Are Americans Looney Tunes?

How can people be so unthinking and irrational as to hold this collection of beliefs at one time?  Some of these beliefs are rational, but others are highly irrational and contradictory.

From the most recent Rasmussen poll findings:

64% of Likely U.S. Voters now view the federal government unfavorably, with 34% who have a Very Unfavorable opinion of it.

Voters overwhelmingly want to scrap or change the new health care law, with 43% who want to repeal it entirely and start over and 35% who would prefer Congress go through the law piece by piece to improve it. Just 18% want to leave the law as is.

Just 25% of voters believe the United States is heading in the right direction. 

Voters are evenly divided at 42% apiece when asked whether they agree more politically with the president or with the average member of the Tea Party.

Democrats hold a six-point lead over Republicans – 43% to 37% - on the latest Generic Congressional Ballot. 

Most consumers and investors believe the country is still in a recession. 

Only 33% of Americans believe the U.S. economy will be stronger in a year's time, while 41% think it will grow weaker by then. 

Fewer than half (47%) of Americans believe it’s still possible for anyone in this country looking for work to find a job.  

OK, so 64% have no trust in government, yet 35% + 18% = 53% want it to run the entire medical industry and health insurance industry either with the ObamaCare law as it is or after Congress has re-worked this entirely wrongheaded law.  What on earth makes them think Congress can do a rework and make something rational and beneficial out of a government-controlled medical care system?

Only 25% believe the US is headed in the right direction, yet 42% side with Obama and the continued growth of government and the emasculation of the private sector.  They are in opposition to the 42% who want a change in direction, namely those who agree more with the Tea Party movement.

Most consumers and investors believe the US is still in recession, which it clearly is in terms that matter, namely the real per capita private sector GDP.  Only 33% believe it will be stronger in a year, yet 43% believe in the anti-business and anti-jobs notions of the Democrat Socialist Party over the more business and jobs friendly Republicans who can only muster 37% support in the Generic Congressional Ballot.  Note also the disconnect with the 42% who believe more like the Tea Party than with Obama.  Based on that, the Republicans should be equal with the Democrats in the Generic Congressional Ballot.  Based on the economy and jobs prospects and opposition to ObamaCare, the Republicans should be favored.

But no, Americans while right not to trust government, still favor the party of bigger government which has so completely bollixed things up.  Go figure.  They really are Looney Tunes.

Obama Did Not Know NSA Spied on Leaders of Other Nations

The pattern continues: Obama was ignorant of the NSA surveillance of telecommunications of the leaders of many nations, including our allies, until recently.  See the 28 October 2013 issue of the Wall Street Journal.  According to Kathleen Sebelius, he also did not know about the massive problems in the roll-out of ObamaCare until those problems were public knowledge.

So, he was ignorant of the management of his signature achievement.  He was ignorant of a keystone of his actual constitutional job to act as Commander-in-Chief to secure our national defense and security.  He is completely detached from any effort to control federal spending and the national debt.  He has no knowledge of what happened in Benghazi and no knowledge of his Justice Department sending thousands of weapons into Mexico.  He believes a trimmed budget means he should increase government spending in such a manner as to cause as many people pain as possible by erecting barriers around open-air public facilities.

Meanwhile, the NSA reports it has so many surveillance programs that it could not brief Obama on them all.  That may be so.  It should not be so.  What is more, that does not mean that the NSA should be hiding a program to spy on Angela Merkel and other leaders from Obama.  But then again, it is likely that Obama told them to keep him ignorant so he would have plausible deniability!

What we have is a con man pretending to be President who does not meet the constitutional requirement to be President, does not like the Constitution he is sworn to protect, chooses to be ignorant about key national defense and security issues, and nationalizes huge segments of the private sector and is disconnected from the management thereafter of all the resulting impacts upon our lives, including factors essential to our literal life and death.

To realize that some people actually believe Obama cares about people is to wonder about their sanity.  There never was a President who took on so many responsibilities and then so greatly and consistently neglected them.  It takes too much effort to really care.  It is more fun to be a con man.

Still no Jobs Recovery

In September 2012, the employment to working age population percentage was a low 58.8%.

In September 2013, the employment to working age population percentage is a low 58.8%.

These are the non-seasonally adjusted Household Survey numbers from the BLS.

This is perfect stagnation, continuing the general stagnation in employment going back to 2010 in this never-ending Great Socialist Recession.  This will continue to be the story at least until some time in 2017, assuming that a Democrat is not elected into the presidency to replace Obama.  Even then, we have to hope his replacement will actually begin a program to reign in the growth of government and end many of the anti-business, anti-energy, and anti-medical care policies now in place.

