FreedomTalks

Watch the video of Carl Mumpower signing the FreedomWorks No Earmarks Pledge. Carl is running for Congress in the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina.

Michael Tanner with more reasons why the only state in the country to mandate health insurance keeps proving that mandates don’t work:

Slightly less than half of Massachusetts’ uninsured population actually complied with the mandate. True, the number of people without health insurance was reduced from 13% of the state’s population to 7%, but when the bill was passed, advocates promised that “all Massachusetts citizens will have health insurance.” Perhaps it depends on your definition of “all.”

Most of those who are signing up are low-income individuals, whose coverage is fully or partially subsidized, proving once again that if you give something away for free people will take it. It certainly appears that it is the expensive and generous Massachusetts subsidies (up to 300% of the poverty level), not the unprecedented individual mandate that is responsible for much of the increased coverage.

Adverse selection remains a big problem, with the young and healthy failing to comply with the mandate. The state refused to change its community rating laws which drive up the cost of insurance for young, healthy individuals. Not surprisingly, they don’t find this a good deal.

The program is far exceeding its projected costs, with at least a 33% budget overrun in its first year.

The program has increased demand for health care services without increasing the supply of providers. As a result, patients are having trouble finding providers and waiting lists (Canada here we come) are beginning to develop.

In New Jersey, it seems, some state legislators are starting to get the message.  Assemblyman Jay Webber recently proposed a bill that would allow individuals to buy health insurance across state lines, which would drive down costs by circumventing burdensome coverage mandates.

Cable a la carte is an older issue, but, thanks to folks like Kevin Martin and the PTC, it keeps popping up.  And guess what: A la carte advocates, who seem to think that there are cost savings to unbundling cable packages, still don’t seem to know what they’re talking about.  Not only is the idea a silly one — why can’t people just change the channel if they don’t like what’s going on? — it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of cable TV delivery.

Over at TechDirt, Timothy Lee explains:

People imagine that an a la carte mandate would mean that if they’re currently paying $50 per month for 50 channels, then they should be able to pay $1 per month for one channel. But that doesn’t make any sense. Switching a given customer from 50 channels to 1 channel doesn’t reduce costs (the other 49 channels would presumably still be produced for other viewers), so why should the customer expect a lower bill? If anything a switch to a la carte actually makes things more expensive because in some cases cable companies have to install new equipment and set up a more complicated ordering and billing system to keep track of who had signed up for which channels. In reality, what would happen is that the cost of each channel would go up a lot. Instead of $1/channel, cable companies might charge something like $8/channel, with each customer choosing 6 channels on average. The result would be that most people would pay about the same for a lot fewer channels.

As I’ve noted before, some studies actually indicate that over costs could go as much as 20% up under an a la carte regime. It’s not only that there’d be little in the way of savings. It’s that it’s actually less efficient to deal with personalizing service that way.  It’s much more efficient to simply allow consumers what they want to watch on the  delivery end rather than try to sort it out on the provider side.

The Senate takes up the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill today, and Robert Samuelson nicely lays out the primary problems with its approach to regulating carbon emissions:

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade — a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases — is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it’s not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it’s promoted as a “free market” mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities.

And not that this will come as much of a surprise, but the bill’s terribly expensive as well. CBO estimates the bill’s cost to the private sector will be about $90 billion a year through 2016.

Gallup also reported last month that many Americans assume recent jumps in gas prices are permanent.  But that’s not necessarily true. As Steve Chapman points out today, there are credible experts who believe that oil prices could well go down by more than 30%.  Lower demand as a result of high prices is part of this.  But, as I’ve already noted today, so is increasing supply, and the best way for public officials to set the stage for this to happen is to reduce regulatory barriers to expanding production and increasing investment.

Here’s an interesting statistic: According to the latest Gallup poll, a majority of Americans support Congress allowing oil companies to drill in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off limits. With oil prices hovering around $4 a gallon in most parts of the country, this is hardly a surprise. Worldwide demand is on the rise, so the only way to make a long-term dent in the price of oil is to increase supply. The editors at NRO agree:

if members of Congress really want to mitigate the effects of high oil prices as much as they claim they do, they could start by letting oil companies bring America’s vast untapped supplies to market.

We’re not just talking about the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) — which Congress stupidly keeps off-limits even though proposed oil exploration there would only affect approximately 2,000 of its 19 million acres — though opening just that 0.01 percent of ANWR to oil and natural gas development could supply 5 percent of America’s oil per year for 12 years before it starts to decline, according to Energy Department estimates. The Outer Continental Shelf — also off-limits to drilling — likely contains billions of barrels of additional oil and natural gas reserves.

Of course, none of this seems to have gotten through to some members of Congress, who insist on trying to pin gas prices on oil executives even as the public’s belief that oil companies are to blame has dropped sharply. The solution here is simple: more oil, lower prices.

Michael Franc in NRO today:

Conservatives on the Hill want to believe they’ve started on that long road to recovery. Last week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) unveiled an exquisite and ambitious reform agenda he calls “A Roadmap for America’s Future.” In it, Ryan sets forth a credible way to address the fiscal catastrophe sure to come when the Boomers retire (consisting of foundational reforms to the big three entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) even as he reforms our tax system to promote economic growth and ensure American competitiveness. Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and some members of the Republican Study Committee in the House have also offered up visionary action plans that should please conservatives.

