Commentary: The Fully Inept Tackle Health Care

by Ralph R. Reiland

December 28, 2009

As I’m writing this, they’re in a panic in Congress, voting in the wee hours, bribing reluctant senators with millions in slush funds for their respective states, all to ram through a health reform bill that few if any of the lawmakers have even read, let alone intellectually reflected upon or debated.

They’ve already lost the public. In the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, support for the Democrats’ health reform bills has dropped to 32 percent. In the latest CNN poll, the public is opposed to the Democrats’ health reforms by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

“Democrats are on a political suicide mission,” writes Megan McArdle, economics writer at The Atlantic magazine’s blog. “At this point, the thing is more than a little inexplicable,” McArdle asserts, speaking of the unpopularity of the legislation and the subsequent likelihood that Democrats will lose seats in both the House and Senate in next year’s elections.

“No bill this large has ever passed on a straight party-line vote, or even anything close to a straight party-line vote,” writes McArdle. “No bill this unpopular has ever passed on a straight party-line vote.”

The Democrats’ suicide mission is the result of their defining America’s health care system as “broken,” a system in such “crisis” that nothing short of an immediate and complete overhaul is required, a task, unfortunately, that’s beyond the skill levels of Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, described the strategy for power grabbing early on: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

To get the “crisis” rolling so nothing short of a full restructuring is required, pharmaceutical companies, health equipment suppliers, hospitals and health insurance firms were painted as greedy profiteers, while Obama charged that doctors were taking out tonsils for money instead of simply handing out inexpensive allergy medicines.

“Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions on the fee payment schedule that’s out there,” declared Obama in a prime-time news conference. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

Added the president, talking alleged “sense” about America’s supposed threat from predatory physicians, “I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change -- maybe they have allergies.”

What’s missing from Obama’s teleprompter is the fact that 63 percent of men and 66 percent of women in the U.S. survive in excess of five years after being diagnosed with cancer, versus 45 percent of men and 53 percent of women who make it five years after diagnosis of cancer in Great Britain’s government-run system.

Also getting the silent treatment is the leading role that American companies and researchers play worldwide in health innovations. “Eighteen of the last 25 winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine are either U.S. citizens or work here,” explained the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner in Senate testimony on September 30, 2009, while “U.S. companies have developed half of all new major medicines introduced worldwide over the past 20 years.”

And so now the politicians, essentially inept, are all set to fix what they know next to nothing about.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Commentary: A Greenie Christmas?

by Ralph R. Reiland

December 21, 2009

This is a tough time of year for eco-friendly global planners.

In Copenhagen, they tried to put together a deal to save the world's forests while we rode around with millions of Christmas trees tied to our car roofs.

Among the ruses that came out of Copenhagen, they called on rich countries to pay poor countries to not cut down their trees.

In other tree news, Alternative Consumer magazine says we should stop buying Christmas trees and just draw holiday trees on old shopping bags. Here's the green prescription from Alternative Consumer for family fun during the holidays and how the tree should look for the kids on Christmas morning:

"No tree. No driving to the tree lot, watching them saw the tree down, wrapping it in plastic and then driving back home. No driving to Target, buying a plastic tree and driving home. We make a tree mural out of shopping bags and leave a few Sharpies around to decorate with. It's personal, meaningful and 100 percent recycled."

Well, not 100 percent, unless the family went Dumpster diving for some used Sharpies.

Imagine growing up in a house like that and not turning into a guilt-ridden psycho. I say cut down the trees and save the kids from developing a mixed bag of anti-social personality disorders --- things like excessive fear, envy, arrogance, pessimism and an anti-capitalist, anti-American ethos.

"The Rules" in Alternative Consumer for "A Freegan Christmas" include the following: (1) "No cards. Not even e-cards." (2) "No wrapping paper. There's something exciting about opening a wrapped gift, and you can achieve that by putting it in a paper bag -- we all know you have a billion under your sink." (3) "No thank-you cards." (4) "No holiday hams. French toast can replace tired turkey and ham dinners." (5) "No stress."

Maybe it's me, but it seems stressful to get a piece of French toast for dinner and think you're going to kill the planet if you don't wrap presents in old bags or don't just draw your Christmas tree on an old shopping bag with whatever Sharpie colors you can scrounge up from the kitchen drawers without spending a dime.

The problem with live Christmas trees, says Ohio State economics professor Brent Sohngen, is that profit-seeking landowners in the U.S. are knocking down stands of carbon-retaining hardwoods in order to increase the number of less-carbon-retaining pine plantations, increasing carbon dioxide levels, a greenhouse gas.

Sohngen estimates that 10 million acres in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana will be switched from hardwood forests to pine plantations (for lumber and the holidays) in the next 20 years, adding 700,000 tons more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year.

Fake Christmas trees from China (85 percent of the artificial trees in U.S. stores are produced in China) are also not politically correct. Alleged carcinogens are said to be generated during production, polluting the disproportionately poor who live near China's factory sites as well as the workers inside the factories, none of whom are paying members of the SEIU, the pro-collectivist Service Employees International Union.

Down under, the Australian Conservation Foundation estimates that the extra clothes and books that Australian consumers buy during the Christmas season add some 720,000 tons and 430,000 tons, respectively, in greenhouse pollution to the atmosphere per year.

The answer? One kid per family, no pets, no blinking Rudolphs from China --- and French toast for dinner, made, naturally, with eggs from only free range chickens.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Commentary: Alarmists Running Hot and Cold

by Ralph R. Reiland

December 16, 2009

Our dreadful destiny was that we were either going to starve to death or be buried by advancing glaciers in a new Ice Age.

The alleged villain was global cooling, coming faster than anyone had predicted. It wouldn’t be all that long before polar bears would be rummaging through the aisles of Macy’s in Manhattan.

That was the dire warning by Newsweek’s science editor, Peter Gwynne, in the magazine’s April 28, 1975, issue.

“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production --- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth,” explained Gwynne. “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now,” i.e., 1985.

In fact, the opposite occurred. World food output and per capita world food production both increased steadily in the decades before and after Gwynne’s prophecy of drastic food scarcities.

Gwynne cited top climate experts to support his premise of global cooling: “A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.”

Interestingly, the aforementioned era of alleged global cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, 1945 to 1968, is the exact period that saw unprecedented increases in overall manufacturing in the Northern Hemisphere and, in particular, huge increases in the number of motor vehicles on the roads, as well as huge increases in the size of the fins on an ever-growing number of ever-lengthening Coupe de Villes.

It’s odd that no one at Harvard got a federal grant to study the obvious correlation between the sales of Cadillacs and the well-being of polar bears, the clear link between bigger fins, falling temperatures and more ice between 1945 and 1968.

In any case, Newsweek’s Gwynne saw an avalanche of evidence for global cooling and a quickly growing scientific consensus: “The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

On top of citing a report from the National Academy of Sciences about how temperature changes would “force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” Gwynne highlighted a professor who had figured out that we were already a sixth of the way to all becoming ice sculptures: “Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras --- and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.”

Gwynne additionally pointed to the increasingly frigid winters between 1600 and 1900 --- “years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.” And, funny, even with no Hummers at the malls to warm things up a bit, the ice on the Thames somehow just melted away.

Nearly a year before Newsweek’s ominous warning about global cooling, Time magazine was beating the same drum, running “Another Ice Age?” in its June 24, 1974, issue.

“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades,” reported Time. “The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassabdras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”

The evidence, said Time, was everywhere, “from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving armadillo from the Midwest.”

In addition to the traveling armadillos, reported Time, satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere showed that “the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12 percent in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.”

Time also saw evidence of planetary cooling in “the Midwest’s recent rash of disastrous tornadoes” and the expansion of “polar winds” and the subsequent “cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of Africa’s drought.”

The effect of all this could be “extremely serious, if not catastrophic,” Time warned. With global food outputs “sharply reduced” by way of droughts, we could well be headed for the non-sustainability of our species if things stayed on the same chilling track. Time quotes University of Toronto climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.”

So what’ll we do? Kill the cows and stop eating burgers because it’s getting too hot, or buy bigger Buicks because it’s getting too cold?

Obama’s answer on the campaign trail was that we should buy the warming premise, buckle to foreign opinion, trade in our comfortable cars for nerd mobiles, keep our homes hotter in the summer and colder in the winter, cut out ice cream and start replacing strip steaks with tofu.

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times,” he stated, “and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

I’d say the first step is to get the data right and forget about what the French or Chinese think about what we’re driving or eating.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Hot Link: Nassau County’s Political Earthquake

December 14, 2009

Raymond J. Keating has another opinion piece in the New York Post titled “Nassau’s Earthquake.” The piece starts out:

Ten years ago, an earthquake shook Long Island politics: Republicans lost control of the Nassau County Legislature. Two years later, Democrat Tom Suozzi won the county executive seat. Last month, another political earthquake swept the GOP back into power -- surprising most everyone, Republicans included. But to maintain their new power, Nassau Republicans must make a positive, substantive difference for overburdened taxpayers. ...

To read the rest of this article, go here.

Hot Link: New York’s Job-Killing Climate

December 11, 2009

Raymond J. Keating has an opinion piece in today’s New York Post titled “New York’s Job-Killing Climate.” The piece starts out:

IT'S no secret what drives innovation, economic growth and job creation forward: It's entrepreneurs and investors taking risks and starting up, investing in and building businesses.