ObamaCare Self-Immolates, but Heavily Taxes Middle Income People

The signature achievement of Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party, the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is undergoing an immediate self-destruction brought on by the unbelievable hubris of party hacks in believing that they could better direct the massive medical and health insurance efforts than the private sector can.  The problems run much deeper than health insurance exchanges whose website portals do not work.  That is an unsurprising problem given the nature of those in charge of setting them up, but it is only the start of the tsunami of problems being unleashed upon the American People by these preternaturally bloated Progressive Elitist's egos.

Obama told us on Tuesday, 22 October, that thousands of people are signing up for ObamaCare and saving money.  Actually, it turns out that most of those who have signed up are really signing up for expanded Medicaid benefits.  It also turns out that many who have struggled with the website problems long enough to sign up are those with pre-existing conditions who will often save money under ObamaCare.  In addition, a few states are already so heavily regulated by the state with consequent health insurance costs being forced skyhigh, that even the ObamaCare costs are lower.  Yet, the costs for all but five states are generally up and often are up by factors of two or more.  A Heritage Foundation study by Drew Gonshorowski produced these results:

Only in Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island can you find cost savings under ObamaCare.  The rest of the nation is screwed.

For 27 year olds, their rates are going up by 100% or more in the following 10 states:

Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas, and Vermont.  Nobody actually knows the rates for Virginia because it appears that the ObamaCare website is giving out a number that must be wrong.

Again for 27 year olds, insurance premium rates are going up by more than 50%, but less than 100%, in the following 15 states:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Of course, ObamaCare is design to milk the healthy young to pay for the sick and older population.  Nonetheless, for adults aged 50 the rates are also generally going up.  In the following 13 states and DC, they are going up more than 50%:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

An adult aged 50 will see rates go up by more than 25%, but less than 50%, in the following 15 states:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

So, a 27 year old will see his premium rates going up by more than 50% in 25 states.  A 50 year old will see rates going up by more than 25% in 28 states and the District of Columbia.  Somehow, I suspect the claims of the Democrat Socialist Party and Obama that ObamaCare was just going to be Hunky-Dorry are ringing, or will soon ring, very hollow.  No, they will even be regarded as the lies that I have always said they were.

When ObamaCare was being pushed through Congress, the claim was that there were 47 million uninsured in the USA and desperately in need of affordable health insurance.  They said it was everyone's responsibility to see that the uninsured had their medical needs assured by ObamaCare.  Now mind you, they did not point out as I did (discussing this here, here, here, and here) that about 10 million Americans do not need insurance since they or a family member are so wealthy that they can readily be self-insured.  Maybe 12 million of that number were then illegal aliens.  Most of the remainder were healthy young people who even at the lower rates available before ObamaCare did not see a reason to insure themselves.  Clearly, ObamaCare does not address any of the needs of the wealthy, the illegal alien, and the healthy young person.  It is only addressing the needs of those who are already sick and do not have health insurance and it is doing so at incredible cost to everyone else.

Let us examine how ObamaCare is doing if thousands had actually signed up as Obama says in the first 22 days of the program.  Since it has been sold recently as covering 50 million people without insurance and since it is now estimated that about 16 million people who had insurance are losing it due to cancellations saying their policies do not meet ObamaCare mandates, there would be 66 million people who have to sign up for ObamaCare by 31 March 2014.  In that 182 day period, 362,637 people a day must sign up, despite Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, and Valentine's Day!  More refined recent claims were that ObamaCare hoped to sign up 30 million of the uninsured.  So, that makes the total number of sign-ups a mere 46 million by 31 March 2014, or a mere 252,747 a day.  In the 22 days to Obama's speech last week, the total number of sign-ups for insurance was not anywhere near even the one-day necessary average of 252,747.  In fact, so few have signed up to date that one can just as well say that 46 million sign-ups have to occur in the remaining 156 days from today, at an average rate of 294,872 a day.

Now stop and think about this.  Is it at all likely that 294,872 people a day will sign-up for ObamaCare before 31 March 2014 given the website problems, the high costs, and the high deductibles?  There is no way this will happen.  No Way!  In fact, it was never a likely development from the beginning.

I have been sure that ObamaCare was designed to fail so that a single-payer system would soon replace it.  But the facts discussed above now make it clear that the Democrat Socialist Party that is always pushing for new taxes was also trying to create a system almost no one would want a part of so they could charge tens of millions of people the penalty tax for not obtaining the prohibitively expensive ObamaCare with its low quality health care service.  This was always primarily a new and massive tax!  By clever, insidious design.

One can even understand that Obama paid no attention to the problems of launching ObamaCare because its immediate failure was the equivalent of a huge additional tax increase.  It was designed to fail either immediately or in a few years.  But the faster it failed, the bigger the tax increase!  Obama was either setting up a future single-payer completely nationalized medical care system or he was getting out of the corner he had painted himself into with his pledge not to increase taxes on the Middle Class.  It was a win-win situation for him.