But no matter how many times Ryan or his allies scream “I get it” from the mountaintop and vow to do the right thing if returned to power, the voters will not believe them until they believe his colleagues are capable of acting in a way that is consistent with conservative principles and contrary to their parochial, political interests.

Political pandering of the sort we saw with the farm bill is obviously not helping either the GOP or Congress (both have abysmally low poll numbers right now).  But despite the efforts of a few genuinely dedicated legislators (like Ryan), it increasingly looks like a lot of members of Congress are going to end up learning things the hard way — at the polls in November.

Kenneth Cole should stick to selling expensive shoes. Instead, he and his blogger minions are selling untruths about FreedomWorks. And covering up their smear campaign when they are proven wrong. Here is what happened. A blogger named Dominic Basulto wrote the following post on the Kenneth Cole Awearness blog.

Ever wondered what a fake grassroots movement looks like? On Monday, the Wall Street Journal pulled back the cover on a site that - on the surface - appears to be a spontaneous, angry tirade from frustrated renters about the proposed $300 billion government bailout plan for U.S. homeowners. But what if the site was actually cooked up by a lobbying organization led by former House majority leader Dick Armey and publishing billionaire Steve Forbes?

If you start to think about the politics involved here - a Rupert Murdoch-owned media publication taking on wealthy and powerful Republican bigshots - things start to get very interesting indeed.

When I sent this out to some of our best volunteers, they got upset and began posting comments about how they are real people that have been fighting for lower taxes, less government and more freedom across the country. We’ve already more than answered the sloppy journalism of Michael Phillips over at the Wall Street Journal with emails to him and the editors there. But our members wanted to sound off on Kenneth Cole’s blog to drive the point home that they exist, that they enjoy fighting for freedom, and that people that call them “fake” are flat wrong.

When our members posted their comments, Dominic must have gotten the message because he tried to cover his tracks by deleting the original post. Unfortunately for him and Kenneth Cole, Google keeps a cache, or snapshot of everything its web crawlers see. When you click on the original post, you get a dead link. But we saved the cached file to show that he posted his thoughts, received comments from our members, and then deleted the post so as not to look foolish. But in deleting the post, that is exactly how he looks now.

There is nothing like defending an attack that you are a “fake” group with real grassroots activism. Great job Freedom Swarm for sending the message loud and clear, one click at a time!

UPDATE: You can let the editor of the Kenneth Cole Awearness blog know how you feel about the company slamming conservative grassroots groups on its website. I doubt the company executives want to lose all their conservative customers due to their left-wing activism and attacks. Email the editor at editor@awearnessblog.com

The farm bill is pretty obviously a bipartisan debacle, one of those only-in-Washington mutual spendathons limited only by the — wait, at $700 billion over the next ten years, it appears to have been limited by basically nothing.

Well, at least it’s money well spent, right?  America’s farmers deserve our support.  Maybe, but not like this. Heritage’s Brian Reidl has seven reasons to avoid the farm bill. Among them?

Farm subsidies are intended to help struggling family farmers. Instead, they harm those farmers by excluding them from most subsidies; financ­ing the consolidation of small, individually owned farms into business conglomerates; and raising land values to levels that prevent young people from entering farming.

Farm subsidies allegedly are intended to be con­sumer- and taxpayer-friendly, but they cost Americans billions of dollars each year in higher taxes and higher food costs.

And guess what: Congress couldn’t even manage the passage of the bill properly:

The House voted 316-108 Wednesday evening to override the president’s veto of the Farm Bill - or did it?

As Politico’s David Rogers explains, 100 Republicans and 216 Democrats voted to override despite the fact that a clerical error had caused one of the farm bill’s 15 titles to be dropped from the version of the bill Bush nixed.

After talking with parliamentarians Wednesday night, House Majority Leader STENY HOYER said Congress will probably need to pass a newly numbered version of the bill today, get Bush to veto it again, and then start the process of trying to override the veto again.

As they say: Whoops!

In this morning’s Washington Post, Vincent Reinhart explains why the Bear Stearns bailout is already causing ripple effects:

Politicians seeking to expand the role of government to help ease problems in the mortgage market face an inconvenient fact: Most Americans own their homes outright, meet their mortgage payments or are renters. As a consequence, mortgage relief never polls well. When people are asked whether they think government aid should be given to households failing to meet their mortgage obligations, a majority routinely says no. The average American, meeting the struggle to live within his or her means, bridles at the notion that those who are overextended should be helped.

The Federal Reserve’s decision in March to lend to the investment bank Bear Stearns changed this debate forever. Fed officials took the unprecedented action of extending the agency’s safety net beyond the banking system. Presumably, they were balancing the risk that other failures would be triggered should Bear, the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, default on its obligations against the precedent of such lending.

It is probably impossible for anyone who was not in the room during those negotiations to accurately assess that balancing act. Still, there is one certainty: That decision to solve the problem immediately at hand will have long-term consequences. In particular, the Fed’s action tipped the political balance toward providing direct subsidies to households having trouble meeting their mortgage payments.

The bailout of Bear’s creditors has allowed the political question to be reframed. Now voters can be asked more than whether federal aid should be given to overextended homeowners.

In other words, the Fed’s bank bailout set the stage for endless bailouts of anyone and everyone. Made a rash decision? Invested poorly? Just stick out your hand and cry, “We need relief!”

This is, of course, the point FreedomWorks has been making for a while: