Here we go again. An approaching crisis. A looming deadline. Nervous markets. And then, from the miasma of gridlock, rises our president, calling upon those unruly congressional children to quit squabbling, stop kicking the can down the road and get serious about debt.
This from the man who:
• Ignored the debt problem for two years by kicking the can to a commission.
• Promptly ignored the commission’s December 2010 report.
• Delivered a State of the Union address in January that didn’t even mention the word “debt” until 35 minutes in.
• Delivered in February a budget so embarrassing — it actually increased the deficit — that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97 to 0.
• Took a budget mulligan with his April 13 debt-plan speech. Asked in Congress how this new “budget framework” would affect the actual federal budget, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf replied with a devastating “We don’t estimate speeches.” You can’t assign numbers to air.
President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.
My compliments. But the Republican House did do its homework. It’s called a budget. It passed the House on April 15. The Democratic Senate has produced no budget. Not just this year, but for two years running. As for the schoolmaster in chief, he produced two 2012 budget facsimiles: The first (February) was a farce and the second (April) was empty, dismissed by the CBO as nothing but words untethered to real numbers.
Obama has run disastrous annual deficits of around $1.5 trillion while insisting for months on a “clean” debt-ceiling increase, i.e., with no budget cuts at all. Yet suddenly he now rises to champion major long-term debt reduction, scorning any suggestions of a short-term debt-limit deal as can-kicking.
The flip-flop is transparently political. A short-term deal means another debt-ceiling fight before Election Day, a debate that would put Obama on the defensive and distract from the Mediscare campaign to which the Democrats are clinging to save them in 2012.
A clever strategy it is: Do nothing (see above); invite the Republicans to propose real debt reduction first; and when they do — voting for the Ryan budget and its now infamous and courageous Medicare reform — demagogue them to death.
And then up the ante by demanding Republican agreement to tax increases. So: First you get the GOP to seize the left’s third rail by daring to lay a finger on entitlements. Then you demand the GOP seize the right’s third rail by violating its no-tax pledge. A full-spectrum electrocution. Brilliant.
And what have been Obama’s own debt-reduction ideas? In last week’s news conference, he railed against the tax break for corporate jet owners — six times.
I did the math. If you collect that tax for the next 5,000 years — that is not a typo — it would equal the new debt Obama racked up last year alone. To put it another way, if we had levied this tax at the time of John the Baptist and collected it every year since — first in shekels, then in dollars — we would have 500 years to go before we could offset half of the debt added by Obama last year alone.
Obama’s other favorite debt-reduction refrain is canceling an oil-company tax break. Well, if you collect that oil tax and the corporate jet tax for the next 50 years — you will not yet have offset Obama’s deficit spending for February 2011.
After his Thursday meeting with bipartisan congressional leadership, Obama adopted yet another persona: Cynic in chief became compromiser in chief. Highly placed leaks are portraying him as heroically prepared to offer Social Security and Medicare cuts.
We shall see. It’s no mystery what is needed. First, entitlement reform that changes the inflation measure, introduces means testing, then syncs the (lower) Medicare eligibility age with Social Security’s and indexes them both to longevity. And second, real tax reform, both corporate and individual, that eliminates myriad loopholes in return for lower tax rates for everyone.
That’s real debt reduction. Yet even now, we don’t know where the president stands on any of this. Until we do, I’ll follow the Elmendorf Rule: We don’t estimate leaks. Let’s see if Obama can suspend his 2012 electioneering long enough to keep the economy from going over the debt cliff.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Friday, July 8, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Obamacare Tragedy Primed To Further Explode the Deficit
By Peter Ferrara on 7.6.11 @ 6:08AM
President Obama bludgeoned Obamacare through Congress on the claim, backed by CBO, that it would not add to the deficit, even though it adopts or wildly expands three entitlement programs. As I discuss in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, close analysis of the CBO score and additional new data indicates that, quite to the contrary, Obamacare will likely add $4 to $6 trillion to the deficit over its first 20 years, and possibly more.
Of course, the deficit is not the biggest problem. Even bigger is that regardless of the deficit, Obamacare involves trillions of increased government spending and taxes. Worst of all is that it involves a loss of control over, and the quality of, our own health care. All of this is ultimately a tragedy because as my book also explains, the uninsured could all easily be covered without any individual or employer mandate for just a small fraction of the cost of Obamacare, as discussed below.
