Those unintended consequences

Remember that this is the signature "achievement" of Obama's first (and last) term.  Weekly Standard: "Study: Under Obamacare, employees will likely engage in 'targeted dumping' of employees."

Minnesota Public Radio reports, “A loophole in the federal health care overhaul would allow many employers to game the system by dumping their sicker employees [into] public health insurance exchanges, according to two University of Minnesota law professors.” Such “targeted dumping” of sicker employees would cause Obamacare’s taxpayer-subsidized exchanges to cost more — potentially far more — than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected.

This seems to be a pattern with the Obama administration from Stimulus I to Cash for Clunkers to Obamacare to Solyndra: it won't work but at least it will cost a lot of money.

"Something had to give" - Megan McArdle has a good review of American Airlines' declaration of bankruptcy and the pressures on the legacy airlines.

Another warning - Fox Business: "Fitch keeps U.S. credit rating at AAA, cuts outlook to negative."

Obama to Joe Sixpack: drop dead

From the New York Times (!): "The future of the Obama coalition"

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

I'd like to believe that the American electorate is running the gamut from concerned to mortified by the inexorable rise in the national debt, and the working class in particular is tuned in to the bill coming due to future generations.  It was only six months ago when a Democratic candidate who "promises to...raise taxes only on the super rich" was up against a Republican "running as a business-minded opponent of deficit spending."

It's a message that's going to resonate beyond New York-9.

Extra - From Opinion Journal.

An inconvenient truth - Opinion Journal: "The non-green jobs boom - Forget 'clean energy.' Oil and gas are boosting U.S. employment."

Crimson tide of debt

Mark Steyn: "SS Spendaholic sailing into debt abyss"

In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that's the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we're lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he'd got a deal for "a real, enforceable cut" of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012.
Which of these numbers is accurate?
The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn't have every hour of every day. So, if it's $1 billion in "real, enforceable cuts," in the time it takes to roast a 20-pound stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government's already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it's $7 billion in "real, enforceable cuts," in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back.

The United States is uncomfortably close to spending $2 for every $1 we raise in revenue; all of this is going on to the national credit card.  At some point we have to envision a government that has to make due with half a defense budget, half a Medicare budget, half of everything - except we can't even cut enough of what we're overspending in a single day.

Happy Thanksgiving

See you after digestion.

That guy who lives on Air Force One - Keith Hennessey: "The President's missed opportunities for deficit reduction."  Let's face it: he doesn't give a fig about debt.

Erskine Bowles doesn't feel the love - Via Jennifer Rubin's blog at the WashPost, the former co-chair of the first debt commission all but accuses Obama of abandoning the commission's recommendations so he could play his "sensible guy" schtick.

USA to OWS - "Meh."

Spending commitments a'comin'

Robert Samuelson reminds us what is really driving the federal deficit over the next couple decades:

As is known, these "entitlements" are the central cause of long-term budget deficits. From 2005 to 2035, their cost will nearly double as a share of national income, projects the Congressional Budget Office. How big a government do we want? What's the balance of fairness between young and old? How much should other programs be reduced or taxes raised? Many Democrats duck the fundamental policy questions and reject any benefit cuts.

Let's be clear about one thing: there is not enough money that could be culled from the "rich" to pay for all the Medicare and Social Security spending coming down the pike which will soon enough suck up every penny in federal revenue.

Time for a diet - Here's Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe with a good review of our federal debt problem: "Kicking our spending habit."

Epic finish - Tonight was the final race in the NASCAR championship and it was a two-man brawl between Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards.  In the end, Stewart finished one slot ahead of Edwards and they actually tied in total points, but Stewart won the championship because he had the most wins in the Chase.

Edwards was classy in defeat and really you couldn't take anything away from Stewart who won half of the 10 races in the NASCAR Chase series.  I was rooting for Edwards, but Tony won it outright.

Except they're not

Fox News: "Deficit panel facing political, fiscal consequences without budget deal."

Really?  Virtually nobody believes that the 2013 budget axe will fall since future Congresses are not bound by the intentions of the past.  And I don't think the political consequences are going to effect the re-election efforts of John Kerry in Massachusetts or Jon Kyl in Arizona.

I was highly skeptical of this budget supercommittee since it carried the political baggage that was mostly muted in the first debt commission chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.  Still, I kinda hoped they would find some middle ground that got somewhere near the target of $1.2 trillion in savings.  As this graph from the Washington Examiner demonstrates, that figure is almost a rounding error compared to the sum of federal spending over the next decade:

Depressing.  As Casey Stengel once griped about another inept committee: "Can't anybody play this here game?"

Western Massachusetts makes OWS news

This is currently the top story on MassLive which is the main news site for Western Massachusetts: it's about some kid from Northampton who was on MTV because of his involvement with Occupy Wall Street.  These paragraphs are beyond parody:

His family owns the Easthampton restaurant Tavern on the Hill. He dropped out of Greenfield Community College, where he was an art history major. Amy Guyette, his mother, said he has only been home twice, for a total of about five days, since the occupation began.
“I’m just a middle-class white kid from Northampton, Massachusetts,” Bryan Guyette says in the TV show. “I’ve seen a lot of communities in my area become pretty economically depressed. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and that doesn’t seem fair to me.”

So, to recap, the art history major college dropout is raging against his family which owns a premier restaurant in Easthampton and clearly resides in the 1% he loathes.  Furthermore, young Bryan thinks it's unfair that the rich keep getting richer while hippies with green dye in their hair keep getting poorer.  You can't make this stuff up.

Abt naturally - WTOV: "Man tries to rob bank, teller can't decipher note."  I believe the note said: "I am pointing a gub at you."

Ways to have fun with vibration

Oh grow up.  I found this video today while I was looking up information on ultrasonic cleaning.  The vibration from the violin bow sets up constructive and destructive waves which appear on the metal plate.



Science is fun-damental!

Golden years are mainly pyrite - As if it wasn't bad enough that Social Security is going to go bankrupt the very year I plan to retire, there's this news from Zero Hedge: "The new retirement normal: the average American must work for two extra years after death."  But I'm tired.

After the sugar high - Hit & Run: "CBO on the stimulus: "A net negative effect on the growth of GDP over 10 years."  The shorter version is that we spent a bunch of cash on a stimulus that didn't work but we still have to pay interest on all the money we borrowed.

I had no idea there were so many diabetics at OWS - CBS News: "Dozens of hypodermic needles found among trash removed from Zuccotti Park."