Hillary Clinton’s disastrous book tour has more high-profile Democrats contemplating a run for the White House in 2016. That includes Vice President Joe Biden. In their latest parody, the Capitol Steps bring Clinton and Biden together. Listen as Hillary tries to force Biden out of the race while Biden vows to run.
Archives for July 2014
Three Martini Lunch 7/25/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review have fun with Michelle Obama telling Democratic donors that special interest money is ruining politics right before she asks them to write the biggest checks they’ve ever given. We discuss Charles Krauthammer declaring that the world is going to hell and President Obama is playing golf. And they enjoy discussing former HHS official Jonathan Gruber’s 2012 insistence that health care tax credits can only be obtained through state health care exchanges.
Israel Halfway to Victory Against Hamas ‘Cowards’
Retired Israeli Brigadier Gen. Elihu Ben-Onn says Israeli Defense Forces have reduced the Hamas rocket arsenal by about 50 percent and he says the military operation will continue until Hamas has no rockets remaining and its tunnel system is eradicated.
“These bloody terrorist had more than 9,000 rockets. We believe we destroyed half of it, that means more than 4,000 rockets. So the mission is not accomplished yet,” said Ben-Onn, who is disgusted as the tactics employed by Hamas to maximize civilian casualties.
“They protect themselves with children and women and hospitals and mosques. They believe that if they hide behind them, (Israel) will not go there,” he said. “They want them to get the bullets first. They don’t fight like soldiers (but) like cowards.”
“We still have to go forward in order to stop all of them. They still have thousands of rockets,” said Ben-Onn.
In addition to the threat posed by relentless rockets fired from Gaza, Israel is also committed to the arduous task of destroying the elaborate system of tunnels that allows Hamas to slip into Israel underground.
“Israel has to move inside and actually go to all basements, all the shelters, all the underground cities Hamas built under the civilians,” said Ben-Onn, who described how the tunnel system works.
“They were dug in the last couple of years. They start in the living room or the kitchen or in the bedroom of the children. They start it from that kitchen down to the ground and then one or two kilometers, all the way to the border,” he said.
Ben-Onn admits discovering all the tunnels is a painstaking task.
“It’s very complicated. you have to go from house to house, from building to building. You need a lot of information, a lot of intelligence. Of course, when you find those terrorists, it’s sad they don’t go out and fight. They prefer to be behind human shelters,” said Ben-Onn.
Several media reports have explained that Hamas regularly fires rockets and stations known military targets in areas of high civilian populations, such as schools, hospitals and even United Nations relief shelters. However, the majority of international reports simply point to the civilian deaths occurring when those sites are attacked by Israel and those reports lead to growing international cries for a cease-fire.
“Well, we are used to that. Unfortunately, for many years, some international media prefer to take the propaganda point of view of the terrorists. I always explain it as simple as it is. If you have a daylight robbery in a bank and terrorists are holding a hostage with a pistol on their head, if you are a police officer you must shoot him before he kills all the hostages,” said Ben-Onn.
The United States government played a key role in two stories connected to the Middle East conflict. On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced a halt to all U.S. flights into Tel Aviv. Many European nations and airlines followed suit. The U.S. allowed flights to resume late Wednesday night.
“We were a little bit surprised because British Airways from London didn’t stop the flights to Tel Aviv. I’m very glad they decided to cancel this wrong decision,” said Ben-Onn, explaining that Bengurion Airport is the most secure in the world and Hamas rockets aren’t even a threat to aircraft.
On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry was caught on a live television microphone saying he needed to head to the Middle East to broker a truce and he seemed to be mocking the notion that the Israeli military actions were part of a pinpoint operation.
Nonetheless, Ben-Onn believes the Obama administration remains a strong ally of Israel. He’s also touched by the outpouring of support from the American people.
“We would like to thank the United States of America, the people. We have thousands of supporters. People are calling my radio station, sending emails, faxes and Facebook (messages). They say, ‘We support the state of Israel. We understand your struggle, your efforts,” said Ben-Onn.
For those who believe Israel’s response to the rocket attacks from Hamas is no proportionate, Ben-Onn suggests Americans consider how they would react if Washington, D.C. were attacked day after day by rockets from a neighboring country.
Ultimately, he says, Israel must defend itself.
“We have an enemy. Our enemy doesn’t recognize our right to exist in this area. The enemy is attacking Israel by missiles and rockets, especially our civilians. They are war criminals and we have to protect ourselves,” he said.
Why Millennials Should Care About Social Security Now
By Ryan Brown
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, it’s possible he didn’t understand the huge effect his social welfare plan would have. In 2014, over 59 million Americans will receive almost $863 billion in Social Security benefits. 9 out of 10 individuals over the age of 65 receive benefits and among those, half of elderly married beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 50% of their income. 47% of single, elderly beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 90% of their income. These numbers are in addition to the disabled workers and dependent family members of deceased workers who also receive benefits.
