The Wall Street Journal has a great article about a surgeon from India who is revolutionizing heart surgery through specialization and volume.

BANGALORE — Hair tucked into a surgical cap, eyes hidden behind thick-framed magnifying glasses, Devi Shetty leans over the sawed open chest of an 11-year-old boy, using bright blue thread to sew an artificial aorta onto his stopped heart.

As Dr. Shetty pulls the thread tight with scissors, an assistant reads aloud a proposed agreement for him to build a new hospital in the Cayman Islands that would primarily serve Americans in search of lower-cost medical care. The agreement is inked a few days later, pending approval of the Cayman parliament.

Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa’s cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

Then there are the Cayman Islands, where he plans to build and run a 2,000-bed general hospital an hour’s plane ride from Miami. Procedures, both elective and necessary, will be priced at least 50% lower than what they cost in the U.S., says Dr. Shetty, who hopes to draw Americans who are uninsured or need surgery their plans don’t cover.

via The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery – WSJ.com.

What our politicians hate and don’t understand is you cannot control the free market and you can only harm yourself by attempting to do so. As you can see, Dr. Shetty will be opening a hospital in the Cayman Islands hoping to capture some of the US market. While our government continues to drive up our health care costs, foreign doctors see a profit opportunity. I’m guessing you will see a huge trend in this direction. If he can do surgery for a few thousand dollars, you will see people flocking. People spend more on insurance in a few months than it would cost for heart surgery at this hospital. Expand this model to other forms of medical care, and you will see global health care eat away at the US market.

The free market will create more an more services to help Americans get to these places. You will see medical transport services helping Americans to get to these places. You could see American doctors leaving to work in these places. How about American doctors being able to work from the US via some video stream? They’d be able to work outside the US restrictions from his US location. Thanks to our politicians,  you will see the economic power of the US moving away from the US. Say goodbye to our long term dominance.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Republican reps Jeb Hensarling and Pau Ryan layout why economic expectations are so low.

Why all the pessimism? The source appears to be a growing fear that the federal government is retreating from the free-market economic principles of the last half-century, and in particular the strong growth policies that began under Ronald Reagan. A review of the economic policies instituted by President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress lends credibility to this concern.

Exhibit A is the economic stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama in February. Even among previous stimulus efforts, the 2009 stimulus stands out for its ineffective targeting and sheer size. With interest, it is $1.1 trillion, double the size of Roosevelt’s New Deal spending as a percentage of GDP.

Exhibit B is tax policy going forward. It is a near certainty that Democratic-controlled Congress will allow most of the tax cuts of 2001-2003 to expire on Dec. 31, 2010.

Exhibit C is the administration’s intervention in the GM and Chrysler reorganizations. Upsetting decades of accepted bankruptcy law, the administration leveraged TARP funds to place unsecured and lower priority creditors like the United Auto Workers union in front of secured and higher priority creditors.

Health care, the administration’s signature issue, is Exhibit D. Disregarding its impact on quality and access, its plan will surely cost well over $1 trillion over the next decade. The House-passed version includes an 8% “pay or play” payroll tax and a half-trillion dollar surtax on incomes over $500,000, much of which will strike small business. Both taxes will tend to depress investment and the creation of new jobs.

If one substitutes the Blue Chip Economic Forecast’s interest-rate forecast for that of the administration, deficits will increase by an additional $1.2 trillion over the administration’s projected deficits. If the next decade’s interest rates climb to match those of the 1980s, then the deficit would increase another $5.3 trillion. If higher interest rates then slow economic growth, the impact on the deficit would be much worse.

via Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan: Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery – WSJ.com.

While I agree with all these, I think the reps believes that government is the solution, and the problem is their solution is not being implemented. This is what happens when you believe the government is the solution to our problems. Whoever lies the best and gets control of the government sets the policies. I’d love to see these guys calling for the government to quit tinkering with the economy.

