If you want to succinctly summarize the economic illiteracy of liberals just watch Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan make his Democrat counterpart (who is apparently still running against Bush) and Meet The Press host Chris Matthews look foolish.

Here’s an excerpt that shows that Matthews in defining the “rich” has zero knowledge of business and our tax code.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Congressman Ryan — you have no problems defending tax cuts for people who make over a quarter a million a year?

RYAN: Small businesses — go to Wisconsin.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, no, individuals. It`s an individual tax cut.

RYAN: No, no. You have to understand, Chris, 75 percent of those people who pay that tax rate are small businesses who file as individuals, not corporations. That`s the problem with this economic argument, Chris, is when you think you`re just taxing rich people like Bill Gates, what you`re end up doing is you`re hitting successful small businesses. When we tax our employers more than our foreign competitors tax theirs, they get our jobs and we lose in global competition.

So, we ought to be keeping our eye in economic growth and job creation, what`s necessary to do, and that means low tax rates on businesses and small businesses in certainty. We have a whole new tax on certainty that`s hurting economic growth. We need to give taxpayers certainty that they`re not going to have a huge wave of tax increases in 2011 and then another in 2013.

MATTHEWS: OK.

Oh… Okay…. most business in America is small business, and the vast majority of small business FILE THEIR INCOME TAX AS INDIVIDUALS, NOT AS CORPORATIONS… gosh… there goes my argument… there goes my class warfare… I’m no longer demonizing Enron or BP but that mom & pop store down the street… Hmmm… Can we go back to the race card..? Can we go back to Shirley Sherrod or did that 15 minutes already end..?

It’s amazing. I’m never surprised by the complete ignorance liberal democrats display on economics.

They perpetually demonize business never realizing that:

* c-type corporations, businesses liberals say is okay to hate, make up just 2 million (or 7.5%) of the almost 27 million businesses in the United States.
* s-type corporations (3.3 million, or 12.3%), limited-liability companies (LLCs: 2.3m, 8.6%), and sole proprietorships/partnerships (19 million, 71.6%) conversely, mostly pay their taxes AS INDIVIDUALS.
* 75% of all businesses file as individuals (some non c-type corporations may file as c-types, which is why the figure drops from 92.5% above to 75%).
* 99% of all business in America is small business, categorized by the IRS as less than 500 employees.
* That 99% of 500 or less employees, according to the Small Business Association, nonetheless employ just over half of all private sector employees.
* They Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
* They have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
* They create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
* They hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
* They are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
* They made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
* They produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

But don’t tell any of that to Chris Matthews (and taken from a government website at that!). And despite the repetitive and tired verbal talking-point nonsense from Rep. Joe Crowley in the video, letting the Bush tax cuts expire will far from just affect the “top 1%” of income earners.

As was recently summarized in Investors Business Daily, on January 1 the following tax increases will occur. As you peruse these figures as yourself how much that will help an economy that’s already at 10% unemployement:

* The death tax returns — at a rate of 55 percent on estates of $1 million or more.
* The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50 percent — to 15 percent from 10 percent.
* The next lowest bracket — 25 percent — will rise to 28 percent, and the old 28 percent bracket will be 31 percent.
* At the higher end, the 33 percent bracket is pushed to 36 percent and the 35 percent bracket becomes 39.6 percent.
* The marriage penalty also makes a comeback, and the capital gains tax will jump 33 percent — to 20 percent from 15 percent.
* The tax on dividends will go all the way from 15 percent to 39.6 percent — a 164 percent increase.
* Both the capital gains and dividend taxes will go up further in 2013 as the health care reform adds a 3.8 percent Medicare levy for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and joint filers making more than $250,000.
* Other tax hikes include halving the child tax credit to $500 from $1,000 and fixing the standard deduction for couples at the same level as it is for single filers.
* Letting the Bush cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and $2.6 trillion through 2020.

It’s no wonder Democrats are seeing their flow of campaign money from businesses evaporate.

Here’s the whole video. Get a good laugh at the expense of the Economic Idiot party:

Here’s Duncan Currie:

Here’s one thing you won’t find in the 2,300-page financial-overhaul legislation that passed the Senate Thursday afternoon: any serious reform of housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the longtime “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs), both of which have been in federal conservatorship since September 2008. Last summer, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the cost of subsidizing the GSEs would amount to $389 billion through 2019. This figure accounted for “substantial losses on the entire outstanding stock of mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at that time.” In January, the CBO updated its forecast, projecting a total price tag of at least $373 billion through 2020. By comparison, it now expects the much-maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program to cost just $109 billion.