ObamaCare was a pretense for an incredible and massive tax increase, which was mostly aimed at the middle class even as the Democrat Socialist Party was pledging no tax increase for the middle class and pretending to care about all the millions suffering without health insurance.  ObamaCare was directly a massive power grab over 16 to 18% of the economy and it was also a heavy tax increase to pay for the program.  People understood that some people would be hit by the penalty tax, but few understood that it was designed to be a massive tax increase to soak tens of millions of people with middle incomes.

Obama is counting on his abilities as a great con man to keep Americans from understanding this.  Eventually, the pain will be so great for so many Americans that I think enough will come to understand the perfidy that fell upon them.  They will finally see Obama and the Democrat Socialists as the malevolent liars that they are.  They will soon no longer control the Senate and in 2016 they will lose the Presidential election.  At last!

I am now reading that the ObamaCare mandated insurance has to be purchased by 31 March 2014, not by 15 March as I had earlier seen reported.  I have recalculated the necessary daily average rates of sign-up for everyone to meet the ObamaCare requirement for its approved insurance plans on 30 October.  Of course, the actual daily sign-ups since I originally posted this remain vastly lower than the necessary daily average.

Is Obama the CEO of the Federal Government and ObamaCare?

Leaving aside the fact that Obama is not eligible to be President because he is not natural born, he is signing legislative bills as though he is the President.  One of the most notorious bills he signed was the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he has adamantly backed.  Indeed, it is his signature achievement and he is happy to hear it called ObamaCare.  ObamaCare is failing in a colossal manner and it is clear that it is doing so so rapidly because Obama is not a functioning Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  To be sure, it had to fail and it was even designed to fail, but it was not supposed to fail while Obama was still pretending to be President.

The President of the United States of America is the CEO and the Chief Operations Officer of the federal government.  He is charged with protecting, defending, and preserving the Constitution while in office.  Obama does not take this task seriously and does not even believe the Constitution should be protected, defended, and preserved.  He said so explicitly when he was a state senator in the Illinois state legislature in a Chicago radio station interview.  In this, he is in agreement with Justice Ginsburg and many other Progressive Elitist Democrat Socialists.

Under the Constitution, the President is charged with executing and enforcing the laws of the United States.  Obama has failed to do that in the case of his signature achievement, ObamaCare, in many ways.  He has unilaterally changed its timetable on many of the mandates of the law and he has unlawfully granted many exemptions to factions among his supporters, such as labor unions or campaign contributors.

A key development necessary for the ObamaCare initiation was that the state exchanges for health care insurance plans that met the mandated requirements of the ObamaCare law, had to be made available to individuals so they could examine the coverage offered and determine what it would cost them.  To do this, they had to access the costs for their age and location and for their income level so subsidies could be calculated.  In addition, the website has to access data from the IRS, HHS, Social Security Administration, the Dept. of Homeland Security, and other sources to verify the identity of the person seeking the required health insurance costs and the information that individual supplied.  This required a complex program and access website.  The development of this website was entrusted to the Department of Health and Human Services.  The bureaucrats in that department then hired a number of contractors to perform much of the work, but kept a high level of control with ever-changing requirements on how the system would work.  Overlooking this Obama signature project that was taking a large measure of control over one-sixth of the economy and our vital medical care, was the CEO of the federal government.

With all of our lives most literally on the line, the CEO of the federal government was paying no attention at all to his duties.  He was present, but he was busy making speeches about how great ObamaCare was rather than directing his signature achievements development and implementation.  He played the role of company spokesman rather than that of CEO.  According to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Obama had no idea that the website was going to fail.  None.  He was totally asleep at the wheel.  The biggest thing the government has ever done aside from fighting two world wars, the Civil War, and the War of 1812, was not important enough to capture even the least little bit of his attention.

To be sure, the real fault lies with the American People who twice voted for this community organizer with no executive experience to be the CEO and COO of the largest and most important organization in the world.  Then they allowed him to undertake the most massive transformation of the private sector and the American economy to give us the ObamaCare debacle.  Among the consequences of which are:

