On the State Children’s Health Insurance Program expansion that Bush is about to veto (from the WSJ):
…Simply on the basis of fiscal responsibility, opposing Schip is a no-brainer. On paper, the bill expands Schip by $35 billion over the next five years, to a total of $60 billion, well beyond the 20% expansion supported by the Bush Administration. To fill this pot of federal dollars, the Democrats will raise the cigarette excise tax by 61 cents.
Naturally, however, there’s a budget sleight-of-hand. Known as a “funding cliff,” the yearly Schip layout increases to $13.9 billion in 2011, then abruptly cuts spending by 65% below current funding levels. This helps “score” the bill as costing only $35 billion over the five-year budget window, but it also means that come 2012 Congress will either have to pass new spending or kick kids off the rolls. The chances of the latter happening are approximately zero…
…More broadly, Schip is designed as a ratchet that jacks up the government’s share of health-care spending, and every time it grows it steals customers from private insurance. All the more so because states have been raising eligibility levels above the 200% of the federal poverty line that Schip was intended to serve. The Democratic bill raises the effective national level to 300%, and it overrules a sensible Bush Administration directive that states enroll low-income families before subsidizing the middle class.
That’s because the real Democratic game here is to turn Schip into a new middle-class entitlement. Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton — who goes out of her way to emphasize Schip as a key mechanism in her new “universal” health-care reform — introduced Congressional legislation that would raise Schip eligibility to 400%, currently $82,600 for a family of four. That move would qualify no less than 71% of American children for public assistance…
Meanwhile, from AP:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 “baby bond” from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home… …”I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home,” she said…
Wow, so Hillary wants to put 71% of American children on public assistance (for health care), and wants to create another massive entitle program for all children (for no reason in particular). At 4MM births per year, that puts taxpayers on the hook for an extra $20,000,000,000 just the first year. What will that liability look like in the run rate?
Say the bonds yield 5%, reinvested tax free. And lets say the money isn’t drawn for 18 years. Start with 4,000,000 births in the first year and grow that 2% each year. After 18 years the first year’s entitlement has compounded to $45,840,366,356. The second year’s entitlement has compounded for 17 years, the third for 16, et cetera. The sum of all of those in the 18th year $652,248,657,410. After 18 years we will have grown a new liability to 1/3 the size of Social Security. Of course, Social Security taxes cover a portion of that program’s liabilities - Hillary’s $5K per child would be secured against other, yet unknown, tax receipts.
Hillary is following a consistent theme in the DNC playbook. Propose massive, unsustainable programs. Most will be shot down by the GOP, which is good politics since the Dems can say the GOP is racist, hates kids, or somesuch. Anything that passes is a ticking time bomb in our economy - rigged to blow years later in an explosion of new taxes.
Update 10/2/07:
NRO touches on a similar theme:
Future fiscal crises are built into the design of S-CHIP. It is funded through cigarette taxes, and will be underfunded to the extent that those taxes succeed in discouraging smoking. But that’s the least of the program’s flaws. Under the Democrats’ bill, states will be able to expand benefits and stick the federal government with two-thirds of the tab. The Medicaid program shows us how these incentives will work. Benefits will expand. When times are good, governors and state legislators will be able to offer voters $3 in services for every $1 in state taxes. When times are bad, the politicians will suddenly discover that they have to cut services by $3 for every $1 in savings.
NRO has an excerpt from Bjorn Lomborg’s latest book on climate change. The most interesting part is this quote Lomborg ascribes to Al Gore:
The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise. . . . When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.
Hmmm…”Mission,”"unifying,” “the thrill of being forced…to put aside…pettiness and conflict,” “human need for transcendence,” “moral and spiritual challenge” - sounds very 1930s Central European.
I’m not sure many people look forward to, “the thrill of being forced,” to do anything. Maybe he meant “the thrill of forcing others.” And what exactly does he mean by the “human need for transcendence”? Sounds like our aspiring Fearless Leader would like to transcend our basic rights - after all one man’s “pettiness” is another’s individualism. Finally, “moral and spiritual challenge(s)” are fine, but without better justification this divinity school dropout will run afowl the Establishment Clause.
From the Prague Daily Monitor:
“The increase in global temperatures has been in the last years, decades and centuries very small in historical comparisons and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities,” Czech President Vaclav Klaus said at the world politicians’ meeting on global warming today…
…Klaus said “the hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon undeniable past experience and upon its trends and tendencies. These forecasts are based on relatively short-time series of relevant variables and on forecasting models that have not been proved very reliable when attempting to explain past developments.”
No scientific consensus exists, “contrary to many self-assured and self-serving proclamations” about the causes of the ongoing climate changes, Klaus said….
…”As as a responsible politician, as an economist, as an author of a book on the economic of climate changes, with all available data and arguments in mind, I have to conclude that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too big and the application of a fundamentally-interpreted precautionary principle a wrong strategy,” Klaus stated….
We’ve written about Klaus before (here, here, and here).
