Meteorologist Joe d’Aleo has studied the weather of the Great Lakes for years. On February 20, 2015, d’Aleo stated that the current state of ice on the Great Lakes is likely greater than at any time since records began.
Feb 20
Medicare Has Cost Ten Times More Than Government Predicted
Medicare was pitched in 1965 as being economically responsible. Its promoters in Congress estimated that the Medicare bill would cost $1.1 billion for the following two years. The day after the bill was signed into law, its costs were widely estimated to be $6.5 billion over a decade. The House Ways and Means Committee said Medicare would cost $12 billion by 1990.
But actual costs of Medicare in its first decade were double the estimates: $13.2 billion. And by 1990, Medicare had cost $98 billion, not $12 billion.
Today Medicare costs at least $457 billion PER YEAR–more than ten times the original estimates–even when inflation is factored in. These figures are from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s “President’s Budget: Historical Tables” (2010).
Feb 18
New report says sea level will likely rise by 11 to 21 inches around New York City by the 2050s
Just as New York City and the U.S. eastern seaboard are experiencing record snow and cold, a panel of heavily-promoted (and undoubtedly massively government-funded) academics have released a report making typically hysterical predictions about the climate in the Big Apple. The report, authored by the professors at the “New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC),” finds that the air temperatures around NYC have risen faster and the sea levels around NYC have risen faster than the observed global rates. In fact, the report claims that sea levels are rising 1.2 inches per decade around the city and temps have increased 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit between 1900 and 2013.
The Panel predicts sea levels around the City may likely rise by at least 11 to 21 inches more by the 2050s. The Panel report displays maps indicating vast losses of acreage around Manhattan, Brooklyn and elsewhere.
As shown by a number of experts, climate-change hysteria is largely driven by socialist ideology and massive research-grant funding by the U.S. (and other) governments. It is used to call for political action such as demands that governments become even more powerful and all-controlling. In 2003 a number of scientists launched the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) to demonstrate that much of what passes for climate-change science by widely-lauded climate “panels” is false, misleading, based on inaccurate models and in some cases fraudulent.
The Nongovernmental International Panel is independently funded and accepts no funding from the oil industry or any other industry.
Academics promoting the socialist manmade-global-warming theology use decidedly ANTI-SCIENCE methods to overcome scholarly criticism. They claim the “science is settled” in THEIR favor (despite the existence of hundreds of countervailing peer-reviewed scientific studies) and call for critics to be silenced and disregarded. In some cases, promoters of climate-change socialism call for the arrests of those who disagree with them.
Feb 16
Lysander Spooner on Democratic Elections and Claims of “Sovereign Immunity” By Government Officials
In Lysander Spooner’s great essay, “No Treason,” Spooner wrote:
No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person, unless they do it in so open and authentic a manner as to make themselves personally responsible for his acts. None of the voters in this country appoint their political agents in any open, authentic manner, or in any manner to make themselves responsible for their acts. Therefore these pretended agents cannot legitimately claim to be really agents. Somebody must be responsible for the acts of these pretended agents; and if they cannot show any open and authentic credentials from their principals, they cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals. The maxim applies here, that what does not appear, does not exist. If they can show no principals, they have none.
Feb 16
WE MUST NEVER FORGET THE 2004 CREEKSTONE FARMS EPISODE IN KANSAS
What would happen if Americans got rid of government meat inspection? Would American consumers be then poisoned by tainted, rancid, rotten or adulterated meat on supermarket shelves? An episode from 2004 answers this question.
Since the early 1900s, federal law has required that all meatpacking companies that ship meat interstate be inspected by federal inspectors. This bureaucracy costs American taxpayers in excess of a billion dollars annually. Many critics have pointed out that the government’s “inspections” amount to little more than what consumers do on their own when they shop for meat. USDA inspectors simply sniff, poke and look at meat as it is being processed.
In 2003, the government of Japan announced that it would require all beef sold in Japan to be tested for “mad cow disease,” also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. This of course goes beyond what American beef inspection requires. The official U.S. position on mad cow disease is that concern about the disease is mostly due to hysteria; this position was forged by heavy lobbying by the major U.S. beef processors, along with cattlemens organizations. (Note that I don’t necessarily disagree with this position.)
But if the Japanese wanted their beef to be certified as BSE-free, the rules of capitalism dictate that American beef providers should—in a free market—want to provide such certification. In 2004, a meatpacking plant in Arkansas City, Kansas sought to provide such BSE testing and certification. But the plant—operated by a small firm named Creekstone Farms—was stopped by the USDA. The USDA announced that Creekstone Farms was prohibited from doing any additional testing! The USDA’s actions caused the Kansas meat plant to lay off 150 of its 800 workers in 2005 and to place the rest on part-time status. (About 40 percent of Creekstone’s sales were to Japan.)
Why did the USDA prevent Creekstone Farms from testing its meat for mad cow disease? Probably because of back-room lobbying by the largest American meatpackers (Tyson, Smithfield, Swift, etc.), who viewed Creekstone’s BSE-certification efforts as a source of dangerous competition. The U.S. government denied this, claiming that Creekstone’s BSE-testing system (like Japan’s) wasn’t sufficient to detect mad cow disease with certainty in all animals younger than 30 months. Thus, according to the U.S. government, Creekstone’s additional testing would have given consumers a false sense of security.
