Is Marijuana Harmless? Don’t Kid Yourself.

We hear a lot, these days, about Colorado’s “experiment” with recreational marijuana. I think Colorado will be sorry some day that the state ever tried such a foolish “experiment.” According to Mitchell Rosenthal, the founder of the substance-abuse and treatment organization, Phoenix House, marijuana damages the heart and lungs and is a cause of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and psychotic episodes. In addition to all that, researchers at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine found that marijuana causes lasting changes in “working memory,” brain structures critical to memory and reasoning. A source of ready recall for basic information, like telephone numbers and solutions to everyday problems, working memory is also a strong predictor of academic achievement.

Recreational marijuana use has important social implications, too. A 2004 study of seriously injured drivers in Maryland found half the teens tested positive for marijuana.

All of us can remember that for decades and even hundreds of years, the use of tobacco for smoking was considered a harmless recreational practice. Finally, it was learned that tobacco use causes multiple kinds of cancer, chronic obstructive lung disease, and—most importantly—a remarkable increase in heart attacks. Who, among thinking people, would ever believe that inhaling noxious marijuana smoke could be harmless. We should use common sense rather than the misguided advice of the potheads among us to help us dispose of this major public health hazard.

Conservatives Need to Reevaluate Thinking about Food Stamp Participation

Conservatives tend to think that the food stamp program is a wasteful government welfare program given to lazy and deliberately nonproductive people. But I think that mindset needs to be modified.

Currently, 47,637,407 people in America are receiving government aid in the form of food stamps. Participation in the food stamp program increased by 955,574 from July 2012 to July 2013, but over the past year, participation has remained fairly stable—monthly numbers of participants has vibrated up and down slightly. About one in seven people in the U.S. receive food stamps. The receipt of food stamps has gradually increased since its low point of 16.9 million in the year 2000 http://frac.org/reports-and-resources/snapfood-stamp-monthly-participation-data/. Admittedly, this high usage of food stamps among our people is alarming; but it must be pointed out that the number of unemployed and underemployed in our society is about the same number as the number of people on food stamps, i.e., one person in seven. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) Clearly, food stamps seem to be going to those among us who really cannot afford to buy adequate food for their families.

Forty-seven percent of food stamp recipients are children, and 26% are adults living with those children. Income for the typical family with children on food stamps stands at 57% of the poverty line—about $10,875 for a 3-person family. Ninety-one percent of food stamp dollars goes to families living below the poverty line.

The reason for the increase in food stamp distribution is that our population has a lot more poor people now. Five years ago, 11.3% of the population was living below the poverty line; now 15% live at that low-income level. According to the Census Bureau, there are 2.9 million more poor individuals today than in 2009. The number of households with income below $25,000 has increased by 3 million since 2009.

One legitimate case conservatives have for their complaint about food stamps is that the number of able-bodied adults without dependents receiving benefits under the food-stamp program has risen to nearly 5.5 million from under 2 million since 2008. Since 2008, work requirements for these individuals have been relaxed. The federal government should reconsider the waivers of current requirements it has extended to many concerning the criteria for receiving food stamps.   

The observed increase in yearly participation numbers demonstrates that food stamps continue to be an important nutritional safety net for people all over the country, especially as unemployment and underemployment rates remain high. The disagreement between liberals and conservatives seems to be about the extent of our collective obligation to the least fortunate Americans and what is the best way to answer their needs.

Although I am an advocate for helping people out of a difficult situation, I do think that the food stamp program has reached an excessive state of liberal distribution. I believe that the free access to food stamps is now contributing to prolonged unemployment. This free government support in food stamps and prolonged payment of unemployment benefits is causing welfare dependency, which eats away at the heart of American bread winners.

It is my recommendation that the food stamp distribution program should be modified. I believe that we all should write our Congressmen and Senators to encourage them to increase the work requirements for those recipients who are able-bodied and without children. Some end to free distribution of food stamps must happen, or else our people will continue to increase in their government/welfare dependency.

(Much of this blog post was redacted from the Wall Street Journal of 11/6/13, page A13.)

