Alvin Greene - The Considered Choice of SC Democrats for the Senate

Members of the House and Senate are generally not held in high regard by Americans in recent years and they are held in still lower regard now than ever.  Republicans all over the country are looking for candidates who will be more serious about ruling the country constitutionally.  What are Democrats doing?  We have an interesting datum in the Democrat primary in South Carolina in the race for the Democrat nomination for the Senate as candidate to face the Republican incumbent Jim DeMint.  Now, Jim DeMint is someone the Democrats find pretty annoying, so one would think they would be eager to replace him in the Senate.

The Democrat primary decision was between Vic Rawl, a white American who was a former state representative and a circuit judge and Alvin Greene, a black American with no job, living with his parents, no campaign organization and no campaign website.  Mr. Greene does have a felony arrest for showing a pornographic picture to a young college woman.  It also appears that Mr. Greene may have less than average intelligence.  Of course, nothing says a man with no job and with less than average intelligence can run for the Senate.  It is not, in fact, clear that he would be entirely out of place in the Senate.

424,893 Republicans voted in the South Carolina primary, while only 197,380 Democrats voted in the primary.  Of the Republican voters, 97.1% voted for a Senate candidate, but among the Democrats only 86.2% did.  Of the 170,221 Democrats who voted for the Senate race candidate, Greene won 59% of the vote or about 100,430 votes.  In the 2008 Democrat primary between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, 530,000 votes were cast and 55% of these, or about 291,500 votes, went to Obama.  In that vote, 55% of the Democrat voters were black, which again is about 291,500 voters.  The 100,430 votes Greene needed was only about a third of this number.

No Senator from South Carolina has ever been black.  Alvin Greene very likely could count on the majority of black votes because he was black and might become the first black Senator ever from South Carolina.   In addition, this novel chance to vote for a black man for the Senate, may have drawn more black Democrats to the polls than usually would appear for a non-presidential year vote.  It is also said that being listed first on the ballot is commonly worth about 5% of the vote, which is where Greene was listed.  So, if Greene received all the votes of black Democrats and they were the same 55% of the Democrat voters they were in the 2008 primary and he got a 5% boost for being listed first, then Greene would have 60% of the votes.  Perhaps a few black voters did not vote for him, because he only got 59% of the vote.

Despite this plausible explanation of Greene's victory over Rawl, there was much speculation, entirely without evidence, that Republicans had somehow manipulated Greene's win.  Yet, the Republican primary to choose a gubernatorial candidate was the big draw and the Republican turnout was twice the Democrat turnout.  There was no evidence for significant Republican cross-over to vote in the uninteresting Democrat primary.  There was speculation that the Republicans paid the $10,400 registration fee to be put on the ballot for Greene, but no one can offer a good reason why they would do that.  Greene says he paid the fee with money he saved while in the Army.

It appears clear that the Democrats were simply reluctant to allow that their voters would pick such an unqualified man for the Senate.  But they did and the Rawl attempt to have a re-do on the primary has been rejected.  The effort to get Mr. Greene to resign his candidacy has failed.  Alvin Greene will be the Democrat standard bearer against Jim DeMint in the 2010 election.  The Democrat elitists will just have to be embarrassed by this equal opportunity candidate, who appears to have won the primary election fair and square.  This does not say much positive about the seriousness and responsibility of South Carolina Democrats, but that is no surprise.  How do you think we got a House and a Senate which are so little respected?

You can keep your health care plan -- It's a lie

Documents from a project of the Labor Dept., Health and Human Services Dept., and the IRS to examine the effects of ObamaCare on existing employer-based health care plans claim that 51% of employers will have to give up their current health care plans by 2013.  That constant refrain that "If you like your present plan, I guarantee you can keep it." was the usual Obama tactic of saying anything to get more control over our lives and to diminish the private sector.  There is no pain in lying when lying is the path to socialism.

Current employer-based coverage will not be grandfathered and will be subject to ObamaCare if compared to 23 March 2010:

• Any benefit related to treatment or diagnosis is lost or reduced.
• Any increase in cost-sharing, such as co-insurance occurs.
• Deductibles or out-of-pocket limits rise by more than medical inflation plus 15%.
• An increase in co-payments greater than medical inflation plus 15% or medical inflation plus $5 occurs.
• The employer's share of the premium decreases more than 5%.
• Any new policy, certificate, or contract of insurance issued ends grandfather coverage.

Small employers with 3 to 99 employees are expected to be no longer able to offer their present plans in 66% of the companies.  Only 45% of large employers are likely to lose their present plans.  The study says that 69% of all companies will lose their plans in their worst-case scenario.  I am puzzled about why they were addressing companies with fewer than 50 employees, unless this means that while they will not be penalized with a tax, at least initially, they will also not be allowed to continue their present plans unless they meet the new ObamaCare mandate.

There is one exception to the above conditions.  The last bulleted item does not apply to collective bargaining contract provisions relating to health care insurance.  Such plans can change insurance companies.  Labor unions are once again an Obama favorite and unions members have special, unequal rights compared to the rest of us.  The General Welfare be damned, if you are among the anointed by the socialists now ruling us all.  It is all about Special Interest or Factions now and their taking advantage of most of the People.

Tom Minchin - Hope is Dead - Long Live Optimism

Tom Minchin in yesterday's TIA Daily discussed how we ought to go forward in the face of the coup scored by America's fascist socialists on ObamaCare.  Here are a couple of quotes from his post:

You need a way to maintain your morale—to counter the effects of dispiriting circumstances. In short you need a solid basis to expect a better future. 

What can provide it when the news headlines fill you with revulsion? 

The virtue of optimism.

The virtue of what? Optimism. But this is a very particular type of optimism. It is not wishful thinking, and it is not mere hopefulness or even assuredness based on favorable circumstances—an assuredness that vanishes with the first real adversity. It is confidence in one's own potency, and it has to be maintained and fought for like any virtue.....

Holding optimism as a virtue begins with understanding what it is and is not. Optimism in its most basic sense is "confidence in the future." And that kind of confidence is only possible to a rational man. As Ayn Rand wrote in "Epitaph for a Culture," the Apollo space program was the supreme demonstration, for it "has shown us the precondition of self-confidence, optimism, and progress, like skywriting left in the wake of those rockets: rationality." That bears repeating: the pre-condition of optimism is not faith, good fortune or wishful thinking. It is rationality. 

Of course, I can choose to be rational, but will other Americans make the same choice?  I can be certain that I will not waver in my own rationality and be confident that if it is up to me, America will not commit to this fascist socialist doom that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their many followers are trying to force upon us.  But, can I count on my fellow Americans to rally to the cause of the rights of the individual and to name their importance to us all as the central American value?  The Tea Party Movement, the many commentators who have realized that this is the central issue, and the 38 states either passing laws to prevent the federal government from forcing their citizens to purchase a government-dictated health insurance product or launching constitutional court challenges, have given me a sound basis for thinking enough Americans are up to the task, or coming up to the task, to turn back the bloodthirsty horde of cutthroats who are presumptuous enough to claim they control our lives, our fortunes, our bodies, and our health or death.  This will not happen, not in America!

Changes of State Representatives and Electoral Votes in 2012

We are close enough to the 2010 Census time that pretty good predictions should be possible for the states which will gain seats in the House of Representatives and states which will lose seats there.  Since the number of Electoral College votes each state has is the sum of the number of Representatives and Senators they have, this also has possible important implications for the presidential race in 2012.

On 23 December 2009, the Census Bureau made its last U.S. population estimate by state as of 1 July 2009 prior to the census.  If these figures were translated into seats in the House of Representatives, the blog site 270toWin says the apportionment results would be:

Texas +3

Arizona +1

Florida +1, now RED

Georgia +1

Nevada +1, now RED

South Carolina +1

Utah +1

Washington +1

Illinois -1

Iowa -1

Louisiana -1

Massachusetts -1

Michigan -1

New Jersey -1

New York -1

Pennsylvania -1

Ohio -2

The states that voted for Obama in 2008 are in blue and those that voted for McCain are in red.  Meanwhile, the voters in Florida and Nevada have become very unhappy with Obama, so Florida and Nevada are now red.  So, of the now Red States, there is a net gain of projected 2012 Representatives and Electoral Votes of +8.  The loss among the Blue States is -8, for a net swing of 16 Electoral College votes and 16 Representatives to the Republicans.  Of course, this is just a zeroth order estimate with respect to the effect upon the House of Representative's party affiliations.  Redistricting and the quality of candidates will have a major impact on the number of Republican Representatives a state winds up with.  The impact on the re-election chances of Obama is more straightforward.

There is something else to observe here.  People go where they can find jobs.  The Red States are clearly creating many more jobs than are the Blue States.  There is a long-term downside to being the more highly socialist party.  The Party of Mass Destruction, the Socialist Democrat Party, is very effective in destroying the business climate and in destroying jobs.  When jobs are killed, as in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, people have to move away to states with jobs.

This is just a snapshot of the jobs issue, but if one weights the state unemployment rate of November 2009 by the absolute number of Representatives projected as gains or losses, the average now Red State unemployment rate for those changing number of Representatives is 10.24%.  That for the now Blue States changing representation is 10.92%.  By November of 2009, the huge sums of money sent to Wall Street for the bailout had surely kept employment from falling as much in NY and NJ as it otherwise would have.  A huge amount of bailout money was transferred to the auto industry in MI as well.  Since the stimulus bill was mostly a long-time wish list of Democrat special interest funding, more of it went to Blue States than to Red States.  Nonetheless, the Red States still had a lower weighted November 2009 unemployment rate!

September Employment Fell Again and by More than in August

Non-farm employment fell by 263,000 in September.  This was a greater tumble than that in August by 62,000 people.  The acknowledged unemployment rate is up to 9.8%, which is somewhat higher than the 8.0% maximum Obama promised us if he and the Democrat Congress were allowed to pass the Stimulus Bill.  Perhaps he forgot to calculate the fact that most of the money would not even be spent until 2010 and that spending large amounts of money on non-productive government programs is hardly the way to encourage businesses to hire.  Some businessmen understand that larger government means more government mischief interfering with the private sector.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the U.S. economy lost 824,000 more jobs in the first quarter of this year than they had earlier reported!  This recession has therefore cost Americans 8 million jobs and 5.8% more of the workforce is unemployed now than was at the start of the recession.  The worst previous loss of jobs since WWII was in 1948 when unemployment rose 5.0%.

CFO Magazine reported that a September survey they did with Duke University found that half of the businesses polled did not expect to return to their pre-recession employment levels until 2012, if then.  43% of company CFOs plan to further reduce their payrolls in the next 12 months.

Nancy Pelosi's talk of adding a value added tax (VAT) is hardly likely to encourage employers to hire again.  Of course the new taxes and regulations to accompany the Democrat health care insurance system will strongly discourage businesses from hiring.  So too will energy use restrictions and taxes in the form of cap and trade.  Ditto the end of the Bush tax cuts.  Ditto the ever-present anti-business rhetoric in the Democrat Congress and White House.  Ditto the on-going desire to make it impossible for employees to avoid being roped into a union.

The health insurance industry sure learned the consequences of trying to cooperate with this government.  They are bleeding profusely from a knife plunged deep in their backs.  Those companies who think they have come out well in the early round one period under the Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade tax will soon feel the same knife in their backs.  Their subsidies will be revoked soon enough.

No, a wise businessman will be very wary about hiring in this political climate.  Every added employee is a further political liability.  Every employee will cost more than ever in health care benefits, unless they are dropped from health care benefits entirely.  If the employees are unionized, they are also a direct threat to company ownership and creditors.  Of course they were always that in that they made the company less productive and nimble, but now they are also a threat to investors and creditors should a company go bankrupt.  It is hardly surprising that rational businessmen are united in not wanting to hire and even in shedding still more employees.  Any employee who can reasonably be replaced with improved equipment will eagerly be replaced.  This mostly means lower paid workers.  These are the workers that the Democrats pretend to champion, but who their anti-business commitments are actually most hurting.