In a word, Social Security is huge.
Unfortunately, the system is in dire need of repair, and that spells bad news for young people.
Andrew Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and he’s also worked as deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. When asked if Social Security will be around for millennials, his answer isn’t reassuring.
“The answer to that is yes and no,” he says.
Biggs says that the program isn’t going anywhere, but what a young person receives will vary.
“The idea that you’re not going to get a penny from Social Security, I really think is false. On the other hand, what are the chances I’m going to get everything I’ve been promised from Social Security? And I think those chances are pretty slim,” he says.
If that isn’t depressing enough, Biggs goes on to say that postponing the problem isn’t helping anyone either.
“The Sooner you fix it the easier it is. For every year that goes by, we’re essentially putting off the problem and so it gets to be harder to solve,” says Biggs.
A solution to the problem isn’t going to come easily, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Economists each seem to have their own ideas of how to create solvency, and they fiercely debate one another over the pros and cons of their plans.
Melissa Favreault is a Senior Fellow in the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. She says that even if economists can’t come to an agreement, though, almost all the proposed solutions include some mix of adjustments on the tax or revenue side, and adjustments to benefits.
“Some of the proposals that are most common are things like lifting the cap on earnings that are taxable for Social Security. There’s also some talk about increasing the taxation of benefits, or broadening the base, for example, to include things like health insurance benefits that are currently not taxed for Social Security purposes,” she says.
The proposed benefits adjustments are equally varied.
“One that we hear a lot about are things like increasing the full retirement age, or increasing the early retirement age. We also hear about things like reducing the cost of living adjustment. Among proposals that we’ve seen in a lot of recent plans are adjustments in the rate of growth for benefits,” says Favreault.
Though a solution will likely entail a combination of changes, Biggs says the most likely change he sees is the retirement age.
“The retirement age currently is slowly shifting from 65 up to 67. It’s something that is not an easy change to make, but I think encouraging people to work longer is really the best way to address these issues,” he says.
But some are disappointed with any and all attempts at fixing Social Security. When the system was designed, it was based on a three-legged stool of retirement: private pension benefits, private savings, and Social Security. Many see a decline in private pensions and savings and an increasing reliance on the third leg, Social Security. For young people, this means they should start saving for retirement now. For other advocates, the increasing reliance on Social Security is the beginning of a downward trend, and they want the freedom to take their retirement savings into their own hands—to privatize the system.
While privatization models of retirement savings have shown huge gains for savings invested in the stock market, Biggs is quick to point out that the biggest issue in privatizing the system is something called “transition cost.”
“If you take the money that you’re currently paying into Social Security and you put it into a personal account on your own, that’s money the system doesn’t have to pay out benefits to your grandparents. So during that time, you have to come up with additional money to cover this transition,” says Biggs.
It’s that transition cost, and the fact that the current system needs money flowing in to function, that necessitates a multifaceted, well-thought-out solution to Social Security’s solvency issues.
For Favreault, the most important thing for young people to understand, is that Social Security requires a group perspective.
“We’re kind of all in this together, and we’re saying that as a society, we want people of retirement age and people who become disabled, or the children of workers who die before retirement, that they’re protected,” she says.
Biggs admits that, for a lot of young people, that can be hard to swallow.
“Is it fair to say that a lot of younger folks are kind of getting ripped of? Well, that’s kind of what the numbers show. So you want to find some solution that smooths things out and makes the system sustainable, not just in a financial sense, but sustainable in that people feel it’s something they can really support,” he says.
For a lot of millennials, Social Security is something that they see having little effect on their day-to-day lives. For a solution to the rapidly approaching solvency crisis, though, millennials and other young Americans will have to decide this is an issue they want to fix. Otherwise, they’ll bear the financial consequences.
Three Martini Lunch 7/24/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Andrew Johnson of National Review are glad to see already vulnerable Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh get caught for his recent plagiarism on a master’s thesis. They also bite their nails as a new Marquette University poll shows Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker now losing to his Democratic opponent. And they react to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s odd rant against CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Vitter Pushes Speedier Deportations
Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) is spearheading a legislative approach to address the border crisis, one that he says will result in far more deportations in less time and slam the door shut on the Obama administration’s ability to use it’s own discretion on enforcing the existing laws.
The plan calls for expediting the deportation process, greatly reducing the grounds for asylum in the U.S. and requiring those in violation of immigration laws to be detained until they are sent home.
The senator also says his bill is far more aggressive than the bipartisan plan sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), which also promises to speed up the processing of those in the country illegally.
“(There are) two main differences. First of all, we raise the standard for anything like an asylum claim. They do not. Secondly, we absolutely ensure that these illegals are detained and not given over to anyone, like family members, until they’re deported out of the country, assuming that’s appropriate. They do not,” said Vitter.