From the Canadian Globe and Mail:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper used a United Nations conference aimed at saving the Kyoto Protocol as a backdrop yesterday to announce that Canada would join a rival climate change pact…
…The Asia-Pacific Partnership, created last year by Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States, has been criticized for lacking the mandatory targets contained in Kyoto. Together, the six countries account for nearly half the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions…
…United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had summoned world leaders to New York yesterday for a one-day “high-level” session, where he urged them to give their officials the green light to negotiate a Kyoto extension.
Mr. Harper did not mention the Kyoto Protocol in his address, instead calling for something different.
“There is an emerging consensus on the need for a new, effective and flexible climate change framework, one that commits all the world’s major emitters to real targets and concrete action against global greenhouse-gas emissions,” he said.
Its not surprising Canada is backing out. Few believed they had any intention of meeting their treaty obligations when they signed on in December 2002. The treaty they signed required them to cut CO2 emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. By the 2004 they were already 27% above 1990 levels. (US emissions were up 16% over that time.) As consolation the soon-to-be-former Liberal government claimed it had spent CA$3.7B on Kyoto compliance.
They Kyoto Accords have really served two purposes. The first is posturing, allowing sanctimonious politicians to feign concern for the environment. The second is the expansion of international bureaucratic power, particularly at the expense of democratic sovereignty. Or, as then French president Jaques Chirac put it, “the first component of an authentic global governance.”
Neither of these purposes really had anything to do with the environment. Governments that are truly concerned (like Australia, the US, the Czech Republic, and now Canada) have largely stayed away.
Related Post: UN - Kyoto Is ‘Illogical’
Most interesting after first 3mins
From IBD:
…On July 9, 1971, the (Washington) Post published a story headlined “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming.” It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man’s use of fossil fuels.
The Post reported that Rasool, writing in Science, argued that in “the next 50 years” fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun’s rays that the Earth’s average temperature could fall by six degrees.
Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, “could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
Aiding Rasool’s research, the Post reported, was a “computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen,” who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time…
And from the Washington Times:
NASA scientist James E. Hansen, who has publicly criticized the Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting “court jesters,” appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an impending ice age within 50 years…
This is the same Hansen who serves as NASA’s Chief Climate Alarmist. Hansen was most directly responsible for the GISS temperature data errors recently uncovered by Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre. Hansen seems to have built his career as a government scientist making all sorts of conflicting apocalyptic predictions that, of course, require massive government intervention.
A review of selected Global Cooling scare pieces:
The Cooling World
Newsweek, 4/28/75
There aer ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every country on earth…The evidence to support these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead
The New York Times, 5/21/75
Sooner or later a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable…The drop in mean temperatures since 1950 in the Northern Hemisphere has been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain’s growing season for crops by two weeks.
Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age
Science Digest, February 1973
Baffin Island, located in the Canadian Arctic, now is covered with snowbanks all year after having been snow free for 30 or 40 years prior to the temperature drop. Pack ice around Iceland has now become a serious hindrance to navigation. Warmth loving animals once found in abundance in the northern part of the American Midwest in the early 1900s are settling further south.
Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages
Science, 12/10/76
A model of future climate based on the observed orbital-climate relationships, but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicts that the long-term trend over the next seven thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.
Warning: earth’s climate is changing faster than even experts expect
Christian Science Monitor, 8/27/74
UN Watch addresses the UN Human Rights Council
From TV Guide France (via No-Pasaran):
The Hidden Face of the Liberators - (rerun) A documentary by Patrick Cabouat. According to ciminologist Robert J. Lilly, liberators who were meant to liberate Europe from Nazism raped or killed French, British, and German citizens in 1944 and 45. The recent opening of legal archives permitted us to see something that would otherwise remain a secret.
Our view: this documentary is a poignant testimony of the acts of atrocities of soldier welcomed as liberators.
To my knowledge no descendents of the 74,721 Jews deported by the democratically elected Vichy French government before the Americans arrived were available for comment.
From the European Science Foundation:
…Addressing the urgent need for fighting fraud, forgery and plagiarism in science world-wide, the very first World Conference on Research Integrity is set to facilitate an unprecedented global effort to foster responsible research in Lisbon, Portugal from 16 to 19 September 2007.
The controversies surrounding the recent assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change demonstrates how research integrity is a critical issue not only for the science community, but for politicians and the society as a whole as well. In August 2007 the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had to withdraw previous published historical climate data. The incident came after a British mathematician discovered that the sources used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have disregarded the positions of weather stations, plus intentionally using outdated data on China from 1991 and ignoring revised data on the country from 1997…
…In other words the World Conference on Research Integrity focuses on an open sore of science, taking into consideration the reality, legal and institutional aspects, as well as regional, social and psychological environments in which scientists work.It intends to be the beginning of the healing process.
This is the first time I’ve seen a serious-looking source suggest the recent NASA temperature record problems were “intentional.” Even McIntyre himself has refrained from making that claim. This despite the fact that the ESF itself is a vocal proponent of anthropomorphic climate change.