Deficits and Debt
CBO made three enormous conceptual errors in scoring the program as not adding to the deficit, explained in detail in my book. The first relates to the new middle class welfare entitlement adopted by Obamacare, providing government handouts for the purchase of health insurance for families earning up to four times the poverty level, or $88,000 for a family of four, indexed to grow to over $100,000 shortly.
These health insurance handouts go only to those who buy insurance on their own individually through the state based health insurance exchanges established under the legislation. Those who receive employer provided coverage are not eligible. CBO assumed that only 19 million workers will qualify for the handouts, out of a work force estimated at 162 million in 2014 mostly still receiving employer provided coverage. It consequently estimated the cost at only $450 billion over the first 10 years, or actually first 6 years of implementation of Obamacare.
But with the mandated insurance likely to cost $15,000 or more by 2016, employers will have powerful incentives to dump their employee coverage and pay the $2,000 per worker fine that applies to such termination of coverage. Employers are all the more likely to do this, and just pay their workers higher wages in place of the health coverage, precisely because the workers would then be able to get the huge welfare handouts for purchasing their insurance through the exchanges, resulting actually in a net income increase. As former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin reported in a paper for the American Action Forum,
“For example, a family earning about $59,000 a year in 2014 would receive a premium subsidy of about $7,200. A family making $71,000 would receive about $5,200; and even a family earning about $95,000 would receive a subsidy of almost $3,000. By 2018,…a family earning about $64,000 would receive a subsidy of over $10,000, a family earning $77,000 would receive a subsidy of $7,800 and families earning $102,000 would receive a subsidy of almost $5,000.”
In fact, in the exchanges, qualifying workers can even get subsidies covering their out-of-pocket expenses.
These are the reasons why a new study released by McKinsey & Company earlier this month concluded that Obamacare will result in “a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored heath benefits.” It found that “30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering” employer health coverage after Obamacare is implemented, and “among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50 percent.”
In the Wall Street Journal on June 8, Grace-Marie Turner, President of the Galen Institute, estimated based on the numbers in the McKinsey report that as many as 78 million Americans would lose their employer provided coverage. If those workers ended up receiving the new Obamacare exchange handouts, the estimated costs for those subsidies in the first 6 years alone would soar by 4 times, adding nearly $2 trillion to the costs and deficits of Obamacare during that time.
What happened to President Obama’s oft-repeated pledge that if you like your health insurance you can keep it? Another transparent manipulation of the public was Obama telling us on national television there is no way Obamacare’s individual mandate can be considered a tax, and then sending his government lawyers into court to argue that the individual mandate is constitutional because it is simply a tax. I predict that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will issue a ruling soon upholding the individual mandate on the grounds that it is a tax.
The second conceptual fallacy in the CBO score was revealed in full by the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government, released last December by the Treasury Department. It documents the total present value of the future cuts to Medicare under President Obama’s policies already enacted under current law as $15 trillion, primarily in payments to doctors and hospitals for health care provided to seniors.
Such draconian cuts in Medicare payments would create havoc and chaos in health care for seniors. Doctors, hospitals, surgeons and specialists providing critical care to the elderly such as surgery for hip and knee replacements, sophisticated diagnostics through MRIs and CT scans, and even treatment for cancer and heart disease would shut down and disappear in much of the country, and others would stop serving Medicare patients. If the government is not going to pay, then seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they expect.
In fact, within a decade after Obamacare is implemented, Medicare’s payments to doctors and hospitals will be less than under Medicaid, where the poor face grave difficulties in finding timely treatment, and are documented to suffer worse health outcomes as a result.
Medicare’s Chief Actuary reports that even before these cuts already two-thirds of hospitals were losing money on Medicare patients. Health providers will either have to withdraw from serving Medicare patients, or eventually go into bankruptcy. The unworkable, draconian effect of these Medicare cuts is why the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a disclaimer of opinion on the Statement of Social Insurance component of the federal government’s 2010 Financial Statement, saying, “Unless providers could reduce their cost per service correspondingly, through productivity improvements, or other steps, they would eventually become unwilling or unable to treat Medicare beneficiaries.”
Yet, reversing these unworkable Medicare cuts would add $15 trillion to the future deficits caused by Obamacare.
