Charlie's Chatter

Readers of my blog should know by now that I have had it with president Obama. The latest news about our Dear Leader concerns his activities and statements with regards to that foul religion Islam. Readers may already know that I am not at all a religious person. But of all the major religions I find Islam most offensive and harmful because its beliefs and practices, today in the modern world, are medieval, not civilized and not tolerant. Yes, one can find a few passages in Islam’s “holy book” – the Koran – which appear to show tolerance; but these are negated by other passages in that same often-ridiculous book.
      Obama hosted an “iftar” — the special evening meal observed during Ramadan — last night in the White House. According to this report, Obama’s speech during this Ramadan dinner was to include the following:

Ramadan is a time when Muslims around the world reflect upon the wisdom and guidance that comes with faith, and the responsibility that human beings have to one another, and to God. This is a time when families gather, friends host iftars, and meals are shared. But Ramadan is also a time of intense devotion and reflection – a time when Muslims fast during the day and pray during the night; when Muslims provide support to others to advance opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere.     . . . . These rituals remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings. Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.

Is Obama kidding me ?   I’m afraid not, which shows just how much of a jerk this supposedly intelligent man is. Islam played a role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings? WHAT? What garbage. We all know the role women play in Islam, a role which obviously belies any claim to providing for the “dignity of all human beings”. As to “advancing justice and tolerance”, why you can not even build any kind of christian and/or jewish church in a select few Muslim countries, with Saudi Arabia being the prime example! Heck, in Saudi Arabia you can not even worship any religion in public except for Islam. What is even worse, in Saudi Arabia, you can not even go into certain large parts of the country unless you are a Muslim! Almost all of Medina, and all of Mecca and a large part of the country surrounding these “holy” cities are entirely off-limits to non-Muslims! Yep, that is real “tolerance” shown by Islam. And our ridiculous president praises this religion, in public.
      Most people in the United States are now aware of a project to build a Muslim “cultural center” and mosque very close to “ground zero” in New York City. A recent CNN Poll found that 68 percent of the public opposes the project. But NO, during the Ramadan dinner at the White House, our Dear Leader lent support to this Muslim project. Among other things, he said:

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.”

Is Obama kidding me ?   I’m afraid not, which again shows just how much of a harmful jerk this supposedly intelligent man is. Note Obama’s “clever” reference to “local laws and ordinances”; that only reinforces my disgust with this man. Muslims and Muslim leaders who insist upon building a “Muslim cultural center” and mosque near “ground zero” are effectively giving us a “slap in the face”, insulting our intelligence, and actually making a mockery of our “right to religious freedom” by taking such advantage of it. And Obama goes along with it. What a jerk. Hey, tell them they can build their mosque near “ground zero” if, and only if, some christian religion is allowed to build a church anywhere in Mecca! Heck, we will even promise to build the christian church at least 5 miles away from the Masjid al-Haram with its Kaaba shrouded in black cloth – the holiest “place of worship” for Muslims!
      Recall that Obama said during the Ramadan dinner that Islam played a role in advancing “tolerance”. If Muslims and Muslim leaders want to show “tolerance”, they would without a doubt not build a Muslim cultural center and mosque close to “ground zero”; that should be perfectly clear to any rational person.
      I am tired of politicians, pundits and others who make a distinction between what they call “moderate” or “normal” Muslims and what they call “radical” Muslims. Given the very nature of Islam and its holy book the Koran, all Muslims are at least potentially “radical”. Do not forget that Sharia law must rule! Given what I have written above about Obama, he has shown weakness towards Muslims, and that harms our country. It’s as though Obama actually showed “submission” towards Islam, which is probably how many Muslims think of it. Yep, most Muslims probably love that.
      By the way, ex-president Bush was just as much of a jerk when, during the days and weeks after 9/11, Bush participated in several public displays in order to “show respect” and tolerance towards “true” and “moderate” Muslims, since Islam is supposedly a “religion of peace”. If I can believe what is reported on this “christian” web site, President Bush hosted an “Iftar” (Ramadan break-the-fast dinner) the evening of November 19, 2001, at the White House for representatives of some 53 Muslim nations — reportedly the first such gathering at the White House. Yes, I can believe it, since I found other web sites, such as this one, which reported on that. What a jerk Bush was to do that.

A recent news article bore the title “Medicare More solvent, Hospital Pay Cut”. The article starts out with the following:

The healthcare reform law significantly improved the outlook for Medicare, according to the program’s trustees, who released their annual report this week. Medicare’s hospital trust fund will be solvent for 12 years longer than projected last year, almost entirely because of savings from healthcare reform, said the Medicare trustees, who include Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and Commissioner of Social Security Michael J. Astrue.

Wow! The Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “The outlook for Medicare has indeed improved greatly compared to this time last year, thanks to the Affordable Care Act”. (That latter is ObamaCare.) However, I am skeptical because this report was provided by Medicare’s “trustees”, and the major trustees include Obama’s liberal appointees Kathleen Sebelius and Hilda Solis, and also Tim Geithner whose views seem to support those of Obama’s.
      If you read the entire article, and also this one which was referenced in the article, you will note that the “savings” are spurious. The “savings” referenced by the trustees are projected to stem from making the healthcare system more efficient and by providing lower annual increases in Medicare payments to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, and most other providers. The Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund is projected to cost much less as a result of healthcare reform. However, that projection assumes that the short-term sustainable growth rate (SGR) fix passed by Congress in June will expire on December 1, at which point doctors will be subject to a 23% cut in Medicare reimbursements. Now that will surely please doctors, the people who actually give us medical care. It is possible that Congress will intervene to block the cut, as it always does. But Sebelius stressed that President Obama is committed to finding a long-term fix for the flawed SGR formula. See? Obama will “do something” in the months to come to fix all that. And don’t forget that some of the “savings” will come from making the healthcare system more “efficient”. I don’t know how the latter will be done, but I guess Obama, his administration, and the bureaucrats who are now writing actual rules and regulations for ObamaCare do know how to do that.   Yeh, right. What a bunch of bullcrap.
      The political spin coming from the trustees’ report ignores the companion analysis by the chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster which repudiates some of the “spin” and is the most damning fiscal indictment to date of the Affordable Care Act. Details are given in this article, assuming that it is still available on the Internet. In that article, note the statement that “the Medicare trust fund is a meaningless accounting artifact because Medicare was long ago financed in part by general tax revenues“. In other words, this trust fund or “lock box” is roughly similar to that associated with Social Security, although it is separate from Social Security and its “accounting rules” are not the same. Also of interest in that article is the following:

Mr. Foster shows that the Medicare “cuts” that Democrats wrote into ObamaCare exist only on paper and were written so they could pretend to reduce the deficit and perform the miracles the trustees dutifully outlined. With the exception of cuts in Medicare Advantage, those reductions will never happen in practice. One of the fictions Mr. Foster highlights is the 30% cut in physician payments over the next three years that Democrats have already promised to disallow. Republicans would do the same, we hasten to add. Another chunk of ObamaCare “savings” are due to cranking down Medicare’s price controls for hospitals and other providers that Mr. Foster says are also “extremely unlikely to occur.” In the absence of “substantial and transformational changes in health-care practices”—in other words, a productivity revolution in medicine that has never happened—costs will simply rise for private patients, or hospitals will refuse to treat seniors insured by Medicare. Congress will never allow that to happen either. In other words, under ObamaCare the “cost curve” will not be bent as the White House has advertised. Under his more plausible outlook, Mr. Foster notes that Medicare’s share of the economy will rise 60% between now and 2040, while under the trustees report that Democrats are crowing about it would “only” rise by 35%. Didn’t President Obama tell us that health-care reform is entitlement reform?

Again, what a bunch of bullcrap the Medicare trustees’ report is, and the same goes for ObamaCare.

Well, more and more people are discovering one very tiny part of ObamaCare that will cause problems. (Sorry, I meant the health care reform law, officially known as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”.)   As described in this article:

Come Jan. 1, 2012, the Internal Revenue Service will require all small businesses and self-employed people to report on Form 1099 the purchase of all goods and services that exceed $600 in a calendar year. The idea is that the new requirement might capture some tax revenue that has been missed in the past. Federal estimates suggest the requirement will generate about $17 billion over 10 years. But the price of the change seems too costly to some business folks, for small businesses lacking the resources to execute the requirement and for consumers whose private information could be compromised. The 1099 form would require a person’s name, address and Social Security number. Some business owners might decide to sell that information, which can be worth a tidy sum to marketing companies.