• Companies are dropping health insurance plans for their employees.
• Insurers are canceling millions of insurance plans that they say do not meet the requirements of ObamaCare, so the cancelled persons will have to buy new plans under ObamaCare.
• Insurers are cancelling the insurance plans of many people with pre-existing conditions.
• People are losing their jobs because providing them with health insurance under the ObamaCare requirements is becoming too expensive.  This will be especially true of young workers, who used to lower the overall cost of insurance to a company far more than they will in the future.  This made it worthwhile to train them and gave them time to learn their jobs.
• Jobs hours are being reduced to less than 30 hours a week.
• High quality medical care institutions are having to fire staff because many ObamaCare health insurance plans will discriminate against them due to their higher costs.  In some cases, as in New Hampshire, people close to good hospital systems will have to travel an hour to get to an ObamaCare covered hospital.
• The many health insurance plans discriminating against high quality medical institutions and their network of doctors will provide lower quality medical care.
• Future innovations in medical care will be much reduced by policy as tougher, more experimental operations and medical equipment investments are denied.
• Administrative costs for health insurance companies are going up due to false and inadequate information being given to them from the malfunctioning exchanges.
• Many young people will not be willing to fight the interminable battle to try to sign up for ObamaCare policies on the malfunctioning exchanges, thereby driving up insurance costs as only the sick and older people have enough incentive to fight that battle.
• Many young and healthy people will not sign up because the magnitude of the subsidy they are providing the sick and older people will shock them.  Paying the penalty tax will be much more affordable.
• Many people absolutely do not want to pay for many of the ten so-called essential health benefits, especially when what they may want is tagged with very high deductibles.
• Many will not sign up because the available plans will not allow them to keep the doctor they like or use the hospital they like.
• Many people will not sign up because ObamaCare violates their religious beliefs.
• Others will not sign up because they are unwilling to allow the government to get away with claiming its owns their bodies and minds, making them slaves.  They will not let the tyrants win.
• Some will not sign up because they know that the government that managed this train-wreck cannot be counted upon to keep their financial and medical data secure.  Not only would that take considerable network security, but huge numbers of people will have access to that data.  Having your bank account continuously emptied is far more crippling than paying the ObamaCare uncaring penalty tax.
• And who wants to be the subject of a Death Panel decision after going to all the trouble to get on ObamaCare?  It is probably safer to fly to Thailand or to Argentina for one's serious medical care.

Federal Judge Rules Suit Against ObamaCare May Proceed

One of the many ways the Obama Regime is violating its Signature Law is by claiming that the IRS can impose penalty taxes on businesses and individuals in the 34 states that did not set up the State Healthcare Insurance Exchanges that the ill-designated Affordable Care Act tried to encourage them to do.  The federal government did not have the power to order the states to set these exchanges up and many Democrats who voted for the law made it clear they would not vote for it if their state was required to set up such an exchange.

The intrepid Competitive Enterprise Institute is assisting in a case, Halbig v. Sebelius, which is challenging the legality of the IRS and Obama Regime attempt to impose mandates on businesses and individuals in those states that refused to go along with this highly unpopular law.  A federal judge ruled on Tuesday, 22 October, that this lawsuit may proceed and he will rule on it by 15 February 2014.

The law itself makes it very clear that in the federal exchanges set up in the non-participating states that businesses cannot be taxed for not providing healthcare insurance such as is mandated by the government in the state-run exchange states.  Individuals cannot be forced to buy health insurance in the same way either.  Subsidies also are not authorized in the law for lower income people under the non-state run health insurance exchanges.  Excluding the exchanges in the 34 states that did not set up the ObamaCare state exchanges is certain to kill ObamaCare in short order.  With the people of 34 states only seeing higher taxes because of ObamaCare and getting no benefits at all, it is not believable that the rebellion against this tyrannical law will not amplify greatly.

Of course, the federal courts may simply rewrite the law as the Supreme Court did in NFIB v. Sibelius when Chief Justice John Roberts so feared opposing Obama that he claimed a broad power to tax for purposes not enumerated in the Constitution was the basis for penalty taxes in the ACA.  He did this despite the many, many Democrat Socialist claims when they created the law and voted for it that it was not a tax.  So, the weak-kneed federal courts may fail to protect our individual rights once again.  But then again, maybe this time the federal court will stand on principle and the letter of the law.  Perhaps the fact that Obama has in so many ways violated the letter of the law is taking a legal toll on the patience of the courts.  Perhaps the fiasco of it implementation and rising anger among the People will give the courts some courage.  We shall see by 15 February 2014.

Thank you Competitive Enterprise Institute and Sam Kazman, its general counsel, and their allies!

Germans are Taxed if Members of an Institutional Religion

While I am often a severe critic of the American government and its many violations of individual rights, it is also objective to understand that many governments are even worse.  For instance, if one is a member of a congregation in Germany, that church collects taxes from you as an appendage to the state income tax.  This is not a voluntary tax, except insofar as one may choose to be a congregation member or not.  The tax is 8% or 9% of income depending upon the German state one is in.  It is not surprising that the population of congregation members in Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany is dropping by 100,000 people a year.

It would be difficult to be able to afford being in a church congregation on top of the already heavy state and federal taxes, the high cost of home ownership, the high cost of German goods and services, and the high cost of energy in Germany.  Consumer Prices are 15.56% higher in Germany than in the United States.  The Average Monthly Disposable Salary After Taxes is 13.86% lower in Germany than in the US.  It does not help at all that the German government has many laws and regulations that keep each of these costs high, including a tax on those who exercise their infringed freedom of conscience by being a member of a church congregation.

I suppose you could look upon the church member tax as a penalty tax for bad behavior, such as that the Democrat Socialists in the USA applies to those who do not buy the health insurance with the 10 essential benefits that most of us to not need.  Of course the religions really are immoral and irrational, while buying a different health insurance plan than that mandated is generally both moral and rational.  So one can look upon the German congregation tax as a state imposed sin tax.  Nonetheless, it is a violation of the right to freedom of conscience.  After all, while it is not wise to actually sin, it is often a right to do so.  Of course I am using my own definition of sin, not that of a church.

An Interesting Discussion of Wealth Inequality and Redistribution

There is an interesting post on the blog Marotta on Money on wealth inequality in the USA by David John Marotta and Megan Russell.  They had earlier critiqued a video called Wealth Inequality in America which was based on a 2005 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely.

A Comment on the Constitution and its Role

I just left this comment on the Constitution and its legitimate role in a discussion in another blog:

Obama said he did not like the Constitution in a Chicago radio interview when he was a state Senator in Springfield, IL.  The reason: It did not allow the redistribution of income that he favored.  So of course, he and the other Democrat Socialists such as Justice Ginsburg, simply ignore the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that the legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, broadly defined as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Preamble to the Constitution sets the terms of the contract the People have mandated that the government will observe, namely that the government will insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.  It then enumerates a very few powers of government designed to make its sphere of influence small and that of the individual in the private sector much, much larger.

This is consistent with a government just big enough to defend us, but not big enough to use a great deal of force, as is the essential nature of government, to control our lives and deprive us of our liberties.  Government was small so the use of force and the fight over the power that represents would not divide the People and cause the destruction of the domestic tranquility.  The General Welfare then was understood to mean that government was to function so that everyone's welfare was promoted, not just that of a majority, or that of the poor, or that of the middle class.  Everyone's interest, which was mostly in their liberties, was to be promoted.  That understanding of the General Welfare has been horribly corrupted.

King Coal Will Continue to Rule the World

The renewable energy, non-fossil fuel phantom is not about to replace Coal as the King of World Electric Power Generation.  The Western European attempt to replace coal with wind energy and solar power has only proven what was perfectly obvious:  They are unreliable and very expensive.  They are threatening Germany and other nations with severe winter power inadequacies and these are continuing to mount.  Industry is fleeing Germany for less expensive and more reliable electricity power.

The problem is not just that wind and solar power generation plants themselves are unreliable and expensive.  Because these power sources are unreliable, they have to be backed up by natural gas power plants, which can be tuned to higher or lower power outputs relatively rapidly, unlike coal-fired power plants.  The late start and the resistance to the development of shale oil and gas fields by using the well-proven frakking technique has left Europe with only high cost natural gas, much of which is imported from Russia.  The use of coal provides much less expensive and very reliable electric power, but also produces more of the falsely accused CO2 villain.

The European Union has regulations that were designed to reduce CO2 emissions which discouraged coal use altogether and limited natural gas power plants to standby duty, only to be turned on when the wind did not blow or blew too hard.  But, natural gas power plants are too expensive to keep running at less than about 57% of their capacity.  The result is that 60% of European natural gas electric power plants will be closed by 2016.  Power outages will become a frequent occurrence.  It will be miserable for residences and businesses will go out of business or move to other parts of the world.  Many of the big European businesses will continue, at an accelerated pace, to move more manufacturing operations to the US, where power is still more reliable and less expensive in many states despite Obama's best efforts to drive prices sky high.

Idiot European Union regulations or not, Europe will have to build more coal-fired power plants at some point.  According to the World Bank, in 2011 world-wide electric generation plant capacity was just over 22 trillion KWH or 22 billion MWH.  The presently known proposed building plans for coal-fired electric power plants are summarized in the schematic map below.  The 1.4 billion MWH of plants proposed will be a about a 6.4% increase in electric power generation capacity.  The biggest two contributors by far to this increase are China and India.  But, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam are a distant 3, 4, and 5 by rank.  In Europe, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany are ranked 1, 2, and 3 with their proposed coal power plant increases.  Ukraine and Poland rightly have no qualms about this, but Germany is being driven to it out of necessity.

Given the coal-fired power plant plans of China, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, South Africa, and the US, the contribution of Germany would have no significant impact on global warming, even if the failed hypothesis of CO2 emission catastrophe were true.  Obama's madmen and madwomen at the EPA are trying to nix the US building of such power plants and may succeed for awhile.  Eventually, we will learn what Germany is in the process of learning.

