President Obama’s Budget Cuts $50 Million From Vaccine Program For Underinsured
“Health insurance expansion will further increase access to immunizations and decrease the number of uninsured and underinsured individuals in need of Section 317 vaccine for routine immunizations,” a White House official told BuzzFeed News.
President Obama’s fiscal year budget for 2016 cuts $50 million from Health and Human Service’s 317 immunization program, which provides provides vaccines at no cost to those eligible, typically the uninsured and underinsured.
The cut from the program comes during a measles outbreak in California and other western states, which has reignited the debate over mandatory childhood vaccinations.
In a statement the White House defended the proposed cut, saying the Affordable Care Act’s coverage makes the program less necessary.
“Health insurance expansion will further increase access to immunizations and decrease the number of uninsured and underinsured individuals in need of Section 317 vaccine for routine immunizations,” a White House official told BuzzFeed News.
Garrett: Obama’s Budget is a Lousy Groundhog Day Repeat
“It’s fitting that President Obama released his budget on Groundhog Day because it’s a painful repeat of the same failed policies that he has presented to Congress for the past six years. This budget increases taxes, expands failed government programs that do nothing to create jobs, and never balances.” Rep Scott Garrett
Garrett: Obama’s Budget is a Lousy Groundhog Day Repeat
Feb 2, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05), a senior member of the House Budget Committee, released the following statement after President Obama unveiled his Fiscal Year 2016 budget proposal to Congress today:
“It’s fitting that President Obama released his budget on Groundhog Day because it’s a painful repeat of the same failed policies that he has presented to Congress for the past six years. This budget increases taxes, expands failed government programs that do nothing to create jobs, and never balances.
“When I talk to hardworking taxpayers in New Jersey, I always hear the same thing—American families are learning to do more with less, so it’s time for Washington to do the same. Mr. President, please join us to work on solutions that make the government more efficient, accountable, and effective.”
Key Facts: The President’s FY 2016 Budget
Tax Increases
• Despite $2.1 trillion in new tax increases, President Obama’s budget never balances—ever.
• Major proposed tax increases include higher levies on savings and investment, small businesses, and increases in the costs of hiring workers.
• These tax hikes would stunt the economic growth needed to get Americans back to work, and come on top of $1.7 trillion in tax hikes already imposed by this Administration.
Spending Increases
• The President’s budget increases annually-appropriated spending for next year by $74 billion relative to current law. Over 5 years, he would increase such spending by $322 billion.
• Next year alone, the President’s budget would grow total federal spending by $259 billion, or 7 percent.
• Total spending will increase by 65 percent ($2.4 trillion) in 10 years under the President’s plan.
Interest Costs Skyrocket
• President Obama’s plan more than triples interest costs, which remain the fastest growing item in the budget.
• Interest on the debt this year would be $229 billion, but would rise to $785 billion in 2025 under his plan.
• At the end of President’s plan, annual interest costs would be larger than his proposed spending for national defense, Medicaid or the combined total of all non-defense agency spending.
Debt Climbs
• Since 2009, we’ve added $7.5 trillion to the debt and spent $21.1 trillion.
• The President’s budget plan would add $8.5 trillion to the debt.
• Cumulative deficits would amount to $5.7 trillion, and gross debt would climb to $26.3 trillion in 2025.
The Typical Millennial Is $2,000 Poorer Than His Parents at This Age
More young people are living in poverty and fewer have jobs compared their parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, in 1980.
Derek Thompson Jan 31 2015, 8:00 AM ET
The past is another country. In 1980, the typical young worker in Detroit or Flint, Michigan, earned more than his counterpart in San Francisco or San Jose. The states with the highest median income were Michigan, Wyoming, and Alaska. Nearly 80 percent of the Boomer generation, which at the time was between 18 and 35, was white, compared to 57 percent today.
Three decades later, in 2013, the picture of young people—yes, Millennials—is a violently shaken kaleidoscope, and not all the pieces are falling into a better place. Michigan’s median income for under-35 workers has fallen by 26 percent, more than any state. In fact, beyond the east coast, earnings for young workers fell in every state but Hawaii and South Dakota.
The median income of young adults today is $2,000 less today than their parents in 1980, adjusted for inflation. The earnings drop has been particularly steep in the rust belt and across the northwest.
As you can see in the next interactive graph, the three states with the highest median income for young people in 1980 were also the three states with the steepest 33-year decline in median income: Michigan, Wyoming, and Alaska. The winners of this continental shake-up are all on the coasts, particularly Virginia, Maryland, and just about all of New England.