Finally, the Obamacare tax increases won’t raise nearly the revenues that CBO projected. The capital gains tax rate would increase by close to 60 percent in 2013, with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and Obamacare applying the Medicare payroll tax to capital gains as well. But over the last 40 years, every time the capital gains tax rate has been increased, revenues have declined.
Similarly, the tax rate on dividends would nearly triple in 2013, due again to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the application of the Medicare payroll tax to dividends as well. The last time dividend taxes were that high, corporate dividend payments were greatly reduced. Corporations just kept the money internally for corporate investment. Corporate earnings are already subject to the 35 percent corporate income tax rate, which is on top of any tax on dividends. So revenues from the tax on dividends will decline sharply as well, exactly the opposite of what happened when President Bush cut the tax rate on dividends in 2003. CBO, of course, has a horrid record of wildly failing to estimate the revenue effects of tax changes relating to capital gains and corporate dividends in particular.
The Tragedy of Obamacare
My book explains the Obamacare tragedy by showing how everyone can be assured essential health care for just a small fraction of the cost of Obamacare. Moreover, this is accomplished with no individual mandate and no employer mandate. Obamacare, by contrast, for all of its trillions in future taxes and spending, and its individual and employer mandates, still does not cover everyone.
Such reform would begin with Medicaid, which already spends over $400 billion a year providing substandard health care coverage for 50 million poor Americans. Congress should transform Medicaid to provide assistance to purchase private health insurance for all those who otherwise could not afford coverage, ideally with health insurance vouchers. This one step would enormously benefit the poor already on Medicaid. The program today pays doctors and hospitals only 60% of costs for their health care services for the poor. As a result, close to half of all doctors and hospitals won’t take Medicaid patients. This is already a form of rationing, as Medicaid patients find obtaining health care increasingly difficult, and studies show they suffer worse health outcomes as a result. Health insurance vouchers would free the poor from this Medicaid ghetto, enabling them to obtain the same health care as the middle class, because they would be able to buy the same health insurance in the market.
Ideally this would be done by reforming Medicaid financing to provide the federal assistance to the states for the program through fixed, finite block grants, which do not vary by matching increased state Medicaid spending as under the current system. With finite block grants, states that innovate to reduce costs can keep the savings. States that operate programs with continued runaway costs would pay those additional costs themselves. Such reforms worked spectacularly to stop the runaway costs of the old AFDC program when Congress adopted welfare reform in 1996. The voters of each state can then decide how much assistance for the purchase of health insurance to provide each family at different income levels to assure that the poor would be able to obtain essential health care. This would rightly vary with the different income and cost levels of each state.
This would not cost much because only about 12 million Americans arguably cannot afford health insurance without some public assistance. Out of the 47 million uninsured we keep hearing about, 9.7 million are already eligible for current government programs like Medicaid or SCHIP but haven’t signed up. Another 6 million are eligible for employer sponsored insurance but have not signed up for that either. Another 9 million are in families earning more than $75,000 per year. Another 10.2 million are immigrants, legal or illegal, and not U.S. citizens. Just give the assistance necessary, counting what they can reasonably pay based on their income, to the 12 million Americans that need it to buy private health insurance.
But a second step is necessary as well to ensure a complete safety net. Federal funding should also be provided to help each state set up a High Risk pool. Those uninsured who become too sick to purchase health insurance in the market, perhaps because they have contracted cancer or heart disease, for example, would be assured of guaranteed coverage through the risk pool. They would be charged a premium for this coverage based on their ability to pay, ensuring that they will not be asked to pay more than they could afford. Federal and state funding would cover remaining costs. Such risk pools already exist in over 30 states, and for the most part they work well at relatively little cost to the taxpayers because few people actually become truly uninsurable.
The law already provides that insurers cannot cut off already existing policyholders, or impose discriminatory rate increases, because they become sick while covered. That would be like allowing fire insurers to cut off coverage for houses once they catch on fire. If this law needs to be modernized, it should be.
With these reforms, those who have insurance can keep it, those who can’t afford it are given the necessary help to buy it, and those who nevertheless remain uninsured and then become too sick to buy it have a back up safety net in the risk pools. Again this completely solves the problem of the uninsured without any individual or employer mandate, which are unnecessary gateways to enormous trouble. Once the government adopts such mandates, it is inexorably led down the path to socialized medicine.