Speak Softly and Carry a Small Stick

Today, we are seeing the preeminent power of the United States deteriorate and disappear in wide swaths of the world. We are observing President Obama walk away and shrink from responsibility for effective foreign relations in Eastern Europe, Egypt, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and Iran. Now, he is refusing to take a public stand in favor of the European Union supporters in Ukraine. He is taking this weak-kneed stand by effectively dismantling our military establishment, as documented by John Lehman in the Wall Street Journal editorial, More Bureaucrats, Fewer Jets and Ships of 12/10/13. During the Reagan years, our navy had 600 ships afloat—today, there are 280. The Air Force has fewer than half the number of fighters and bombers it had 30 years ago. Air Force fighter planes today are, on average, 28 years old. Instead of the 20-division army supported by the United States during President Reagan’s administration, we have only 10 now.

Our President thinks he can control worldwide terrorism and naked aggression against our Middle Eastern allies with diplomacy. He is ignoring the classic aphorism that diplomatic power is the shadow cast by military power.

President Reagan’s legacy for the time he was in office included his facing down the Soviet Union and breaking apart the Berlin wall. He demonstrated that a race for military power need not result in a destructive use of that power. The Soviets backed down because they feared the obvious catastrophe that would consume them if they tried to challenge the United States. Thus, diplomacy backed by the Big Stick mentioned first by President Theodore Roosevelt, was the driving power in saving the world from a conflagration of violence and disorder perpetrated by a rogue nation bent on conquest.

When Jimmy Carter was President, he watched and tried diplomacy to get Libya to quit bombing passenger planes over the Mediterranean. He got no place with that policy. Soon, Ronald Reagan succeeded him in office. One of the first things that Reagan did was to send fighter/bombers over Libya and drop a bomb on a munitions plant in Libya. The trouble with hijacked planes over the Mediterranean quit immediately. Diplomacy without military back-up is a waste of time.

The world has seen timidity like that of President Obama demonstrated before. Prior to World War II, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, tried to placate and appease the Nazi’s at Munich in 1938. The result was disaster, as Germany marched directly into Czechoslovakia and Poland and subsequently attacked the low countries, Russia, France, and Great Britain, herself. Appeasement does not work with tyrants.

Clement Atlee succeeded Winston Churchill as Britain’s Prime Minister in July 1945 and proceeded to dismantle the strategic and imperial inheritance of world power ceded to him by his successor. Under Atlee’s guidance, the British Empire divested itself of its hegemony over its colonies in India, Burma, and Ceylon; and he reduced the British presence in Egypt, Iran, Turkey Greece, and Southeast Asia. British bases in the Mediterranean and the East Indies were considered obsolete; and they were decommissioned. Atlee’s legacy was a weakened British presence in the world. Britain has never regained her former influence and power in the world.

President Obama seems extremely interested in leaving a good and lasting legacy to America when he is out of power. His legacy seems to be a markedly weakened United States abroad (and a confused health care system at home).  

Foreign Policy, Obama’s Weakest Point

Ever since he was elected, I have considered President Obama’s weakest point of policy making to be his foreign policy. Today, we are seeing that fear becoming manifest.

He has placated the Iranians and given empty promises of attaining peace in the Middle East by appeasement of that regime’s tactic of lying about their faithless peace desires. He has given a pass to Bashar Assad’s tyranny in Syria. He has abdicated the American gains in Iraq and given our Middle Eastern allies cause to distrust us and to know for sure that he will never back up any of his promises, e.g., the “red line” about chemical weapons in Syria. (I’ll bet the Iranians and the Assad regime are still laughing about that one!)

He must admit that Iran has been hostile to U.S. interests in the Middle East. And he must also admit that Iran has done its best to frustrate the war in Iraq and that that country has proclaimed a fierce ideological war against Israel’s place as a state. President Obama’s response to these undisputable facts is to point the blame to his predecessors. 

To make matters worse, during the first summer of his presidency, he remained aloof in the vacuum of his own ideas concerning the uprising in Iran of the brave advocates of government overthrow in Iran in the form of the Green Movement. He gave that very significant uprising no moral support of any kind. Supposedly, he was hoping that his abstention from the movement would induce the Iranian government to quit producing nuclear weapons. Of course, the regime did not do anything of the kind—the centrifuges kept spinning! On top of this, the world can see Iran continuing its support of the Assad regime and Hezbollah in Beirut. (All this without significant American protest.)

