Category Archives: Business

Teaching History

It isn’t happening:

Questioner: What was the Holocaust?
American College Student: Umā€¦Iā€™m on the spot.

Questioner: Which country was Adolf Hitler the leader of?
American College Student: I think itā€™s Amsterdam?

Questioner: What was Auschwitz?
American College Student: I donā€™t know.

Questioner: What were the Nuremburg Trials?
American College Student: I donā€™t know.

Questioner: How many Jews were killed?
American College Student: Hundreds of thousands.

We’re doomed.

ObamaCare’s Million-Dollar Question

It’s actually a trillion-dollar question: Will enough young people sign up?

Thereā€™s another self-inflicted wound that could prove fatal. Since the ACA allows young people to stay on their parentsā€™ health plans until they turn 26, the law dramatically shrinks the pool of healthy young customers whose overpayments on insurance are supposed to subsidize the middle aged beneficiaries of the law.

…All told, we wonder if Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama are as happy today about Obamacare as they were on the day the law was passed. Beyond that, everything that has happened since passage has confirmed our view that far from solving the problems facing American health care, this poorly drafted, poorly executed system makes the problem of health care reform both more urgent and more difficult.

One of the myriad idiocies about the law is that they let people stay on their parents’ plans until they’re twenty six. Why did these morons imagine that those people that they needed to sign up for their own insurance would do so? It was just part of an incoherent grab bag of goodies they stuffed into the bill to try to sell it to low-infos.

[Update a while later]

Don’t worry, GOP. ObamaCare will defund itself:

With only a small penalty for abstaining, the numbers for signing up not only donā€™t add up ā€” theyā€™re absurd. Hereā€™s one of the supposedly attractive deals: ā€œOne option available only to people under 30 is a so-called catastrophic policy that kicks in after a $6,350 annual deductible. In Monroe County, you can buy that policy on the New York State of Health exchange for as low as $131 a month for single coverage.ā€

Over fifteen hundred a year for a sixty-three hundred plus deductible? What healthy thirty year old would waste his or her money?

Who invented this plan? Certainly not Obama or Pelosi, neither of whom was paying close attention, I would bet. (Pelosi admitted she wasnā€™t. All Obama wanted was something to put his name next to, something that sounded vaguely ā€œprogressive.ā€)

Neither Obama or Pelosi is smart enough to even understand the problem.

ObamaCare’s Useful Idiots

A round up.

Sadly, some of them inhabit this comments section.

[Update a while later]

The abysmal, pathetic ObamaCare roll out:

After the search for bin Laden, the Obama administrationā€™s biggest manhunt has turned out to be for someoneā€”anyoneā€”who managed to actually sign up for and enroll in an insurance plan offered by the federal exchange. As The Miami Herald declared in a recent headline, ā€œObamacare enrollees become urban legend.ā€ So far, youā€™ve got a better chance of turning up a gerbil escapee scurrying down Richard Gereā€™s leg than finding a couple dozen satisfied customers of healthcare.gov. During a legendarily awful Daily Show appearance, Sebelius lowered expectations yet further by saying that HHS will release enrollment figures on a monthly basis. Right after all the parades for record-setting grain harvests and successful launches of canine cosmonauts.

The first high-profile case of an Obamacare enrollee was paraded around the mainstream media like a captured U2 pilot in the old Soviet Union. But he turned out to beā€¦well, not so much. On October 4, my colleague Peter Suderman broke the story that Obamacare poster boy Chad Henderson had not actually purchased insurance for either himself or his father. Hendersonā€”a paid activist for Organizing for America, an outgrowth of the presidentā€™s re-election committeeā€”eventually admitted to The Washington Post, ā€œI have not purchased a specific plan.ā€

The broken web site didn’t help.

ObamaCare Supporters

…go through the stages of grief.

Somehow, being leftists, I don’t think they’ll ever get to acceptance. Bargaining’s as far as they’ll go, and then only to buy time until they can come up with a new strategy.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The disastrous roll out could spell doom. It certainly deserves it. And the Democrats deserve the accruing political fallout.

How Congress Screwed Up Human Spaceflight

There’s a good piece over at the Washington Times:

Imagine what could be done if resources being thrown into the furnace for the Space Launch System was repurposed for technology incubation, commercial projects, or heaven forbid, actual missions. For the cost of SLS, you could afford close to 170 launches to the ISS, 55 missions to Mars with cargo or for probes, or more than 220 Falcon Heavy launches. There are opportunity costs to funding bad projects, and funding SLS costs mankind nearly 500 opportunities to actually go to space.

But it gets it wrong at the end:

When President Obama came to office, NASA was working on the Constellation Program, its most ambitious project in decades. The plan would have seen the United States return to the moon and establish a permanent base as a first step toward the manned exploration of the solar system. Fiercely lauded in the scientific and space community, it even earned the rare but ringing endorsement of Neil Armstrong. However, this highly ambitious project was clumsily canceled by the Obama administration in the name of cost-cutting in 2010 ā€” only to be replaced with the government monstrosity known as SLS a year later.

No. A reader would imagine that Constellation was just peachy, but it was just as programmatically disastrous as SLS, slipping more than a year per year in schedule with continuously ballooning costs. It (like SLS) needed to be cancelled. The mistake of the administration was not in cancelling it, but in not working with Congress in doing so, or providing a coherent explanation of what the replacement was to be. Constellation may have been “fiercely lauded” by some in the scientific and space community, but it was just as fiercely, and justly, attacked as a barrier, rather than a mean of serious human spaceflight beyond earth orbit. It’s curious that Mr. Jacobs seems to understand the current problem without understanding the actual history that led up to it.