Month: February 2019

Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office about the impact of Obamacare’s individual mandate off by millions, according to a new report.

My former editor at the Washington Examiner, Phil Klein, writes that the “scandalously off” estimates “had significant ramifications for healthcare and tax policy over the past decade.”:

“CBO estimates about the importance of an individual mandate to a national healthcare scheme prodded President Barack Obama into including the unpopular provision into the law in the first place. The mandate projections also played a key role in President Trump’s two major legislative initiatives. The fact that the CBO assumed 14 million could lose coverage mainly due to the elimination of mandate penalties helped kill the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, while its later assumption that 13 million fewer insured individuals would mean less spending on subsidies from the federal government helped get the 2017 Republican tax cut across the finish line by improving the budgetary math. Yet those incredibly influential estimates now appear to have been wildly off.”

This information was contained not in a major section of the report, or in news sources about the report, but in a lone footnote in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ annual report on national health expenditure projections, according to Klein.

Remember that the scary “14 million would lose coverage” was based almost entirely on people voluntarily giving up their insurance because they no longer would be charged for going without. This new report from CMS shows that just 2.5 million more would forgo health insurance coverage in 2019 because the individual mandate was repealed and even fewer would be impacted after 2019.

As Klein reports, the individual mandate was included in Obamacare even though then-candidate Barack Obama opposed the mandate during the 2008 campaign. It was included in the legislation because the CBO and others estimated it was necessary to pay for older Americans by forcing the young – who don’t need as much health care – to pay into the system. The CBO estimates worked for the passage of the bill and against Republican attempts in 2017 to repeal and replace it. Then, CBO estimates saying 14 million would lose coverage (even though the majority would voluntarily give up their coverage) scared some Republicans from voting to repeal.

“While any CBO analysis of the Republican bills was likely to project large coverage losses due to the cuts to Medicaid and subsidies, if CBO had more realistic assumptions about the mandate, the numbers would have been significantly smaller, and perhaps left more room to convince centrist Republicans to get on board,” Klein wrote.

But, Klein notes, these misleading numbers ended up helping Republicans when it came time to pass President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017. The CBO said 4 million fewer people would have coverage in 2019 because of the penalties, and 13 million fewer would have insurance over all – thus saving $338 billion.

The footnote in the annual report states there would be just “1.5 million fewer direct-purchase-market enrollees” because the mandate was repealed, and about “1.0 million fewer employer-sponsored-insurance-market enrollees.” The footnote also said Medicaid enrollment was “assumed to be unaffected.”

Klein, who’s spent a decade covering Obamacare, says “the CBO’s misfire on the individual mandate should be a major story.”

Obviously, it won’t be. One, because few people talk about Obamacare anymore since it has become so entangled in our healthcare system, and two, because the left-wing media isn’t going to give up one of its favorite talking points.

One man was given a humiliating lesson in respect after slinging some vile words at a teenage fan of President Donald Trump over the weekend.

According to The Daily Caller, it all started when a 14-year-old boy walked into a Vans skateboarding apparel store at a mall in Overland Park, Kansas, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat. An employee spotted the iconic headgear, and allegedly said “f*** you” to the teen.

When the boy’s mom stepped in, the employee’s anti-Trump bravado vanished.

Part of the encounter was recorded and made its way to Twitter, where it quickly went viral.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. A Vans store employee at Oak Park Mall, Kansas told a 14-year-old “f*ck you” for wearing a MAGA hat. Let’s get him fired. pic.twitter.com/PNkPqAxBci

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) February 17, 2019

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Although the video doesn’t capture the employee’s vulgar insult, it certainly records his apparent regret over being held accountable for his actions.

It opens with the mom demanding answers for the treatment of her teenage son. The Vans employee smugly replied, “I’m sure he’s heard it before.”

Wrong answer.

The mom then hits him with the three words every bottom-rung retail employee dreads: “Where’s your manager?”

What follows is the beginning of the end for the seemingly liberal worker. A man at the register, apparently a manager, looks around the store as he’s being told about his unruly employee.

The Daily Caller reported that the incident was even escalated to Vans’ corporate level, and ultimately ended in the vulgar employee losing his job.

“We did let this employee go. He is no longer with our company. The actions and comments from this employee at the Oak Park location is in contrast with our values and beliefs,” the company said in a statement.

“We have taken care of the situation,” it added.

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Vans, for those who don’t know, is a Santa Ana, California-based company that trades in skateboarding shoes and clothing and also sponsors surfing, snowboarding and motorcross teams.

