Obama’s budget proposal would increase taxpayer funding of abortion

The Heritage Foundation explains.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2014 budget released yesterday persists in entangling taxpayer dollars in the abortion industry.

Obama’s budget includes $327 million for Title X family planning programs, a more than $30 million increase over last year’s request. Title X is one of a number of sources of government funding to Planned Parenthood, which performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the United States and was recently accused of tacitly supporting infanticide.

In 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood received over $542 million in total taxpayer funding while performing a record 333,964 abortions. According to analysis by the Susan B. Anthony List, Planned Parenthood has performed almost 1 million abortions in the past three reporting years alone.

Even though the organization boasts the title of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has ridden the waves of taxpayer funding to millions of dollars in annual surpluses. During its last reporting year, like many before it, Planned Parenthood saw a very comfortable income, reporting excess revenues exceeding $87 million and net assets of more than $1.2 billion.

How does Planned Parenthood feel about infanticide? Let’s see:

If the organization’s single-minded provision of abortion services isn’t enough to question the continual stream of federal tax dollars, recent disturbing admissions by a local Florida Planned Parenthood affiliate should at least raise scrutiny of the organization’s federal funding.

A few weeks ago, a local Planned Parenthood representative testified against a Florida bill that would require abortion doctors to provide emergency care for infants born after a failed abortion attempt. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” asked one Florida legislator during the hearing, “what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

Instead of expressing the need to provide potentially life-saving medical care to the child, Planned Parenthood official Alisa LaPolt Snow simply responded, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”

The Obama Administration also continues to export taxpayer funding of abortion, requesting $37 million for the United Nations Family Population Fund (UNFPA). Despite continued assertions that UNFPA has been involved in China’s coercive one-child policy, the U.S. government persists in sending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to an organization complicit in forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.

Previously, I wrote about how Obama voted for infanticide several times and he opposed the ban on partial birth abortions.

Excerpt:

BAIPA [The Born Alive Infant Protection Act] (both the federal and Illinois state versions) on the other hand, was introduced to insure that babies who survive attempted abortions are provided the same medical care and sustenance as any other infant born alive. BAIPA was introduced after evidence was presented that babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions were simply discarded in utility closets without food, care, or medical treatment until they died.

As both Andy and I pointed out last night (and numerous times before), state senator Obama fought against the Illinois version of BAIPA that was identical in all material respects to the federal version. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama claimed that he voted against the Illinois BAIPA because it failed to contain a “neutrality clause” making it clear that the bill did not affect the right to an abortion. This is false. Documents obtained by National Right to Life show that the Illinois BAIPA did, in fact, contain a neutrality clause identical to the federal version.

As noted yesterday, not one U.S. senator voted against  BAIPA. Even NARAL didn’t oppose it. At the time of the vote, CNN reported that NARAL’s spokesman said the following:

We, in fact, did not oppose the bill. There is a clear legal difference between a fetus in utero versus a child that’s born.And when a child is born, they deserve every protection that the country can provide. (Emphasis added).

The logical import of Obama’s vote against BAIPA is that he disagrees, i.e., once a baby has been targeted for abortion it thereafter has no inherent right to the food, comfort, and medical care provided to other babies born alive. Indeed, during Illinois state senate deliberations on BAIPA, Obama stated that one of his objections was that the bill was “designed toburden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.” Apparently, once the decision to abort has been made, a child is doomed even if born alive.

When it comes to abortion, there is no one more radical than Barack Obama.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Barack Obama, Budget, Democrat Party, Infanticide, NARAL, Partial Birth Abortion, Planned Parenthood, Subsidies, Taxpayer, Title X

Americans finding out the true costs of Obamacare

The Daily Caller has a sobering article about the true costs of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

Millions of Americans are receiving double-digit premium hikes. For many people under 30, their health insurance premiums are going up much more — by as much as 189 percent. What happened to candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise that every family’s health care costs would go down by $2,500 by the end of his first term? (Costs actually went up by $3,000.)

The Congressional Budget Office projects Obamacare will cost tens of billions more over the next decade than the agency projected just three years ago. Those increases were not budgeted for, and will add to massive deficits.

So much for the promise that the law “will not add one dime to the deficit.”

Millions of workers at places like Wendy’s and Olive Garden are now being preemptively reclassified as part-time, and an estimated 7 million to 20 million employees face the loss of workplace health benefits altogether.

So much for the oft-heard promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

[...]Seniors were assured that the new system wouldn’t affect their benefits, despite Obamacare’s $716 billion in ten-year cuts to Medicare (to help pay for the new entitlement).

