Steve Bannon Address and Q&A at Oxford Union (video)

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Economy, Employment, global world order, Steve Bannon

Rather interesting session at Oxford Union a few weeks back with Steve Bannon. The man is a patriot, hero and brave as heck to walk into the belly of the beast, i.e., a venue full of brainwashed snowflakes incapable of individual thought.

Democrats Should Not Get a Single Vote from Seniors

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Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Economy, GDP, Health Costs, healthcare rationing, Medicare for All (M4A), National Single Payer Healthcare System, seniors

When Barack Obama was in the White House, he never addressed the concerns of seniors and the disabled.  His staple legislation, Obamacare, fundamentally transformed healthcare for many into a nightmare.

What can be worse than Obamacare?

Medicare for All (M4A) as is being pushed by red diaper baby, Bernie Sanders and his disciple, Progressive Congressional candidate from New York City, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this 2018 mid-term election season.

The polls will open early this coming Tuesday and it is the civic duty of every American to vote. As for seniors and the disabled, voting for Democrats would be the equivalent of shooting onself in the foot.

While we all have much to lose should we not vote or not vote Red, voters on Medicare have much to lose if Progressives are victorious.

Bob Bennett posted a must-read over at Independent Sentinel on the elephant in the room, i.e., Medicare for All (M4A).

Source: Brookings Institution-Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Independent Sentinel by Bob Bennett

Would seniors vote for a party that has PROMISED to destroy Medicare? Maybe—if they believe the lies of Democrats and Socialists. SO, IT’S IMPORTANT TO SHARE THIS.

Democrats have gotten behind Socialist Bernie Sanders’s deranged plan, the Medicare for All Act (M4A), which is nothing more than single-payer health care—a long-time leftist dream for America; but a nightmare for those in other nations who have it.

Professional liars and Socialists Sen. Sanders—no, that’s not the fried chicken guy—and candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez claim that Medicare for All would actually cost LESS than Medicare for seniors or disabled alone costs now. The latter actually told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, on August 8^ththat a study “show[ed] that Medicare-for-all is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now.” Sanders said in a video that the plan “would save the American people $2 trillion over a 10-year period.”

Of course, any fool knows that’s mathematically impossible. To support their ludicrous promises, these hucksters cite a study titled, “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System,” published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Alas, like everything the Socialists say in order to sell their lunatic agenda, this is a lie: the study doesn’t say that at all.

The true cost of M4A

The paper clearly says the cost of Medicare for All would dwarf what we’re paying now to finance health care insurance for seniors and disabled alone:

The Medicare for All Act (M4A), would, under conservative estimates, increase federal budget commitments by approximately $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation (2022–2031)…. This projected increase in federal healthcare commitments would equal approximately 10.7 percent of GDP in 2022, rising to nearly 12.7 percent of GDP in 2031 and further thereafter. Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan. [Emphasis added.]

But, the study adds, “It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than has been estimated from its legislative text. That text requires that healthcare providers —hospitals, physicians, and others—will be reimbursed for all patients at “current Medicare payment rates.”

[Read the Bill, page 13, line 17.]

That last part sounds good, right? But it’s not.

Sanders based this rule on a projection by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), that Medicare provider payments will be roughly 40 percent lower than those paid by private insurers during the first 10 years of M4A’s proposed implementation (by 2031.) [Figure 2, page 8]

But those cuts in provider payments would only happen if Congress allows adjustments [cuts] that are mandated under current law[…]

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On China, Tariffs, Trade Wars and Intellectual Property

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China, Economy, TARIFFS, Trade wars

FoxConn factory workers in China (screenshot)

Vassar Bushmills

A little background to President Trump’s proposed use of tariffs to punish China, a background that most businessmen his age will understand, while many of more recent generations won’t.

China cheats and steals.

And has for as long as I can remember. And since Taiwan was equally as bad about intellectual property, especially in their bootlegging of copyrighted books, I’ve often pondered if it isn’t cultural.

During the Vietnam War we had a small military mission in Taiwan, which allowed for a lot of TDY travel to the island. Military who traveled there were given small handouts warning against buying bootleg books which printers there had copied, in really cheap print and binding, but still, for a NYT best seller going for $10 back in the states, a great buy at $1. A friend of mine bought coins there and told me there was a pretty good export business for buying some books in large lots then bringing back to the states via Air Force runs from Japanese airbases such as Tachikawa or Yokota AB, near Tokyo. There was a regular hashish run from Thailand at the time, so criminal teams were all over the place, but the next leg back to the States was much safer for big boxes of books. College textbooks were more preferred than hot novels.

Publishers were losing millions, but students didn’t care.

That was Taiwan, not mainland China, which was not yet into economic expansion into commercial Western markets. Mao was still in charge, the Cultural Revolution still at full throttle, and Deng Xiaoping, who would transform the Chinese economy, was still in some type of internal Party exile.

So by the time I left my corporate position in textiles in ’89, with some history with the PRC Chinese, and decided to take my knowledge of Chinese business practices on the road, as a private consultant, it was with the belief, based on some practical observations, that they were not, in the western sense, men of honor in business.