China is talking about trying to reduce its coal-fired power plant contribution to its increasing power needs.  However, the projected 2030 electric power plant generation capacity in 2030 is expected to compare with that of 2006 as shown below:

So in 2006, China had a 2.77 trillion KWH capacity and by 2030 it is expected to have an 8.55 trillion KWH capacity.  This is a 3.1 times increase.  Try as China may, the only way that can happen is if the use of coal powered plants greatly increases.  The 2006 coal-fired power plant capacity was 2.19 trillion KWH and it will expand in 2030 to 6.41 trillion KWH.  This is a 2.9 times increase!  The 2030 coal-fired power plant capacity of China will be the equivalent of nearly 30% of the present total world electric power generating capacity.

It is a very good thing that the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming has failed.  The world is not going to be able to avoid the continued and even the increased use of coal.  If it tried, that would be a catastrophe.  The global warming alarmists time is drawing to a close.  King Coal will remain well ensconced on his throne.

Federal ObamaCare Health Insurance Exchange Website Boondoggles

The Obama administration, even more incompetent than most governments, examined the proposal of only one website developer for the ObamaCare Health Insurance Exchange.  There are very widespread reports of how difficult it is get on to get cost and benefit information from this website, how inaccurate the subsidy information is, and how difficult it is to use if you do get on it.  The Obama regime is not at all transparent in providing numbers on how many Americans have signed up for insurance on the exchanges or what the subsidies will cost the taxpayers.

Now there are reports that the Canadian company whose US subsidiary was given the contract to develop the website was criticized by the Canadian government as incompetent and unreliable.  This company had the American ObamaCare Health Insurance website developed in India using Java script, which was a cheap, but totally inadequate way to set up the website for the necessary volume of traffic.  Despite the cheap approach, the company went way over budget.  Various reports claim that between $400 and $600 million has been spent on the website which is far from capable of doing the job required.  John McAfee claims that 15 good programmers could easily have provided an adequate site for $5 million.

In addition to the fact that many people may never be able to sign up for the mandated insurance and will be hit with outrageous penalty taxes as a result, those who try to set up the required accounts before they can learn anything at all about the costs and benefits of the few mandated insurance plans allowed by our draconian, authoritarian government, risk losing everything in their bank accounts.  There are no security precautions to keep social security numbers and birth dates along with full names and addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses safe from hackers.  Imitation websites can easily be set up and induce people to provide all of this information which are actually easier to find and get on.  No one will be surprised that a fake website only takes the usual information demanded by the real websites to set up and account and then fails to give them insurance information.  That behavior would be a good copy of the real website behavior.  With that required account information, the fake website operators can quickly drain the American citizen's bank account.  What a field day for crooks!

See what John McAfee told Fox News.

For all of these risks, one gets rationed and lower quality medical care, which suppresses future medical developments and discourages good, conscientious doctors and other medical care providers.  Many of the best doctors and best hospitals are systematically excluded from the few plans operating under ObamaCare because they are deemed too expensive.  Of course there is no expense in being killed or inadequately treated by less capable or even incompetent doctors and hospitals!  Since my own father was killed by an incompetent, uncaring doctor, I recognize these costs.

It is not enough for the the Obama regime to force us to give up the ownership of our bodies and minds, the health insurance and doctors and hospitals we wish to use, and control over the benefits and costs we are willing to take in health insurance of our own free will.  No, the Obama and Democrat Socialist Rulers must also put Americans to great expense either with health insurance plans that are not suitable for them, with tax penalties, or with the danger of losing everything in their bank accounts.

The incompetence and the hubris of the tyrant is once again affirmed.  The so-called Progressive Elitists are no better than the monarchs of old, the robber barons, the fascists, the communists, and many a petty dictator or warlord.

Why the Democrat Senate Will Not End the Slimdown of the Government

Why is the slight slimdown of the government, wrongly called a shutdown, continuing?

First the Republican House authorized all spending except that small part of the funding for ObamaCare which is in the so-called discretionary budget.

Then the Republican House authorized all spending, but required a one-year delay of the ObamaCare fiasco.

Then the Republican House authorized all spending including that for ObamaCare but with the proviso that the House and Senate and their staffs had be subject to ObamaCare just as everyone else was.

So, as Ann Coulter has pointed out, the only reason that the government slimdown, incorrectly called the government shutdown, continues is because the Democrat Senate recognizes ObamaCare to be so awful that they refuse to obey the law they passed over everyone else' objections.  Obama gave them an exemption, which is surely illegal anyway.  We are to be subjected to rationing, high expense requirements, and its capricious will and they are not.  After all, the Rulers of the People must have their special privileges.  They deserve them because they are the Progressive Elitists caring for we the mere sheep.

You can see why they hate the Constitution so much.  That document is the People's mandate to the government and makes it clear that government is to serve the People.  The People do not serve the Government or its politicians and bureaucrats.  But, this mandate of government service is inherently unsustainable with a big government model.  That model insists upon rulers with prerogatives and peons who do as they are told.