That kind of business might lean toward a more stereotypically liberal customer base, but that doesn’t explain the employee’s outburst by itself. Not even liberal businesses generally want employees insulting paying customers.

It’s a good possibility that this whole incident was another manifestation of Trump derangement syndrome.

Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS, is the anger, confusion, and mania exhibited by some in the left over the fact that Donald Trump is president. Even the esteemed mental health journal Psychology Today weighed in on the syndrome.

While the author, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Canada’s McGill University, acknowledged that the syndrome isn’t officially recognized, he did point out that it has been widely observed:

“Many have argued that some people have been seriously disturbed and distressed by the policies, speech, behavior and tweets of President Trump, so much so that it has affected their cognitive, affective and behavioral functioning. Such people may need mental health support.”

What else could lead a grown man to verbally attack a boy who can’t even legally drive a car by himself? And in a workplace environment, no less.

Whether it was TDS or something else, it doesn’t excuse the former employee’s behavior.

Pro-Trump Americans have been demonized by the left and the mainstream media, leading to unfair smearing like what the Covington Catholic boys endured. The strange case of actor Jussie Smollett reveals that sometimes, unscrupulous people might even manufacture their own “MAGA hate crime” out of thin air.

Accountability appears to be the answer. This means accountability for everyone — from the nameless mall employee to newsroom editors. A consequence-free culture is not something we should embrace.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

David Wallace-Wells is taking his climate change fear mongering to a new level. He has transformed his doomsday pieces featured in the past two years in New York magazine into a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, released today.

James Delingpole, the executive editor of Breitbart London, has written about Wallace-Wells’ previous over-the-top predictions about global warming, including an article in the magazine last year: 

Climate change is going to kill at least 150 million people and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

Well, at least it is if you believe climate doomster David Wallace-Wells in the latest issue of New York magazine. Things are bad. Really bad. We didn’t listen and now we can expect to pay a terrible price — starting with all those deaths:

Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts. It is five times the size of the death toll of the Great Leap Forward — the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced. It is three times the greatest death toll of any kind: World War II.

Now that the book is in print, the author is making the rounds to promote it, including in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) where he announces more staggering numbers attributed to climate change.

• “More than half of all fossil fuel emissions have been emitted in the last 25 years, which means that we’ve now done more damage to the climate than in all of the millennia before and all of the centuries before.”

• “4.3 degrees of warming would mean $600 trillion in damages from climate impacts. Six hundred trillion dollars is double all of the wealth that exists in the world today. Our agriculture would probably be about half as bountiful, so the same plot of land would be producing about half as much yield in a world that we would have at least 50 percent more people to feed.”

• “U.N. estimates for the number of climate refugees that could be produced just by 2050 – on the conservative end of their estimates, we’re dealing with 100 million climate refugees by 2050.”

Delingpole is not the only critic of Wallace-Wells’ climate change reporting. 

The Washington Post did a round up of scientists panning his 2017 article:

The temptation to paint a dire picture of climate change, at a time when the Trump administration seems bent on questioning a widely accepted body of climate science and withdrawing from international agreements, is clear. But the picture still has to be plausible and accurate, a number of scientists argued this week in response to a lengthy article in New York Magazine.

The article by David Wallace-Wells is entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” and begins with the sentence, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It runs through a number of extreme climate possibilities — most prominently, the idea that some parts of the Earth will experience a combination of heat and humidity so intense that human beings won’t be able to survive outdoors in some regions.

The article gives the sense of being fairly definitive, saying it is “the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change.” Wallace-Wells also warns that he’s describing worst-case scenarios that might not be realized but could occur if the world does not take action. “But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline,” he writes. “In fact, they are our schedule.”

Scientists weighed in:

Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University is a climate researcher who isn’t always kind to climate change skeptics.

“The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century,” Mann wrote. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”

“The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now is overwhelming on its own,” Mann continued. “There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”

“Overall, the article highlights important effects that have been discussed in the literature, but in a manner that is often sloppy and hyperbolic,” Bob Kopp of Rutgers University said of Wallace-Wells’ reporting. “It would have been helpful had the reporter identified his sources, which makes it difficult to check what he intended in some points.”

Wallace-Wells defended his work.

“My purpose in writing the story wasn’t to survey the median scenario, it was to survey the worst-case scenarios because I believed — and still believe — that the public does not appreciate the unlikely-but-still-possible dangers of climate change,” he said.

“It is difficult to tell the story of climate change,” the Post reported. “It never happens on any particular day; it never moves very rapidly; it does not directly cause individual weather events.”

“But a number of scientists are saying that this particular story has gone too far,” the Post reported.

