Why Obama's Speech Doesn't Matter

President Obama has broken all records for national speeches by a new president. In many ways, it seems his campaign never ended. His die hard supporters say this is necessary, as the campaign for change will take a new effort with new energy. But the rest of us aren't so sure.

The health care message seemed like a vital issue to me a few months ago. I was scared that the government was taking over, driving us deeper into debt. But now I'm tired of it. I'm not unhappy with my current coverage, the nation seems to have reacted negatively to government movement towards a one payer system, and the only reform I see as vital, tort reform, has been entirely left out (I guess even the democrats don't want to reform the legal community).

So tonight's speech is a lame duck. The far left wants to fight for everything, the far right wants to stop them, and I don't trust either of them. On top of that, I'd rather read a book than listen to one more speech about "change we need right now".

What change have we gotten so far from our new president? Bipartisanship? Nope. Green jobs? Yeah right. Progress from nuclear rogues like Iran or North Korea. Laughable. So why should health care be any different?

I'm hoping for poor ratings this evening. It is time the white house got the message that talk is simply not enough. The campaign is over Mr. President.

Is the FDIC in Trouble?

In a recent release the FDIC listed 416 banks as being on the problem bank list. These banks have deposits totaling over $300 billion, but the FDIC balance of funds on the same day of that release was barely over $10 billion. Quite a mismatch.

The FDIC was created in 1933 as a confidence booster for a public that was badly shaken by the Great Depression. The idea was that a government insurance program would allow citizens to have enough confidence in banks to use them again, and the program worked extremely well. Today the FDIC guarantee is proudly displayed at nearly every bank you walk in to, stating that deposits are protected up to $100,000. But is that true?

The FDIC runs numbers and creates formulas to determine how much cash it needs to keep on hand to bail out banks that fail. These formulas are based on historical averages. Unfortunately, the problem we are dealing with today doesn't track to historical averages, so the FDIC funds are much lower than what is needed.

I'm not afraid of losing my money at the bank. The white house will issue emergency funds to replenish the FDIC money if needed (which will happen yet this year), but I am concerned about how we do it. As the government prints more money to bail out failed banks, it devalues all of the money in the entire system, causing all of us to suffer.

The illusion of guaranteed safety in banks is a vital underpinning to our entire system. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as comprehensive guarantees for all of our deposits, but as long as the illusion holds we don't have to deal with that ugly truth. Instead, we just need to print enough money to deal with the troublemakers. But the price we pay is inflation.

Thanks to my good friend Tim C. for calling attention to the material for this post!

Good Day for Terrorists

Imagine a terrorist cell in a dark basement. They are putting together bomb vests, meant for suicide bombers that other cells are busy recruiting from the poorest segments of the local population. It's a simple plan of attack: find people with nothing to live for and convince them that blowing themselves up in the middle of lunch hour at a local cafe will make them a hero.

This terrorist plan works. It kills innocents and creates a tragic story that generates a lot of press coverage. The cost of the strategy is low, as the suicide bombers are as cheap to obtain as the bomb vests they wear. The biggest problem for terrorists is how to get into areas that Americans frequent, because after all, killing Americans is the fastest way to the jihad wall of fame.

Today these terrorists can celebrate a good day. Not only is the U.S. Attorney General opening investigations into CIA interrogations, but layers of bureaucracy are being added to the law enforcement process to avoid future problem of a similar nature. Instead of protecting Americans from terrorists, the CIA is now expending a lot of energy protecting it's own agents from federal prosecutors.

All of this adds up to less pressure, less resources, and less motivation to chase terrorists. And if we are foolish enough to drag a CIA agent out and publicly embarrass him or her for interrogating a terrorist harshly, you can guarantee that the story will be a top headline on Al Jazeera, prompting much celebration.

God help us. We've become more interested in chasing our own protectors than we are in chasing our enemies.

No More Cash 4 Clunkers

We have recently learned that if you give $4,500 to people that trade in junk cars that we can raise auto sales. It was so important that we borrowed money from China to fund the program. But at what expense?

As I walked my children to their first day of school this morning I caught myself wondering how much debt we, as a country, have taken on in the name of quick auto sales. In 2015, as we continue to pay interest on our national debt, will we still think the Cash 4 Clunkers program was worth it? I doubt it.

The U.S. government is literally risking the future of my children over these programs. These silly little, multi-billion dollar programs that have great media tag lines and very little (if any) economic effect mean more tax burdens for the future. The math doesn't work any other way.

We are spending government (taxpayer) money at a record pace. We are mortgaging our future.

I don't care how much we need change, if we can't pay for it, we don't deserve it.

Where Did the Anti-War Movement Go?

Last night I watched clips of president Obama as he spoke concerning the war in Afghanistan. It was eerie. He said things like:

• This is a war of necessity.
• It will not be easy, or over quickly.
• This war is about freedom, and make no mistake, we will win.

If you were to read such quotes without knowing who the speaker was, would you dream it was anyone other than Bush? Where did the anti-war movement go?

We still have roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq. We are on our way to 68,000 in Afghanistan. We are actively fighting terror in 2009 in exactly the same way we fought it in 2007. But I haven't seen any media coverage of peace vigils. I still see bumper stickers with anti-Bush messages, but now that the commander in chief has changed I don't feel any of the same energy in the discussion.

Is is possible that Bush ignited such hatred in the U.S. that simply removing him from the white house has made the war on terror acceptable to millions of citizens? I'm at a complete loss on this one...

The Fallacy of a Public Mandate

The false idea of a public mandate has created problems for the white house and its most loyal followers at critical moments. Cap & Trade is dead, and health care reform is dying. How could this have happened? Didn't Americans give president Obama a mandate for change? No, but the media sure did.

Jay Cost, writing for RealClearPolitics.com says:
Yet the election of 2008 was not like the 1932 contest. It wasn't like 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, 1984, or even 1988, either. Obama's election was narrower than all of these. FDR won 42 of 48 states. Eisenhower won 39, then 41. Johnson won 44 of 50. Nixon won 49. Reagan won 44, then 49. George H.W. Bush won 40. Obama won 28, three fewer than George W. Bush in his narrow 2004 reelection.

When I read this I was extremely surprised. The election certainly never felt that close. And yet this begins to explain why democrats are having trouble pushing a more liberal policy agenda. The majority of voters are centrists, and these centrists have always feared big swings in government policy.

Just as important, these centrists do not trust the U.S. government to control costs in any way. Neither republicans nor democrats have a recent track record of fiscal control, and attempting to push reform with a "we can do it cheaper" argument borders on comical.

There is no mandate. There was instead a vote of no confidence for former president Bush. But confusing these two could prove very harmful for the white house.

Free Preventive Health Care is a Lie

Proponents of health care reform have changed their talking points, now it is all about "Free preventive health care for all!". They tell us that preventive medicine saves money for all of us. But this is a big, fat lie.

At first take this story sounds plausible. If we can help someone avoid a heart attack, then the treatment it takes to prevent the heart attack is certainly cheaper than treating the crisis of an actual heart attack. But this is only true in individual cases. When you spread the costs out across our entire country, it ends up costing us billions more.

Here's how the math works:

Paying for Heart Attacks-

• Each year roughly 1.1 million Americans suffer a heart attack
• A heart attack will cost roughly $20,000
• Total heart attack costs for all 1.1 million patients should be roughly $22 billion

Paying to Prevent Heart Attacks-

• There are over 300 million Americans in this country
  If we granted preventive care to the 20% that are at the highest risk we would need to treat 60 million people (which may not be a big enough number for the biggest disease problem in the U.S.)
• If we could take the entire $22 billion expense of treating heart attacks and divide it by the 60 million people needing preventive treatment we would be allowed to spend $367 per person on preventive care.

What would $367 get us? Nothing of substance I'm sure, at least not with the government in charge of it. And that number assumes we stop all spending on treating actual heart attacks, which is a terrible assumption. It would be a huge deal if we could cut the number of heart attacks in half (saving 550,000 heart attacks annually). But that means we can only spend half of the $22 billion, or $184 per person, on preventive care. And this is with zero savings!

So please, let's not lie about saving money by opening up free health care to millions of people. Free health care may be a lot of things, but free isn't one of them.