The Real, Really High Unemployment Rate

The media has been happy to report to us that the unemployment rate in July 2009 was slightly improved to 9.4%, compared to a 9.5% rate in June. They also reported that the number of jobs lost was fewer than in most prior months. But this is an odd combination. For the real unemployment rate to drop, some number of net new jobs must be created, yet another 247,000 net jobs were lost in July. Some time ago, I remember that for the unemployment rate not to go up, 154,000 new net jobs had to be created in a month. So, the net number of new jobs appears to be about 401,000 jobs fewer than used to be needed to keep percent unemployed static.

Is this anything to crow about? Apparently it is not as bad as earlier in the year, but is it not awful nonetheless? Well apparently it is good if you are Obama and his Democrat Congress. It is improvement. Or maybe not. What if the recession long ago weeded out the worst employees and companies are simply reluctant to let their better employees go? And, what if the real unemployment rate is being very badly understated?

The unemployment rate does not count the underemployed or those who are involuntarily working fewer hours than they would like. It also does not count those "who have not searched for work in the last 4 weeks." In reality, no one really knows how many people want a job, but have not searched for it for 4 weeks. The government assumes that people who had been telling them they were searching for work while they were collecting unemployment benefits, but stopped doing so when their unemployment benefits ran out, are not searching for work. So they are not counted as unemployed. But, would you go down to an unemployment office looking for work for more than 26 weeks when they were not going to give you any money for doing so and when they had done nothing in 26 weeks to get you employed? Of course not. Thus, when things really get bad, the unemployment rate falls even when the number of really unemployed workers increases!

The number of people who were looking for work a while back, but have not done so recently, though they are still unemployed is estimated at 2.3 million. Adding them to the number in the official unemployment count at 9.4% unemployed, raises the real unemployment rate to 10.9%. So, Obama and the Democrat Congress now have a real unemployment rate of 10.9% and this rate is not going down!

Or, we could add in the 8.8 million workers who are on involuntary part time work. The total unemployed or underemployed would then be 16.6%. Nothing for the Democrats to crow about and hardly good evidence that the Stimulus Package is accomplishing much of anything.

In the 4th Quarter of 2008, the GDP shrank by 5.4%, in the 1st Quarter of 2009 by 6.4%, and in the 2nd Quarter of 2009 by 1.0%. Construction and manufacturing sectors have been hit very hard. They totaled 15% of jobs, but they account for 40% of the unemployment. 9.8% of adult men are unemployed, while 7.5% of adult women are unemployed. Asians are 8.3% unemployed, while whites are 8.6% unemployed, Hispanics are 12.3%, and blacks are 14.5% unemployed. All of these numbers are for the usual, under-reported statistics giving the 9.4% total unemployment rate.

Great job Obama. You really have been great at putting it to those terrible employers and wealthy investors. You scared the tar out of them even during the presidential campaign and with the known desire of the already Democrat Congress for increasing taxes and piling on regulations on businesses and investors, you made the recession worse long before you took office. Since then, your constant bad-mouthing and threats combined with those of the leadership of the House and Senate, has done a great job of keeping employers uncertain and scared. In such times, they are pulling themselves back into their shells. This is hardly surprising.

Guess what? It is all about being able to believe you will be allowed to make a reasonable profit, stupid! If you tell businessmen that they are going to taxed much more, but do not even tell them how they will be taxed, they cannot calculate whether a business operation can make money. If you tell them they will be more heavily regulated, but they do not know how they will be regulated, they cannot tell whether they can make money in those operations which may be restricted. If you tell them you will dictate management compensation, they do not know why they should bother to undertake new operations or even continue working hard on older operations. The value of the dollar is very uncertain, thanks to you. Increasing taxes and regulations are likely to make it harder for U.S. operations to make money relative to overseas operations. Besides, where will the energy come from for manufacturing and transportation and heating buildings in the U.S. with Waxman-Markey type carbon cap and trade? What on Earth are employee health insurance costs going to be when you have finished mandating many benefit additions?

