The Foundry

“The science behind climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming. That conclusion is not a partisan one.” – Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Forget being partisan or not. That conclusion of settled science isn’t existent. It hasn’t been for a long time, but they are especially bold words in light of the climate scandal involving the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the flaws uncovered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Yesterday, the Senate Minority Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) released a new report that scrutinizes the climate scandal and CRU and its connection with the IPCC and U.S. government policy.

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Tomorrow, President Barack Obama will host a summit to discuss health care reform, but as Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko notes in this video, if the President is serious and sincere about making the summit a success, he should simply start over.

Owcharenko, who is Heritage’s Deputy Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies, says that the fundamental direction of the President’s plan is flawed.

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In anticipation of the February 25^th health care summit with members of Congress, the President released his proposal for pricey, government-run health care.  The White House estimates the cost of the proposal to be $950 billion over a decade, decreasing the federal deficit.  However, health policy expert James Capretta, a former senior official of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),  shows in a recent paper that this is not only inaccurate, but far from reality.  Capretta’s research shows that ten full years of implementation of the President’s proposal would cost closer to $2.5 trillion, with the strong likelihood of far exceeding this amount.  Here’s how:

• The President’s proposal ignores “doc fix” legislation, which would cost roughly $200 billion over ten years.  As Capretta notes, it is ironic that the President does not account for this provision, but includes several other Medicare provisions in his proposal.

• Non-coverage spending would add about $90 billion to the cost of the bill.

• Cost estimates for the President’s plan should apply to the ten year window from 2011 to 2020—not to 2019.  This would add approximately $200 billion more to the cost of the bill. Continue reading...

What do you think most Americans would say if the U.S. government created a new and exclusively race-based government with the authority to exempt itself from the U.S. Constitution and state authority at its own discretion? As ridiculous as it sounds, that is exactly what the House of Representatives voted for yesterday by a vote of 245-164. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explained that the passage of the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2010 pleased President Obama, and that he, “looks forward to signing the bill into law and establishing a government-to-government relationship with Native Hawaiians.” But before celebrating the birth of a new tropical bureaucracy (it still needs to pass the Senate) our lawmakers should put some thought into whether this plan is equitable and constitutional. Brian Darling, The Heritage Foundation’s Director of Senate Relations, explains that the plan would create a racially exclusive government, “to solicit federal monies and create programs to benefit individuals who fit the definition of “Native Hawaiian.”

Congratulations, Native Hawaiians. You are the 2010 nominee for the government-issued identity politics prize. The winnings include self-governance, with the authority to go over the head of the Hawaiian state government (without the support of the Governor) to negotiate with the federal government over territorial, resource, and tax matters.  Now, who qualifies as a Native Hawaiian? The plan indicates that a federal commission is to decide using criteria including, but not limited to, “a direct lineal descendant of the aboriginal, indigenous, native people who resided on the islands that now comprise the State of Hawaii on or before January 1, 1893”, as well as being eligible in 1921 for the programs authorized by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, or a direct lineal descendant of such a person.

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced a new report estimating that the $862 billion stimulus has thus far saved or created 1.5 million jobs.

Yet the CBO’s calculations are not based on actually observing the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they used an economic model that was programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs—thus guaranteeing their result.

Logicians call this the begging-the-question fallacy. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove. Continue reading...

Between the 9/11 terrorist attack and the inauguration of Barack Obama, the CIA’s detention and interrogation program yielded intelligence that foiled several terrorist attacks, according to author Mark Thiessen. That program, according to Thiessen, uncovered plots for attacks on high-rise apartment buildings; the U.S. Marine Camp in Djibouti, the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles – the tallest building on the West Coast; and London’s Heathrow Airport and downtown buildings.

On the second day of Barack Obama’s presidency, he signed an executive order ending the CIA program. Marc A. Thiessen, author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack. explained why this decision compromises American security at a Heritage Foundation event on February 23.