That promise was broken recently, when the Medicare agency issued surprise regulations cutting Medicare even more deeply than Congress had directed — cuts that target a popular and very successful part of Medicare, one that actually features consumer choice and competition, namely, Medicare Advantage (MA).

Seniors who opt into MA enjoy greater care coordination, disease management for chronic conditions, and on-call nurses available by phone. Those extra services — which in some cases mean the difference between life and death — are now slated for the chopping-block.

Rosemarie Battaglia will be among the millions of victims of these new regulations, which beginning April 1 will effectively shave MA plan payments by about 2 percentage points. On top of prior cuts enacted in Obamacare, that spells an 8 percent cut next year — a level higher than the profit margins for these plans.

Actuarial experts at the American Action Forum predict the cuts will cause between 2 and 5 million seniors to lose their MA benefits, and that MA recipients face health care cost increases averaging $2,235 a year.

When a President makes promises about economic policy, we shouldn’t believe him unless we have reasons to believe that he understands business and economics. We had no reason to believe that Obama understood economics. And, when given the reins of the economy, he’s proven that. Instead of electing people who sound nice in speeches, we should be electing people who have shown that they know how to solve the problems we’re facing in the economy. A track record of success at creating jobs, reducing the costs of health care, improving health care quality and choice, etc. should have counted for more than rhetoric. We chose the rhetoric and now we’re getting the screws.

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• Obamacare’s new tax on medical devices trickles down to hospitals and patients
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• Christian business Hobby Lobby defies Obamacare abortion mandate
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• The full list of Obamacare tax hikes in order from largest to smallest
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• Health insurance premiums up $3,000 since Obama was elected
• Report: Obamacare regulations will cost taxpayers and businesses $1.8 trillion
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• Obamacare subsidizes the risky behaviors of sexually active women
• Obamacare begins forcing states to cap and cut prescription drug benefits
• CBO: 20 million Americans could lose employer-provided health coverage under Obamacare

Filed under: News, Barack Obama, Big Government, Business, Costs, Coverage, Death Panels, Debt, Deficit, Democrat Party, Economics, Economy, Government, Government Spending, Health Insurance, Health-care, Healthcare, Medicine, Nationalization, Obamacare, Premium, Rationing, Recklessness, Regulation, Socialism, Socialized Medicine, Spending, Subsidies, Unemployment, Waste

Single mothers are better off with a $29,000 job and welfare than with a $69,000 job

Socialism subsidizes single motherhood by choice

(click for larger image)

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute explains how the welfare state discourages women from getting married before they have children.

Excerpt:

The U.S. welfare system sure creates some crazy disincentives to working your way up the ladder. Benefits stacked upon benefits can mean it is financially better, at least in the short term, to stay at a lower-paying jobs rather than taking a higher paying job and losing those benefits. This is called the “welfare cliff.”

Let’s take the example of a single mom with two kids, 1 and 4. She has a $29,000 a year job, putting the kids in daycare during the day while she works.

As the above chart  – via Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s secretary of Public Welfare — shows, the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income and benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income & benefits of $57,045.

It would sure be tempting for that mom to keep the status quo rather than take the new job, even though the new position might lead to further career advancement and a higher standard of living. I guess this is something the Obama White House forgot to mention in its “Life of Julia” cartoons extolling government assistance.

Fatherlessness is absolutely horrible for children across the board. Not just in terms of their development, but also their material well-being and their physical safety. Fatherlessness is a loss in three ways for children. The federal government should NOT be taking money from good married households and transferring it to women who decline to marry before choosing to have reckless, irresponsible recreational sex.

Filed under: Polemics, Assistance, Benefits, Child, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Children, Day Care, Daycare, Dependence, Dependency, Family, Father, Fatherless, Fatherlessness, Fathers, Feminism, Government, Income, Kids, Life of Julia, Marriage, Mother, Recreational Sex, Redistribution, Salary, Single Mom, Single-Mother, Single-Motherhood, Socialism, Subsidies, Subsidize, Unmarried Mom, Unmarried Mother, Welfare

The Great Global Warming Swindle Channel 4 documentary

Details:

The film, made by British television producer Martin Durkin, presents scientists, economists, politicians, writers, and others who dispute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming.