New York policymakers often talk a good game about all this -- but over the years they've worked hard to make the state one of the most inhospitable places in the nation to invest and do business. …

To read the rest of this article, go here.

Commentary: Botched Year One for Obama

by John LeBoutillier

December 10, 2009

The latest Gallup Survey showing President Obama’s approval rating at 47% is indicative of something: once the media-induced honeymoon ended, it has been a steady decline for this rookie, in-over-his-head executive neophyte.

Just look at the graph from pollster.com - a compilation of dozens of polls - of his approval/disapproval ratings during the year since his election. Go to:

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php

It is indeed a steadily declining approval rate - and a correspondingly increasing disapproval rate.

Obama has mismanaged his first year so horribly that he might not ever be able to get himself back to his honeymoon highs - the mid 70’s in some polls.

He has:

1) Veered Left on Federal spending and bailouts; thus the deficits are exploding;

2) Lurched way Left on bringing the 9/11 terrorists to NYC;

3) Totally mismanaged the health care debate - to the point where he has devoted seven months to something - and then last night settled for the removal of the troublesome “public option” - that he could have had with bi-partisan support last June!

4) Dithered on Afghanistan - and then given a speech last week that has confused us all - probably including the Taliban! And then Secretaries Gates and Clinton have subtly changed the timeline since the West Point speech to indicate we will be in Afghanistan for perhaps 5 more years.

5) Seemed to be standing by while the economy - and the jobs situation - has deteriorated. None of his “cures” are seen as working. Thus talk of yet another stimulus. But Obama is seen now as behind the eight ball on the economy - primarily because he has only been talking Health Care for seven months!

5A) The Jobs Summit was a total PR farce - and hurt him even more. That was a sham - all for show - and demonstrates that Team Obama is just paying lip service to this crucial problem.

6) Copenhagen and the Global Warming Issue are seen as another sop to the Left - not as something vital to the economic survival of the country.

7) Make no mistake about it: we are at a critical time in this nation: a political vacuum, a deteriorating economic and global position and a President in-over-his-head.

8) 2010 will be a good year for the GOP. But it will be more an anti-Obama-Reid-Pelosi vote than a pro-GOP vote. The Republicans still need to get their act in gear. Being anti is OK for now, but in order to win in 2012 we will have to have a good, tight positive message.

9) Sarah Palin is sucking all the oxygen away from any other GOP presidential candidates. Romney, Pawlenty and the others are getting nowhere - as of now - as long as she is on stage.

10) Many things will change by 2012. Whoever is up today, will be down - and vice versa. That’s how it works.

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John LeBoutillier is a former member of Congress from Long Island, and is the author of Harvard Hates America.

Hofstra, Football and the Point of Higher Education

by Raymond J. Keating

December 8, 2009

The best education is a well-rounded one. That is, educating mind, body and soul.

For many institutions of higher education – even a hefty number still affiliated in some way to church bodies – the soul part of that equation has been lost. Indeed, colleges and universities that still help in educating the soul are rare treasures in the early twenty-first century.

That leaves mind and body for most in academia.

Hofstra University made a splash when announcing on December 3 that it was dropping its football program. Collegiate football had been played at Hofstra since 1937, and in 1991, Hofstra football jumped from Division III to Division I-AA.

Unfortunately, for many schools, Division I-AA can be collegiate football’s version of purgatory. That was the case with Hofstra. Attendance and interest were minimal, while the annual net cost of the program was $4.5 million.

Hofstra decided to reallocate those dollars to academics, while still competing in 17 other intercollegiate Division I sports.

Is this the right decision for the university?

In an open letter, Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz wrote: “This strategic decision to reallocate resources is based on our academic mission and priorities, and our vision of attaining recognition as one of our nation’s leading universities. Investment in academic initiatives and need-based scholarships is warranted for the long term benefit of our students and the University community. Simply stated, academic excellence has been and will continue to be our highest priority.”

Well, it’s pretty hard to argue with the pursuit of academic excellence.

Collegiate sports can be a positive learning experience. They also can help a school financially. But when done improperly – not that this was the case with Hofstra football – they can be an academic drain if athletes who are not really students replace students who happen to be athletes. That is too often the case with some schools having big time sports programs that are not really part of any education process, but instead simply serve as minor league systems for the NFL or NBA.

Colleges and universities first and foremost are about educating the mind. Hofstra made a decision to cuts its losses on a football program that was not advancing its overall mission, and to shift resources in a way that will further build up the university. That was a bold choice, and the right one in the tradition of what it means to be an institution of higher learning.

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Raymond J. Keating is the publisher and editor of Keating Reports and the Long Island Sentinel. He can be reached at keatingreports@aol.com.

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