President Obama has artfully isolated the chemical weapons being used to kill civilian citizens of Syria from the larger issue that the government is using all other kinds of killing devices to destroy its civil enemies. He has also isolated the nuclear bomb issue in Iran from the obvious pain that sanctions are having on the Iranian people. He absolutely refuses to see the bigger picture of what is going on in the Middle East.

All the feckless dithering President Obama is doing in the Middle East is alarming our allies in the region. Israel is rightly afraid they will have to attack Iran just to prevent being vaporized by nuclear weapons—and all this without American support. Obama’s attitude toward the situation in the Middle East has produced a feeling of abandonment among our allies in the region, i.e., Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

 
President Obama, despite his winsome ways at the podium, is not fooling anyone. Middle Easterners have taken the full measure of this president. They know he will not back up any of his promises; they know that he is desperately trying to get out of the Middle East at any cost. They are alone in the world with the most powerful force on earth sitting on its hands in helpless repose, just hoping for a miracle. WE NEED A LEADER!

What Was the Theory Behind the Affordable Care Act?

We are being saturated with information and propaganda these days about the Affordable Care Act, i.e., ObamaCare. But I, for one was not clear on exactly what was the thinking and the theoretical provisions of this recent piece of legislation that is planned to take over one sixth of our economy. For this reason, I am electing to review its essential features for my readers.

We are aware of the fact that about 47 million Americans are without health insurance. Many of those are young and healthy adults who do not want insurance. They do not seem to realize a need in that area. Nevertheless, this group does need health care from time to time; and the cost of treating them falls on hospitals and on those of us who buy insurance. Additionally, health care costs have been increasing more rapidly than the rate of inflation for many years. Everyone, both conservatives and liberals, understand this problem and seek a remedy.

The Affordable Care Act, (ACA) was designed to bring these 47 million Americans under insurance protection and to distribute health care costs throughout the population. But…how to pay for their protection—that is the question. Democrats devised a system they thought would pay the bill for health care coverage. It ran as follows:

1)      Money would be taken from Medicare and put into the funding for the ACA. $716 billion is to be taken from Medicare spending over the coming 10 years and used to fund the ACA. Concurrently with spending Medicare money on the ACA, spending reductions in Medicare reimbursement schedule for procedures will be legislatively decreased. This will mean that doctors and hospitals will receive less money for their work and for procedures that they do, which were formerly covered by Medicare.

2)      Increased money is to be raised from higher taxes charged to medical devise manufacture and to pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.

3)      Penalty money will be collected from young persons who refuse to buy insurance through ObamaCare exchanges.

4)      Increased income taxes will be levied on the wealthy, i.e., those with annual income >$200,000.

5)      Monthly premium payments from young and healthy persons will more than pay for their own care; and the overage will be used to pay for more expensive, older, and sicker people.

Democrats believe that this increasing money stream will more than pay the cost of insuring the 47 million people.  They even believe that there will be a surplus of money which can be used to decrease federal budget deficits. They believe that our country will be better off financially with ObamaCare in full operation.

Republicans do not believe that there will be nearly enough money in the kitty to pay for this program. I, personally, think that one major defect in the program will be decreasing participation in Medicare by physicians and hospitals caused by the government’s reduction of payment. I have seen doctors for decades declining Medicare payment schedules because of low payment levels. These lower ObamaCare fee schedules will aggravate that tendency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Success Obamacare?

President Obama and the  Democratic proponents of the Affordable Care Act emphasized three promises when promoting the health-care law.

1)      It will provide “universal coverage.”

2)      It will reduce costs, both to the consumer and to the nation, as a whole by decreasing the total costs of health care in America.
3)      It will not take away your current health-care plan if you want to continue with it.

Let us look at these three promises in order:

The primary promise was universal coverage. In the year that preceded the law’s passage, President Obama emphasized over and over again the number of Americans who were uninsured, which ranges from 30 million to 47 million, and explained that the nation had a moral imperative to cover those who could not find coverage on their own. One complicating factor in calculating the number of uninsured persons in America was that the recession increased the number of the uninsured by 6 million. The Congressional Budget Office in 2013, before the law was implemented, estimated that there would be 31 million uncovered Americans in 2019; that estimate does not bode well for the effectiveness of the Act in decreasing the number of uninsured people in America.