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday supported Covington High School student Nick Sandmann and his lawyers for suing the Washington Post.

“Go get them, Nick,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Fake News!”

Trump quoted the lawsuit which said the Post “ignored basic journalistic standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump.”

The lawsuit is seeking $250 million in damages, accusing the Post of targeting and bullying Sandmann and his peers for wearing a Trump campaign Make America Great Again hats during a school trip for the March for Life.

The lawsuit claims that the Washington Post ignored the truth of the event between Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips on three different occasions.

On January 19, 20 and 21,the Post ignored the truth and falsely accused Nicholasof, among other things, “accost[ing]” Phillips by “suddenly swarm[ing]” him in a “threaten[ing]” and “physically intimidat[ing]” manner as Phillips “and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave,” “block[ing]” Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips “to retreat,” “taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,” chanting “build that wall,” “Trump2020,” or “go back to Africa,” and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct which ended only “when Phillips and other activists walked away.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) and 64 House colleagues sent a letter on Tuesday to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in support of work requirements for food stamps.

Brooks’s letter backed the agency’s recent proposed rulemaking, which implemented work requirements for food stamps. The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposed rule would make it harder for states to waive the work requirement by manipulating unemployment statistics.

Reps. Mark Meadows (R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Andy Harris (R-MD), Mark Green (R-TN), and other prominent conservatives signed on to the letter.

The lawmakers contended that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements would help save Americans billions of dollars and help citizens get off of the public dole. In 2016, there were 3.8 million adults without dependents on food stamps, and nearly 2.8 million (nearly 74 percent) of those recipients did not obtain gainful employment while they received food stamps.

The lawmakers wrote, “These reforms would save hard-working American taxpayers $15 billion over a ten-year period and would help re-establish the true goal of the SNAP program, to help hard-working Americans in their attempts to gain self-sufficiency.”

Brooks said in a statement on Tuesday:

Americans who can work should earn the money they need to buy their food. It is wrong to let slackers live off the work of taxpayers. With unemployment at 4.0% (a mere three-tenths higher than the all-time low) and 7.3 million current job openings, work opportunities are abundant. It is selfish and irresponsible to allow able-bodied adults to vote for a living rather than work for one.

SNAP generally provides work requirements for food stamp recipients; however, the program contains many waivers that allow states to exempt many of their citizens from the 80-hour-per-month work requirement.

For instance, Breitbart News reported last August how California managed to exempt 95 percent of its counties from food stamp work requirements through a USDA loophole.

President Donald Trump promised to transform America’s welfare programs and reduce American dependency on welfare during his inaugural address.

Trump said in January 2017, “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work — rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said Tuesday that climate change poses an “immediate danger,” while decrying the lack of school teachers equipped to educate students concerning its perils.

Ms. Feinstein spoke as part of her push for the “Climate Change Education Act,” a bill that would allocate resources to prepare teachers to promote the climate change agenda in schools.

“Despite the immediate danger posed by climate change, many middle school and high school teachers lack the training to teach students about it,” Feinstein said in a tweet. “Our bill will create professional development grants for teachers to ensure students are getting the best education they can.”

Despite the immediate danger posed by climate change, many middle school and high school teachers lack the training to teach students about it. Our bill will create professional development grants for teachers to ensure students are getting the best education they can. pic.twitter.com/Fj4ZJReRA4

— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) February 19, 2019

The new legislation proposes to “increase the climate literacy of the United States by broadening the understanding of climate change, including possible long-term and short-term consequences and potential solutions.”

As a premise, the bill declares that the “evidence for human-induced climate change is overwhelming and undeniable” and that atmospheric carbon “can be significantly reduced through conservation, by shifting to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal, and by increasing the efficiency of buildings, including domiciles, and transportation.”

Neither of these assertions is self-evident or proven, but they are the basis for everything that follows in the proposed legislation.

“Providing clear information about climate change, in a variety of forms, can remove the fear and the sense of helplessness, and encourage individuals and communities to take action,” the bill continues, without explaining how teaching kids that climate change puts their families in “immediate danger” will help allay their fears.

The legislation seems aimed at defusing the broad skepticism toward climate change that currently reigns in the United States by indoctrinating children “with attitudes, skills, and knowledge about the climate that inform their actions.”

Curiously, in a Senate hearing last year Feinstein denounced the zealous Catholic faith of Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, saying: “the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”

In so doing, Ms. Feinstein provided a catchphrase that proves remarkably apt to describe her own ardent climate-change beliefs.

“The dogma lives loudly within you.”

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome