Congress apparently didn’t bother to read the bill before voting on it and passing it. I guess it’s just too much trouble.
Do they have any concept of what incompetent boobs they appear to be to we normal people?
Category Archives: Business
The Satellite Dish
And The Hits Just Keep Coming
Here’s the latest, from AT&T. Bet this will encourage them to hire a lot more people:
AT&T Inc. said it plans to take a non-cash charge of about $1 billion in the first quarter following the passage of the health-care reform bill earlier this week, according to a filing submitted by the company Friday. The telecommunication giant will also evaluate changes to its health care benefits for employees and retirees.
But don’t forget — if you like your plan, you can keep it! As long as the ObamaCare hasn’t wiped it out, of course…
And of course, we can at least count on new jobs for IRS agents.
If You Liked The “Stimulus…”
…you’ll love ObamaCare. Further thoughts here:
In both cases, despite broad public skepticism, the Democrats pushed forward on their bill while the White House intensified its messaging efforts, turning President Obama loose on crowd after friendly crowd in an effort to sell Middle America on a near-trillion-dollar fix whose murky specifics were in flux even as it approached a final vote. Sure enough, in both cases polling found support for the measure slowly creeping up as Congress passed the measure (with virtually no Republican support.) And in the days immediately after each became law, public support even reached scant majorities or pluralities in some places, with many saying that though the bill was imperfect, it sure beat doing nothing at all.
Liberals, covered in the stink of success, are now enjoying that bump. But, as I outline in the piece, if Obamacare’s post-passage public opinion trajectory is anything like that of the stimulus, they shouldn’t get too comfortable. A year out, the popularity of the stimulus falls somewhere between Tiger Woods and John Edwards. — and for similar reasons. The stimulus is widely-perceived to have been a failure because it didn’t keep its promise to stop and reverse job losses. Instead, 49 of 50 states have lost jobs since the stimulus passed.
We’re only a few days out from Obamacare’s passage and already reports are piling in from businesses bracing for tax increases and coverage changes. Wait until it’s been a year.
Maybe they should have read the bill…
Good News On ITAR
I’ve long said (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that ITAR is like the weather — everybody talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. Well, that may be about to change:
The legislation gives the president the authority to remove satellites and related components from the US Munitions List (USML), hence removing them from the jurisdiction of ITAR. (It would not, though, allow the export of such items to China.) Other provisions of the legislation would direct an ongoing review of the USML “to determine those technologies and goods that warrant different or additional controls”, which could benefit the space industry even if the White House didn’t exercise the provision to remove satellites and related components from the list wholesale.
The legislation passed the House last year, but for several months has been sitting in the Senate, raising fears they may never consider it. But speaking on an ITAR panel at the Satellite 2010 conference last week, David Fite, a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee but speaking only for himself, said things were going “somewhat on schedule” compared to authorization bills in previous Congresses. That schedule would have the Senate passing its version of the authorization bill by the summer and a conference report reconciling the differences between the two in September or October.
It’s unclear from the reporting whether or not this will fix the problem for launch providers, or just satellite manufacturers. For instance, will it make life easier for the suborbital folks? Of course, the biggest problem is this:
“We are in an election year,” cautioned Fite. In his 11 years on Capitol Hill, he said, “I have never seen an environment that has been this partisan.” Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred. “The danger is that this will become a political issue in an election year, which means it’s not going to be addressed on its merits, it will be addressed by slogans.” That will make it harder for reform to make its way through Congress and could also hurt the administration’s other reform efforts.
I’ve also long said that, as it took Nixon to go to China, only the Republicans can fix ITAR (though Duncan Hunter made sure it would never happen all through the Bush administration) because the Dems can’t afford to look weaker on national defense than they already do. I do fear very much that this will become a casualty of the very ugly campaign we’re heading into.
A Propellant Depot Architecture
Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing presented their current concepts at a recent NASA in-space servicing workshop. It’s an impressive story of the performance leverage that a depot gives you, even with Constellation. I wonder if the trade includes dry launch in the depot case?
It’s interesting that he shows how they could use a Falcon 9, and an Atlas, but that Delta is unmentioned. Of course, now that ULA has taken over, perhaps Boeing has no institutional bias any more. I assume that this is the story that he’ll be telling at Space Access in a couple weeks, in the panel that we’ll both be on.
I’d like to see more detail on the ops (one of the slides came through as black for me). How do they propose to reuse the GTO/GEO tug? Aerobraking, or impulsively? You might want to check out some of the other papers at the link to Clark Lindsey’s site as well.
Fiscal Federalism
Is it dead? It seems to be on life support, particularly with the passage of the latest legislative atrocity, but let’s hope it’s not beyond resuscitation.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This seems related — is VAT coming? Europe, here we come.
Message To Dems
People still don’t like ObamaCare. We’re going to follow your sage advice from yesterday, Mr. President, and “bring it ongo for it.”
And it turns out Nancy Pelosi was right — we had to pass the bill to learn what was in it:
Now that the bill has been safely passed and signed into law, the mainstream press is gradually revealing the scores of delightful provisions tucked away in the 2,700 page abomination: job-killing taxes on businesses, innovation-killing taxes on medical products, suffocating regulations on individual freedoms, wealth-sapping taxes on the middle-class, unprecedented intrusions on personal privacy, unconstitutional mandates on individuals, racially discriminatory preferences for favored groups, a Ponzi-scheme-on-steroids financing mechanism, and spending on a galactic, incomprehensible scale.
Not to mention this:
The health care overhaul will cost U.S. companies billions and make them more likely to drop prescription drug coverage for retirees because of a change in how the government subsidizes those benefits.
In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.
With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.
Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.
But “if you like your plan, you’ll be able to keep it.” Right? And just think of all the job creation this will mean. For IRS agents.
“Bring it onGo for it,” indeed. For the Democrats, that bill may be the longest suicide note in history.
[Update mid morning]
(Dr.) Paul Hsieh, on the real ObamaCare fraud.
Always A Good Idea
…but now, more than ever. Repeal Davis-Bacon.
Like many “progressive” laws and impulses (such as gun control), its roots lie in racism.
What Will Republican Health-Care Reform Look Like?
The vote-a-rama provides several clues.
[Update a few minutes later]
You know what? When you’re getting praise for your public policy from Fidel Castro, maybe you ought to rethink it. But of course, people who like this bill probably don’t have a problem with Fidel.