Paul Davidson, USA TODAY 1:20 p.m. EST January 30, 2015
The economy grew more slowly than expected in the fourth quarter as government spending fell sharply and business investment pulled back.
Gross domestic product expanded at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.6% in the three months ended Dec. 31, slowing sharply from a robust 5% pace in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. Economists expected 3.1% growth.
For all of 2014, the economy grew 2.4%, up from 2.2% in 2013, after harsh winter weather early in the year caused the economy to shrink in the first quarter.
In the fourth quarter, consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy, grew a healthy 4.3% as plunging gasoline prices and strong job growth bolstered Americans’ confidence.
But government spending declined 7.5% as defense outlays tumbled after rising sharply in the third quarter.
The income gap between the rich and poor — the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, the 1% — has increased four times faster under Obama than under Bush. That’s according to the New York Times.
Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
By DIONNE SEARCEY and ROBERT GEBELOFFJAN. 25, 2015
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.
But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.
This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home.
NJ’s annual job growth slow, with some bright spots
JANUARY 23, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY HUGH R. MORLEY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
* State’s growth trails well behind nation’s
Four years after New Jersey reached its post-recession employment low, figures released Thursday show the state’s economic recovery continues to be slow.
The state added a modest 29,000 jobs in 2014, leaving employment far below its pre-recession peak and lower even than the level 14 years ago, according to the monthly employment report released by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The report showed New Jersey shed 400 jobs last month, even as national employment forged ahead strongly, adding 252,000 jobs in December. And although the state’s jobless rate dropped from 6.4 percent to 6.2 percent, it remains above the national figure of 5.6 percent.
The report, nevertheless, contained some positive elements, including the fact that the state added more jobs in 2014 than the previous year, despite the loss of thousands of casino jobs in Atlantic City, a very harsh winter and the lingering effects of Superstorm Sandy.
“It was a sustained, moderate pace of growth,” said Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at the accounting firm CohnReznick.
Obama’s New State Of The Union Tax Hike On Middle Class 529 College Savers
Hoping to dominate the narrative on a holiday weekend and on the eve of the annual “State of the Union” speech, the Obama White House late Saturday night leaked some of the new tax ideas in their upcoming budget.
Thankfully, those of us with several kids and no life were home at the time, so I penned Americans for Tax Reform’s analysis of the major tax hikes in the leak before the stroke of midnight. If the intention was to have an unchallenged narrative, mission not accomplished.
One tax hike in particular was very odd, since it’s aimed almost exclusively at middle class families with kids–the exact demographic the goodies in the tax plan is targeting.
The levy in question would increase taxes on college savings accounts known as “529 plans” (after their section in the Internal Revenue Code). By definition, these accounts are really only used by middle class families. Poorer households don’t have the extra income to save (and even if they have a little, there are much higher priorities like retirement or saving for a home). Very wealthy families might use 529 plans, but it’s far more likely that they have complex trust arrangements set up for their children.
According to the Investment Company Institute (the trade association for the mutual fund industry), there was $245 billion accumulated in 529 plans in 2014. With just south of 12 million accounts open, that means there’s an average balance of about $21,000 in these plans. This is not a mechanism for rich Democrats like the Kennedys or the Gates to shelter wealth.
The White House wants President Obama to play the part of Robin Hood at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Obama hopes to use the big speech to remove a blemish of his presidency: an economic recovery that has left wage growth behind.
Free community college. A $175 billion tax cut for the middle class. Faster, cheaper broadband internet. A week of paid sick leave. Discounted mortgages.
Obama wants to move forward with all of these populist proposals for the poor and middle class, and he wants to do so by taking from the rich in the form of higher taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street.
Few of the proposals are going anywhere with a GOP Congress, but the White House sees Obama’s penultimate State of the Union as the president’s last, best chance to lay down policy markers for the next two years —and to frame the 2016 battle for the White House.
Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty
By Lyndsey Layton January 16 at 5:00 AM
For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.
“We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”
The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, more than half of the children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home to succeed, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.
“Apparatchik” is defined as as unquestioningly loyal subordinate: a subordinate who is unquestioningly loyal to a powerful political leader or organization. You can find a cadre of Obama apparatchiks here. They are known as the Editorial Board of the NY Times. It is claimed that this board operates independently of the regular “news operations” but if no one objects to it, well….
I was going to title this “The Devil Wears Pravda.”
Pravda is the Russian government information outlet, unflinchingly loyal to the leader of the Communist government. The NY Times editorial board has become the US version of Pravda. It has become a pathetic, apologetic, partisan, left wing shadow of itself. It is sodden with democrat bias. It is essentially an arm of the Obama Progressive Movement and the National Democratic Committee.