A Piecemeal Approach to Appropriations is Exactly the Way for Congress to Proceed

We are constantly hearing from most of the media and from Obama and his allies generally that the proper way to appropriate funding for government is to pass an omnibus authorization to continue the massive spending of the government and every current program.  They demand a "clean" continuing resolution that includes the very dirty ObamaCare program with full funding.

They choose to ignore many things in this assertion.  Among them:

• The debt due to this unsustainable spending has surpassed the GDP and will be harder and harder to roll-over.  The debt will saddle the People with much higher interest rates in the future.  Any attempt to increase taxes to pay the increased debt payments and the increases in Medicare, Social Security (retirement and disability), Medicaid, and ObamaCare spending, will slow the growth of the economy enough to result in a decrease in tax revenues.  In other words, only spending less is a possible sustainable solution.  This solution is to be avoided at all costs according to Democrats.

•  It is the job of Congress, especially the House of Representatives, to carefully review spending and only authorize that spending which is constitutional and necessary.  This constitutional responsibility is forfeited in the continuing resolution process.  Only in a piecemeal consideration of government program funding will irresponsible, unnecessary, and unconstitutional programs be ended as they ought to be.  Programs should be examined closely by Congress.  This takes time and effort, which it is all too clear Congress is not up to.  Neither is Obama up to it.  This is a great reason to demand huge reductions in government spending and in the number of programs all by itself.  Giving Congress so much money and so many programs is like giving a five-year-old a house, a gun, and a car of his own and filling the house to the ceiling with hundred dollar bills.

• The infamously named Affordable Care Act is very unpopular with the People.  It is a major source of increased government spending.  This spending will add greatly to the national debt.  Many will push for higher taxes to fund it in the future, despite the fact that higher taxes will result in less tax revenue over time, while lowering our standard of living.  Of course a past Congress passed ObamaCare without reading it and without regard to its many violations of individual rights and of the limited powers given the government by the Constitution.  This does not mean that the present or future Congresses are not obliged to stop the funding for this program if they assess it to be unworthy of funding, unconstitutional, or against the will of the People.  Indeed, if any is the case, then it is Congress' responsibility to stop the program.

So much for the nonsense that only a Continuing Resolution to fund all government programs at present levels is responsible.  Nothing could be more untrue.

What is Missing in the ObamaCare Car? The Chained Driver

So Obama is a used car salesman trying to sell a clunker that somehow escaped the Great Cash for Clunkers Buyout of his first term in office.  Well, I have nothing against used car salesmen in the private sector.  What is missing in this cartoon is the very critical fact that Obama is forcing us to buy this clunker.  And it is not just inoperable, but the buyer is chained to it.

Obama or any would-be tyrant like him controls the chain and they can ration our health care in any way they wish.  Obama is abrogating to himself the power to throw us under the ObamaCare car and kick out the blocks holding it up at his will.  Can you imagine the magnification of his power then?

You vota fer me or I kicka ofer these blocks!

I see you are alive and have diabetes.  Well, you pay 70% taxes or I cut off your treatment, since you have no social value unless you are paying your fair share of taxes. 

Hey, Grandma, you are too old to have social value, so we are going to stand by while you die because you cannot afford the mandated insurance that provides 10 essential health benefits you do not need and still afford treatment of your common elderly health problems.

If Obama Gets All of the Funding He Wants, He Will Listen

I heard the tail end of Obama's speech today.  As usual, I was nauseated by the constant stream of lies, misrepresentations, and the utter disdain for the intelligence of the American citizen.

He posed as a reasonable man by saying that he was open to negotiations with the Republican House as long as he got everything he wanted up front.  Yes, then he would sit down with them and listen to their complaints.  Well, if the Republicans prove stupid enough to give him all the funding he wants, they will find that he will spend a token few minutes listening to their complaints about ObamaCare and some of his other wild and unfunded spending and he will do nothing to fix the huge problems the Republicans have concerns about.  The Republicans will have lost all leverage and will become powerless.

A legitimate government is one of very limited power, as is ours when it abides by the enumerated powers of the Constitution.  Government has not done so in 100 years under the authoritarian influence of the self-proclaimed Progressives.  Our government was designed to distribute power between the two houses of the Congress, the President, and the Federal Courts.  It was purposely designed so that it would be difficult to spend money and enact laws unless there was overwhelming support for those laws and expenditures.  The Progressives have worked hard and consistently to decrease the distribution of power and centralize it in the hands of the President as much as possible.  This is because when they hold the presidency, they can shove through large chunks of their socialist agenda and anchor them in place.