President Obama bludgeoned Obamacare through Congress on the claim, backed by CBO, that it would not add to the deficit, even though it adopts or wildly expands three entitlement programs. As I discuss in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, close analysis of the CBO score and additional new data indicates that, quite to the contrary, Obamacare will likely add $4 to $6 trillion to the deficit over its first 20 years, and possibly more.
Of course, the deficit is not the biggest problem. Even bigger is that regardless of the deficit, Obamacare involves trillions of increased government spending and taxes. Worst of all is that it involves a loss of control over, and the quality of, our own health care. All of this is ultimately a tragedy because as my book also explains, the uninsured could all easily be covered without any individual or employer mandate for just a small fraction of the cost of Obamacare, as discussed below.
Deficits and Debt
CBO made three enormous conceptual errors in scoring the program as not adding to the deficit, explained in detail in my book. The first relates to the new middle class welfare entitlement adopted by Obamacare, providing government handouts for the purchase of health insurance for families earning up to four times the poverty level, or $88,000 for a family of four, indexed to grow to over $100,000 shortly.
These health insurance handouts go only to those who buy insurance on their own individually through the state based health insurance exchanges established under the legislation. Those who receive employer provided coverage are not eligible. CBO assumed that only 19 million workers will qualify for the handouts, out of a work force estimated at 162 million in 2014 mostly still receiving employer provided coverage. It consequently estimated the cost at only $450 billion over the first 10 years, or actually first 6 years of implementation of Obamacare.
But with the mandated insurance likely to cost $15,000 or more by 2016, employers will have powerful incentives to dump their employee coverage and pay the $2,000 per worker fine that applies to such termination of coverage. Employers are all the more likely to do this, and just pay their workers higher wages in place of the health coverage, precisely because the workers would then be able to get the huge welfare handouts for purchasing their insurance through the exchanges, resulting actually in a net income increase. As former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin reported in a paper for the American Action Forum,
“For example, a family earning about $59,000 a year in 2014 would receive a premium subsidy of about $7,200. A family making $71,000 would receive about $5,200; and even a family earning about $95,000 would receive a subsidy of almost $3,000. By 2018,…a family earning about $64,000 would receive a subsidy of over $10,000, a family earning $77,000 would receive a subsidy of $7,800 and families earning $102,000 would receive a subsidy of almost $5,000.”
In fact, in the exchanges, qualifying workers can even get subsidies covering their out-of-pocket expenses.
These are the reasons why a new study released by McKinsey & Company earlier this month concluded that Obamacare will result in “a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored heath benefits.” It found that “30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering” employer health coverage after Obamacare is implemented, and “among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50 percent.”
In the Wall Street Journal on June 8, Grace-Marie Turner, President of the Galen Institute, estimated based on the numbers in the McKinsey report that as many as 78 million Americans would lose their employer provided coverage. If those workers ended up receiving the new Obamacare exchange handouts, the estimated costs for those subsidies in the first 6 years alone would soar by 4 times, adding nearly $2 trillion to the costs and deficits of Obamacare during that time.
What happened to President Obama’s oft-repeated pledge that if you like your health insurance you can keep it? Another transparent manipulation of the public was Obama telling us on national television there is no way Obamacare’s individual mandate can be considered a tax, and then sending his government lawyers into court to argue that the individual mandate is constitutional because it is simply a tax. I predict that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will issue a ruling soon upholding the individual mandate on the grounds that it is a tax.
The second conceptual fallacy in the CBO score was revealed in full by the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government, released last December by the Treasury Department. It documents the total present value of the future cuts to Medicare under President Obama’s policies already enacted under current law as $15 trillion, primarily in payments to doctors and hospitals for health care provided to seniors.
Such draconian cuts in Medicare payments would create havoc and chaos in health care for seniors. Doctors, hospitals, surgeons and specialists providing critical care to the elderly such as surgery for hip and knee replacements, sophisticated diagnostics through MRIs and CT scans, and even treatment for cancer and heart disease would shut down and disappear in much of the country, and others would stop serving Medicare patients. If the government is not going to pay, then seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they expect.
In fact, within a decade after Obamacare is implemented, Medicare’s payments to doctors and hospitals will be less than under Medicaid, where the poor face grave difficulties in finding timely treatment, and are documented to suffer worse health outcomes as a result.
