About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

An Analysis - Trump Versus Clinton - Issue By Issue

Shortly after the third presidential debate Donald Trump released what he calls Contract With The American Voter – an eighteen point program that starts Trump's first day in office & will dominate the agenda the first hundred days, if he is elected. 
 
Highlights of Trump's contract include: 1) cancelling all of BO's unconstitutional executive actions that bypassed Congress on immigration law & bestowed work authorization benefits on illegal immigrants including providing cash in the form of tax refunds even for years when no income tax return had been filed, 2) pursuing a constitutional amendment to place term limits on members of Congress, 3) placing a hiring freeze on all non-military employees – except for public safety & health needs, 4) requiring that each new federal regulation eliminates two existing ones, 5) picking Supreme Court justices "who will uphold & defend the Constitution" based on a list of twenty prospective justices previously presented, 6) cancelling all federal funding to sanctuary cities, 7) suspending immigration from terror prone regions like the Middle East, 8) removing two million dangerous undocumented immigrants & cancelling visas from countries that won't take them back, 9) repealing & replacing ObamaCare with Health Savings Accounts where healthcare insurance can be purchased across state lines & Medicaid is managed by the states following block grants of funding, 10) cutting red tape @ the FDA where there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, 11) supporting Kate's Law (HR 3011) that calls for a mandatory five-year prison sentence for those who illegally reenter the country with a felony conviction on their record – the law is named for Kate Steinle who was murdered by a homeless man who was an illegal alien who had previously been deported five times, & 12) authorizing the Keystone XL Pipeline Project.
 
In addition Trump has an economic growth plan that lowers taxes on the middle class & businesses, has vowed to eliminate the fallacious destructive anchor baby claim to birthright citizenship, & will restore the enforcement of immigration laws.
 
If you are not one of the 17 million people who have already voted please compare Trump's contract vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton's positions before you vote.
 
Hillary Clinton's positions include raising taxes & increasing regulations on businesses, expanding Social Security benefits, reintroducing the public option to the ObamaCare legislation, enacting a $15 per hour federal minimum wage law, providing free college to people making less than $125,000 per year, mandating overtime pay for salaried personnel, enacting paid family leave legislation, & increasing the proposed 65,000 poorly vetted Syrian refugees by hundreds of percentage points in her quest for simultaneous open borders & a welfare state & all the government-dependent problems that follow such an arrangement.
 
Let's take them one by one:
 
1) raising taxes & increasing regulations on businesses - Name one job that you create when you tax income?  Name one small business that actually expands when you increase taxes or regulations?  Name the economic freedom principle that is enhanced when you raise taxes?
 
2) expanding Social Security benefits - Social Security & Medicare along with Medicaid & ObamaCare (see below) form the cornerstone of the American welfare state.  To illustrate just how dependent many Americans are on these programs please consider that two thirds of our seniors depend on Social Security as the main source of their income & for one in five it is the only source of income.  Without Social Security half of all seniors would be living in poverty so naturally seniors love Social Security.  If possible seniors love Medicare even more.  Today's retiring baby boomers are the only people who have paid into Medicare their entire working lives.  Medicare Part A is primarily paid for by the 2.9% payroll tax plus co-pays & deductibles paid for by the recipient while Medicare Part B is primarily paid for from funds taken out of the general tax revenues taken from the U.S. Treasury plus monthly premiums & shared co-pays & deductibles  paid for by the recipients.  The portion of Medicare Part B paid by seniors amounts to only 25% of the program's cost.  Medicare Part D is under a similar arrangement as Part B & is 75% funded by the U.S. Treasury meaning that the drug plan constitutes a public subsidy of 75% of the cost of the program.

 

So what's not for seniors to like – except that these programs are not financially sustainable? How unkind is it for our elected reps to let this continue until total collapse of the programs?  It is the elderly & people over 55 who are dependent on these programs who will be hurt the most when the programs collapse.  Just what will these people do then? 