Those numbers help put the GSE bailout in perspective, yet they tell only part of the story. Fannie and Freddie currently own or guarantee roughly $5.5 trillion worth of mortgages — over half the residential market. If these liabilities were included in the federal budget, Americans would better appreciate the true fiscal impact of rescuing the GSEs.

But Fannie and Freddie are not counted in the budget, a maneuver “worthy of Enron’s playbook, except not quite so hidden,” as Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil has written. Their exclusion “makes a joke” out of the U.S. balance sheet, says former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins. The argument for bringing them on budget became even more compelling in December, when the Obama administration removed a cap on their Treasury Department credit line, essentially giving the GSEs a blank check. A few months later, after House Financial Services Committee chair Barney Frank (D., Mass.) suggested that GSE debt obligations were not backstopped by the federal government, Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly affirmed that “there should be no uncertainty about Treasury’s commitment to support Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they continue to play a vital role in the housing market.”

… In December 2008, mortgage-finance consultant Edward Pinto, who served as Fannie’s chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989, told Congress that “Fannie and Freddie went from being the watchdogs of credit standards and thoughtful innovators to the leaders in default-prone loans and poorly designed products. They introduced mortgages which encouraged and extended the housing bubble, trapped millions of people in loans that they knew were unsustainable, and destroyed the equity savings of tens of millions of Americans.”

In a new paper, George Mason University economist Russell Roberts points out that the GSEs bought roughly twice as many home-purchase loans made to below-median-income buyers in 2003 as they had in 1997. It was during this period — from the late 1990s through 2003 — that “Fannie and Freddie played an important role in pushing up the demand for housing at the low end of the market. That in turn made subprime loans increasingly attractive to other financial institutions as the prices of houses rose steadily.” From 2004 to 2006, Roberts adds, commercial and investment banks played a larger direct role in the subprime market than the GSEs did, though Fannie and Freddie were still very active in the mortgage markets in ways that contributed to the subprime problem. In 2006, they bought 390,000 loans with less than 5 percent down, compared with just under 269,000 two years earlier. In 2007, they purchased more than 608,000 such loans.

Hey, we can say no, but other countries will say yes. And, similarly, foolish governments and politicos, such as Florida’s Charlie Crist, can write legislation all they want denying American companies the ability to drill offshore, but that won’t do a damn thing for companies based in the UK, or China for that matter. Here’s Greg Pollowitz:

Is there a category for jobs that just float away?

Last week, Diamond Offshore announced that it was sending the Ocean Endeavor rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Egypt. This week it announced that it was pulling the Ocean Confidence out of the Gulf of Mexico and sending it to the Congo.

Bloomberg reports that the Congo project is expected to generate $234 million in total revenue — revenue and jobs that should have been created in the Untied States.

Besides the actual production of oil, workers on the rigs and people that supply the rigs will be adversely affected. According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association:

• Each drilling platform averages 90 to 140 employees at any one time (2 shifts per day), and 180 to 280 for 2 2-week shifts
• Each E&P [exploration and production] job supports 4 other positions
• Therefore, 800 to 1400 jobs per idle rig platform are at risk
• Wages for those jobs average $1,804/weekly; potential for lost wages is huge, over $5 to $10 million for 1 month—per platform.
• Wages lost could be over $165 to $330 million/month for all 33 platforms

There are also impacts to people who supply the rigs:

• Supply boats — 2 boats per rig with day rates of $15,000/day per boat — $30,000/day
• Impacts to other supplies and related support services (i.e., welders, divers, caterers, transportation, etc.)

This is the problem with the Administration’s overly restrictive moratorium. Rigs are portable and they will go where the work is. When a rig leaves the Gulf, not only the jobs on the rig are endangered, but also the jobs of those who supply the rig. As noted above, each job in oil and gas exploration and production supplies 4 other positions.

Here’s Avik Roy on American’s aversion to socialized medicine (Also, it can summarized in one word via an older post — Cancer):

Liberals find it odd, and perhaps slightly irrational, that Americans so heavily criticize the British National Health Service. This has been of particular relevance in light of Donald Berwick’s “love affair” with the agency.

