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York's Morning News
Thursday, May 17, 2012
6:10-6:15- Dan Holler, Communications Director of Heritage Action for America- TOPIC: Why Congress needs to vote against the Farm Bill, if they are really committed to limited government.
6:20-6:25- Dan Holler continued.
6:40-6:45- Eben Brown, Fox News Radio LIVE from Greensboro, NC- TOPIC: The John Edwards Case- Final Arguments Today-Jury gets case tomorrow!
7:10-7:15- Paul Bazell, HR Consultant- TOPIC: Healthcare for families tops $20,000 per year for families- Paul breaks it all down.
7:20-7:25- Paul Bazell continued.
7:40-7:45- Phil Ittner, Fox News Radio LIVE from London, UK- TOPIC: The Latest on the Greece Financial Crisis.
8:10-8:27- Dr. Terry Madonna, Franklin and Marshall Pollster- TOPIC: Is the Tea Party lying dormant? Waiting to erupt or sliding back into apathy?
8:40-8:51-"It's Your Turn to Make the Call !- Elise Viebeck , Staff Writer for "The Hill" Magazine- TOPIC: CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY DROPS STUDENT HEALTH INSURANCE, CITES OBAMACARE
A Catholic university in Ohio said Tuesday it is being forced to end a student health insurance pro gram over the Obama administration's contraception mandate and costs associated with other provisions of the health care overhaul. Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, said it has so far excluded contraceptive services and products from its health insurance policy for students and will not participate in a plan that "requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life." In its decision to drop coverage, the school cited the contraception mandate, but also a requirement that the maximum coverage amount be increased to $100,000 for policyholders -- claiming that would have made premiums skyrocket. A university official told Fox News Radio the students' basic $600 policy was going to double in cost in the fall and triple next year and that the school's insurance provider said the increases were the result of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "This is putting people in a position wher e they are having to choose between their faith and their morality, and now an unjust cost," said Mike Hernon, the school's vice president of advancement. "These sorts of regulations from the government are forcing our hand in a way that's really wrong."
Will Obamacare be President Obama's greatest failure?
A. Once again, unintended consequences lurks its ugly head!
6:10-6:15- Dan Holler, Communications Director of Heritage Action for America- TOPIC: Why Congress needs to vote against the Farm Bill, if they are really committed to limited government.
6:20-6:25- Dan Holler continued.
6:40-6:45- TBA
7:10-7:15- Paul Bazell, HR Consultant- TOPIC: Healthcare for families tops $20,000 per year for families- Paul breaks it all down.
7:20-7:25- Paul Bazell continued.
7:40-7:45- TBA
8:10-8:27- Dr. Terry Madonna, Franklin and Marshall Pollster- TOPIC: the Tea Party lying dormant? Waiting to erupt or sliding back into apathy?
8:40-8:51-"It's Your Turn to Make the Call !- TOPIC: TBA
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Read the Article Below:
Trustees Warn About Social Security Fiscal Picture
(Copied from the Wall Street Journal-4/23/12)
The trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds issued a fresh warning about the solvency of the programs on Monday.
(Note: The full WSJ article is now published.)
Here is some key data released by the trustees:
1) The Social Security Disability Insurance trust fund will exhaust its reserves in 2016, two years earlier than projected one year ago.
2) The Social Security trust fund that goes mainly to retirees will be exhausted in 2036, two years earlier than projected last year.
3) If the funds are combined, they would be exhausted in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year.
4) In 2011, 44.8 million received benefits from Social Security’s trust fund for retirees, compared with 43.8 million in 2010.
5) In 2011, 48.7 million people were covered by Medicare, up from 47.5 million in 2010. That means the program is covering on net an additional 100,000 Americans every month.
6) The trustees said the worsening picture for the Social Security trust funds was due to “updated economic data and assumptions.”
7) The ratio of workers paying taxes per Social Security beneficiary continued to fall. It will hit 2.8 workers per beneficiary in 2012, down from 3.4 in 2000.
Noonan: America's Crisis of Character
The nation seems to be on the wrong track, and not just economically.
By PEGGY NOONAN
People in politics talk about the right track/wrong track numbers as an indicator of public mood. This week Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we're on the right track as a nation. That's a historic low. Political professionals tend, understandably, to think it's all about the economy—unemployment, foreclosures, we're going in the wrong direction. I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.
Now I'd go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.
Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.
A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: "flash robs."
That's just the young, you say. Juvenile delinquency is as old as history.
Let's turn to adults.
Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore.
There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers.
The reason the story is news, and actually upsetting, is not that a government agency wasted money. That is not news. The reason it's news is that the people involved thought what they were doing was funny, and appropriate. In the past, bureaucratic misuse of taxpayer money was quiet. You needed investigators to find it, trace it, expose it. Now it's a big public joke. They held an awards show. They sang songs about the perks of a government job: "Brand new computer and underground parking and a corner office. . . . Love to the taxpayer. . . . I'll never be under OIG investigation." At the show, the singer was made Commissioner for a Day. "The hotel would like to talk to you about paying for the party that was held in the commissioner's suite last night" the emcee said. It got a big laugh.
On the "red carpet" leading into the event, GSA chief Jeffrey Neely said: "I am wearing an Armani." One worker said, "I have a talent for drinking Margarita. . . . It all began with the introduction of performance measures." That got a big laugh too.