The free market works, and will handle slow downs much better than politics. This recession would have hit us fast and moved on already without the tinkering. Can you imagine a doctor giving you a shot and saying I don’t want to inflict the pain, so let me put the needle in slowly? When you get a shot, you want it fast and quick. You know it’s going to hurt. Just get it over with. The economy is the same way. If we are going to go through some economic pain, take the brunt of it and get it over with. Instead we have these idiots trying to avoid any pain, and all they do is prolong it. The Fed caused the damn pain, and then says their role is minimize the pain and prevent it going forward. Really? Good job jackasses. Maybe we should try to control the weather so we don’t have any natural disasters.

If you want expectations to pick up, go back to the constitution. Quit tinkering. Tinkering only causes people to speculate on what the tinkering will be, and because our current tinkerers are bigger socialists than the previous tinkerers, they don’t feel good about the tinkering. Remove the tinkering ,and you remove the speculation and the negative expectations.

Was Bush, Obama and Geithner really “bailing out Wall Street in order to bail out Main Street”? It sure not looking like it.

TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky keeps committing flagrant acts of political transparency, which if nothing else ought to inform the debate going forward over financial reform. In his latest bombshell, the IG discloses that the New York Federal Reserve did not believe that AIG’s credit-default swap (CDS) counterparties posed a systemic financial risk.

Hello?

For the last year, the entire Beltway theory of the financial panic has been based on the claim that the “opaque,” unregulated CDS market had forced the Fed to take over AIG and pay off its counterparties, lest the system collapse. Yet we now learn from Mr. Barofsky that saving the counterparties was not the reason for the bailout.

In the fall of 2008 the New York Fed drove a baby-soft bargain with AIG’s credit-default-swap counterparties. The Fed’s taxpayer-funded vehicle, Maiden Lane III, bought out the counterparties’ mortgage-backed securities at 100 cents on the dollar, effectively canceling out the CDS contracts. This was miles above what those assets could have fetched in the market at that time, if they could have been sold at all.

The New York Fed president at the time was none other than Timothy Geithner, the current Treasury Secretary, and Mr. Geithner now tells Mr. Barofsky that in deciding to make the counterparties whole, “the financial condition of the counterparties was not a relevant factor.”

This is startling. In April we noted in these columns that Goldman Sachs, a major AIG counterparty, would certainly have suffered from an AIG failure. And in his latest report, Mr. Barofsky comes to the same conclusion. But if Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn’t driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why pay Goldman and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax dollars to make them whole?

Who was Treasury Secretary and worked hand in hand with Geithner to bail out Goldman Sachs, I mean AIG? Henry Paulson. Where did Henry Paulson work prior to becoming Treasury Secretary? What do you know, Goldman Sachs. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. I’m sure one man couldn’t force the spending of billions of tax payer dollars to bail out the company he ran. Wonder if there are any other politicians that are involved with Goldman. Let’s see!

• Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, and one of Obama’s go to guys
• Joshua Bolten, White House Chief of Staff under Bush
• Jon Corzine, who just lost his Governorship even after Obama stumped like hell for him
• George Herbert Walker IV, a Bush family member
• Robert Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State under Bush
• Oh, and there’s more, but I’m beginning to throw up in my mouth a little. You get the point.

Here are some great excerpts from a Wall Street Journal article this morning. I’m so frustated, I don’t even have comments on it. Just take notice of the bold areas.

Since regular mammography became standard practice in the early 1990s, mortality from breast cancer—the second leading cause of cancer death among American women—has dropped by about 30%, after remaining constant for the prior half-century. But this week the 16-member task force ruled that patients under 50 or over 75 without special risk factors no longer need screening.

So what changed? Nothing substantial in the clinical evidence. But the panel—which includes no oncologists and radiologists, who best know the medical literature—did decide to re-analyze the data with health-care spending as a core concern.

The task force concedes that the benefits of early detection are the same for all women. But according to its review, because there are fewer cases of breast cancer in younger women, it takes 1,904 screenings of women in their 40s to save one life and only 1,339 screenings to do the same among women in their 50s. It therefore concludes that the tests for the first group aren’t valuable, while also noting that screening younger women results in more false positives that lead to unnecessary (but only in retrospect) follow-up tests or biopsies.

Of course, this calculation doesn’t consider that at least 40% of the patient years of life saved by screening are among women under 50. That’s a lot of women, even by the terms of the panel’s own statistical abstractions. To put it another way, 665 additional mammograms are more expensive in the aggregate. But at the individual level they are immeasurably valuable, especially if you happen to be the woman whose life is saved.

The recommendation to cut off all screening in women over 75 is equally as myopic. The committee notes that the benefits of screening “occur only several years after the actual screening test, whereas the percentage of women who survive long enough to benefit decreases with age.” It adds that “women of this age are at much greater risk for dying of other conditions that would not be affected by breast cancer screening.” In other words, grandma is probably going to die anyway, so why waste the money to reduce the chances that she dies of a leading cause of death among elderly women?

…every Democratic version of ObamaCare makes this task force an arbiter of the benefits that private insurers will be required to cover as they are converted into government contractors. What are now merely recommendations will become de facto rules, and under national health care these kinds of cost analyses will inevitably become more common as government decides where finite tax dollars are allowed to go.

More spending on “prevention” has long been the cry of health reformers, and President Obama has been especially forceful. In his health speech to Congress in September, the President made a point of emphasizing “routine checkups and preventative care, like mammograms and colonoscopies—because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.”

It turns out that there is, in fact, a reason: Screening for breast cancer will cost the government too much money, even if it saves lives.

via Mammograms Provide Preview of ObamaCare – WSJ.com.

You can pretty much say goodbye to the days of ever increasing advances with the internet. Everyday there are more and more articles about government involvement. Eventually the debate will switch from should they be involved, to which policy is best. Once that happens, you are back to the “head or gut” question.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission began to lay the groundwork for a bigger federal role in the broadband business Wednesday, outlining the hurdles the U.S. needs to overcome to improve the availability of high-speed Internet access.

The FCC identified a number of issues the government should address, including the high cost of laying new broadband lines in rural areas, a lack of airwaves for wireless Web access and ill-informed consumers.

“This focus on broadband is a reflection of a recognition that the U.S. is lagging behind,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Wednesday at the agency’s monthly meeting.

The FCC is drafting a National Broadband Plan, which will lay out ways the government can improve broadband service in the U.S. The plan is scheduled to come out in February, and it’s uncertain how many of its suggestions will ultimately be adopted. Already, some big cable and telecommunications companies are concerned the agency wants to impose rules that could undermine their business strategies and profitability.

via Bigger U.S. Role in Broadband Is Likely – WSJ.com.

Why is this such a big damn issue? No one in the public is demanding it. The government is going to tell us why we are lacking broadband?

Notice one issue they claim is the cost of laying new line in rural areas. So the rest of us who live in more populated areas have to pay for someone’s internet who decides to live out in the boonies. That’s just great. More of the majority paying for the minority. Besides, satellite already delivers this, but this is the problem when the government looks at a “problem”. It’s not that they don’t have the ability to get internet, it’s that they don’t have it by means of cables under the ground. You always get a misidentification of the problem (in this case there is no problem) when you have central planning. Satellite used to be fast only on download, and it was still dialup for the upload. Now you have it fast in both directions. This is what is called innovation. But you can’t have that. We all need it by wire.

Next is the lack of airwares for wireless. In this case, just as all cases where the government controls something, you have scarcity created by the government. If the airwaves were owned or handled by the private sector, they would be used for their best use. If people were demanding more airwaves for wireless, then it would happen. Instead politics is entering into it (PBS is not happy about it).

Next, the government falls back to it’s default position. The people are just too stupid to know what’s good for them. The people are too dumb to realize they don’t need 100mbs broadband to every house like Japan has. Who cares if Japan has 100mbs to every house. Are they better off than us overall because of it? Are we harmed by only having 20mbs, when we decide that is all we need at the cost that it’s delivered at? My 93 year old grandma shouldn’t have her phone bill raised when she doesn’t even know what the internet is.

We are told we are lagging behind. This is just like the “keep up with the Jones” mentality of the consumer. It’s not that we truly need 100mbs broad band. It’s that someone else has it. It’s not fair. Didn’t we learn our lesson over the past decade with this mentality? Again, I say, why do we think things are so different at a governmental level than they are on a personal level. If keeping up with the Jones is bad personally, it is bad governmentally.

The government is creating an illusion of lack of supply. If there was more demand and not enough supply, prices of broadband would be increasing. As we all know, broadband is constantly decreasing in prices. Thanks to the free market and technological innovation, supply is increasing faster than demand. When that happens, prices go down, as they have. So, why are we even looking at this? We’ve already established we have more supply than demand. Who is benefiting from this? Could it be some of the big businesses that bought and paid for your politicians? Could it be Big Brother? It sure in the hell isn’t you. You aren’t even demanding it.

In case you missed it, yesterday, housing starts fell by 10.6%. Of course all the articles about it had some excuse, and how government was addressing it.

The U.S. housing market is sputtering again, adding to doubts about the vigor of the economic recovery.

Just a few months after housing showed signs of leveling off, bad weather and uncertainty over the extension of a home-buyer tax credit sent new-home starts in October tumbling 10.6% from the previous month. They fell to the lowest level since April, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Starts of single-family houses fell 6.8%.

Earlier this month, Congress expanded the tax credit and extended it through April, so building should improve. Still, the latest data portend poorly for the economy overall, and for fourth-quarter …

via Fear of Double Dip in Housing – WSJ.com.

Is this idiotic or what? We created a bubble by pushing so called affordable housing with government policies and “free money” via the Fed. “Everyone should be a homeowner” was the slogan of the day. So, as the bubble is deflating, instead of letting it deflate naturally so we can quickly get past it, we are prolonging it. We don’t want the quick fast pain of a bursting bubble, so we spend money, which only prolongs and delays the bursting and leaves us further in debt as a nation.

The government is creating speculation by people making their decisions based on if and when the government is going to extent a tax credit. This is why you have speculators. The government is giving them something to speculate about. This blurb even says that now that the tax credit passed, building should improve. OK, so what happens when it expires? Do people stop building? Do we pass another tax credit? We just keep going further in debt as a country trying to minimize the pain of our past mistakes all the while making new mistakes.

Think about this on a personal level. While tax credits and policy seems very impersonal, what is taking place is government is taking by force our money in order to give it to people they want buying a home. Is this moral? Why shouldn’t you be able to keep your own money and decide what you want to do with it. Maybe you’d decide to buy a home if you had more money.

This morning on Morning Joe, they had on NBC’s medical expert to discuss the government’s medical panel’s recommendation that women should wait till they’re 50 for mammograms, and then only get them every two years.

So the death panels are not real? This is your death panel. If government controls health care, either this task force or some other central planning board will decide these type of issues based on cost. No panel can be independent when it is funded by the government. Also, their answer has to have a question. What was the question? Who posed the questions, and why? If I tell my wife, we need to cut our coffee budget by $50 a month, she is going to look and say, “well we really don’t need to have a cup of coffee after lunch, so I’d say we only have coffee in the morning going forward. That should reduce our cost.” This is similar to how this is being decided. We only have so much money for health care (thanks to the government), so do we really need to start mammograms at 40? Is the extra cost worth the saved lives? Under government controlled health care, the value of your life will be determined by these boards, or as Sarah Palin correctly called them, death panels.

I love how this lady starts putting down the Susan G. Komen charity.  Apparently, she doesn’t know what freedom is all about. No one is forcing people to donate time and money to this charity. People who have been touched by breast cancer donate to fight breast cancer. This is what real compassion is all about. Of course, that is great until it interferes with government policy. Now, she decides to turn it into greed.

Next, she says, (paraphrasing) “This is rationing. We ration food, sleep, etc.” Yes that is true, but we ration it based on our own personal choices and needs. The government does not force rationing. We decide what foods we want based on the money we have and the need we want to fulfill. This is how the free market works, and why you don’t need a government agency telling you how often you can eat meat (oh this did happen when the government controlled the economy during WWII). Only government creates unnecessary rationing.

When talking about rationing, she says, “Let’s take money to invest in ‘new treatment tools’” OK, this is silly. Treatment only matters if you are identified first, so they don’t do you any good if you aren’t getting tested. Also, who is the government to decide where money should be invested. If there is demand for mammograms by women, then it should be up to the woman and the doctor where that money should be invested. Are we to believe that companies aren’t investing in new technologies when there are so many people touched by breast cancer and so much money flooding into fighting breast cancer? If there is a need, the market will meet it.

But to her, this is “smart health care rationing”. I’m sure the Soviets and the Chinese thought they were doing smart rationing as well when tens of millions died of starvation. The problem is you can’t have a person or group of people who aren’t party to the transaction being the decider of rationing. Rationing is done by consumers and suppliers based on needs and pricing.

You have to love how compassionate she is about it though. It only saves 1 out of 2000 she says.  I guess one person doesn’t count. Joe has a great point. If that’s your relative, you don’t care if it’s only one out of two million. Also, this is voluntary. If it saves only one in 500,000, who cares as long as people want to get mammograms and doctors are willing to provide the service. Oh wait, that’s right. It is against the public good once government takes over health care. Also, what they are saying is confusing. It isn’t one life is saved out of 2000. It is one person is identified out of 2000 to have cancer. That does not sound too bad to me. Hopefully, it will eventually be only one out of 10,000. This has to be one of the most stupid reasons for not having mammograms. “Not enough people have cancer, so we shouldn’t check.” The government doesn’t mind when the poor spends hundreds of dollars per month on the lottery when their chances are one in millions. Oh, but that benefits the government . Never mind.

Then she talks about we don’t scan for these other things till 50 like colon and prostate cancer. So what. Could that be because those don’t normally occur till 50, and because maybe men just aren’t as prudent about things like that?

Next she delves off into the sex and the breast. I have no clue what that has to do with whether it’s worth having mammograms that catch cancer early, so I’ll just skip past it before I start blushing.

As with all media, there is no question as to whether the government should even have a role or say in this. Joe Scarborough says “We’ve been able to afford these fiscally(that means government money) in the past, and we just can’t anymore.” I’m sure glad he’s a Republican. He doesn’t even understand the market and that government is creating this shortage. Nor does he realize this is a free society, and the government should have nothing to do with these decisions.

As with all consumer purchases, this is not the place for the government to be involved. It should be up to a woman and her doctor. If a woman wants to get mammograms at 40 and every year, that should be her perogative. This is what I’ve been saying in all my post. If you ask the government to give you something, you give up your liberty. Ask them to pay for your health care, and you give up your right to have  your mammogram.

So, I wonder what’s next?

An article in the Wall Street Journal discussing jail time if you don’t buy health insurance.

The notion of imprisonment has its origins in the bill’s requirement that most Americans must get health insurance, with the help of government subsidies if necessary, or pay a special income tax of up to 2.5%. If someone refuses to get insurance and refuses to pay the tax, that person would be guilty of tax evasion. Criminal penalties for willful tax evasion, which are pursued in rare cases, include a fine of as much as $250,000 and up to five years in prison for the most egregious cases, Republicans point out.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.) said on the House floor that this means the health overhaul comes with handcuffs. “Now, I am not talking about figurative handcuffs,” he added. “If you don’t comply with the individual mandate, what happens to you? You can be subject to five years in prison and you can be subject to a quarter of a million dollars in fines.”

Supporters of the health overhaul say this is a distortion and prosecutors don’t pursue criminal penalties for tax evasion except in drastic cases. “It’s like saying you could be jailed for jaywalking,” said Rep. Robert Andrews (D., N.J.).

via Coverage Mandate Under Fire – WSJ.com.

So there you have it. Don’t worry about jail time. You can rely on the Government to only use it in “drastic cases”. Who decides what’s drastic? Also, just because you don’t get sent to jail doesn’t mean you are free? The IRS would inflict high penalties on you, and ultimately could confiscate your property and your bank account. Oh but don’t worry. You still live in a “free” country.

Well, the scam is up, and the Democrats know it. TARP and stimulus have had no effect on creating jobs. So if government didn’t work the first time, I guess they just didn’t do enough.

The House of Representatives is pushing a bill aimed at boosting employment, a potentially risky move that underscores Democrats’ fears about the economy and jobs — including their own as they head into an election year.

Elements of such a bill could run the gamut from infrastructure spending to small-business lending to extra aid for states and the unemployed, lawmakers said. Democratic leaders haven’t determined any specifics — including the politically dicey question of how to pay for it.

The beauty of the free market is you don’t have to pay for it. Get the government the hell out of the economy, and jobs will be created. Oh, and we won’ t have to pay for it. This one line underscores the idiocy of the government. Infrastructure spending is not going to create long term jobs. It also does nothing but reduce wealth, just as all central planning of the economy does. Ask Russia. Lending to small business isn’t going to create jobs either. If the economy is a disaster thanks to government, why would small businesses borrow money. Who are they producing for? Of course the government’s solution to this disasterous credit bubble is to offer more credit. Lastly, what the hell is extra aid to states going to do for jobs. There was extra aid to states with the last stimulus bill. It did absolutely nothing. It’s just moving money from the Federal government to the state government, both of which are out of control.

Among ideas floated Tuesday by Democratic leaders were using bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and a tax on Wall Street firms’ financial transactions, such as derivatives trades.

“Hey, trust me.” says the government. We only lied to you about needing the $750 billion by the weekend to bailout Wall Street. Low and behold we have tons of the money still sitting around waiting for us to play God with.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who runs the House Democrats’ campaign effort, said lawmakers were aiming for a six-year infrastructure bill that also could include energy-related investment.

Energy related investment? You mean a GE payoff? Energy companies will invest themselves if it makes economic sense. If it doesn’t make economic sense, and the government decides to do it, that means we’ve basically had our standard of living reduced. If solar power, for example, doesn’t produce a good ROI, it doesn’t matter who is paying for it. No matter what it’s not a good ROI and in this case, the tax payer is funding this bad investment.

Mr. Van Hollen, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said lawmakers also might consider a payroll-tax holiday — a short-term break on Social Security and Medicare taxes to boost private-sector hiring. He said that might be an alternative to an employer tax credit for new hires, an idea that critics say is fraught with enforcement problems.

Hahaha. So the solution to creating jobs is a payroll-tax holiday? Social security and medicare are both bankrupt, but taking money from them is a good idea. If it’s such a good idea, and this is what is hampering the job market, let’s ditch it for good. This is just stupid. While I would love to see these taxes go, a temporary holiday isn’t going to trick an intelligent business person into hiring. If that reduction in cost is temporary, so is the position.

The White House didn’t comment on the developments. President Barack Obama announced a jobs summit for early December and the administration is likely to weigh in with its own recommendations.

Please President Obama. Give us your wise recommendations. They have benefited us so much so far.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said he hoped to bring the bill to the House floor by mid-December, giving rank-and-file lawmakers a chance to vote just before the start of the 2010 election season, when control of Congress will be up for grabs.

“Clearly, 10.2% unemployment is unacceptable and is causing great pain to literally millions of people around the country,” Mr. Hoyer said.

This is so important that we need to wait till the political season begins, so politicians can take complete advantage of the politics of it.

House lawmakers hope the Senate also will act before the end of the year. Senate leaders said late Tuesday, they planned to tackle the issue only after completing the health-care overhaul. Sparring over the jobs legislation could last for many weeks beyond that.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put pressure on Congress to act Tuesday when he rolled out a proposal putting heavy emphasis on government spending on infrastructure, including schools, as well as a new round of aid to states and local governments to forestall layoffs.

Let’s have a guy who never started a business and only loots business owners tell us how to create jobs. The only form of job creation the AFL-CIO knows is pummeling private businesses into the ground until they aren’t competitive, and then costing many jobs.

Rep. John Larson (D., Conn.), the House Democratic caucus chairman, said he believed House Democrats would have to offset the bill’s cost, at least in part, to answer concerns about the soaring federal budget deficit. The government is expected to run a $1.4 trillion deficit in fiscal 2010, which began on Oct. 1. Democrats are likely to delay the effective date of new taxes until the recession is over.

Another possible revenue source is taxes on Internet gaming.

Mr. Larson, who as the House Democratic caucus chairman pays close attention to rank-and-file members’ attitudes, said there was growing momentum for a tax on some Wall Street trading.

There you go. Tax Wall Street trading. That should boost the economy. Let’s tax capital that is used to fund business expansion and creation.

Leading Democrats in both chambers, including Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, have expressed reservations about a tax on financial transactions, out of concern it could drive trading offshore.