Britain’s Conservative prime minister, after all, often talks “of how proud we in Britain are of the NHS.” Just as with Medicare in the U.S., British politicians who talk of dismantling the NHS get hammered in the polls. (Despite Her Majesty’s Government’s surprise announcement this week of incremental market-oriented reforms to the program, the Tories under David Cameron have repeatedly pledged to preserve its funding.)

But describing the NHS as “popular” with British voters is a bit like describing cocaine as “popular” with crack addicts. Once people become dependent on heavy state subsidies, it is natural for them to feel insecure at the thought of losing them. Tocqueville long ago articulated how this problem inevitably arises from majoritarian democracies. And people who live under a single-payer regime have no way, short of moving abroad, of appreciating that there are better alternatives.

Having said that, Britons are frustrated by the indifference and inhumanity of the National Health Service. Its problems are covered widely in the British press. Here are some examples (and readers are welcome to provide others):

• NHS doctors routinely conceal from patients information about innovative new therapies that the NHS doesn’t pay for, so as to not “distress, upset or confuse” them.
• Terminally ill patients are incorrectly classified as “close to death” so as to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support.
• NHS expert guidelines on the management of high cholesterol are intentionally out of date, putting patients at serious risk, in order to save money.
• When the government approved an innovative new treatment for elderly blindness, the NHS initially decided to reimburse for the treatment only after patients were already blind in one eye — using the logic that a person blind in one eye can still see, and is therefore not that badly off.
• While most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, leaving them immobile and disabled in the meantime, the actual waiting times are even worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees. (This compares to a wait of 3 to 4 weeks for such procedures in the United States.)
• One in four Britons with cancer is denied treatment with the latest drugs proven to extend life.
• Those who seek to pay for such drugs on their own are expelled from the NHS system, for making the government look bad, and are forced to pay for the entirety of their own care for the rest of their lives.
• Britons diagnosed with cancer or heart attacks are more likely to die, and more quickly, than those of most other developed nations. Britain’s survival rates for these diseases are “little better than [those] of former Communist countries.”

These problems are not an accidental side effect of socialized medicine — they are inherent to socialized medicine. Liberals who believe that technocratic experts can rationally allocate health care resources ignore the real-world examples, like Britain’s, of how that model fails in practice.

The American health-care system has its flaws, and real reform is urgently needed. But the reason why Obamacare is so unpopular is that most people would never trade our approach, warts and all, for that of Donald Berwick’s NHS.

Here’s Kevin Williamson on the curious (0ver) reaction by liberal lamestream media in condemnation of gun ownership.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius  wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops re­quired of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Never mind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu­ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun­dation of progressivism.

Be sure to check out Tom Gross’ Mideast Dispatch Analysis and his coverage of a new mall opening in Gaza. Let’s just say it’s a far cry from the typical Lamestream media reports about the impoverished in Gaza. Here’s an excerpt worth highlighting:

“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?

“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”

In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.

In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.

Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West. (Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)

World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.

While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.

Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.

As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”

Don’t look now but mainstream media (aka the lamestream media) is beginning to throw up the white flag and admit that their cure for supposed man-made global warming and our reliance on foreign energy sources is just to use less electricity.

How will this happen? First by guilt, then by force.

In the heat wave, the case against air conditioning

By Stan Cox
Sunday, July 11, 2010; B03

Washington didn’t grind to a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn’t even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree, record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting, fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner.

This isn’t smart. In a country that’s among the world’s highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. The energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the early 1990s. Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for — you guessed it — more air-conditioning.

A.C.’s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life for months on end. Less than half a century ago, America thrived with only the spottiest use of air conditioning. It could again.

Just consume less energy! What a novel idea. Ignore that people in developing nations would gladly slit your throat to enjoy the energy consumption advantages you have thanks to 200-plus years of liberty and innovation (converting to horsepower – Americans use about 4.5 horsepower per capita, while their counterparts in Pakistan and India use less than 0.25.”[ Courtesy of Power Hungry by Robert Bryce) Ignore that there's a direct relationship between the amount of electricity a country generates and its GDP (America is top in both electrical generation and GDP, followed by China and then the Western world with a high rank by Russia too [Bryce again]). No, no, our lifestyle, says this pretentious Ghia worshiper, is too “lavish.” No doubt his next commentary will extol the virtues of horse-drawn carriages (while ignoring disease from horse manure concentrations) and candles to replace light bulbs (ignoring productivity loss, among other things).

Once again the Greens’ definition of progress is technological regression.