It is unreasonable to expect employers and investors to hire workers under these circumstances. You must allow employers some reasonable level of certainty, but you, like FDR, love uncertainty, experimentation, and socialist redistribution and equalization. It is you who have given us 10.9% unemployment. Take credit for it and live up to it.

The Green Jobs Commissar

Van Jones is the Green Jobs Commissar in the Obama administration. He is an advocate of creating jobs for the poor by having them perform insulation improvements on homes and buildings. That is fine, at least before we find the government suggesting subsidies to have people make such insulation improvements. This guy has his roots deep in socialism, however, and has even described himself as a communist and a friend of anarchists. He worked for years to be a revolutionary and is a founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which was connected with the STORM collective (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) with Marxist influences. Kathy Shaidle has written about this here.

That Obama sure can pick them, can't he? Over and over again we find the strongest evidence that Obama's worldview is completely socialist. He is a thoroughly committed enemy of the free market system and capitalism, though he is frequently a corporate socialist.

47 Million Uninsured Americans Revisited

Obama recently claimed that he was going to see to it that all 47 million uninsured Americans received health insurance. Anyone who is not completely out of their mind in thinking they are qualified to run for the office of President, should be informed about who these 47 million uninsured people are in the United States. In November 2007, I posted on this issue here.

Dick Morris was giving Obama a hard time about this issue on Fox News earlier today. He pointed out that Obama has both claimed that he will not provide health insurance coverage to illegal aliens and that he will insure all 47 million uninsured in America. The fact that many millions of the uninsured numbered in the 47 million are illegal aliens, was either something he was ignorant of or he was so carried away with taking advantage of the exaggerated implications that 47 million desperate Americans are suffering constant trauma due to having no health insurance, that he never thought of what his commitment really means.

The 47 million uninsured has become a huge selling point for an even more massive socialist takeover of the whole health insurance and health provision industries and the left has fallen in love with this number. But, as I previously pointed out, all of the millions of the Americans who are without health insurance, have access to health care already. Many of them are so wealthy, that they choose to be self-insured. Most of the 47 million who actually are citizens or legal residents in the U. S. can afford health insurance, but they choose to spend their money on other things instead. Some of those who are young and healthy, simply see no reason to spend money on insurance to pay for the health needs of others who are not so healthy. I have at least one nephew whose family has no insurance by choice for this reason.

We often forget how many Americans are millionaires or multi-millionaires. In March of 2006, there were 8.9 million Americans with a net worth exceeding $1 million excluding the value of their primary residence. Surely these 8.9 million Americans cannot be expected to buy health insurance and forcing them to do so, as Obama claims he will, cannot be justified. If $1 million dollars will not buy them enough health care, then few commercial health plans will either. But in any case, they should be free to make this choice as they wish. I suspect that many of these people were able to make so much money in part because they enjoyed good health and yet they had a median age of 58, at which age health insurance tends to become quite expensive. Choosing to be self-insured makes a lot of sense for many of these people. What is more, they were in a position to provide self-insurance support to their entire families. Consequently, many of their children in their household or in separate households may not have a need for health insurance either. With an average of two children with wives and two children in each child's household and given a millionaire household with husband and wife, each millionaire household might easily provide health care self-insurance for 10 people. This could mean we could easily and reasonably have as many as 90 million Americans without health insurance who had no need for health insurance. Excluding the illegal aliens, it is clear we have many fewer than half that number.

Of course, many of the Americans who can afford health insurance and choose not to have it are not backed by a millionaire for their health needs. But, noting how many could be, points out that we surely have a need to examine more closely why many Americans do not have health insurance. We do know that most of those who are uninsured could afford to be insured if they wished to be. We should hesitate to impose the will of others, elitists all, upon them. We should hesitate to use the force of government to make them redefine their values and their assessments of their own lives.