Medicare’s Chief Actuary reports that even before these cuts already two-thirds of hospitals were losing money on Medicare patients. Health providers will either have to withdraw from serving Medicare patients, or eventually go into bankruptcy. The unworkable, draconian effect of these Medicare cuts is why the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a disclaimer of opinion on the Statement of Social Insurance component of the federal government’s 2010 Financial Statement, saying, “Unless providers could reduce their cost per service correspondingly, through productivity improvements, or other steps, they would eventually become unwilling or unable to treat Medicare beneficiaries.”
Yet, reversing these unworkable Medicare cuts would add $15 trillion to the future deficits caused by Obamacare.
Finally, the Obamacare tax increases won’t raise nearly the revenues that CBO projected. The capital gains tax rate would increase by close to 60 percent in 2013, with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and Obamacare applying the Medicare payroll tax to capital gains as well. But over the last 40 years, every time the capital gains tax rate has been increased, revenues have declined.
Similarly, the tax rate on dividends would nearly triple in 2013, due again to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the application of the Medicare payroll tax to dividends as well. The last time dividend taxes were that high, corporate dividend payments were greatly reduced. Corporations just kept the money internally for corporate investment. Corporate earnings are already subject to the 35 percent corporate income tax rate, which is on top of any tax on dividends. So revenues from the tax on dividends will decline sharply as well, exactly the opposite of what happened when President Bush cut the tax rate on dividends in 2003. CBO, of course, has a horrid record of wildly failing to estimate the revenue effects of tax changes relating to capital gains and corporate dividends in particular.
The Tragedy of Obamacare
My book explains the Obamacare tragedy by showing how everyone can be assured essential health care for just a small fraction of the cost of Obamacare. Moreover, this is accomplished with no individual mandate and no employer mandate. Obamacare, by contrast, for all of its trillions in future taxes and spending, and its individual and employer mandates, still does not cover everyone.
Such reform would begin with Medicaid, which already spends over $400 billion a year providing substandard health care coverage for 50 million poor Americans. Congress should transform Medicaid to provide assistance to purchase private health insurance for all those who otherwise could not afford coverage, ideally with health insurance vouchers. This one step would enormously benefit the poor already on Medicaid. The program today pays doctors and hospitals only 60% of costs for their health care services for the poor. As a result, close to half of all doctors and hospitals won’t take Medicaid patients. This is already a form of rationing, as Medicaid patients find obtaining health care increasingly difficult, and studies show they suffer worse health outcomes as a result. Health insurance vouchers would free the poor from this Medicaid ghetto, enabling them to obtain the same health care as the middle class, because they would be able to buy the same health insurance in the market.
Ideally this would be done by reforming Medicaid financing to provide the federal assistance to the states for the program through fixed, finite block grants, which do not vary by matching increased state Medicaid spending as under the current system. With finite block grants, states that innovate to reduce costs can keep the savings. States that operate programs with continued runaway costs would pay those additional costs themselves. Such reforms worked spectacularly to stop the runaway costs of the old AFDC program when Congress adopted welfare reform in 1996. The voters of each state can then decide how much assistance for the purchase of health insurance to provide each family at different income levels to assure that the poor would be able to obtain essential health care. This would rightly vary with the different income and cost levels of each state.
This would not cost much because only about 12 million Americans arguably cannot afford health insurance without some public assistance. Out of the 47 million uninsured we keep hearing about, 9.7 million are already eligible for current government programs like Medicaid or SCHIP but haven’t signed up. Another 6 million are eligible for employer sponsored insurance but have not signed up for that either. Another 9 million are in families earning more than $75,000 per year. Another 10.2 million are immigrants, legal or illegal, and not U.S. citizens. Just give the assistance necessary, counting what they can reasonably pay based on their income, to the 12 million Americans that need it to buy private health insurance.
But a second step is necessary as well to ensure a complete safety net. Federal funding should also be provided to help each state set up a High Risk pool. Those uninsured who become too sick to purchase health insurance in the market, perhaps because they have contracted cancer or heart disease, for example, would be assured of guaranteed coverage through the risk pool. They would be charged a premium for this coverage based on their ability to pay, ensuring that they will not be asked to pay more than they could afford. Federal and state funding would cover remaining costs. Such risk pools already exist in over 30 states, and for the most part they work well at relatively little cost to the taxpayers because few people actually become truly uninsurable.
The law already provides that insurers cannot cut off already existing policyholders, or impose discriminatory rate increases, because they become sick while covered. That would be like allowing fire insurers to cut off coverage for houses once they catch on fire. If this law needs to be modernized, it should be.
With these reforms, those who have insurance can keep it, those who can’t afford it are given the necessary help to buy it, and those who nevertheless remain uninsured and then become too sick to buy it have a back up safety net in the risk pools. Again this completely solves the problem of the uninsured without any individual or employer mandate, which are unnecessary gateways to enormous trouble. Once the government adopts such mandates, it is inexorably led down the path to socialized medicine.
Federal Judge Forces Interior to Decide on Drilling Leases
Typically when someone buys something, that person receives some good or service in return. That’s not always the case when it comes to the federal government.
The Department of Interior failed to issue leases after several oil and gas companies purchased them from the Bureau of Land Management. Consequently, the six companies that won and bought the leases and Western Energy Alliance, which represents more than 400 independent natural gas and oil producers, sued the government. They earned a partial victory last week when a federal judge in Wyoming ordered Interior to decide on 47 leases in Utah and Wyoming but not necessarily issue them.
Between 2005 and 2010, these oil and gas companies purchased a number of leases on federal lands to explore and drill for oil and gas. Before the companies can move forward, however, Interior must issue the leases. The Mineral Leasing Act requires that “leases shall be issued” by the Secretary of the Interior 60 days after a company wins the bid, but Secretary Ken Salazar hasn’t done so. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Wyoming office of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, where many of the leases were purchased, said leases were held up by objections from environmental groups.”
The government offered no refund for the money paid for the leases. One company, Baseline, “paid more than $1.3 million for Wyoming leases and nearly $545,000 for Utah leases. At the time of the lawsuit’s filing, Baseline had only received some of its leases in Wyoming and none of the Utah leases. The Utah leases were won during auctions held as long as six years ago.”
The tag-team of radical environmental groups and onerous regulatory red tape continues to halt America’s energy production and stifle job creation and economic activity. Environmental activists delay new energy projects by filing endless administrative appeals and lawsuits. Shell cited regulatory delays and legal challenges preventing it from moving forward with exploration programs in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
This is the second time the federal courts have sided with America’s energy producers. Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman held the Interior Department in contempt of court for ignoring his ruling to cease the job-killing drilling moratorium imposed by President Obama last year.
The Obama Administration touted that U.S. crude oil production in 2010 was the highest it has been since 2003. While this is true (as a result of increased horizontal drilling in North Dakota), the Energy Information Administration projects that oil production will decline in the coming years as a result of Obama’s anti-drilling policies. Oil and gas production drives the economy in significant portions of the western United States. It’s nonsensical to unnecessarily hold up energy production at a time when it’s badly needed.
The Department of Interior failed to issue leases after several oil and gas companies purchased them from the Bureau of Land Management. Consequently, the six companies that won and bought the leases and Western Energy Alliance, which represents more than 400 independent natural gas and oil producers, sued the government. They earned a partial victory last week when a federal judge in Wyoming ordered Interior to decide on 47 leases in Utah and Wyoming but not necessarily issue them.
Between 2005 and 2010, these oil and gas companies purchased a number of leases on federal lands to explore and drill for oil and gas. Before the companies can move forward, however, Interior must issue the leases. The Mineral Leasing Act requires that “leases shall be issued” by the Secretary of the Interior 60 days after a company wins the bid, but Secretary Ken Salazar hasn’t done so. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Wyoming office of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, where many of the leases were purchased, said leases were held up by objections from environmental groups.”
The government offered no refund for the money paid for the leases. One company, Baseline, “paid more than $1.3 million for Wyoming leases and nearly $545,000 for Utah leases. At the time of the lawsuit’s filing, Baseline had only received some of its leases in Wyoming and none of the Utah leases. The Utah leases were won during auctions held as long as six years ago.”
The tag-team of radical environmental groups and onerous regulatory red tape continues to halt America’s energy production and stifle job creation and economic activity. Environmental activists delay new energy projects by filing endless administrative appeals and lawsuits. Shell cited regulatory delays and legal challenges preventing it from moving forward with exploration programs in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
This is the second time the federal courts have sided with America’s energy producers. Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman held the Interior Department in contempt of court for ignoring his ruling to cease the job-killing drilling moratorium imposed by President Obama last year.
The Obama Administration touted that U.S. crude oil production in 2010 was the highest it has been since 2003. While this is true (as a result of increased horizontal drilling in North Dakota), the Energy Information Administration projects that oil production will decline in the coming years as a result of Obama’s anti-drilling policies. Oil and gas production drives the economy in significant portions of the western United States. It’s nonsensical to unnecessarily hold up energy production at a time when it’s badly needed.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Peter Foster: The demons in Krugmanomics
Paul Krugman’s affection for markets fell as he became obsessed with inequality, market instability and catastrophic climate change
Nobel economist Paul Krugman is due to address the Economic Club of Toronto Wednesday on whether the United States has “mortgaged its future.” If Mr. Krugman is true to form, he will tell his audience that it has not mortgaged its future enough. What is desperately needed is more government borrowing and spending.
Mr. Krugman is a Nobel-winning trade-policy academic economist who, over the past couple of decades, has gone increasingly to the liberal dark side, as evidenced in his columns in The New York Times. What seems to have driven him completely over the edge is a combination of Bush Derangement Syndrome and an evangelical desire to prove that Reaganomics was a failure. He criticizes Barack Obama for not going far enough. He hates Republicans with a passion and is Keynesian to the core. Thus he can only interpret the failure of government stimulus as evidence of “cowardice” or “lack of political will.”
Like most liberal moralists, Mr. Krugman demonizes his opponents as not merely wicked and/or stupid/and or venal, but also “furious” because he is so right and they are so wrong. On election night 2008, he and his even more uncompromisingly liberal wife, Robin Wells, who is also a Princeton economist, had a party at which effigies of their enemies were burned. Salem, anyone?
Mr. Krugman constantly concocts conspiracies of the rich to grind the faces of the poor. He calls anti-Keynesians “The Pain Caucus.” He is currently lashed to the mast of not one but two sinking ships, the USS Keynes and the USS Draconian Climate Policy.
Modern American conservatism, he has written, “is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paycheques for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defences of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultra-wealthy families.”
Maybe he should check out what causes the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pew, Hewlett and Packard foundations are actually promoting. It certainly isn’t climate change denial.
Mr. Krugman’s Nobel Prize for work in international trade and economic geography was widely praised. Early in his career he was a fan of markets and free trade, and attacked “popular” economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Lester Thurow and Robert Reich, who catered to economic misconceptions beneath a cloak of liberal good intentions. However, that cloak in the end proved too attractive not to try on.
Mr. Krugman’s affection for markets has declined as he has become obsessed with inequality, market instability and catastrophic climate change. He doesn’t think consumers can be trusted to make the “right” choices any more, and has taken to the remarkably annoying habit of condemning free marketers as people who believe that people are always rational and markets perfect. Then again, straw men are easy to torch.
Mr. Krugman’s take on the ongoing crisis is remarkable not merely for wishing to keep doing more of what has failed, but his blindness to the role of government policy in its creation. Fannie and Freddie? Mere bystanders who only decided to help blow up the system “late in the game.” Greece? It’s all the euro’s fault.
Anthropogenic global warming has become an article of religious faith for Mr. Krugman, which has required him to go through astonishing convolutions in the face of growing evidence of corruption. Climategate? A “fake scandal.” Remember those emails about a “trick” to “hide the decline”? According to Mr. Krugman this was an “anomalous decline.” Well, no. The decline was in actual temperature readings which failed to concur with the proxy data from tree rings. These had to be “hidden” because tree ring data were essential to the credibility of the poster child “hockey stick” graph that presented the twentieth century as a thousand year anomaly. The decline had to be hidden because it exposed fake science.
The former free trader now thinks that carbon tariffs might not be such a bad idea, and since cap and trade represents an alleged “market solution” to the catastrophe-to-come, the conservatives who (successfully) opposed it are, in Mr. Krugman’s view, hypocrites.
Mr. Krugman leans towards the global salvationist posturing of Lord Stern, whose climate review is a monument to perverted cost-benefit analysis. “Stern’s moral argument for loving unborn generations as we love ourselves may be too strong,” Mr. Krugman has written, “but there’s a compelling case to be made that public policy should take a much longer view than private markets.”
The problem is that it doesn’t.
The evil of Mr. Krugman’s opponents is all embracing. He has written that “[T]hose who insist that Ben Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be more or less the same people who insist that the scientific consensus on climate reflects a vast leftist conspiracy.” You see the connection? Leaving aside the blood libel, if you oppose further corruption of the monetary system you are clearly also a climate denier. And why doesn’t America have universal public health care? Simple, it’s due to “The legacy of slavery, America’s original sin.”
Once Mr. Krugman’s intellectual inspiration was Adam Smith. Now it’s Naomi Klein.
Nobel economist Paul Krugman is due to address the Economic Club of Toronto Wednesday on whether the United States has “mortgaged its future.” If Mr. Krugman is true to form, he will tell his audience that it has not mortgaged its future enough. What is desperately needed is more government borrowing and spending.
Mr. Krugman is a Nobel-winning trade-policy academic economist who, over the past couple of decades, has gone increasingly to the liberal dark side, as evidenced in his columns in The New York Times. What seems to have driven him completely over the edge is a combination of Bush Derangement Syndrome and an evangelical desire to prove that Reaganomics was a failure. He criticizes Barack Obama for not going far enough. He hates Republicans with a passion and is Keynesian to the core. Thus he can only interpret the failure of government stimulus as evidence of “cowardice” or “lack of political will.”
Like most liberal moralists, Mr. Krugman demonizes his opponents as not merely wicked and/or stupid/and or venal, but also “furious” because he is so right and they are so wrong. On election night 2008, he and his even more uncompromisingly liberal wife, Robin Wells, who is also a Princeton economist, had a party at which effigies of their enemies were burned. Salem, anyone?
Mr. Krugman constantly concocts conspiracies of the rich to grind the faces of the poor. He calls anti-Keynesians “The Pain Caucus.” He is currently lashed to the mast of not one but two sinking ships, the USS Keynes and the USS Draconian Climate Policy.
Modern American conservatism, he has written, “is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paycheques for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defences of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultra-wealthy families.”
Maybe he should check out what causes the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pew, Hewlett and Packard foundations are actually promoting. It certainly isn’t climate change denial.
Mr. Krugman’s Nobel Prize for work in international trade and economic geography was widely praised. Early in his career he was a fan of markets and free trade, and attacked “popular” economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Lester Thurow and Robert Reich, who catered to economic misconceptions beneath a cloak of liberal good intentions. However, that cloak in the end proved too attractive not to try on.
Mr. Krugman’s affection for markets has declined as he has become obsessed with inequality, market instability and catastrophic climate change. He doesn’t think consumers can be trusted to make the “right” choices any more, and has taken to the remarkably annoying habit of condemning free marketers as people who believe that people are always rational and markets perfect. Then again, straw men are easy to torch.
Mr. Krugman’s take on the ongoing crisis is remarkable not merely for wishing to keep doing more of what has failed, but his blindness to the role of government policy in its creation. Fannie and Freddie? Mere bystanders who only decided to help blow up the system “late in the game.” Greece? It’s all the euro’s fault.
Anthropogenic global warming has become an article of religious faith for Mr. Krugman, which has required him to go through astonishing convolutions in the face of growing evidence of corruption. Climategate? A “fake scandal.” Remember those emails about a “trick” to “hide the decline”? According to Mr. Krugman this was an “anomalous decline.” Well, no. The decline was in actual temperature readings which failed to concur with the proxy data from tree rings. These had to be “hidden” because tree ring data were essential to the credibility of the poster child “hockey stick” graph that presented the twentieth century as a thousand year anomaly. The decline had to be hidden because it exposed fake science.
The former free trader now thinks that carbon tariffs might not be such a bad idea, and since cap and trade represents an alleged “market solution” to the catastrophe-to-come, the conservatives who (successfully) opposed it are, in Mr. Krugman’s view, hypocrites.
Mr. Krugman leans towards the global salvationist posturing of Lord Stern, whose climate review is a monument to perverted cost-benefit analysis. “Stern’s moral argument for loving unborn generations as we love ourselves may be too strong,” Mr. Krugman has written, “but there’s a compelling case to be made that public policy should take a much longer view than private markets.”
The problem is that it doesn’t.
The evil of Mr. Krugman’s opponents is all embracing. He has written that “[T]hose who insist that Ben Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be more or less the same people who insist that the scientific consensus on climate reflects a vast leftist conspiracy.” You see the connection? Leaving aside the blood libel, if you oppose further corruption of the monetary system you are clearly also a climate denier. And why doesn’t America have universal public health care? Simple, it’s due to “The legacy of slavery, America’s original sin.”
Once Mr. Krugman’s intellectual inspiration was Adam Smith. Now it’s Naomi Klein.
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