Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.  And those who repeat failed policies of the past are doomed to failure themselves, and the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  We can apply all of these proverbs to what the Washington Post reports as the next phase of Deadbeatonomics, in which Obama will try the old populist “soak the rich” policies in order to close a deficit that he himself exploded in the past two weeks:

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation’s economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

A summary of Obama’s budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October will be delivered to Congress on Thursday, with the complete, multi-hundred-page document to follow in April. But Obama plans to unveil his goals for scaling back record deficits and rebuilding the nation’s costly and inefficient health care system tomorrow, when he addresses lawmakers and budget experts at a White House summit on restoring “fiscal responsibility” to Washington.

Yesterday in his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said he is determined to “get exploding deficits under control” and said his budget request is “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.”

Take a look at the second paragraph again.  Obama wants to jack up taxes to cut the deficit, but still wants “a major expansion of health coverage” — even with the entitlement meltdown rapidly approaching.  If Obama cares about deficits so much, he should reduce spending, especially as he demands more from Americans’ paychecks to fix the budget hole.

Raising taxes in a recession is about the surest way to ensure its continuance.  We’ve seen this over and over again in American history, including the Great Depression.  With the budget deficits where they are, permanent tax cuts are almost certainly political suicide, but better to do nothing than to take capital out of the market.  Yet that is exactly what Obama proposes, albeit perhaps a bit milder than some may have expected.  The top marginal rate will increase from 35% to 39.6% for earners over $250K, and capital gains taxes will go from 15% to 20%, lower than the 28% Obama suggested in the debates last spring.

However, the capital-gains tax is crucial to the economy.  Bush lowered it in the midst of the last recession and economic upheaval after 9/11 to prompt investors to put their money at risk.  Raising the tax on investment gains will ensure that we see less investment at the moment we need more of it.  Jobs get created by investors taking risks, and if the reward on risk taking becomes low enough, they’ll sink their money into safer havens instead of building job-creating businesses.

Obama wants to cut spending from 26% of GDP to 22%, which is a worthy goal, but it should be lower than that.  However, he plans to make those cuts primarily in defense, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The former has settled down to where massive outlays should no longer be necessary and where costs should get budgeted normally, rather than as riders.  But Obama insisted that he would fight the war in Afghanistan more robustly than the Bush administration, claiming that we had taken our eyes off the ball there.  How does cutting the budget for that front in the war on terror make our effort more robust?  We’re not going to win that war on the cheap, as we discovered after the Clinton efforts to do just that.

Basically, we’re going to get a replay of failed liberal economic policies in the next two years — nothing we haven’t seen before, but nothing that worked before, either.  It’s the kind of populist nonsense on which Obama got elected, but still far milder than some of the lunatic economic policies we saw during the 1970s.  When these taxes go up, expect the economy to slow even more and Obama to miss his targets for revenue, as he and his team have apparently never heard of dynamic tax analysis.  When that happens, the GOP will be poised to win back control of the House in 2010.

 by Ed Morrissey

RUIN YOUR HEALTH WITH THE OBAMA STIMULUS PLAN

Tell Congress STIMULUS CONTAINS RATIONED MEDICINE

FAXDC.com wants to send this urgent and personalized Blast Fax message to all 535 members of the House and Senate for YOU.

Alert: The former lieutenant governor of New York is warning that the $50 billion that President Obama expects to spend in the next few years on a nationwide digital health records system for every individual easily could, and probably will, result in rationed medical care.

WND recently reported on a little-discussed provision in Obama’s plan that would demand every American submit to a government program for electronic medical records without a choice to opt out, raising alarms for privacy advocates.

Privacy advocates said patients might be startled to discover personal information could be shared electronically with, perhaps, millions of people, including documentation on abortions, mental health problems, patient non-compliance, lawsuits against doctors and sexual problems.

Sue A. Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom, said unless people have the right to decide “if and when” their health information is shared, there is no real privacy.

Now Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has released a commentary warning about the likelihood of rationed care – or a health care system that simply provides treatment when it determines the cost-benefit ratio for the treatment and the patient meets its guidelines.

Obama plans to spend $50 billion “over five years” to create a system of electronic health records for every person who sees a doctor.

“Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion,” wrote McCaughey. “These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.”

“If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes … in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face … rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.”

Other nations that utilize such programs typically deny costly treatments to patients who are senior citizens, and McCaughey warns that would be the case in the United States, too.

“Daschle says health-care reform ‘will not be pain free.’ Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt,” she warned.

“Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost-effectiveness standard,” she said.

McCaughey noted Daschle has written of such plans, modeled after the United Kingdom, which include a national board to make necessary decisions.

“This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis,” she wrote.

She cited a 2006 ruling in the U.K. that determined elderly patients with macular degeneration must go blind in one eye before getting treatment with a costly drug to save their other eye, a decision that outraged taxpayers who eventually forced a change.

“Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition,” McCaughey said.

The stimulus plan calls its board the “Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.”

“The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs.. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept ‘hopeless diagnoses’ and ‘forgo experimental treatments,’ and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system,” she said.

She said the plan simply needs more review.

“The bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn,” McCaughey said.

She said doctors would end up with no choice about treatments.

“Hospitals and doctors that are not ‘meaningful users’ of the new system will face penalties,” she warned.

The Institute for Health Freedom today also renewed its warning because the system is scheduled to be mandatory for everyone.

“IHF calls on Americans who care about health privacy to contact their members of Congress and President Obama to voice their own opinions about the need for opt-out and patient consent provisions, to ensure true patient privacy rights,” the organization said.

Blevins’ organization, one of the few raising the alarm at this point, said the stimulus plan would impose an electronic health records system on every person in the U.S. without any provision for seeking patient consent or allowing them not to participate.

“Without those protections, Americans’ electronic health records could be shared – without their consent – with over 600,000 covered entities through the forthcoming nationally linked electronic health-records network,” Blevins said.

“Nobody wants to stop the proper use of good technology,” Blevins said, “and for some people privacy is not an issue.”

But she said the bottom line is that patients “would end up losing control of his or her personal health information.”

WND previously has reported on attempts in Minnesota by state lawmakers to authorize the collection and warehousing of newborns’ DNA without parental consent.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been successful in stopping the action there so far…

The Citizens’ Council on Health Care has worked to publicize the issue in Minnesota. The group raised opposition when the state Department of Health continued to warehouse DNA without parental consent in violation of the genetic privacy and DNA property rights of parents and children.

DO NOT BE SILENCED BY ANYONE STAND UP! MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s home district includes San Francisco

Star-Kist Tuna’s headquarters are in San Francisco, Pelosi’s home district.
Star-Kist is owned by Del Monte Foods and is a major contributor to Pelosi
Star-Kist is the major employer in American Samoa employing 75% of the Samoan work force.
Paul Pelosi, Nancy ’s husband, owns $17 million dollars of Star-Kist stock.

In January, 2007, when the minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25, Pelosi had American Samoa exempted from the increase so Del Monte would not have to pay the higher wage. This would make Del Monte products less expensive than their competition’s.

Last week when the huge bailout bill was passed, Pelosi added an earmark to the final bill adding $33 million dollars for an ‘economic development credit in American Samoa

Pelosi has called the Bush Administration “CORRUPT” ? ?

How do you spell “HYPOCRISY” ?