Vitter says his legislation also gives the president far less wiggle room in using the law to advance his political agenda. He says he doesn’t trust the administration to enforce the law, so he believes tying its hands through this new legislation would also be an improvement.
“Quite frankly, I don’t trust the administration with regard to enforcement in general, and that’s why my bill doesn’t give them room to maneuver. It doesn’t leave much, if anything, to their discretion. That’s another big difference between our legislation and some other alternatives out there in Congress, even among Republicans,” he said.
What needs to change in our border policy is not particularly complicated, according to Vitter. He says there are certain things that obviously need to change to stem the current tide of people illegally crossing the border and dissuade others from coming in the future.
“We need to detain these illegals and not let them go and not release them into American society but quickly and efficiently deport them to their home countries,” said Vitter. “Way too many of these illegals coming in are basically caught and released to family members in the country, many of them illegal. The great majority of those are never heard from again. They’re given a court date and a ‘pretty please’ note to show up in court. Ina great majority of cases, that never happens.”
Another headache for Border Patrol officers and other officials dealing with the border surge is the vast number of people issuing rehearsed pleas for asylum. Vitter says the approach to that would change through his bill as well.
“There will be a very, very small percentage who have a real sort of asylum claim. We also strengthened the standard so that people can’t just lie their way through that,” he said.
“You have to do more than just say a few magic words. Part of the problem now is folks quickly learn what magic words or vague claims they have to make to possibly have that argument. We raise the standard, make it more stringent and meaningful, so that they have to have a lot more detail or documentation about these sorts of issues,” said Vitter.
Genuine war refugees and victims of sex trafficking, among others, can still find safe haven in the U.S. under Vitter’s plan. However, he says there is a specific standard that must be met to be allowed to stay.
“Is it clear when they go back to their home country that they are going to be in a completely untenable situation. That doesn’t mean, ‘Are there problems in their home country? Is there poverty in their home country.’ Of course, that’s been the case forever and it’s going to continue to be the case for awhile, unfortunately,” said Vitter.
Democrats regularly reject such an approach, arguing that the moral thing to do is help these people, many of them children, who are desperate for a better life. Vitter says the current policy is having exactly the opposite effect of that stated goal.
“Right now we have a policy that causes that humanitarian crisis to grow, to get worse, more minors being put into the hands of more criminal gangs, coyotes, dangerous people who often times who often times abuse these minors. It’s not a humanitarian policy if that policy is causing that to continue and to grow,” he said.
Within the past few days, Texas officials started to cast doubt on the media narrative that the vast majority of the unaccompanied minors are small children, going so far as to estimate 80-85 percent are teenagers and many of those affiliated with gangs.
Does Vitter believe the media are getting the story right?
“No I don’t, because I think they, for the most part, convey the story line that these are all tiny kids. They’re not. It’s much more of a mixed bag. It depends on what media reporting you look at. I think the more accurate picture is slowly getting out,” he said.
That said, the senator insists the government needs to treat everyone with respect.
“We need to treat them all carefully and humanely. The question is what do we do with them. We need to detain them and then quickly deport them. That’s what’s going to stop this flow from continuing and continuing to grow,” said Vitter.
In addition to the impact on the border states, Vitter says this crisis impacts every other state as long as the government is actively handing off illegal immigrants to sponsors here in the U.S. He is aware of 1,200 cases in Louisiana alone since this crisis began.
But what are the political odds and how is the bill being received by lawmakers?
“Great support on Capitol Hill, even greater support in America,” said Vitter. “I think it’s galvanizing the American people around the common sense notion that we need to do something meaningful in quickly, effectively deporting these folks back to their home country.”
However, just as Democratic control of the U.S. Senate stymies the GOP on other issues, Vitter’s bill will struggle to reach the floor. Nonetheless, he remains hopeful.
“Harry Reid seems determined to just take up a spending bill that’s basically given President Obama a big chunk of money, mostly to house and feed these illegal aliens, not to fix the problem. That isn’t going to go anywhere. I hope when that doesn’t go anywhere that opens up the debate and we look at real enforcement measures that can make a difference,” said Vitter.
Three Martini Lunch 7/23/14
In a hyperventilating edition of the Three Martini Lunch, Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review shake their heads as European leaders admits they plan to do nothing in response to Russia’s connection to the shooting down of an airliner that killed nearly 300 people. They also rip the FAA for halting flights into Tel Aviv after one Hamas rocket was stopped near the airport. And they discuss President Obama’s unwillingness to handle the unpleasant aspects of his job.