The film’s basic premise is that the current scientific opinion on the anthropogenic causes of global warming has numerous scientific flaws, and that vested monetary interests in the scientific establishment and the media discourage the public and the scientific community from acknowledging or even debating this. The film asserts that the publicised scientific consensus is the product of a “global warming activist industry” driven by a desire for research funding. Other culprits, according to the film, are Western environmentalists promoting expensive solar and wind power over cheap fossil fuels in Africa, resulting in African countries being held back from industrialising.

The film won best documentary at the 2007 Io Isabella International Film Week.

A number of academics, environmentalists, think-tank consultants and writers are interviewed in the film in support of its various assertions. They include the Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore, former member of Greenpeace but for the past 21 years a critic of the organisation; Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia; Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966; John Christy, professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama; Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute; former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson; and Piers Corbyn, a British weather forecaster.

Famous economist Thomas Sowell has written about the documentary in National Review.

He likes it:

Distinguished scientists specializing in climate and climate-related fields talk in plain English and present readily understood graphs showing what a crock the current global-warming hysteria is.

 

[...]There is no question that the globe is warming but it has warmed and cooled before, and is not as warm today as it was some centuries ago, before there were any automobiles and before there was as much burning of fossil fuels as today.

None of the dire things predicted today happened then.

The documentary goes into some of the many factors that have caused the earth to warm and cool for centuries, including changes in activities on the sun, 93 million miles away and wholly beyond the jurisdiction of the Kyoto treaty.

According to these climate scientists, human activities have very little effect on the climate, compared to many other factors, from volcanoes to clouds.

These climate scientists likewise debunk the mathematical models that have been used to hype global-warming hysteria, even though hard evidence stretching back over centuries contradicts these models.

Take a look. I liked this documentary so much that I purchased the DVD of it.

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• Polar bear populations are not decreasing now
• Oceans are not warming now
• Polar ice caps are not melting now

Filed under: Videos, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Battery, Campaign Contributions, Campaign Donations, Climate Change, Corruption, Crony Capitalism, Democrat, Democrat Party, Energy, Energy Policy, Faith, Fraud, Global Warming, Green Energy, Green Jobs, Medieval Warming Period, Michael Mann, Obama, Phil Jones, Redistribution, Religion, Scandal, Socialism, Solar Power, Solyndra, Stimulus, Subsidies, Wind Power

Obama administration blocks energy development on 1.6 million acres of federal land

From The Hill. (H/T Doug Ross @ Journal)

Excerpt:

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

The move is sure to rankle Republicans, who say President Obama’s grip on fossil fuel drilling in federal lands is too tight.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management cited environmental concerns for the proposed changes. Among other things, it excised lands with “wilderness characteristics” and areas that conflicted with sage grouse habitats.

Remember when Obama that Obama’s goal is not to lower energy prices – it’s to raise the price of energy in order to save the planet from global warming:

Investors Business Daily will help you remember Obama’s record of blocking domestic energy development.

Excerpt:

Shell has fought the administration to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.

The federal government estimates there are 26.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Arctic Ocean’s Outer Continental Shelf but repeated safety reviews and designation of much of the region as critical polar bear habitat has slowed development to a crawl.

Only 2.2% of federal offshore land is currently being leased for production.

Then there are the 10 billion barrels locked up in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, which would require drilling in just 2,000 acres out of 19 million.

The Obama administration recently rescinded 77 oil and gas leases in Utah and stalled oil shale research and development in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, where the federal government owns most of the world’s oil shale reserves.

Out West, we may have a “Persia on the Plains.” A Rand Corp. study says the Green River Formation, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world, holding from 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of crude — most of it locked up by federal edict.

Under President Obama, the American Petroleum Institute notes, leases on federal lands in the West are down 44%, while permits and new well drilling are both down 39% compared to 2007 levels.

After the BP oil spill, President Obama shut down most Gulf of Mexico drilling and there’s been a 57% drop in monthly deepwater permits since 2008, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index.

Who needs jobs? We have to “save the planet” from the global warming monster – and raise the price of electricity! Only “the rich” put gas in the their cars and use electricity, right? So only the rich will be affected when electricity prices skyrocket. That’s Obama’s goal. That’s what his supporters elected him to do in the last election.

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Filed under: News, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Battery, Beacon, Campaign Contributions, Campaign Donations, Climate Change, Corruption, Crony, Crony Capitalism, Darwinism, Democrat, Democrat Party, Electric, Ener1, Energy, Energy Policy, Faith, Global Warming, Green Energy, Green Jobs, Jane Oates, Job Training, Labor Department, Million, Obama, Religion, Scandal, Solar Power, Solyndra, Stimulus, Subsidies, Wind Power