 

See graphic below for couples, both one earner & two earner, that shows the projected lifetime Social Security benefits compared to the lifetime taxes paid in.  The lower the annual income the higher the projected lifetime benefits ratio.  Two earner couples start to pay more in lifetime taxes than they receive in benefits around the $130,000 annual income level while the same is true for single people around the $65,000 annual income level (not shown on graphic).

 

 click on graphic to enlarge

 
3) reintroducing the public option to the ObamaCare legislation – This is the next step toward single payer universal healthcare but ObamaCare has its own problems in the meantime.  Average premium hikes for 2017 are 25% across the 39 states served by the federally run online market (22% increases are the average hike for all insurance marketplaces, both federal and state-based exchanges), before subsidies, with increases ranging all the way up to 116% in Arizona.  With United Health, Humana, & Aetna dropping out of some state exchanges many consumers have far fewer plans to choose from.  Some consumers have lost coverage because smaller insurers have shut down.  And of course many consumers cannot see the doctor of their choice.
 
The welfare part comes in because 85% of customers on the exchanges qualify for subsidies which reduce the monthly premiums.  And more than half the people who receive subsidies to help pay their premiums also qualify for additional assistance that reduces their deductibles in a feature of ObamaCare known as cost sharing reduction subsidies. 
 
But the deductibles are still too high for many people to pay their hospital bills meaning hospitals are still suffering from bad debt. "It feels like a sucker punch.  When someone has a really high deductible, effectively they're still uninsured, and most people in Childress don't have $5,000 lying around to pay their bills" says John Henderson, chief executive of Childress Regional Medical Center in Texas.
 
So taxpayers keep paying their fair share & everyone else's for that matter.
 
4) enacting a $15 per hour federal minimum wage law – Just debunk this Democrat idea by asking how can a politician declare a worker is suddenly worth more to an employer than they were the day before – that is what a raise in the minimum wage really is, a government decree.
 
The people most hurt by raising the federal minimum wage are the most unskilled workers – people who do not add more to a businesses' revenue than to costs when making a higher wage.  Women are twice as likely to fall into this category than men.  Teenagers are especially priced out of the labor market by increases in the minimum wage more than any other group - with the biggest cost being their lost opportunity to gain experience & training that they will need later in life.  In essence the people who carry their weight @ a wage rate agreed to by their employer & themselves, but not @ a higher rate, will be the ones who lose their jobs.
 
Democrats love to automatically assume the high moral ground by saying Republicans & Tea Partiers abandon the morality issue in not caring about low income people who do not make a living wage – but every bit of evidence I am aware of makes me not trust Democrats & government with morality.
 
5) providing free college to people making less than $125,000 per year, mandating overtime pay for salaried personnel, enacting paid family leave legislation, & increasing the proposed 65,000 poorly vetted Syrian refugees by hundreds of percentage points in her quest for simultaneous open borders & a welfare state & all the government-dependent problems that follow such an arrangement - These points only further cripple what's left of America's free enterprise system by continuing the last sixteen years of two-party government-dependent socialism. 
 

1 comment:

  1. RTE-oct-31-2016
    Doug - excellent analyses! We may all do our part to educate the low information and economic-ignorant of your analyses. We can all start by pointing out that income redistribution retards wealth creation, and actually decreases our flexibility in "essential" income redistribution.

    Regarding Syrian refugee policy:
    I am sure the ISIS heads are sending their fiercest warriors to Syria to pose as refugees, then come to the US. I believe ISIS strategy is to wait until a critical mass of warriors are in the US before implementing terror events more devastating than 9/11. Hence, Hil's policy is incomprehensible and treasonous. A president's primary responsibility is to protect its citizens. How can anyone vote to increase odds substantially of being killed.

    Trump's economic policies favor the private sector which is the only sector to create new industries, jobs, and wealth. Hil's public sector focus will be a dead weight on job creation. Trump is right about immigration policy to protect our core interests. Hil is more than #CrookedHilary. She is #treasonousHilary.

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