The second promise was to reduce the cost of health care, specifically the cost of premiums. Universal health care would provide greater economies of scale for insurance companies, while new regulations would keep insurance companies and doctors from getting too greedy. On numerous occasions, President Obama promised that his reforms would reduce the cost of premiums by $2,500 for a family of four.

This is not going to be the case. Using the same methodology that Obama used to come up with the $2,500 figure, health-care expert Avik Roy found that costs per family of four would increase by $7,450 by 2022. Furthermore, the cost hikes in certain states are going to be far worse, including a 41 percent increase in average premiums for Ohioans in 2014, and a 72 percent increase for Indianans. A recent Manhattan Institute analysis shows an overall average increase of 41 percent over the nation, as a whole. Whatever amount of increase there is, it’s not a $2,500 decrease.

Obamacare proponents note that higher premiums will not be felt because the law will provide subsidies to offset the increases. That’s nice, but premiums will still be higher under the new law. The subsidies only mask the impact of the premium increases for certain individuals. Others, not eligible for the subsidies, will get the double hit of paying more for insurance (which they are now required by law to purchase) and of paying higher taxes, now and in the future, to cover the costs of the subsidies to others. Those subsidies have to come from somewhere; and the obvious source of money for the subsidies is from the taxpayers.

In evaluating the money needed for implementing the ACA, we must remember that President Obama has repeatedly said the this program will be “budget neutral.” It will be nothing of the sort. The original 10-year cost of the bill was said to be around $940 billion, offset by tax hikes and spending reductions—most notably a $716 billion cut in Medicare. In 2013, the Congregational Budget Office (CBO) estimated the cost at $1.8 trillion; it is likely to be closer to $2.5 trillion by 2015. The gross costs of the Obamacare insurance subsidies alone will be $1.8 trillion over the first 10 years; in other words, the costs will be lowered for those who get the subsidies at a cost of $180 billion a year to everyone else. Meanwhile, a Government Accounting Office estimate suggests Obamacare’s guarantees could increase our long-term costs by $6.2 trillion over 75 years.

 In examining this second goal of the ACA, the Obamacare supporters have claimed loudly and clearly that the Affordable Care Act will save money in the federal budget. Their most vociferous and widely heard pundit, Paul Krugman of the New York Times editorial board has defended it primarily on this ground, i.e., it will and already has saved great amounts of money. Let us look at some of his reasoning.

Mr. Krugman says that the “affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act  was not just about subsidizing premiums. It was also supposed to be about slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs. He recently indicated in his newspaper column that the law’s opponents believe that serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age. However, he points out that the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that such this measure would hardly save any money. Krugman has also pointed out that opponents of the bill have suggested that one way of saving money would be to take many Medicaid recipients off the program. He points out that a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.”http://www.americanprogressaction.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/01/pdf/budgetcommitteefinal.pdf And he claims that the opinions of these many economists and health care experts have been ignored. However, a simple reading of the letter from these experts reveals that they did not address the idea of limiting Medicaid. I think we all know that the ACA certainly does not provide for taking people off the Medicaid roles. Medicaid in the days of the ACA will greatly expand. It is also an obvious feature of the ACA that the law did not even say one word about tort reform, which is needed because so much of health-care money is funneled into the pockets of lawyers.

It is true that in recent years, the rate of increase in federal spending has declined somewhat, which is a most welcome development. ObamaCare partisans tout this reduction in the rate of increased spending as evidence that ObamaCare is working. However, the actual AMOUNT of federal spending is not decreased—only the rate of increase in spending has decreased.

There is little to no evidence that ObamaCare has caused the reduction in the rate of spending increase, especially since ObamaCare has not yet been fully implemented. The administration’s own Medicare actuary attributes the recent reductions in the growth rate to the recent recession. Furthermore, when ObamaCare is actually implemented, evidence suggests that inflation will increase again. In 2014 the implementation of provisions of the Affordable Care Act is expected to accelerate health spending growth to 6.1 percent (considerably above the annual rate of inflation).

So, in summary of this second goal of the ACA, I think we can dispose of the idea of cost savings, to the individual consumer and to the government and the taxpayer.

