Free Republic

The so-called Obamacare Cadillac Tax is scheduled to begin on January 1, 2018. It is a 40% non-deductible tax on the cost of medical insurance plans that exceed "predetermined thresholds". The "predetermined thresholds" will be determined by government appointees. The Cadillac Tax is supposed to raise $80 billion over ten years to finance the expansion of health coverage. The reality is that the Obamacare Cadillac Tax will ultimately diminish the quality of medical insurance coverage for tens of millions of Americans because no entities will be able to afford to pay it. The cost of the tax is beyond what...

Government economists revised upwards their GDP estimates for the fourth quarter of 2013. And guess what? We did much better than anybody thought possible! The Commerce Department revised GDP upwards to 2.6% growth from the 2.4% growth that they had previously estimated for the fourth quarter. So while everybody was bemoaning the fact that the Christmas shopping numbers that came out in December were adversely affected by weather, it's clear now to government economists that the effects of fourth quarter weather were put off until the first quarter of 2014. Or something. “Robust consumer spending on services,” says Bloomberg, “particularly...

Unemployment claims came out, and WOW! So even though our economy is down, it's still up. Or we’re up, but still down. Whatever… it’s all good, because your neighbor pays. And it’s another example of the stupid math liberals use to mask reality. The unexciting nature of the newest unemployment claims is papering over all of the downward revisions that we are seeing in other areas of the economy. For new readers the sentence above is an example of a device I employ now and again called “sarcasm.” “Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 26,000 to a seasonally adjusted...

The Los Angeles Times details how despite high hopes Obamacare deniers had for welfare-friendly Hawaii, thus far only 4,300 people have enrolled in Obama’s home state. That’s $27,906 per enrollee. Aloha! Which, fittingly, in can be translated in English to mean "hello" and "goodbye." And of course, 4,300 is not the number of insured people-- those who have paid for an Obamacare policy-- just the numbers of people who have completed applications. And I suspect I know what SEIU employees have been doing in their free time. Aaaand… So do you. I think the same people who filled out...

It's time for your latest Obamacare update, and it will come as no surprise to you that things are not getting any prettier for this monstrosity. Let's just take a jog down Obamacare Avenue and see what is popping out at us from the storefronts this week. Roll down your windows so you can get a clearer look: --Obamacare devotees are still clinging to the idea that this law will expand coverage, but the most recent data indicate that it may fall short of this goal, too, just as it has failed in every other respect. Forbes reports that instead...

A few things have happened since California voters approved $10 billion in bonds for a $45 billion California High-Speed Rail project -- which promised to take passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2 hours and 40 minutes -- in 2008. Most recently, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny blocked the release of $8 billion in bonds because the California High-Speed Rail Authority "abused its discretion" by not complying with the law. Kenny found that the bullet train board failed to show how it expects to fund itself and lacks all the environmental clearances needed for the system's initial...

When Thanksgiving 2013 is over, will Americans remember it as the holiday when the Obama administration body-snatched their friends and family and turned them into Obamacare robots? Maybe it happened to your own loved ones. Maybe Cousin Sue brought her favorite cranberry Jell-O mayonnaise salad but when she opened her mouth she sounded like Jay Carney on a roll. As for Uncle Al, there’s a reason he kept asking “Have you thought about signing up for health insurance on the new marketplace?” every time it was your turn at Scrabble. BarackObama.com told them to. Turning Thanksgiving into Obamacaring was clearly...

Soon after President Obama told the White House press corps he was solely responsible for the botched Obamacare rollout, he decided to shift part of the blame on Republicans. A mea culpa can be hard to deliver in public when you are the kind of politician who thinks he never mistakes and rarely if ever apologizes for anything that went wrong. But Obama's apologies have a brief shelf life, and a few days later they had reached their expiration date. So at a gathering of business executives on Tuesday, Nov. 19, the president concluded that he had done enough...

It’s Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to acknowledge some of the things I’m thankful for this year. Problem is, I’m a cynical man. So, I’m truly thankful for some things on this list, but others are there purely for purposes of sarcasm. You decide which is which. First, my friends and family. Blah, blah, blah, love them, blah, blah, blah. They’re “insert your favorite positive adjective here” to me. Without them…I’d probably leave the house less often and spend a lot less time on the phone. I’m kidding, of course, I am thankful for them, but...

For Republicans, winning enough races next year to take control of the Senate and expand their current majority in the House is suddenly oh so easy. Democrats are already underwater because of a flood of clear and compelling evidence that Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster. And there’s no end in sight to the rising tide of bad news, which won’t begin to ebb until painfully close to Election Day 2014. Horrendous as the stories about the damage Obamacare has inflicted upon the individual market have been, certain to be even worse will be news yet-to-come about its damage to both...