What it cannot do is tell the truth. The board is an Obama propaganda machine. Yesterday they posted an editorial entitled “Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping”.
In it, they decide what’s worth keeping and what is not despite a complete absence of facts. But more importantly, they send a very important message- lying is acceptable to get what you want.
“He clearly misspoke.”
“Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it.
“Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. ”
Misspoke? This is astonishing – it is a lie in itself. Obama didn’t misspeak. He LIED.
It could be argued that Obama misspoke when he claimed that premiums would go down 3000% when he meant to say that premiums would go down an average of $2500 per year (and that was another lie). That’s closer to what one might call misspeaking.
Let’s revisit what Obama said one more time:
“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
Obama probably said it hundreds of times and he knew it wasn’t true. He and his aides knew that the truth wouldn’t sell:
More from the NY Times today: “The former official added that in the midst of a hard-fought political debate “if you like your plan, you can probably keep it” isn’t a salable point.
They knew the truth wouldn’t sell. This wasn’t misspeaking. This was wholesale deceit and the point cannot be made too strenuously. The President of the United States and the democrat Congress sold America a lie.
The Times’ apparatchiks then spend the rest of their apologia defending Obama’s big lie:
“But insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees. They must offer consumers options that do comply with the law, and they are scrambling to retain as many of their customers as possible with new policies that are almost certain to be more comprehensive than their old ones.”
And they spend the rest of the editorial defending the lie.
“Indeed, in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that, and some didn’t cover hospital care.
“This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes.”
“What health care reform is trying to do.”
This is distraction. It is deflection. It is dishonest. What they needed to be was honest, but the Times doesn’t agree.
The NY Post sees Obama going from “Bullsh*t to dishonesty.”
“Obama denounced the individual mandate to purchase health insurance during the primaries to get to Hillary’s left, but his stated reason was that it wouldn’t be fair to force people to buy health insurance if they couldn’t afford it. You could argue he covered himself by including in the law large subsidies — your income can be four times the poverty line ($94,000) and you still qualify for aid.
“He said he would close Guantanamo but that was just campaign blather for suckers — an applause line, not a serious policy proposal. As any student of the matter knew, there wasn’t a better alternative, and nobody really cares about Guantanamo detainees anyway. It was just opportunistic Bush-bashing.
“This week was something new. It was the week Obama was revealed to be a stone-cold liar.”
Obama’s lies are so egregious that even WaPo gave Obama Four Pinocchios.
There are a number of ways one could summarize the NY Times position, but “the end justifies the means” is probably the most accurate.
Obama and the NY Times will decide. They know what’s best for you. You are too stupid to make your own choices.
You don’t even deserve the truth.
No, you can’t keep your plan and you can’t keep your doctor. For one woman, that could be fatal:
“Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.
“But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.”
Should she lose her battle, would it be fair to say Obama killed her?
The Times go to great lengths to defend what is being done here but the truth remains- Obama lied and they are endorsing his lying so that he and the rest of his Progressives can force upon you what they and they alone decide is best.
Just like Stalin.
Just like Hitler.
Just like Mussolini.
Just like Gaddafi.
Just like Mubarak.
Just like Mugabe.
This is how it always begins. They impose their will on people. They knew what was best for you. Once you get past the need for the truth anything is possible.
Examiner Editorial: If top 5% paid 40% of taxes, what is their ‘fair’ share?
November 22, 2012 | 8:00 pm
Riding a wave of confidence after his re-election victory, President Obama is eager to collect scalps from the class war he appears to have won. Americans, Obama said in his postelection news conference earlier this month, “want to make sure that middle-class folks aren’t bearing the entire burden and sacrifice when it comes to some of these big challenges. They expect that folks at the top are doing their fair share as well.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., echoed this point in a fundraising pitch sent out on Monday: “Voters sent a clear message to Republicans in the election: we must stand up for the middle class and ensure the wealthy pay their fair share.”
Although Obama and his fellow Democrats repeatedly call on wealthier Americans to pay their “fair share,” they never specify what percentage of the nation’s tax burden the wealthy would have to bear. As matters stand, the top 1 percent of American households paid 39 percent of income taxes in 2009, according to the most recent data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office, and the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid 64 percent.
But income taxes, taken in isolation, do not tell the whole story, because lower-income Americans do pay payroll taxes. But even taking into account all forms of taxation, the top 1 percent still paid 22 percent of federal taxes while earning just 13.4 percent of household income. The top 5 percent paid 40 percent of all federal taxes, despite earning only 26 percent of all income. No matter how you slice the numbers, it’s hard to understand why anyone would think the wealthy aren’t already shouldering a burden commensurate with their blessings.
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