The Worst Legislation EVER?

I'm used to hyperbole so this might be viewed as a bit of a stretch, but the following tidbits might actually be true:

The Healthcare Bill the Senate passed might well be the WORST LEGISLATION EVER PASSED.  Once it goes through the House (and it surely will), it will enact so many destructive components to our nation's economy that it may just surpass the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and the Escaped Slaves Act of 1831 for pure stupidity.  Allow me to explain a few things that this bill does, without the propaganda of Senate Democrats to bolster it.


- The CBO projected that it will add an additional $2.4 TRILLION to the nation's deficit over the next ten years.  Who knows how much this entitlement will cost after that?  For those keeping score, that's equal to 17% of America's annual production.  This means we will have to give up about 1/6th of all our wealth that we create in one year to pay for this legislation over the next decade.


- It will increase taxes on all Americans by about $1.5 TRILLION on the next decade.  President Obama famously claimed that he "will not raise taxes on any Americans making over $250,000 a year" until he changed that to "$200,000" and then "$150,000" and later changed it to "$100,000" and then "$75,000".  Well now, this legislation settles it at "$0".  EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN WILL SEE THEIR TAXES RAISED.  This is plainly written into the bill.


- It will cut $500 BILLION from Medicare over the next ten years.  That's right: the very entitlement that Democrats and liberals have threatened to kill others to protect is going to be gutted like the fresh catch of the day with all the aplomb of the bad guy in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The only problem here is that all of the benefits that Medicare is legally obligated to provide will remain meaning that an ADDITIONAL $500 BILLION hole is now opened up in a program that will literally be out of money i.e. bankrupt in a decade.


- It will give the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unprecedented authority over medical decisions.  You read that right: bureacrats from an unelected government body will dictate medical care standards to physicians, surgeons and specialists based solely on accounting tables.  If you have a medical malady and require treatment that costs money, YOUR DOCTOR WILL NO LONGER HAVE AUTHORITY TO TREAT YOU.  This is not hyperbole; this provision is a central tenet of the "reform".  The idea is that the lowest cost alternative of care will be used.  The only problem is that every patient and every medical situation is different and requires a trained physician to make decisions on what is needed for treatment.  Sometimes, the cheapest alternative is not the most effective to heal people's ailments.  Under this legislation, they'll no longer be allowed to do that.


- The CMS will be excluded from lawsuits over these treatment decisions.  The private insurance industry is liable for all the payment decisions they make.  If you don't agree with a judgement by your health insurer, you have the right as an American to seek legal retribution to overturn their decision, and also to seek damages from the insurer if their decision leads to medical harm.  But the Feds have cleverly excluded their own body, the CMS, from ever having to be sued over these decisions.  This is patently unconstitutional and absurdly wrong.


- Medical device makers will no longer be allowed to set their own prices for new innovations.  Currently, such manufacturers spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to create novel medical inventions to improve patient care and combat illness.  This legislation allows the CMS to set prices for all medical innovations that "resemble" previous products, based on the prices for those other innovations.  There's only one problem: medical innovators introduce newer versions of older devices and medicines on a continuous basis so they can incrementally improve their products.  The advantage of this approach is that consumers benefit from all this innovation all the time.  If they don't like the price of the newer version, they can use a competitors product (if one exists) or an older version of that product.  Now, consumers will have to wait until suitably "new" innovations are brought to market by the medical device makers so they are exempt from rules.  Very simply, this will slow down and stifle medical innovation.  For proof of this, look at Britain's National Health Service which is struggling to increase medical innovations in their country because onerous regulations just like this are keeping medical inventions from being made and brought to market.


This doesn't even include the NAKED BRIBERY to several states that was included in the legislation in order to get this destructive bill through the Senate.  Simply put, those exclusions for several states from having to pay their own Medicare bills violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.  Altogether, this makes this the most heinous and truly destructive bill that the Congress of the United States has ever passed.


I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this subject.

Global Warming Is Like Santa Claus

Global warming is like Santa Claus: it exists so long as you want it to.

As for the scientific validity of the case for global warming, there are so many convincing arguments against it, but I'll start with one that I hope you, as a scientific thinker, can appreciate. If you are given a data set (regardless of what the data are) with x and y values and you plot them on a Cartesian plane, you can draw the inference that there is a correlation between these values. This can lead you to one of three possible explanations for this correlation.

1. x causes y, so y is dependent of x

2. y causes x, so x is dependent of y

3. y and x are independent of each other, and have a coincidental correlation.

Global warming theorists simply looked at such a chart plotting temperatures against man-made CO2 emissions and immediately assumed that CO2 caused the temperature to increase. They haven't even bothered investigating the alternative explanations for this correlation, which is what good scientists would seek to do. As yet, there has not been any causal relationship shown between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures. Until such proof is presented and validated by the scientific community, I will remain skeptical of these claims.

Last week, the researchers at the East Anglia University climatology department were shown to have been manipulating their data set on temperatures and CO2 levels. This data was, until now, the primary source for global warming theorists. Additionally, they even admitted that there has actually been a decline in global temperatures since 2002, while CO2 emissions have risen steadily, bucking the purported trend between the variables.

Meanwhile, the main proponents of global warming theory, most notably Vice President Al Gore, stand to reap immense financial rewards based on the validity of this theory. For example, Gore personally owns a firm that sells "carbon credits" that people can purchase to offset their personal carbon creation. If global warming was shown to be false, his investment would collapse. So he has a strong incentive to keep the hoax alive, even if he needs to resort to outright lies to make it so.

Politicians the world over have found a convenient bogeyman in the form of global warming. Unless they are granted sweeping powers over people's lives and decision-making, they claim that the world will essentially end in apocalypse from this threat. And it is immensely convenient, since the "enemy" is not a human figure but instead a phenomenon of nature. Additionally, they claim that this end-of-world scenario will unfold in 50 to 100 years, just long enough for them to never have to live long enough to see if it becomes true or false. There is simply far too much incentive for the parties invested in this theory to give up on making it stick in the mind of the voting public. Hence, even when substantial scientific evidence is presented that overwhelmingly refutes this theory, they childishly begin name-calling their opponents rather than take on the issue at hand. The finest rule of politics is: if you're debating an issue and you start losing, just change the subject and call the other guy names. Works like a charm.