This is what WaPo says, in the lead paragraphs of a new story, that the CBO scoring of the Baucus health insurance reform plan would do: A health-care reform bill drafted by the Senate Finance Committee would expand health coverage to nearly 30 million Americans who currently lack insurance and would meet President Obama's goal of reducing the federal budget deficit by 2019, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade, but would more than offset that cost by slicing hundreds of billions from government health programs such as Medicare and by imposing a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies starting in 2013. All told, the package would slice $81 billion from projected budget deficits over the next 10 years, the CBO said, and continue to reduce deficits well into the future. It would also expand coverage to 94 percent of Americans by 2019, the CBO said, up from the current 83 percent. This is what ...

From AOL Auto , a thorough debunking of the myth of Cash for Clunkers (C4C) success finally begins to hit selected parts of the MSM: Myth One: C4C was environmentally friendly Quicker than you can say, “Holy statistics, Mr. Wizard,” the numbers nerds ascertained that the new vehicles sold under C4C will use more—not less—fuel than the beaters that were turned in and destroyed. How can that be? Think of it on a personal level. Suppose you had a 10-year-old particulate belcher that, as the euphemism goes, needed work. Even if you lived in an Orlando suburb, you’d still be less than excited at the idea of piling the kids into it and lighting out for Disney World. But that new Malibu that gets a hell of a lot better mileage is a different kettle of green. You trust it; it’s economical; you drive it more. A lot more, according to another piece of research. CNW surveyed drivers involved in the purchase of the first 239,000 C4C vehicles. The average intended annual mileage was 10,894, up fr...

I said earlier that I would examine this paragraph by Dana Garrett in the light of the success of Cash for Clunkers: Great news all around, right? But, reader, if you hear a note of weeping in the national celebration of this program's success, it's those economic conservatives who, for entirely doctrinaire reasons, simply cannot admit they were wrong. A government stimulus program worked—in fact, it exceeded expectations—and that must be denied at all costs. You see, if they admit that a government stimulus program worked here, then they'll have to admit that such programs might work in other aspects of the economy as well. Too bad for them. Reality is rarely kind to dogmatists. A couple caveats first: 1) I would dispute Dana's assertion that economic conservatives reject the idea of government stimulus. The whole argument over the stimulus package found the GOPers arguing for stimulus in the form of tax cuts or payroll tax holidays, which everyone from Peter Orzag ...

From Kids Prefer Cheese : In Peru, the government recently delivered a boatload of laptop computers to over 2,000 school kids in indigenous communities. There's just one big problem. In 50 of the 73 communities where the computers were sent, there is no electricity to keep them running (these are not self cranking types). As it turns out though, this is actually a big improvement over the last program like this. In that case, the computers were set up in English (!!!!) and the batteries were defective. Plus, not to worry because the government is pledging to soon deliver 2 solar panels to each of the communities that got laptops but don't have electricity! No word on how these panels would be utilized or how an electric grid for a village could run on two panels (maybe they are VERY BIG panels?).

Tommywonk has joined the ranks of those praising Cash for Clunkers , and his analysis seems compelling at first glance: The average gas mileage of vehicles sold was 25.4 mpg, compared to 15.8 mpg for vehicles traded in. 83 percent of trade-ins were trucks, while 60 percent of new vehicles sold were cars. The most popular vehicle was the Ford Focus, which is rated 28 mpg combined city and highway. If 250,000 new cars are bought under the program, and the average car is driven 10,000 miles per year, car owners will save nearly 60 million gallons of gasoline in the first year. At $2.50 a gallon, the savings to drivers will total about $150 million. He also points out the rise in automobile sales. So why wouldn't we do Cash for Clunkers II? The devil is in the details of the sequel, that's why. Here's PoliticsDaily on the current House Bill to extend funding for the program: But a close look at what qualifies as "more fuel efficient" in the program reveals loopholes...

Here's the thing most people don't get about Libertarians: we don't argue that no government program will ever work. We argue the ethical issue of government by blackmail or coercion, and the general ineptitude of government as pretty much leaving the burden of proof to the State that it should be trusted. Lots of Americans have lined up for Cash for Clunkers because its the next-best-thing to the tax rebates and tax cuts we'd all like to see. But lots of Americans also expected to be able to line up for mortgage refinances under President Obama's Making Homes Affordable program (actual acronym: HARP). The program was announced in February, and in May here's what Treasury Secretary Geithner said in a self-serving government press release about the success of the program thus far: With the Making Home Affordable (MHA) program delivering much-needed relief to homeowners and to our economy just over two months after the release of program guidelines , Treasury...

