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« on: December 29, 2013, 01:25:51 AM » |
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The Patriot Post Monday Digest 12-02-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
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THE FOUNDATION
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.” –Thomas Jefferson
GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Holiday ObamaCare News Dump
As everyone was closing up shop last Wednesday for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Obama administration was dumping more inconvenient news. Something tells us, however, that it wasn’t part of Obama’s suggested Thanksgiving table talking points1.
The White House delayed for one year the online ObamaCare exchange for small businesses. (There goes our shopping list!) Perhaps Healthcare.gov – the individual exchange – has been such a handful that they haven’t even bothered to start building the site for small businesses. Since Oct. 1, small businesses have been able to use paper applications, but instead of the online option, HHS offers alternatives such as working with agents or brokers or buying directly through insurers. According to HHS, “We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP [Small Business Health Options Program] Marketplace, and adding key new features, including an employee choice option and premium aggregation services, by November 2014.” It seems like something else happens in 2014 – what was that again?
Ah, the mid-term elections, that’s right. Also delayed beyond those elections is the open enrollment period for ObamaCare. Sign-ups for the 2015 plan year won’t begin Oct. 15, 2014 as previously scheduled, but will happen beginning Nov. 15. The only possible purpose for such a delay would be to postpone the inevitable premium sticker shock until after the mid-terms. Unfortunately for Democrats, employer-provided plan prices will skyrocket next year and those results will be known well before the election.
The self-inflicted bad news gets worse for Democrats. Next year will feature numerous plans booting your favorite doctor2. If you like your doctor… Oh well. On top of that, some 50 million to 100 million insurance policies, mainly employer provided, could be cancelled next fall3. If you like your plan… Oh well.
Speaking of those cancellations, note the story of cancer patient Bill Elliot, who appeared on Fox News to describe the loss of his insurance due to ObamaCare. He planned to pay the penalty, er, tax and “let[…] nature take its course.” Shortly after that, he received notice that he is being audited by the IRS for the years 2003-2009, with an interview in April 2014 – if he lives that long. Coincidence?
ECONOMY, REGS & TAXES
Republicans' Ethanol Addition
Iowa Republicans Gov. Terry Branstad, Sen. Chuck Grassley, and Rep. Steve King are up in arms over the EPA’s decision to roll back ethanol-to-gas volumes because ethanol producers have reached a blending wall in production. The trio – who are ostensibly against government subsidies except in cases where it helps them – have threatened legal action against the EPA because they believe the agency doesn’t have the authority to arbitrarily reduce the amount of ethanol in gasoline. According to their logic, though, the EPA does have the authority to arbitrarily raise the amount.
These men who call themselves Republicans claim they are fighting for jobs in their state, but they have grown grossly overdependent on ethanol. Despite years of production, the product has never gained widespread use. Automobile manufacturers believe it may actually be harmful to engines, and recent studies have shown that it is wreaking havoc on the environment as well. Five million acres of land that has been set aside for conservation has been converted to grow corn to make ethanol, leading to the filling-in of wetlands and the dumping of billions of pounds of fertilizers that have seeped into drinking water. Corn prices have skyrocketed because so much of the crop is used for ethanol production, leading to an inflation of food prices as corn is used in the manufacturing of most processed foods. And ethanol has not led to a softening of gas prices in the U.S., which was another claim that producers used to popularize the additive.
Even with all these strikes against it, ethanol remains politically popular. No member of Congress with a farmer in their state dare speak out against it. And since Iowa is America’s ethanol capital, every single person who runs for president also supports it because Iowa is the state that always kicks off the race for the White House.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Warfront With Jihadistan: Karzai’s Kabuki
Recent attempts6 to work out a security agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan have hit some snags. Recall that the joint security pact has been evolving through negotiations since 2013 and sets a framework for the presence of American troops and their continued role in conjunction with Afghan security forces. The country’s Loya Jirga has accepted the agreement and wants it to be put in place immediately, but President Hamid Karzai has no intention of signing the agreement, claiming he believes it should be the authority of the next president to make the decision on whether to keep 15,000 soldiers in the country until 2024. He also wants a complete prohibition on American troops from entering homes under any circumstance – a constraint the U.S. rejects.
Elections aren’t until April, and the Taliban is certainly not going to wait for an agreement. Karzai seems to be concerned only with embarrassing the Obama administration, but if a security pact is not reached, U.S. forces will pull out next year – a procedure that would have dangerous ramifications. We saw what happened in Iraq after America’s military presence evaporated. Karzai himself might not even survive if such a thing happens in his country.
CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH
New Study: Not Such a Large Head Start
For decades the federal government has claimed that our youngest children, particularly those brought up poor, would be best served by getting an early jump on the formal educational process. This notion led to the Head Start program, which serves children in the year or two before the normal commencement of kindergarten.
Yet for years, studies have proved that the Head Start program and other similar efforts are a colossal waste of money because the early advantage given to these children is erased in the first few years of standard K-12 schooling. This argument has been borne out in another large, 3,000-child study7, based on successful and unsuccessful applicants from 2009 to Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program. Now that the children have been tracked and the the study’s results evaluated for performance through first grade, the authors found that, in most areas, the children who did not attend the Pre-K program were academically ahead of those who attended.
The study’s authors “found that the effects of [the program] … observed at the end of the pre-k year had greatly diminished by the end of the kindergarten year and the differences between participants and nonparticipants were no longer statistically significant.” Why is this important?
Consider that the Obama administration wants to make “high-quality preschool available to every single child in America,” and imagine the cost. You can also imagine the need for thousands of additional (unionized, of course) “educators” as well as the millions of children immersed in government-sponsored indoctrination at a very precocious age.
With this administration we’ve learned results don’t matter, but employing power and control does. |