Obama claims that his Executive Order #13491 put an end to “torture,” even though the Bush Administration had already taken waterboarding off the table by 2003. The interrogation techniques Obama eliminated by his Executive Order included “the facial hold, attention grasp, tummy slap, facial slap, a diet of liquid Ensure and mild sleep deprivation (a maximum of four consecutive days).” According to Thiessen, none of these methods constitute torture, or even inflict more suffering than training for a typical high school football team. Continue reading...

Thursday, Democrats and Republicans will convene at the President’s request to discuss the way forward on achieving bipartisan health care reform.  In a recent paper, Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko discusses how congressional Democrats and the President can use this meeting to start over on health care reform by enlisting Republicans to pass legislation both sides agree on.

Says Owcharenko, “If the President is sincere and the summit is going to be successful, it must begin by setting aside the highly unpopular bills that the House and Senate have developed. Simply adjusting the magnitude of these proposals or adding new “conservative” provisions as suggested in the President’s latest proposal, does not change their fundamental direction.”

Polls show a majority of Americans stand in opposition to the left’s health care proposals, which fall short of meeting expectations established by promises made by the President. To restore the nation’s trust in Washington, Congress and the President should focus on areas of reform which have bipartisan support.  Owcharenko suggests the following as areas in which to move forward: Continue reading...

Is a congressional compromise on financial services regulation in the works? Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post today reports the answer is “yes,” citing progress in negotiations between Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. Specifically, Pearlstein points to a breakthrough on one of the major sticking points of the debate: whether to create a new agency to enforce consumer protection laws in financial service markets.

As described, the compromise proposal may alleviate many of the potential organizational objections to the idea. Nevertheless, the new regulator could hurt — rather than help — consumers.

The creation of an independent super-agency dedicated soley to consumer regulation has been a centerpiece of President Obama’s financial regulation agenda. But, while it was approved last summer by the House, the idea has languished in the Senate, as opponents have pointed out that a consumer regulation agency independent of other banking regulators would foster confusion and bureaucratic infighting, and actually undermine efforts to assure the safety and soundness of banks.
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The latest attempt by Congress to wrestle the high unemployment rate is the HIRE Act, which is little more than a tax holiday for companies who hire additional workers. Even if this Act works as intended and encourages businesses to hire more workers, which in and of itself is not a guarantee, then other measures undertaken by the Obama Administration have the opposite effect, by actually stifling hiring by business. Some of the measures that counteract intentions of the HIRE Act are the minimum wage increases of the last few years, uncertainty of pending legislation on healthcare and cap-and-trade, and the Davis-Bacon Act that requires government contractors to pay wages that are above the market rates.

The idea behind the HIRE Act is that the payroll tax holiday would reduce the cost of labor for participating companies by temporarily suspending the employer’s share of the Social Security payroll tax, thus coercing companies to hire new workers. However, the impact of such a measure is unclear, since the tax holiday will only be temporary and will have little impact – a qualified employer who hires a worker earning $51,000 annually will receive a subsidy equaling roughly $264 per month. However, these subsidies amount to lost revenue in the Federal Social Security Trust Fund – an institution that even without this additional burden is running a significant deficit. Continue reading...

The President’s health care proposal contains little that is new.  The well tested rhetoric used by the White House to sugarcoat the health policy outline should not fool ordinary Americans. This proposal is even more expensive than the Senate bill upon which it is apparently based: $950 billion over ten years rather than $871 billion.

Consider the claims made by the White House regarding the effects of the President’s proposal on the health care system.

The Rhetoric on Affordability.
“It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today.”

The Reality: In fact, the tax credit would be limited to only a limited number of persons within a limited set of income brackets, not the entire middle class. One cannot ignore the tax increases, or the prescribed cost of the health care benefits packages themselves. As the premiums increase, the cost of the subsidies, based on percentage of income, would track these increases, resulting in another direct cost shift onto all taxpayers. In fact, the President’s proposal, based on the Senate bill, would result in major tax increases (estimated at $629 billion over ten years) and would include a variety of  middle class tax increases. This, of course, once again violates the president’s promise to refrain from imposing taxes on those with family incomes of less than $250,000 per year. Continue reading...