They believed then, and to a great extent still do, that “foreign devils” from the West were well beneath them, notwithstanding that every improvement to their material culture since the fall of the Manchus had come about by Western invention. Still, that every Westerner was beneath contempt and worthy of being fleeced was deeply engrained. And a few American presidents proved them right. (Interesting factoid: “Kowtow” is a Chinese word, and not a New York Times word to define an effete Obama mannerism.)

I won’t turn this into an ethnic screed, as I know far too many Chinese living here who are not of this frame of min. But still, a thousand years of acculturation of royal Chinese worldviews could not have been erased by a few short years of “democracy” in the period just before WWII, when China was largely run by warlords. Chairman Mao simply provided a Marxist validation and system of control for what centuries of despotic rule had bred into them, especially about how humanity was designed, by nature to be ranked, top to bottom[…]

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Where War Might Start

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asia, China, Economy, war

The Glittering Eye by Dave Schuler

I didn’t want to let this go by without comment. At National Interest Ted Galen Carpenter muses over whether China’s economic slowdown might encourage its leaders to foment a war:

‘China’s leaders likely feel increasingly uncomfortable. The implicit bargain that has been in place since the onset of market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s has been that if the public does not challenge the Communist Party’s dominant political position, the Party will deliver an ever-rising standard of living for the people. The bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was a graphic reminder of what happens if the Party’s position is challenged. However, until now, the economic portion of the bargain seemed secure, characterized by breathtaking, often double digit, rates of growth. It is uncertain what happens if the Party can no longer maintain its part of the implicit bargain, but it is likely that a dangerous degree of public discontent will surface….

Just for grim fun let’s list some of the places where a major war might break out. It could be deliberate…

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LINK:
http://theglitteringeye.com/where-war-might-start/

Employees of Small Businesses Salaries Reduced By Est. $1,000 Per Annum under Obamacare

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Economy, Higher Premiums, Job Loss, Obamacare, Reduced Wages, Small Businesses, UNEMPLOYMENT

 

The impact of the Affordable Care Act on small business earnings and employment continues to wreak havoc across America.

According to a report by the American Action Forum (AAF), the salaries of employees working for small businesses that employ 20 to 99 employees were reduced $22.6 billion annually due to Obamacare regulations and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In addition, due to rising premiums and regulations under the ACA more than 350,000 small business jobs have disappeared on a national scale, “with five states losing more than 20,000 jobs.”

Excerpts:

For businesses with 50 to 99 workers, we found that a one percent increase in total premiums has been associated with a 0.109 percent decrease in average weekly pay since the ACA. So a 19.8 percent increase in total premiums is associated with a 2.2 percent decrease in average weekly pay. This is consistent with past research from the Journal of Labor Economics, suggesting a double-digit increase in premiums reduced wages by 2.3 percent. Accordingly, our results suggest that the average weekly pay of $831 in 2013 was 2.2 percent lower than it would have been absent the ACA, costing workers $18.70 per week.^[11] Moreover, if employees work all year, our results suggest that ACA regulations are costing them on average $935 annually….

For businesses with 20 to 49 workers, we found that a one percent increase in total premiums has been associated with a 0.031 percent decrease in average weekly pay since the ACA. This suggests that the 19.8 percent increase in total premiums since the ACA is associated with a 0.6 percent decrease in average weekly pay. Moreover, we also found that in businesses with 20 to 49 employees before the ACA a one percent increase in total premiums was associated with a 0.077 percent increase in weekly pay. Thus, if the ACA had never become law, the 19.8 percent increase in total premiums since 2009 would have been associated with a 1.5 percent increase in weekly pay. So our results indicate that on net, the average weekly pay of $771 in 2013 was actually 2.1 percent lower than it would have been without the ACA, costing workers on average $16.55 per week. To put that in perspective, if employees work year round, they are losing about $827.50 on average due to ACA regulations….

Nationwide the employer mandate costs workers of small businesses with 50 to 99 employees at least $10.8 billion annually and workers of small businesses with 20 to 49 employees at least $22.6 billion annually.

You can view the full report here or below.

View this document on Scribd

LINK:
http://americanactionforum.org/research/ObamaCares-Impact-on-Small-Business-Wages-and-Employment

Has Hamas ended the prospects for a two state solution?

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Economy, Gaza, Hamas, israel, Tel Aviv, Two-State Solution

Terminal 3, Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel. Image: Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

Alan Dershowitz, Gatestone Institute

Hamas’s decision to fire rockets in the direction of Ben Gurion Airport may well have ended any real prospect of a two-state solution. Whether the regulators and airlines that have stopped flights to and from Israel are right or wrong, this stoppage cannot possibly be tolerated by a democratic country that relies so heavily on tourism and international travel. It is of course a war crime to target an international civilian airport, as Hamas has clearly done. Israel has every right to keep that airport open, employing all reasonable military means at its disposal. Since Hamas fires its rockets from densely populated civilian areas, there will be more Palestinian civilian deaths.

This of course is part of Hamas’ grand strategy: by targeting Israeli civilians and international air travel from its own civilian areas, Hamas…

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Aftermath of rocket attack that prompted Tel Aviv travel ban 1:

LINK:
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4467/hamas-israel-airport