How will this be done?

First by guilt trips by those like Mr. Cox. Then next via “smart utilities,” which is a fancy way of saying that your power company, under fiat by the government, will dictate the amount of energy you may use since we Americans aren’t like Pakistanis and Indians and can thus afford the energy prices. It’s no joke, unfortunately. It’s being seriously considered by the Leftist Greens and their government enablers.

[WND] In “Climategate [A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam],” [Brian] Sussman warns readers about the coming Smart Grid, Smart Meters, Smart Thermostats and Energy Star appliances – which he says will allow unseen bureaucrats to regulate all of the appliances in America’s homes.

“This is not fantasy,” says Sussman, an award-winning television meteorologist, “This is reality. Smart Meters have already replaced the whirling, old-fashioned electric meters on the side of millions of houses in America – they monitor electricity usage minute-by-minute and can be read remotely. The remote controlled Smart Thermostats are being installed as well and further enable bureaucratic control the temperature of your abode. The Smart Grid, which was mandated in the 2007 Energy bill and funded with ‘stimulus’ money, is coming next. The grid will possess interactive broadband capabilities to further control all of the new generation Energy Star appliances you will be forced to purchase – like your washer, dryer, water heater, and even your flat screen TV.”

Sussman notes the pandering tone of the Washington Post piece. “Look at the arguments presented in this story,” says Sussman. “In a post-AC nation, we’re told that ‘Congress will adjourn for the summer, giving ‘tea partiers’ the smaller government they seek,’ or that on a hot summer evening we’ll all trade the electrical stove for the barbeque and eat on the porch. Do the environmentalists and their media partners think Americans are that easy to fool?

“I live in California,” Sussman adds. “On certain summer evenings it’s illegal to have a barbeque. Guess will just have to stick to a salad.”

And why are the Greens forced to do this? Because it’s not about the environment or “saving” the planet from imaginary tidal waves swallowing San Francisco after polar icecap thaws, but it’s about control, and socialism, and collectivism, and increasing the power of the state. It’s about eroding personal liberty, and what’s more liberating that power consumption?

The Greens know that the facts are coming out, and the future of renewables simply cannot mathematically replace our need for oil, coal, natural gas (or nuclear) fuels. Wind and solar, for example, fail miserably in how we measure utility consumption: power density, energy density, cost, and scale.

For instance, again quoting from Robert Bryce:

The energy sprawl of renewables can easily be illustrated by comparing the footprint of a typical U.S. nuclear power plant, in this case, the South Texas Project, with that of wind and solar. Using conservative calculations—which means counting all 12,000 acres of the South Texas Project’s land area as part of the two-reactor plant’s footprint—yields a power density of about 300 horsepower per acre (56 watts per square meter). Compare that with wind power, which produces about 6.4 horsepower per acre (1.2 watts per square meter). Or look at solar photovoltaic, which produces about 36 horsepower per acre (6.7 watts per square meter). The results: Wind power requires about 45 times as much land to produce a comparable amount of power as nuclear, and solar photovoltaic power requires about 8 times as much land as nuclear. The corn ethanol scam is even worse, requiring about 1,150 times as much land as nuclear. … Thus, if the world’s policymakers really want to quit using carbon-based fuels, then we will need to find the energy equivalent of 23.5 Saudi Arabias every day, and all of that energy must be carbon-free.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. Because of intermittent breeze and sunlight, both solar and wind must be backed by traditional power sources, which as the Danes have learned, makes such power sources unsustainable without huge subsidies from government.

But that won’t stop the subsidies, of course. But just be prepared for the next bi-pronged attack of guilt and artificial outages.

Here’s Brian Riedl on why the economy is a mess. Hint: Bush tax cuts aren’t “spending.” (By the way, on that first myth, and this is highly relevant with the news that the Obama administration has turned to former Clinton era budget director Jacob Lew, let’s not forget that Clinton had the benefit of the “peace dividend,” or slashing the defense budget from the 6-7% of GDP it had been in the Cold War to barely 3% it became after the fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a ton of moolah!)

[MYTH #1] • The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade’s budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having “taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see.” That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels.

The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I’ve analyzed CBO’s 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits (and that is according to a “static” analysis, excluding any revenues recovered from faster economic growth induced by the cuts).

The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. If there were no Bush tax cuts, runaway spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007.

…

Over the past 50 years, tax revenues have deviated little from their 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) average. Despite a temporary recession-induced dip, CBO projects that even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2% of GDP by 2020—slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards.Spending—which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years—won’t remain as stable. Using the budget baseline deficit of $13 trillion for the next decade as described above, CBO figures show spending surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter.

Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average.

Entitlements and other obligations are driving the deficits. Specifically, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and net interest costs are projected to rise by 5.4% of GDP between 2008 and 2020. The Bush tax cuts are a convenient scapegoat for past and future budget woes. But it is the dramatic upward arc of federal spending that is the root of the problem.

The recess appointment of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Don Berwick is unlike previous and common recess appointments by past presidents, explains Avik Roy, for several reasons. First among them is that generally presidents use recess appointments because Congress drags its feet on hearings. But in Berwick’s case, Obama used the recess appointment precisely to avoid hearings which Republicans were eager to have to expose Berwick’s extreme views on health care. Once more the Obama administration displays that it has no intention of keeping its promise of an open, transparent and debate-healthy administration.

4. Berwick is an advocate of socialized, government-controlled health care. As we and others have documented, Berwick is “starry-eyed” about Britain’s National Health Service, in which government owns the insurers, the hospitals, and the doctors’ offices. He is a highly intelligent and articulate defender of that position. Liberals claim that Republicans are taking his views out of context. If that is true, why not give Berwick a public platform to explain himself? The answer is clear: Berwick would only generate more controversy if he aired his views in Congress. And we’re not talking “controversy” in the mountain-out-of-a-molehill sense: We’re talking about the basic philosophy of whether or not we should have a free or centrally-planned health care system. The American public and, more importantly, the American idea, are not on Berwick’s side.

Read the rest.

Another example: this way Obama doesn’t have to worry about Berwick answering a question such as: “According to the Boston Globe the ‘The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.’ How will government-funded medical programs at the federal level not meet the same fate?”

It’s said that all history occurs twice, first as tragedy and second as farce. That bears repeating with at least one element of the proposed “financial overhaul,” the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. That element, writes Eugene White, is the “Financial Crisis Fund,” a fund in which Sens. Dodd and Frank propose strong banks will pony up for a $19 billion “war chest” to be reserved for the next banking crisis, supposedly also aimed to “protect the taxpayers.” Aren’t Misters Dodd and Frank so kind… if only they’d apply that same thinking to the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2011, creating the single largest tax increase in American history.

The problem facing Dodd and Frank Democrats, says White, is that we tried this before, in 1893, and the same economic arguments that lead to its defeat then have not been solved today.

When [William Jennings] Bryan [(D, Neb)] presented his bill to the House committee, he was met with skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans. One critic, Nils P. Haugen (R., Wis.) quickly pointed out that many recent bank failures were quite large, “and that would be a great draft upon the fund in the case of a failure of two or three large banks,” easily exhausting it.

One of Bryan’s most telling exchanges was with Nicholas N. Cox (D., Tenn.):

Cox: “Now, the fund becomes exhausted and you have to assess another tax to make it good, and then after that is exhausted you have to assess another?”

Bryan: “Yes.”

Cox: “Then how can you arrive at any certainly about [the $10,000,000 figure]? Take this panic on hand now, and six, eight or 10 banks have broken in a technical sense and the depositors closed out, and they want their money, now it does not strike you that you would have to be continually assessing the solvent banks to supply those which have broken?”

Bryan: “A greater [one] than I has said that you can only judge the future by the past, and judging by the past, I do not think the danger of which you speak is a proximate one at all.”

Cox: “If it does not go to that extent, does it not result in the end that the good banks, that the well-managed banks, stand as a guard for the badly managed banks?”

With distaste for taxing safer banks to protect risky ones and distrust about the seemingly modest sum required by Bryan, the committee dismissed the bill. When the next big panic hit in 1907, fewer banks suspended business than in 1893. But as Bryan’s critics had correctly guessed, failing financial institutions were larger and outside the safety net that he had originally proposed. They were trust companies that had engineered their operations around the existing system of state and federal regulations and were now at the epicenter of the crisis. The fund would have been inadequate and perhaps have engendered a complacency that might well have made the 1907 crisis even worse.

Wondering what $10 million meant in 1893? It was 0.065% of GDP in 1893, while $20 billion is 0.132% of 2009 GDP. The ante has been roughly doubled by the Dodd-Frank bill, but the criticism of the bewhiskered men in starched collars is still on the mark.