If the Republicans can't fight wars and the Democrats stink at socializing medicine, what good are they? That would not be an altogether unreasonable question for a typical American today. No doubt spokesmen for the respective political parties would offer all sorts of objections to that summation. And many of those objections would be fair. A defender of George W. Bush's stint as commander in chief would point to the quick toppling of Saddam and the Taliban. He or she might argue that the Democrats undermined a wartime president and fomented defeatism. As for the Democrats, a partisan might...

"It's not my dog. He didn't bite you. Besides, you kicked him first." Thus the trial lawyer's complete defense. And President Obama's too when it comes to the epic fail of Obamacare: "He didn't know it was so badly constructed." "It's working better now." "And besides, the state exchanges are running so smoothly that they prove the concept is a good one. Too bad those Republican governors blocked other state exchanges" This last bit of malarky seems to have been swallowed whole by a media eager to spin for the floundering, fading, 37% approval-rating president. One example: The reliably left-wing...

The Obama administration once gave us "man-caused disasters" for acts of terrorism and "workplace violence" for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to mask the Obamacare disaster. The president and his advisors apparently knew long ago that millions of the insured would face cancellations or premium hikes once Obamacare would be fully implemented. Yet to get the 906-page bill passed, they had to convince the public of the very opposite scenario. So they repeated ironclad guarantees that no one would lose their coverage or doctors -- "period!" Now the administration explains...

The talking heads love presidential analogies. Is Obamacare's rollout Obama's Hurricane Katrina or his Iraq? Is Obama's false promise that you could keep your health care plan like George H. W. Bush's "read my lips" pledge, or is it like Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"? Iran-Contra anyone? These comparisons don't take you far. The president's troubles are unique to his particular vanities and blind spots. Some of Obama's most devoted admirers are at pains to distinguish his current fall from grace from George W. Bush's. Chris Matthews, for example, argues: "The problem with Katrina...

Just when you think things can't get much worse with Obamacare, another shoe drops. Correction: This thing has enough dropping shoes to fully fit a centipede. That Obama deliberately lied (please excuse the redundancy, but it is apparently necessary to clarify one's meaning in this postmodern age) in telling people they could keep their plans and doctors is now beyond dispute. He and his handlers have tried to obfuscate the issue with further deception but have fallen way short of passing the laugh test. Some liberals have taunted me on Twitter that all politicians lie. Well, that certainly ends the...

Let’s get this out of the way right now—there is no Obamacare fix. Repeat after me—there is no Obamacare fix.Obamacare is not an epic failure simply because of its incompetent implementation best symbolized by a $94 million website that doesn’t work. Rather, Obamacare’s incompetent implementation is a symptom of its real disease. That real disease is this: Obamacare cannot possibly work because it operates outside the natural laws of economics, and it’s another ham-fisted attempt by government to do something that is outside of its God-given (or Constitutional) jurisdiction. In other words, Obamacare is magical thinking. It’s tilting at windmills,...

Barack Obama's presidency is falling apart, as a growing number of Americans now realize his promises of prosperity and jobs were bogus and his health care law a fabric of lies. A president who promised hope and change has given us despair and a failed,1930s agenda, as a once-mighty economy continues to limp toward the end of its fifth year in "recovery" -- yet with no full, lasting recovery in sight. Twelve months ago, a majority of voters handed him a second term. This week, the Gallup Poll reported that a 54 percent majority disapprove of the job he's doing...

Everything was all set. The scenery had been painted, the lighting arranged, the actors given their lines and put through their paces. The proper air of suspense had been maintained throughout the opening acts, and now the curtain was about to rise on the grand finale. The management wasn't quite ready to admit it, maybe even to itself, but the Happy Ending had already been written. All the players had to do was follow the script. The stars were already practicing their bows. The supporting cast of foreign ministers from far and wide -- Teheran to Paris, Moscow even...

Union bosses have an air of entitlement among themselves nowadays. Over the past two election cycles, organized labor has collectively spent hundreds of millions dollars electing President Obama and like-minded Congressmen and Senators. For their efforts, they have come to expect a sizable return on investment. And for the most part, their every wish, no matter how absurd, has been granted by the president himself. Since Big Labor helped President Obama pass his signature healthcare legislation, union bosses have been pushing to receive an exemption from the very same law. The hypocrisy is striking, which is perhaps why the...

"The end justifies the means" is an unstated rationale that guides much liberal thinking and rationalizes immoral behavior in service to a supposedly greater good. But a column I've just read stretches this twisted ethical calculus to a new level. Columnist Michael Cohen, in an op-ed for the New York Daily News, tells us, essentially, that President Obama's lie that people could keep their health care plans if they liked them is not just defensible -- because it was in service to the greater good of imposing Obamacare on an otherwise unwilling populace -- but darn near laudable. Obama...