Well, at least that part of ObamaCare will not come into effect until one and one-half years from now. And of course it will raise some money to help pay for ObamaCare. The fact that gold coin dealers are upset with this law should be of little concern; after all, of what use is gold compared to health care, or even food and shelter? Most of these “gold bugs” are selfish, greedy capitalist pigs, after all. And this comment about tax revenue that has been “missed in the past” is misleading because this revenue is that not being paid by tax cheaters! Good! We must catch tax cheaters!
      Sure, small businesses in particular are complaining about this part of ObamaCare. However, according to this information from Wikipedia, many businesses and organizations are already filing hundreds if not thousands of 1099s per year! So the impact of filing a few hundred or a few thousand more will not be a large burden. Some businesses are even complaining that they might have to hire more people just to handle the extra paperwork burden. But so what? Heck, Obama should mention that as part of his job-creation efforts! Why one year from now many of these small businesses may have to hire at least one more “clerk” to handle these added reporting requirements. Clearly the IRS will have to hire more people to handle these new additional 1099 forms. See? New jobs!
      Yeh, right. Assuming that businesses do have to hire more people to handle these new requirements, those people will not be doing productive work. That is, they will not be doing work that helps to increase our standard of living by providing us with more and better goods and services. Certainly the new IRS workers will not be doing productive work. They will only be making sure that more of Peter’s money is being taken from him to pay Paul. In any case, the added expense of all this to businesses, particularly small businesses, will often result in slightly higher prices to consumers for goods and services, and, in a few cases, businesses that will no longer stay in business. Yep, Obama is sure taking care of us, the jerk.

During my 50 years as an adult, I have never seen so much polarization in our society as I have seen over the past year or two. (The 1960′s were a probable exception, mostly due to the civil rights movement and the unpopular war in Vietnam.) Although an oversimplification, on the one hand there are those “on the left” who, for the most part, like Obama and most of his policies, such as ObamaCare. On the other hand there are those “on the right”, plus at least half of those “in the middle”, who do not like Obama and/or most of his policies, ObamaCare definitely included.
      When it comes to ObamaCare, certainly one good example of a politician and pundit who likes ObamaCare is Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In this recent article of his, he sings the praises of ObamaCare. His short article can be summed up as follows:

• ObamaCare ends the insurance industry’s worst practices.
• ObamaCare can create new quality, affordable coverage options for uninsured Americans.

ObamaCare extends Medicare’s solvency by nearly a decade, by fighting waste, fraud and abuse.

• ObamaCare has finally come to pass after a decades’ long struggle to provide affordable health care for all, thanks mostly to the Democrats and to Lyndon Johnson who started it all with Medicare.
• Thanks to ObamaCare we will now all be much better off.

What is striking about Tim Kaine’s article is that he never mentions that somehow all of this will have to be paid for! He never mentions that Medicare, Medicaid, and now ObamaCare cost a heck of a lot of money, and will cost much more in the years to come. (His only mention of costs is his comment about extending Medicare’s solvency by nearly a decade by fighting waste, fraud and abuse. That is bullcrap. Finding and eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is a very common argument used by politicians when they need money for new spending programs.) My opinion of Tim Keine, based on his article, is that he is either an ignorant and foolish man, or, most probably, a despicable politician who is demagoging the “health care” issue in order to score political points and exchange political favors.
      The other side of this issue is expressed in several articles, such as this one, this one, and also this one. This article states that ten years from now the three main entitlements – Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – plus interest, will consume 93 percent of all federal revenues. And that is NOT taking into account the added costs of ObamaCare. Taking into account Social Security alone, this New York Times article makes clear that this year the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (The “trust fund” or so-called “lockbox” for Social Security is nothing but a bunch of US Treasury bills, notes and bonds; this means that the past payroll taxes used to buy those US Treasury securities have already been spent by the government, and next year when some of these need to be redeemed to keep Social Security “solvent”, the government will somehow have to come up with the cash – cash which it will not have without further borrowing from people and countries such as China. By the way, the year 2037 is mentioned in that New York Times article as the year when the Social Security system will “run out of money”. That only means that 2037 is the predicted year when all the Treasury securities now in the “trust fund” will have been redeemed. But before then, of course, the government will somehow have to come up with new money to redeem those securities in the first place. Up until this year, none at all ever had to be redeemed. Actually, when they had to be redeemed due to the expiration date, that debt was just “rolled over” by replacing those redeemed with new ones.) As to Medicare and Medicaid, it does not take a rocket scientist to know that just these two “health care” programs are starting to go broke now. And now here comes ObamaCare !   And for that I am supposed to be grateful?
      I am astounded and amazed at all these politicians who give out “goodies” to citizens, even if there is not enough money to pay for all of these “goodies”. Heck, the government can always borrow the money if it does not have enough, and it certainly has been borrowing a lot of money lately. This can not go on much longer. The citizens who elect and support these politicians better wise up, and soon. I won’t hold my breath, however.