannot do that if the people who are sickest cannot afford to buy insurance.

For the poor, we need to offer direct subsidies to allow them to purchase health insurance. The other reforms discussed should keep these subsidies to a minimum, as insurance will cost less without all the mandates. And remember, we already subsidize the poor by allowing those without insurance to seek treatment at emergency rooms, which drives up costs for the insured already. Certainly a direct and transparent subsidy is superior to the implicit subsidy we already pay, one which is hard to quantify because we don't see it on our bills. In fact, we could use Medicaid funds already budgeted to pay for this subsidy, thus more efficiently using dollars we are already spending.

As to achieving universal coverage, this need not be the goal. Conservatives rightly reject an individual mandate. We want to put health insurance within reach, but in America, to use a trite expression, we can lead the horse to water, but we are not going to force him to drink. 

But at the same time, we also believe in accountability. If insurance costs are driven down, and an individual elects not to purchase it, they do so at their own risk. If you don’t have insurance and you rack up medical bills, no longer will the insured bail you out. This, along with subsidies for those truly too poor to pay for coverage on their own, will provide a powerful incentive for everyone to buy health care, without a mandate.

The sum total of these changes would give America a system much like the successful ones in Europe... and totally unlike the failed single-payer systems Democrats seem to want to emulate. 

Consumers would be free to choose doctors, hospitals and treatments (unlike Medicare and Medicaid patients now). 

Insurers would be free to offer a wide range of plans to suit the needs of our diverse nation. 

People would have an incentive to purchase insurance, because of the risks associated with expensive illnesses potentially wiping out a lifetime of savings, but they would not have any incentive to insure against routine expenses, as the current employer-linked system encourages. 

Individual involvement in purchasing of insurance, and also in the selection of doctors and treatments would help to control costs. 

Eliminating mandates by making plans that include them have to compete for dollars with plans that don’t will also control costs. 

All of this will have the net effect of making health insurance more affordable, which will lead to more people purchasing it.

And in the end, if we can control costs, and reduce the number of uninsured, the public clamor for “universal” coverage provided by the government, will subside, and with it will go the Democrats hopes of nationalizing health care, and turning all Americans into wards of the all-powerful state.