Wow, I actually can’t believe Barney Frank said this. So, he understands that this could drive trading offshore, and thus cost the government capital gains taxes, but for some reason he doesn’t see how massive business taxes and regulation drive businesses offshore.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) said he would support legislation that would further extend the jobless benefits program and boost infrastructure spending, including roads and bridges. The senator said such spending would not only create jobs but boost the efficiency of the U.S. economy. “We need to do much more, ” he said.

Hahaha, the government is going to boost the efficiency of the economy. Did I read that correctly? Also, extending jobless benefits even more. Now there is motivation to get off you butt and start working.

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R., Va.), said any bill that added to the deficit wouldn’t work. “They tried that approach once and failed,” Mr. Dayspring said.

Among the ideas for unused TARP funds are direct lending to small businesses, and funding of an infrastructure bank that would provide seed money for projects.

via House Leaders Push for Jobs Bill – WSJ.com.

I guess ultimately we get what we deserve. We elect these moronic bums to represent us, so we have no one to blame but ourselves. Who cares if their ideas don’t make sense. Who cares if your family is struggling financially, you wouldn’t believe spending more and borrowing more is the fix. This is the government. It’s different.

The Government is responding to who about the supposed lack of broadband? I don’t think I have heard one complaint from anyone about lack of internet access, but supposedly there is a serious injustice going on out there. Luckily for us Captain Government is here to fix it.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are considering whether the government should take greater control of the Internet and ask consumers to pay higher phone charges in order to provide all Americans with cheaper access to broadband Internet service.

The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday will lay out the case for expanding broadband Internet service, outlining current obstacles to making it widely available. The agency is considering whether to force Internet providers to share their networks with rivals and raise fees charged on consumer phone bills to pay for the broader access.

The proposals, which have sparked criticism from telecommunications and cable companies, represent a reversal from the Bush Administration, when regulators cut back on government control of Internet and telephone service.The new commission, controlled by Democrats, is considering whether more government control is needed to ensure competition and more affordable Internet service.

via Feds Mull Rules, Fees to Spur Net Access – WSJ.com

I’m pretty sure the free market has done a great job expanding broadband access without government intervention. Not that long ago, I remember having dial up. Then I got cable with 400k download speeds. Then cable gave 1mb, then 2mb, then 6mb, and now Verizon has jumped in, and you can get 20mb for $60/month. Are you telling me competition isn’t working?

Also, because of competition, you have different levels of service to fit your budget. You can get DSL from Verizon for $15 month. Granted, the speed is slower than other plans, but it’s still light years ahead of dialup and fits the needs of many consumers.

So government is going to increase competition by forcing people to pay more for phone service. Does this sound like competition, or does it sound like a tax? Many people don’t even have regular phones anymore. That’s the beauty of the internet. You can ditch your old phone for a free or extremely cheap phone service. So, how is the government going to make those who use something like Skype for their phone pay increased phone rates? Are they going to force you to have a phone service like they are going to force you to have health insurance?

Democrats say that they want more affordable internet service. Are you serious? There are even free dialup services out there now. What they want is everyone to have the same exact service despite what consumers decide they need. This does not help competition, and it sure doesn’t incentivize providers to innovate and consumers to make wise decisions. This will be the beginning of the end for the internet revolution.

Well, one must ask why is the government pushing this if there doesn’t even seem to be a problem? Could it have something to do with controlling you? Maybe the smart grid? The smart grid is just one entry way for the government to step into your house. There will be more. Once everyone has broadband, it will be easy to put new monitoring and control measures in place. Think the government isn’t already spying on your internet usage?

We used to believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We gave up the right to life with abortion. Conscription also says you don’t have a right to your life. While we don’t have it now, there have been talks of it, whether it be a draft or mandatory “National Service”. We gave up the pursuit of happiness, because it’s not fair that your are achieving happiness while someone else isn’t. All along we’ve been giving up liberty.

We’ve replaced those rights, with the right to health care, welfare, education and now broadband. Americans better wake up. We have not cracked the code of building a righteous government, and history has shown how all societys progress from limited governments to tyranny. There is a reason civilizations never last, and we are about to find out why this one won’t either.