Let’s look at the third promise of the promoters of the ACA; The third promise was that if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it. During his year of salesmanship, President Obama mentioned it nearly every time he spoke about the act, often stating it more than once in the same setting. The exact wording of the comment varied over time, but the political strategy behind the statement was clear: If you were among the 85 percent or so of Americans who already had insurance, ObamaCare would have its impact on other people, not on you.

The early indicators are not encouraging. One CBO analysis has estimated that ObamaCare will cause approximately 7 million people currently covered to lose employer-sponsored coverage. On top of that, millions of Americans who purchase insurance via the individual market are already receiving letters notifying them that their coverage is being terminated.
In summary, this law is not good for the American people. We do, indeed, need a modification of our health-care provisions. But…the ACA, as it stands, is NOT the answer.

Where Did Capitalism Come From; and Where Is It Going?

Capitalism is unquestionably the most productive economic system ever devised by human society. Even with its excesses and abuses as evidenced by the strikes and human suffering capitalism caused in 19^th Century America, still, it has produced goods and services that have been highly beneficial to society today.

To understand where this complex system of economics came from, we must first study the place where it did not originally arise and why it did not arise there. That place is China. The Zhou Dynasty in China was active from 1046 BC until its replacement by the Qin Dynasty in 256 BC. Zhou and Qin emperors ran a nation from a Confucian viewpoint that looked back into time and ancestry to find out how society should operate. Their administrative viewpoints were very similar to Western European feudalism. Administrators were chosen from family heritage lines and not from any merit of their own. These early dynasties did not provide the common people with property rights. Neither did they manifest rules of law. Laws that existed were only the capricious movements of the emperors acting on the instant impressions they had of how things should be adjudicated. They ruled over a society that was fraught with wars between competing states, and very little peace and security prevailed. In 256 BC, the Zhou emperors were replaced by Qin emperors who ruled China for only 15 years; but Qin rooted out the heredity system of government succession to a large extent and brought a system of merit into being for the first time. The Qin emperors were, however, very harsh governors; they taxed the people heavily and regulated all aspects of their existence. Their heavy-handed autocratic ways were so obnoxious to the people that they were soon replaced by the Han Dynasty. Confucianism reigned supreme in the thinking of the people and their administrators.

These early Chinese dynasties produced a nation with a bureaucracy and a functional situation where specialization and organization could coexist. These things were necessary for a stable economic system to develop and persist. But…although these things are necessary preliminaries for the development of a capitalistic economy, they are not sufficient.

The Chinese system of life did not lend itself to entrepreneurial, profit-seeking, businesses.

Western Europe, on the other hand, produced an environment with a very different system of thought. The difference was primarily the difference between Confucianism, which looked backward, and Christianity that saw things very differently and from a forward-looking perspective. Christians had the understanding that God had created a universe that was rational and, therefore, understandable. Christianity saw man as God’s image bearer and a creature with dignity, who deserved rights to property, and a stable rule of law, instead of the momentary judgments of emperors who might change decisions unpredictably. Christians came to believe that it is legitimate and desirable to understand God by looking carefully at his creation. Thus…the development of the forward-looking scientific method.

Science made it possible for people to profit from knowledge—thus…scientific thinking received an economic impetus. European society produced universities and scientists, the large majority of whom were professing Christians. To name a few: Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Copernicus, and Galileo.

Our Western way of life, including our capital-based economies, owe their existence to the Christian heritage we have received from the thinking of early Christian students and explorers of every type. Even such non-Christian 20^th Century thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead and J. Robert Oppenheimer have stressed that modern science was born out of the Christian worldview.

Today, however, we are in danger of reverting to the stultifying effects of high taxes and onerous regulations characteristic of the ancient Chinese. Many people seem to think that our Western system is “too big to fall;” but I fear that this is not the truth. Big government, high taxes, over-regulation, all threaten to shut down our successful free-enterprise system of government and economy. We need some government regulation, especially in the banking and medical areas; but this overactive government is drawing our economy and our nation into dangerous areas of discouragement, lack of motivation for gainful work, and resultant unemployment.

The capitalist system of economy is bound to produce some inequality of outcomes for the people, but as I expounded in my last blog post, this inequality and the opportunity to further and profit oneself in life is necessary for a healthy economic lifestyle.