Update On 2/3 Of The Radical Leftist's Roadmap To Taking Over America

First up is even more good news about DemCare:

Come September, a feature of the ACA will kick in that could spell the end of affordable "mini-med" coverage plans for low-income workers. Such plans typically provide access to a limited number of health-care providers and cap annual benefits payouts, but a provision in Obamacare bans insurance companies from doing the latter. That could spur massive spikes in premiums that put the mini-med plans beyond the reach of the very consumers for which they are designed.

And remember, the up to 1 million workers who will be affected by the provision won't have exchanges or subsidies to fall back on for years, thanks to the tax-and-regulate now, pay later structure of Obamacare.

Or, put another way:

Democrats will get their wish — but the employees won’t get their coverage. The law imposes the penalties for mini-med plans in three months, but the exchanges won’t start until 2014. That means more than three years of having no insurance at all for low-income workers who previously had it, even if Obama and Pelosi sniffed at the worth of the plans.

So why did they do it this way? Good question:

This was part of the “front-load” strategy of the Democrats, who wanted to implement what they thought would be the most popular components of ObamaCare immediately, in order to build support for its continuance. Instead, the mandates will mean that mini-med plans will either cost so much that the employees can’t afford it, or more likely, the insurers will drop the plans as money-losers. It’s a big indicator that the people who drafted the law had very little understanding of the insurance industry, or of the private sector.

NO...! I'm shocked SHOCKED that the Obama administration doesn't understand the private sector.

Hot Air points out that the massive unintended consequence here is that up to 1 million people could be kicked out of their health insurance by DemCare just a few weeks before the election. I'm pretty sure that's not going to do any favors for any Democrat on any ballot.

RedState thinks that not even the brainwashed, sycophantic media can cover over this one...but they'll give it another shot, anyway:

Why sell it when it does not go into effect for a few more years and it has already passed Congress? To improve Democrats’ chances in November, of course. Duh.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane and remember that past performance is the best indication of future success. So you liberals shouldn’t expect this time will be any more successful than all the other times.

June 7, 2010: “Tomorrow, Democrats and the White House will hold more than 100 simultaneous events nationwide as President Obama plunges back into health reform, selling the historic plan all over again…” (Politico Playbook) “White House Mounts PR Blitz for Health Care Reform” (AOL News)

May 18, 2010: “White House seeks missing health bounce. The White House is aggressively touting the new healthcare law after failing to see an immediate bounce in polls from congressional approval of the legislation.” (The Hill)

May 11, 2010: “White House health-care campaign begins. The Obama administration’s campaign to sell the new health-care law to a skeptical public is beginning to take shape…” (The Washington Post)

May 8, 2010: “President Barack Obama on Saturday touted the benefits of his healthcare overhaul, renewing a bid to counter Republican criticism and ease public doubts more than a month after he signed reform into law.” (Reuters)

April 22, 2010: “Stephanie Cutter, the Democratic communications strategist who spearheaded the White House effort last year to win Senate confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, is returning to the Obama administration to help sell the newly passed health care bill.” (The New York Times)

March 24, 2010: “Clearly, inside the White House there is acknowledgement that Republicans outmaneuvered Democrats in the weeks after the stimulus bill passed and did a better job of defining for the public what was in that bill. … The White House is determined to learn from that experience. ‘Obama and the Democrats won’t make the same mistake,’ said Thomas Mann, who studies Congress for the Brookings Institution.” (CongressDaily)

And those are just the efforts to sell it after it was passed into law! Hit the link for many, many more.

Related:
The federal government is a bunch of radicalized, hippy slackers
DemCare starts squeezing the private sector



Now, on to the economy in general...