These anchored programs are very hard to repeal as we are finding with the very unpopular and floundering ObamaCare.  The funding for almost all socialist transfer programs is even termed mandatory.  Congress no longer even has effective control over the 80% of government expenditures termed mandatory.  We have a government which finds it much too easy to spend money and to pass mandates.  Obama objects mightily to the Republican House attempt to thwart his will, though the House was explicitly given the lead in funding and taxing legislation by the Constitution.  Good government is only possible if the agenda to grow government and to displace the private sector is thwarted frequently and with principled determination.

Seth Mandel at Commentary made some very good observations on Obama's speech and answers in the Q & A today.

The Anti-Science IPCC Global Warming Report 5

Fundamentally, the IPCC has never had any solid evidence of measurable man-made global warming caused by man's emissions of carbon dioxide.  The newest report about to be issued apparently does not change this according to those who have read the drafts.  Yet, the Summary Report issued to the press and politicians claims that catastrophic man-made global warming is now known to be more certain than ever.  This claim is made on the basis of General Circulation Model (GCMs) computer models interpreted with an embarrassing flight of fancy.

In the light of that claim, let us examine the predictions of such GCMs used in the prior reports, when we were informed that the science was already settled and well-known.  The draft report that was sent out to actual scientists for review had the following graph in it.  The various shaded areas show the range of certainty of the average global temperature according to the body of computer models.

The FAR was the first report of 1990, the SAR was the second report of 1995, the TAR was the third report of 2001, and the AR4 is the fourth report of 2007.  Over this period the U.S. government alone spent about $150 billion funding climate change related phenomena.  Each IPCC report claimed a higher level of confidence in catastrophic man-made global warming.  So we should expect to be able to look at the range of expected temperatures from each report for 2015 and see that the range of each successive report falls within the range of the previous report, but is narrower.  This is both because the claim is that the science is better known and because the prediction time is becoming shorter.

Because the colored ranges overlap, it is easiest to quickly see how the certainty of the predictions of the settled science actually changed from report to report by looking at the brackets on the right side of the graph which are color-coded.  These represent the range of the prediction for 2015 for each report.

So what actually has happened is that the settled science did claim a smaller temperature range in the second report than in the first report, but its prediction range did not lie entirely within the range claimed in the first report.  No, it admitted that the temperature increase might be smaller.  In the third report the 2015 temperature range was much wider than in the second report.  The 2015 temperature might be much higher than that predicted in the second report, or a bit lower.  This represented a large increase in the scientific uncertainty being claimed.  The fourth report claimed that knowledge had improved and the range shrank compared to that of the third report, but apparently the knowledge was not as good as that of the second report whose range was narrower.  While the range of the fourth report prediction does lie entirely within that of the third report prediction and that of the first report, it excludes the lower part of the range of the second report on the settled science.

Unfortunately for the IPCC, the fourth report prediction of the temperature did not allow for such low temperatures as have been measured in the meantime.  The black and red dots of recent years are well below the predicted range of the fourth report and even below the range by a bit from any of the reports.  The only conclusion a rational person can make is that the settled science incorporated into the many computer models was wrong.  This presents a major problem for the fifth report which is about to be issued in January.

So, the predictions of the computer models will be presented in a way to obscure these failures.  Instead of averaging the results of the 162 or so model predictions and then using an uncertainty range that is claimed to be narrowed by the average result, some individual computer model predictions will be given on the graph.  Since a few of the models do predict a smaller increase in temperature by 2015, a few lines representing those outlier predictions will pass through the actual measured temperature data points or just below them.

This will not change the fact that almost all of the computer model results still predict higher temperatures than are actually observed.  It will not change the fact that the science clearly has not been well-understood and should never have been claimed to be settled.  The implication of the fifth report will once again be one of a widening range of predictions and therefore an increasing level of uncertainty when compared to the fourth report of 2007.  Apparently, the upcoming report will claim the same upper range on the temperature prediction, but include lower temperatures that were ruled out by the settled science of the fourth report.

The actual measurements have to be kept in the range of the predictions, so some sleigh of hand is needed to make them appear to be so.  This is not how science is done, but it is how politics is done.

This is all very much a circus of clowns, not scientists.  This is becoming recognized by more and more scientists and even by more and more non-scientists.  One no longer even needs to know much science to see that this has been a very expensive farce.

Far worse than the $150 billion largely wasted on this science is the huge damage done politically with such misguided policies as green energy subsidies, ethanol mandates and earlier subsidies, electricity source mandates, the vendetta against coal and the Keystone XL pipeline, and a host of anti-fossil fuel laws and regulations which have cost people their jobs and forced them to spend much more on energy which is also less dependable.

As a scientist, I am also very angry that so many so-called scientists have done so much to undermine the credibility of science and scientists.  Just as bad money drives out good money, so does bad science drive out good science, especially when the politicians and bureaucrats dive into the mess and use it to hurt the People to the advantage of special interest groups and to increase their own control over our lives.