Category Archives: Government
ObamaCare Subsidy for Congress
You get an ObamaCare subsidy if you make less than 40% of the poverty level. The poverty level bar is lower for persons of Congress. They make $174,000 and get and still get a subsidy.
When the Affordable Care act was being passed late in the night, Republican Senator Charles Grassley got members of Congress to agree to go to the exchanges, just like everyone else, to buy health care.
Except the political class isn’t like everyone else. They get gold-plated coverage mostly paid for by the government. Grassley’s plan meant they would now be liable for thousands of dollars in out of pocket expenses.
Congress Gets Its Subsidy
Well, the political class takes care of its own and President Obama got the Office of Personal Management to restore the subsidy. You’d think Republicans would raise a stink about this and try to blame Obama for shutting down the government in order to save subsidies for politicians.
But we didn’t hear that so much. The reason, according to Forbes, is that it was Speaker Boehner, working behind the scenes, who pushed Obama to push to restore the subsidies.
Update: Michael Tanner of Cato Institute points out that 780 companies and 451 unions have received exemptions from ObamaCare.
House Republicans offered an amendment to strip out the ObamaCare subsidy for Congress but the Senate refused to bring it to a vote.
Unions and Obamacare
Unions have found that ObamaCare will cost them money and possibly membership.
Charles Lane, in the Washington Post, points out that unions negotiate “Cadillac” health coverage as a primary service to their members. Under the Affordable Care Act those plans get hit with a 40% excise tax.
So, while Big Business gets waived from the “employer mandate”, Big Labor gets nothing.
Unions Left Out
Don’t know why the Republicans haven’t jumped on this, but they should at least be pleased to learn that Obama’s not a socialist.
Won’t Negotiate
The president won’t negotiate. He issues executive orders. He grants waivers of the employer mandate to big business. He gives a special subsidy to the political class for health care. But he won’t negotiate.
Harry Reid, Obama, and others like to say that ObamaCare is the law of the land and can’t be changed. Isn’t the debt ceiling also the law of the land.? They want that changed.
Negotiate This
I thought negotiation was what politicians do. How is it that when the government shuts down, it’s not the fault of the guy who won’t negotiate.
Bernanke’s Economy
Bad news for the economy is good news for Wall Street these days.
Yesterday Bernanke announced it was too early to taper off on his greenback spinning wheel. He’ll continue to pump $85 billion per month into the sluggish economy through quantitative easing. The magic money is conjured up when the Fed buys Treasuries and mortgage backed securities.
The sorcerers on Wall Street were pleased and stocks hit record highs.
Exceptional Exceptionalism
Putin wrote an op-ed in the NYT last week mocking Obama and the idea of American Exceptionalism. He scored bonus points because everyone knows Obama himself is not so wild about the idea. He thinks America is exceptional in the same way Britain and Greece are exceptional. Which is to say, not very. But that didn’t stop him last week from asking Americans to support an attack on Syrian president Assad – with something more than a pinprick, yet unbelievably small – because we are exceptional.
The abuse continued this week when a Russian minister claimed the Navy Ship Yard shooting was an example of American Exceptionalism.
Exceptional and Weird
Maureen Dowd had a few thoughts of her own about the president concerning the partisan speech he delivered while the shooting was still going on:
“The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore… Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.”
When the going gets tough the weird get going.