Michael Munger lays it all out today at Kids Prefer Cheese. The North Carolina anti-gouging laws, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, not only caused gasoline shortages , but spent nearly $200,000 of taxpayer money to collect $56,000 in fines . This, of course, makes really good sense to somebody. Just not to me.

... inside the United States. Since the Energy Department claims to have lost track of several hundred thousand pounds of such material. From NTI : WASHINGTON -- A number of U.S. institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported to the Energy Department in 2004 that the amount of material they held was less than agency records indicated. But rather than investigating the discrepancies, Energy officials wrote off significant quantities of nuclear material from the department's inventory records. That's just one of the findings of a report released yesterday by Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman that concluded "the department cannot properly account for and effectively manage its nuclear materials maintained by domestic licensees and may be unable to detect lost or stolen material." Auditors found that Energy could not accurately account for the quantities and locations of nuclear material at 15 out of 40, or 37 percent, of facilities review...

... when the Center for Constitutional Rights points out that the internal miliatry investigation of potential abuses at Gitmo was, essentially, a sham: A leading human rights organization charges that, contrary to recent U.S. government reports that found prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, being treated humanely, they are in fact "deteriorating at a rapid rate" due to "harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines." The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a report [.pdf] on the current conditions in Camps 5, 6, and Echo following a press conference convened late last week by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations. In his own report on conditions at Guantanamo, delivered to the White House, Walsh determined that conditions at the base meet the standards of the Geneva Conventions. CCR's report, "Conditions of Confinement at Guantanamo: Still in Violation of the Law," disput...

... is that we're apparently not very good at it. From Reuters : SANG-I-KHEL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The United States' decision to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan will mean little to the people of northern Sang-i-Khel village whose fight is not against Taliban insurgents but against hunger. Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama ordered 17,000 additional U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan to tackle an intensifying insurgency across the south and east of the country. Yet in the relatively peaceful north, Afghans face a different struggle. Severe drought and soaring food prices have left hundreds of thousands of people facing a daily battle to survive the winter. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says some 280,000 Afghans in the north of the country are suffering from the drought, the worst in a decade, and are unable to meet their basic food needs. But the US, curiously enough, is sending most of its aid to the parts of the country where people are not st...

Well, we didn't exactly set up booths in the bazaars and sell them to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, except .... ... that we sorta did. From the Times Online : The US military has lost track of about 222,000 weapons shipped to Afghanistan since 2001, a leaked report compiled by the US Government Accountability Office revealed. The report shows that the US military failed to keep proper records of 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons sent to Afghanistan between December 2004 and June 2008. It also failed to track 135,000 weapons donated to Afghan security by 21 other countries. The UN spent more than $100 million (£70 million) on a disarmament programme that sought to remove weapons from the hands of illegal armed groups after November 2003. Many militiamen are known to have handed over antique or faulty weapons and UN officials reported First World War and even 19th-century flintlock rifles surrendered, rather than AK47s and rocket launchers. There remains a thriving arms tr...

... maybe we should check to see if the GAO criticisms of the Federal aircraft fleet in 2003 were ever actually addressed. Like maybe the Federal government (a) actually ever determined how many aircraft it owns, or (b) ever fessed up to how much they cost? From the GAO : GAO could not accurately determine the number of government-owned aircraft and total costs of federal aircraft program operation s, because it found that GSA's database was unreliable. Although the database showed federal agencies owned nearly 1,400 aircraft and that agencies reported spending over $700 million to operate and maintain federally-owned and contracted aircraft in fiscal year 2002, GAO found it understated the cost of federal aircraft operations by at least $568 million over the past 3 years. This is because some agencies did not report all the required information. GAO also found there was no requirement for the agencies to report other aircraft costs such as depreciation. The systems and controls ...

... when the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, and the Vice-President formally offer you the job of envoy to Iraq, but--all of a sudden--the President doesn't call, and nominates somebody else. Of course, the story of General Anthony Zinni was only reported in that radical talking-points rag, WaPo . I'm not going to excerpt this, except for two lines, because you have to read it yourself to believe it: The next day, General Zinni said, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called to thank him for taking the job. .... “As a sorry offer to placate me, they offered ambassador to Saudi,” he said in a separate e-mail message, referring to Saudi Arabia. “I told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.” And you thought the tax problems were entertaining....