This morning White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and budget director Peter Orszag will release a memo directing all federal agency heads “to develop plans” to cut at least 5 percent from their budgets by “identifying programs that do little to advance their missions or President Obama’s agenda.” This spasm of fiscal responsibility can mean only one thing: the Obama administration is about to go on another wild spending binge. And sure enough Politico reports that while Blue Dogs in the House managed to whittle what was a $200 billion “jobs” bill down to $146 billion last month, the Senate is now larding it back up again with a $24 billion Medicaid bailout and a $23 billion teachers union bailout.

This spend-now/cut-later act has become a staple for the Obama administration.

It just doesn't work very well when you go overboard with the 'spend-now' part and never get around to the 'cut-later' part, which is exactly what Obama has done.

Of course, to be fair, overspending isn't solely an Obama problem. Washington in general has an overspending addiction that needs to be stopped immediately. Of course, you and I both know that the way to fix that problem is to STOP THE SPENDING, but the geniuses in Washington haven't quite figured that out yet.

Case in point:

On May 13, 2010, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) introduced H.R. 5297, TARP III. The bill is being promoted as necessary to increase the availability of credit for small businesses. TARP III would create a $30 billion lending fund and authorize the Treasury Secretary to make capital investments in banks with less than $10 billion in assets.

Another TARP?! What happened to the previous ones?? They failed, that's what. They did little to stimulate the economy, nor generate jobs or anything useful; all they did was to prop up some favored liberal constituent groups and lobbies. Now that the money is running out, the bribes must continue, so they're back to the spigot for more. The GOP points out several of the inconvenient problems with TARP 3:

Taxpayers Can't Afford Another Bailout: The original bailout bill, TARP I, was $700 billion. In 2009, the Democrats enacted a $1.138 trillion "stimulus" plan, including the cost of interest, a $410 billion FY09 omnibus appropriations bill and a $3.6 trillion FY2010 budget. The Democrats increased the debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion, and the national debt now stands above $13 trillion. The taxpayers lost $145 billion by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, and the CBO expects the cost to approach $400 billion. Recently, the EU and the IMF pledged $145 billion to bail out the bankrupt nation of Greece. America's taxpayers are on the hook for $6.8 billion in loan guarantees from the IMF. The EU and IMF also announced a $1 trillion bailout plan that could put America's taxpayers on the hook for $50 billion in additional loan guarantees to bail out other financially irresponsible members of the EU. Yet, the Democrats continue to spend the nation into a financial abyss.

Creates Unnecessary Programs: Under the original TARP, Treasury created several programs to generate lending to small businesses. In addition, the federal government instituted federal guarantee programs through the FDIC and the Small Business Administration. The creation of a $32 billion TARP III program to do what the $700 billion TARP and other federal programs were intended to do is simply unnecessary. In fact, according to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, 8 percent of the small businesses surveyed cited a lack of credit as an immediate problem, but more than 50 percent cited a lack of sales as an immediate problem. In other words, small businesses are suffering due to a lack of jobs for consumers.

Lacks Proper Oversight: The TARP III program would not be subject to the effective oversight of the Special Inspector General for TARP. SIGTARP's Neil Barofsky, on February 19, 2010, sent a letter to Treasury's assistant secretary for financial stability, Herb Allison. In the letter, Barofsky, expressed concern regarding Treasury's decision to remove TARP III from SIGTARP's oversight and warned that such a move would be "terribly wasteful" and "could lead to significant exposure to waste, fraud and abuse."

Creates More Uncertainty: Like the original TARP program, the federal government will once again, at it discretion, be able to reach into the boardrooms and pocket-books of private sector firms and employees. The use of the original TARP by some banks begot the use of the Obama administration's pay czar and auto task force (which closed thousands of dealerships). Also, the use of the original TARP inspired the Democrats to pursue a "responsibility fee," another tax on financial firms. Through TARP III, many small and mid-size banks may soon find the federal government as their new senior partner.

Whether they like it or not. And remember, the pay czar will stick his nose in there, and many Dems actually believe that the government should set wages of everyone in every company in the country!

How are you liking the hope-n-change? Just wait...it'll get lots better, I'm sure.

There's my two cents.