Posts By Author » Phil Kerpen

The Government Can’t Be Trusted With Our Health
18 May 2013 12:03 am

“We have a large government,” political consultant David Axelrod offered as a plea of ignorance to all of the scandals swirling around his boss. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.” And yet, thanks to Axelrod and Obama, we now stand on the precipice of the largest expansion of government power in almost half a century: Obamacare, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Car e Act (PPACA).

PPACA massively expands and empowers the same IRS that …

Obama Agenda Undermines Medical Innovation
11 May 2013 12:03 am

Alzheimer’s Disease costs the U.S. economy over $200 billion per year, about $140 billion of which is a direct federal budgetary cost to Medicare and Medicaid. On our present course, this cost will quintuple to $1 trillion by 2050. It is the major driver up the steeply rising health care cost curve. Given this context, the most important question for health policy is not the green eyeshade question of who-pays-how-much that has come to dominate questions of health care policy in Washington, but rather: How do we maximize the incentives …

FCC Must Run Honest Auctions
4 May 2013 12:03 am

“America’s global leadership in mobile, and the strategic bandwidth advantage so many have worked hard to create, is being threatened by the looming spectrum crunch,” recently departed Federal Communications (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski said.

But while Genachowski asked Congress to authorize incentive auctions to free up spectrum, he also opposed language to require free and fair auctions to the highest bidder. Instead, he wanted the authority to micromanage auction rules to pick winner and losers, effectively handing spectrum to smaller players at below-market prices by excluding the largest carriers, AT&T and …

Obama’s FAA Harm Offensive
27 Apr 2013 12:03 am

If sequestration happens and nobody feels it, does it have a political impact? No, apparently; so two months into what we were told would be Armageddon, the Obama administration is launching a harm offensive, trying to punish the American people for suggesting Washington might modestly reduce federal spending. The weapon of choice? Furloughs of air-traffic controllers, deliberately imposing flight delays.

The corrupt media is largely falling into line, blaming “steep budget cuts” for the flight delays. But President Obama’s original FAA budget request for fiscal year 2013 was $15,146 million. Congress, …

NLRB Bill Key Test for the Senate
20 Apr 2013 12:03 am

On April 12, the House passed H. R. 1120, the Preventing Greater Uncertainty in Labor Management Relations Act, on a narrow 219 to 209 vote. The bill would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from taking any action that requires a quorum unless and until the Senate confirms new board members or the Supreme Court overturns the recent D.C. Circuit decision that found President Obama’s purported appointees to the board to be unconstitutional. The bill would not stop workers from petitioning for union elections or restrict NLRB regional offices …

Lobbyists versus Sick People
20 Apr 2013 12:03 am

What if you had to choose between making insurance more affordable for Americans with pre-existing conditions or funding lobbyists and political hacks? That’s the decision the House will face when it considers H.R. 1549, the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, sponsored by Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania. It should be an easy choice.
Earlier this month, Susan Zurface of Hillsboro, Ohio testified before Rep. Pitts’s health subcommittee.
“With my newly diagnosed illness, I was unable to find any health insurance coverage that would cost less than $350/month with a $10,000 deductible,” the …

Will Senate Democrats Really Cut the Death Tax?
6 Apr 2013 12:03 am

One of the most significant votes in the recent Senate budget vote-o-rama was on the federal death tax. Not the disappointingly predictable vote on full repeal, which just two Democrats supported, but the vote on an amendment offered by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia that created a deficit-neutral reserve fund for “the repeal or reduction of the estate tax.” It racked up 80 votes, including 35 Democrats. Zero Republicans and just 19 Democrats voted no. So the Senate has voted overwhelmingly to at least reduce the death tax. Good. It …

Repeal the Mandate Tax
30 Mar 2013 12:03 am

With over 2000 pages of legislative text and over 20,000 pages of regulations so far, most Americans can’t possibly know all the details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Fortunately for opponents of the law, however, the best known provision is also the most hated: the individual mandate, confirmed to be a tax by the United States Supreme Court. It should be repealed.
While awareness of many other Obamacare provisions has declined over the past three years, awareness of the mandate tax continues to climb. …

Obamacare is Crumbling
23 Mar 2013 12:03 am

Obamacare is falling apart before our eyes. The long-term care insurance program known as the CLASS ACT was deemed financially unworkable and shut down by the administration’s own actuaries. Taxpayer-funded health care cooperatives never got off the ground and were shut down in the fiscal cliff deal. Last month the federal Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan stopped accepting enrollment applications. This week 79 U.S. senators, including 34 Democrats, voted to repeal the law’s medical device tax. Premiums in the individual and small group markets could spike as much as 116 percent …

Carbon Tax Fight Looms
16 Mar 2013 12:03 am

The White House continues to inch closer to a carbon tax. In Obama’s first post-election press conference, he dodged the question. The next day his spokesman Jay Carney said: “We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one.” Great, but they don’t have to propose it. The proposals have now been made by Obama’s key allies. Senator Barbara Boxer, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee introduced a carbon tax bill with Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. On the House side, …

Medicare Needs More Competition, Not Less
9 Mar 2013 12:03 am

Senate Democrats are finally beginning the process of writing a budget after four years of dereliction. They will almost certainly include some changes to Medicare, the largest driver of federal spending and debt. But unfortunately, there are indications that they intend to focus on the small piece of Medicare (10.6 percent in 2012) that is actually working well: the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.
The drug companies cut a deal with the White House early in Obama’s first term to provide the funding for pro-Obamacare TV commercials and street organizing …

Government Spending Hurts People
2 Mar 2013 12:03 am

We should not accept the statist premise that most government spending helps people. Government spending is not just wasteful or inefficient, but all too often serves to crush the private economy and individual freedom.
In the coming days the media will provide a constant stream of purported victims of spending cuts. But for every victim of cuts there are victims of government spending itself. There are people who lost their businesses because of overzealous federal bureaucrats, who were trapped in dependency and despair by welfare programs, who were forced to pay …

What a Difference 50 Years Makes
15 Feb 2013 12:03 am

President Obama opened his State of the Union address with a quote from President John F. Kennedy: “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.” But Obama’s speech that followed and the agenda it advocated indicate he failed to study JFK’s famous 1963 State of the Union and its ambitious program of tax cuts and tax reform that successfully shifted the U.S. economy into high gear.
“The mere absence of recession is not growth,” Kennedy said. Words that ring even more true now, with the U.S. economy …

End the Bed Tax Scam
10 Feb 2013 12:02 am

Buried in Barack Obama’s budget (last year’s, of course, because this year’s is still late) is a common sense idea for health care savings that is worthy of broad bipartisan support and immediate action: an end to the so-called “bed taxes” Medicaid scam.
It goes like this: states tax hospitals (who happen to be begging to be taxed), use those funds to qualify for federal Medicaid funds, and then turn around and give the hospitals back the money – now legally laundered – and then some. The losers? All federal taxpayers, …

Obama’s Act of Constitutional Disobedience
3 Feb 2013 12:02 am

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals emphatically smacked down the crazy idea that the president has the power to make recess appointments while the Senate is not in recess.
“An interpretation of ‘the Recess’ that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the advice-and-consent requirement, giving the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely …

Dodd-Frank is an Unconstitutional Disaster
27 Jan 2013 12:02 am

In his first term, President Obama passed two of the most sweeping expansions of federal power in history. The first, his federal takeover of the health care system, narrowly survived at the Supreme Court thanks to the refashioning of its mandate into a tax by Chief Justice John Roberts. The second , his federal takeover of the financial system, may not fare as well.
That law, Dodd-Frank, is being challenged in State National Bank of Big Spring v. Geithner. The lead plaintiff is a community bank that has had several of …

No Budget, No Debt Ceiling Hike
20 Jan 2013 12:02 am

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama inserted a speech into the Congressional Record decrying the increase in the debt ceiling that President Bush was asking for. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t actually deliver the speech, because it would have been a real stem-winder.
“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” Obama said. “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I …

The Senate is the Problem
14 Jan 2013 12:04 am

The late night drama cast Senator Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden as heroes. They did what Obama and Boehner failed to do, come together on an agreement to limit the bite of the fiscal cliff’s tax hikes. That agreement led to bipartisan Senate action. But the appearance of the Senate coming to the rescue obscures the fact the Senate has recklessly refused to act for months, sitting on the House-passed bill to avert the tax hikes, H.R.8, for fully five months before jamming a massive amendment through when …

Googling Cronyism
13 Jan 2013 12:02 am

An impartial rule of law is one of the pillars of a free society, so the curious resolution of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe into alleged anti-competitive practice by Google should be cause for concern even for those of us who are skeptical of antitrust law.
The FTC investigated Google for nearly two years and concluded that it had engaged in abusive practices. The result? A letter from Google saying they won’t do it again. No lawsuit. No binding consent decree. This from an administration that is otherwise extremely hostile …

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