Subsidy Showdown Threatens Obamacare
Conflicting federal appeals court decisions might soon bring Obamacare back to the Supreme Court, this time to determine whether patients can receive subsidies through the federal health exchange even though the Affordable Care Act says they are only permitted through state-run exchanges.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 that the law repeatedly refers to subsidies being available only through state exchanges and, therefore, the law must be interpreted that way. However, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that subsidies could come through either the federal or state exchanges.
However, the D.C court is more prominent, and observers say its verdict carries considerable weight.
“This is a hugely important decision. The government has now lost a case that really addresses the heart and soul of what this law is supposed to do,” said Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute.
“The law specifically says, at least seven times, that the subsidies are only allowed through an exchange established by a state. It was part of Congress’ coercion to try to get the states to set up their own exchanges,” she said. “The states basically called their bluff and said, ‘Nope, we’re not doing this.’ So when the law says seven times that tax credits for health insurance can only be distributed through an exchange created by a state, the court said, ‘The law must mean what it says and we’re going to rule that way.’ Congratulations to them for upholding the rule of law.”
The administration is appealing the decision of the three-judge panel to the full D.C. Circuit, which includes seven Democratic appointees and four selections by GOP presidents. According to Turner, precedent suggests the full, or en banc, court will not be interested in second-guessing three of their colleagues, but she says there is a tinge of politics on the bench that did not exist until recently.
“The judges really respect each other. They don’t want to overrule one another, although the Obama administration has been stacking this court with several new appointees. They very likely would have the votes to overrule the three-judge panel, but it would look very, very political and would likely discredit future decisions,” said Turner, who says it is vital for one full appeals court to rule in line with the three judges.
“It is consequential, because in order for this to go to the Supreme Court, you would then have to have different rulings in the different appeals courts. There are four similar cases going through the courts. So you’d have to have another court decide the same as the D.C. Circuit Court panel has today for the Supreme Court to heart it. If there are no conflicts in the appeals courts’ decisions, then the Supreme Court would less likely take it up,” said Turner.
Tuesday’s decision in the D.C. Circuit does not force an end to subsidies through the federal exchange while the appeals process plays out. But if the decision is ultimately upheld, the implications are huge.
“About 4.5 million people, who are getting subsidies through the federal exchanges, are not getting them legally. Eighty-seven percent of the people signing up for health insurance in the exchanges are getting subsidies, some of them significant subsidies of $12,000-14,000. Those are not legal in the healthcare.gov website,” said Turner.
If the Supreme Court were to declare subsidies obtained through the federal exchange illegal, Turner says it would give great incentive for lawmakers to take a smarter approach to health care reform.
“Congress would then have to go back to the drawing board. I think people that opposed this law all along would actually have more bargaining power now to be able to move to a place where we can actually get subsidies that are structured the right way, not this “mother may I,” 159 new government rules and commissions that are basically running our health sector,” said Turner.
She says urgent action would be need to help people trapped in a system where they had to buy health insurance but could not get any help in paying a much higher than expected price tag.
“They’re not going to leave the millions of people who’ve been thrown out of their coverage out in the cold. They’re going to try to figure out how to come up with a better solution, but one that gives people and doctors choices, not government bureaucrats and politicians,” said Turner.
Obamacare Takes a Hit
By Ryan Brown
In an unexpected blow to Obamacare, a federal appeals court has ruled against the federal health care exchange, HealthCare.gov, saying it may be violating the mandates of the Affordable Care Act.
In essence, the court’s decision attacks the Obama administration for creating a nation-wide system for delivering health care subsidies when the law, known commonly as Obamacare, only allows for subsidies to be distributed in state-based health care marketplaces.
Fox News contributor and author Dr. Ben Carson said that he isn’t surprised by the court’s decision.
“This is completely what I’ve expected, and there will be more revelations as time goes on,” he says.
Carson went on to say that he feels this is emblematic of the administration’s desire to simply take control of the situation and do what they want.
“The Obama administration has been, along with the Internal Revenue Service, saying they could do almost anything they wanted. It states very specifically in the law, the ACA, that subsidies were going to come through the state exchanges. And many of the states decided that they were not going to set up these exchanges. The administration decided to give them subsidies anyway. Well, it doesn’t say that. That’s not part of the law,” says Carson.
Though the decision is almost guaranteed to face an appeal by the administration, it’s reach is quite expansive. 36 states haven’t yet set up state-based health care marketplaces. That means Obamacare enrollees in those 36 states may have received subsidies illegally.
Even though the court’s decision is considered a blow against Obamacare, the likelihood of it having any power to fully derail Obamacare is slim.
Three Martini Lunch 7/22/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer an appeals court ruling that struck down health care subsidies issued through the federal exchange. They have a mixed reaction as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker slams hid Democratic opponent for championing a “living wage”, while her family’s business outsources jobs to China. And they discuss reports about Bill Clinton’s new mistress, nicknamed “the energizer” by his Secret Service detail.