Over at Delawareliberal , Deldem provides a (completely unconscious, I suspect) example of this. Here's the paragraph with the sentence in bold that caught my eye: The classic refrain from Wall Street and the Republicans, in opposition to President Obama’s $500,000 cap on the salaries of those bank executives who have so failed in their jobs that they required billions of taxpayer money, is that 1) the market should determine the salaries; and 2) the best get paid the best. Those two excuses are, of course, wrong. Banks were failing all last year, but the market did nothing to prevent those failed CEOs and executives from receiving hundreds of millions, if not billions, in bonuses that they did not earn. Indeed, some of the bonuses paid out had the feel of a literal robbery. And if these miserable failures in life did earn that money, if they were the best, then why are banks failing everywhere? Why did they need a federal bailout? OK, I was poised to say (in my own, long-winded ...

This from the Coyote : The Town of South Attleboro, MA sent out wildly threatening past due letters for folks with balances as low as 1-cent (thereby investing at least 42 cents to get one back). In response to charges that this was stupid, City Collector Debora Marcoccio responded: A computer automatically printed the letters for any account with a balance remaining, and they were not reviewed by staff before being sent out, Marcoccio said. "It would be fiscally irresponsible for me to have staff weed through the bills and pull out any below a certain amount," Marcoccio said. " And what would that amount be?" What, are we living in the 19th century with clerks in a musty room preparing bills by hand? This fix probably requires one whole entire line of program code in the billing system to fix. I could probably teach myself to code whatever language the payroll system is written in (my guess is COBOL, which, god help me, I already know) in less time than this wo...

The Department of Homeland Security has thus far spent $90 million on it. I know, I know, that would barely purchase the stationary necessary to print the documents to buy out a single failing bank. But still: $90 million bucks. Oh, yeah. The Office of Management and Budget has determined it doesn't work, and that DHS should stop spending money on it until its effectiveness can be proven. The White House (wonder of wonders!) agrees. The Congress agrees. The General Accounting Office agrees. Even the DHS Advisory Committee agrees. So what's going to happen? DHS has announced it's moving ahead with the program. Somewhere in the bizarro world this makes sense: the people to whom we have entrusted our national security have a system that doesn't work and nobody wants, but they're not going to drop it. And, apparently, nobody is going to do anything about it. [h/t Michaelbrownblog ]

The Congress voted to send hundreds of billions of dollars to bank to ease the credit crunch ... and neglected to include language that requires them to lend any of it out: The infusion of federal money is to rebuild banks' battered capital reserves so the institutions would feel comfortable resuming more normal lending practices. But that confidence was undercut somewhat when reports surfaced that bankers might use the money to buy other banks. Indeed, the government approved PNC Financial Services Group Inc. to receive $7.7 billion in return for company stock on Friday and, at the same time, PNC said it was acquiring National City Corp. for $5.58 billion. There is little federal officials can do about it. There is no language in the bailout bill that specifically obligates banks receiving money to increase their loans. Officials had argued that attaching strings to the capital-infusion program would discourage financial institutions from participating. So while Barney Frank wo...

So your bottle water meets Federal safety standards? Here's what that means, says the AP : Tests on bottled water turned up a variety of contaminants often found in tap water, according to a study released Wednesday by an environmental advocacy group. The findings challenge the idea that bottled water is purer than tap water, the researchers said. All the brands in the study met federal health standards , but two violated a California standard, said the Washington-based Environmental Working Group. The study's lab tests on the 10 brands detected bacteria and 38 chemicals including caffeine, the pain reliever acetaminophen, fertilizer, solvents, plastic ingredients and the radioactive element strontium. The International Bottled Water Assn. called the findings "alarmist." Please note two important, but fairly subtle points about this story: 1) It was a private environmental advocacy group, not the Federal government, that blew the whistle. [ But we need the government...

... and not American citizens. But Becky beat me to it . Ask yourself why Asian stock markets and bourses are celebrating this morning, and why anybody thinks its good for the average homeowner . You don't have to be a Libertarian to realize that both Senators McCain and Obama are pandering on this issue (but it helps).

As reported in the Kansas City Star : Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy. Nevertheless, Obama has no plans to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond their expiration date, as Republican John McCain advocates. Instead, Obama wants to push for his promised tax cuts for the middle class, he said in a broadcast interview aired Sunday. "Even if we're still in a recession, I'm going to go through with my tax cuts," Obama said. "That's my priority." What about increasing taxes on the wealthy? "I think we've got to take a look and see where the economy is. I mean, the economy is weak right now," Obama said on "This Week" on ABC. "The news with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I think, along with the unemployment numbers, indicates that we're fragile...