Creekstone Farms acknowledged the imperfections of BSE testing. But the issue wasn’t how good the company’s (or any company’s) testing procedures were. The real issue was whether the federal government can deny an American business its right to do the best it can to satisfy its customers.
We must never forget the lesson of the Creekstone Farms episode. Although a decade has passed since this outrage, the episode proves that food safety is not guaranteed by government inspectors. True food safety stems from free-market competition between food providers. And government regulation is often a guise behind which consumers are made to accept goods and services of lower quality.
Feb 15
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE ESTIMATES THAT OBAMACARE WILL REDUCE TOTAL HOURS WORKED BY 1.5 TO 2 PERCENT
In February 2014, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an overlooked report on the “Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act.” The Report provided updates of earlier estimates, and by February 2014 the CBO was able to draw on more accurate data than the CBO had cited in its earlier reports.
CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.
The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.
Of course, the passage of time often reveals that government programs end up costing much more than politicians originally estimate. We predict that the CBO’s estimate of a 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent decline in total hours worked will turn out to be optimistic.
Feb 15
REGULATION OF EMPLOYMENT HAS KEPT YOUNG AND POOR PEOPLE FROM BEING GAINFULLY EMPLOYED
The chartmakers at “Political Calculations” have released a new graph showing “A Decade of Disappearing Teen Jobs” Political Calculations blame minimum wage laws for keeping teens from gainful employment. “As we see in the chart,” write the authors, “the practical effect of all the minimum wage hikes that occurred from 2007 through 2009 was to remove the jobs available for this portion of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized labor force.”
That is the result of a structural change in the U.S. economy, where changes in the laws mandating the amount of the minimum wage at the federal, state and local levels have made it too costly for employers with little ability to increase their revenues to continue to hire the members of the least educated, least skilled and least experienced portion of the U.S. workforce: Americans between the ages of 16 and 19. Their ability to generate revenue for the businesses who might employ them is too little to justify the cost of employing them at the governments’ mandated minimum wages.
Feb 14
Edward Snowden Reveals that NSA’s Surveillance Is Now Harming the American Economy by an Amount Larger than the NSA’s Budget
Exiled U.S. surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden recently spoke to an audience at Harvard University, via videofeed from Russia. The occasion was the Harvard Institute for Applied Computational Science’s “Data Privacy Symposium” on January 23, 2015. Professor Bruce Schneier joined Snowden for an enlightening discussion.
Snowden pointed to published media reports showing that the NSA is now intercepting American products and services before they are exported to consumers overseas so that the NSA can implant various “Trojans,” and U.S.-government malware into digital products. This implantation of malware allows the NSA or other U.S. government agencies to track, surveil and monitor all users of American tech products. The practice is so widely known by foreign purchasers that they are increasingly avoiding American exported electronics.
According to Snowden, this increasing worldwide avoidance of American tech products and services has already cost American tech suppliers between 35 billion and 185 billion dollars—an amount larger than the NSA’s budgets. And these losses are just what are known and reported on the surface. Actual losses to long-term American tech viability are undoubtedly much greater.
Feb 13
UPDATE: WE HAVE CHANGED OUR DATE FOR PHOTOGRAPHING GLACIER NATIONAL PARK: New Date is September 13
Previously, we announced a volunteer research project in which we hope to record images of North American glaciers on the precise same dates every year. This research idea is something of a response to official government imagery showing glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park appearing to melt rapidly in recent years. Those who call for more socialism to save humanity from manmade global warming often point to such imagery to bolster their “settled science” claims.
Official government websites provide suggestive images in which photos of glaciers taken decades ago are compared to photos of the same glaciers taken in recent hot summers. The government appears to be using trickery, in that no specific dates of the year are provided.
As every Montanan knows, glaciers and snowfields cover most of the northern Rockies throughout the winters and these glaciers and snowfields steadily melt throughout the summers. By showing a photo of a dwindling glacier taken on an extremely hot August day and comparing it to photos taken decades ago in the Spring, one can easily manipulate the emotions of the unsophisticated.
We do not deny that the glaciers in Glacier National Park have melted substantially over the past century.
We initially proposed July 24th—traditionally the hottest average date of most summers—as our annual date for photographing the glaciers of Glacier National Park. Upon reflection, however, we believe the project would be better conducted by taking photos of the glaciers ON THE DATE OF AVERAGE FIRST FREEZE in the region. This is because glaciers generally continue to melt throughout the late summers, long after the hottest days of summers.
According to the meteorologists at the Weather Underground, “In West Glacier, Montana, the average date for the first temperature below 32 degrees is Sept. 13.” (Note that it is likely that glaciers generally continue melting even after the first freeze of Autumn, but we have chosen September 13 for the sake of simplicity.) Remember that the point of this project is simply to record imagery on the same day of the year, year-after-year.
Feb 13
People Living in Socialist Hellhole Venezuela Deprived of Basic Medicines As Shelves Empty
Trusters of government (including trusters of government living in America) point to Venezuela as a socialist paradise. But an expose’ posted on “Oxy” reveals that Venezuelans are now without basic medicines due to Venezuela’s policies of price controls, central planning, single-payer slave-plantation healthcare administration, and government-monopoly licensing.