All the workers looked affluent, satisfied. Only a generation ago, earnest, tidy government bureaucrats were spoofed as drudges and drones. Not anymore. Now they're way cool. Immature, selfish and vain, but way cool.
Their leaders didn't even pretend to have a sense of mission and responsibility. They reminded me of the story a year ago of the dizzy captain of a U.S. Navy ship who made off-color videos and played them for his crew. He wasn't interested in the burdens of leadership—the need to be the adult, the uncool one, the one who maintains standards. No one at GSA seemed interested in playing the part of the grown-up, either.
Why? Why did they think this is OK? They seemed mildly decadent. Or proudly decadent. In contrast to you, low, toiling taxpayer that you are, poor drudges and drones.
There is the Secret Service scandal. That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes.
What's terrible about this story is that for anyone who's ever seen the Secret Service up close it's impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best. That has been their reputation because that has been their reality. They have always been tough, disciplined and mature. They are men, and they have the most extraordinary job: take the bullet.
Remember when Reagan was shot? That was Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who stood there like a stone wall, and took one right in the gut. Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the car, and Mr. Parr was one steely-eyed agent. Reagan coughed up a little blood, and Mr. Parr immediately saw its color was a little too dark. He barked the order to change direction and get to the hospital, not the White House, and saved Reagan's life. From Robert Caro's "Passage of Power," on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, Nov. 22, 1963: "there was a sharp, cracking sound," and Youngblood, "whirling in his seat," grabbed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and threw him to the floor of the car, "shielding his body with his own."
In any presidential party, the Secret Service guys are the ones who are mature, who you can count on, who'll keep their heads. They have judgment, they're by the book unless they have to rewrite it on a second's notice. And they wore suits, like adults.
This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers.
They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles.
Special thanks to the person who invented casual Friday. Now it's casual everyday in America. But when you lower standards people don't decide to give you more, they give you less.
In New York the past week a big story has been about 16 public school teachers who can't be fired even though they've acted unprofessionally. What does "unprofessionally" mean in New York? Sex with students, stalking students, and, in one case, a standing behind a kid, simulating sex, and saying, "I'll show you what gay is."
The kids in the flash mobs: These are their teachers.
Finally, as this column goes to press, the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers. The soldier who brought the pictures to the Times told their veteran war correspondent, David Zucchino, that he was, in Zucchino's words, "very concerned about what he said was a breakdown in . . . discipline and professionalism" among the troops.
In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week.
The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.
Something seems to be going terribly wrong.
Maybe we have to stop and think about this.
Big Oil Profits Aren’t Excessive — Left's Rhetoric Is!
Energy Policy: One of the most effective arguments used against the oil industry is that it earns "excessive" profits that must be taxed away. But as with the rest of the left's failed energy agenda, it's based on pure falsehoods.
With prices for crude above $100 a barrel, it's no surprise the news media are fixated on oil companies' "record profits."
Predictably, Democrats and others on the left use rising profits to bludgeon "Big Oil" and push more subsidies for money-losing "green energy" schemes while working to raise taxes and kill subsidies for oil.
"When the price of oil goes up, prices at the pump go up, and so do these companies' profits," President Obama explained last week, calling for higher taxes on oil companies.
"Meanwhile," he added, "these companies pay a lower tax rate than most other companies on their investments — partly because we're giving them billions in tax giveaways every year."
A new attack ad for an Obama-linked political group excoriates the oil industry for its "record profits and ... billions in special tax breaks."
On closer inspection, those profits turn out to be nothing special. Government policies have driven up the price of oil, which has boosted oil companies' total profits. But their profit margins — the best measure of industry profitability — remain modest.
As of the third quarter of last year, the oil industry earned just 6.7 cents per dollar of revenue, less than the average for all manufacturing of 9.2 cents (see chart).
This year, even after a spike in prices, the oil industry ranks 90th in profitability out of 215 industry groups. "Big Oil"? How about "Just Average Oil"?
This is just one of the tricks used by the left to tar the industry, which employs 9.2 million people and accounts for 7.7% of the total U.S. economy.
As for "billions in subsidies" — oil gets $4 billion a year, a drop in a very large bucket, and far less than the $29 billion-plus a year for so-called alternative energy.
Hit the oil industry with higher taxes and punish them with regulations — as the Obama administration proposes to do — and you will hurt economic growth and kill potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Further, Obama's charge that oil companies pay "a lower tax rate" than "most other companies" is simply false. Oil and gas companies in 2010, the last year for which all data are available, paid 41.1% of their net income on income taxes. That compares with 26.5% for other industrial companies listed by Standard & Poor's.
And it doesn't include oil industry payments of rent, royalties and leases to the government, which have totaled $100 billion since 2000. Nor does it include $2 trillion in oil industry investments since 2000.
Demonizing profits is foolish. Profits signal companies that they need to produce more. Profits encourage the industry to use the most efficient, clean methods possible, and to boost pay for their workers and dividends for their investors. Aren't these good?
Mutual funds today own an estimated 30% of all oil shares, while pension funds hold 27%, individuals 23% and IRAs 14%. Basically, anyone who owns a mutual fund or a broad retirement portfolio almost certainly owns oil shares. They all benefit from higher profits.
As turns out, Big Oil isn't some abstract entity. It's you.