Steve Chapman:

If Medicare were a bank, federal regulators would be closing its doors, selling its operations, and sacking its managers. Thanks to soaring costs, the program is fast running out of money?even though it pays such low fees that many doctors refuse to take Medicare patients. Meanwhile, Medicare fraud costs taxpayers some $60 billion a year, according to a report by CBS's 60 Minutes, making it among the most profitable fields for felons.

That's our experience with government-run health insurance for the elderly. So what do congressional Democrats propose to do? Offer government-run health insurance to everyone else.
...

President Obama says it would help consumers by giving private insurers some real competition. But the typical state has 27 companies competing in the small-group health insurance market. If there were insufficient competition, the health insurance sector wouldn't rank 86th among American industries in profitability.

Health care plans average profits of just 3.3 percent. In wireless communications, a vigorously contested market, profits are 11 percent. Does Obama think we need a government cell-phone company to compete with Verizon and AT&T?

Read the whole piece.

October 31 ...

In 1517 Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Palace church, marking the start of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. In 1795 English poet John Keats was born in London. In 1864 Nevada became the 36th state. In 1941 the US Navy destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Iceland with the loss of 115 lives, even though the US had not yet entered World War II. In 1955 Britain's Princess Margaret ended weeks of speculation by announcing she would not marry Royal Air Force Captain Peter Townsend. In 1968 President Johnson ordered a halt to all US bombing of North Vietnam, saying he hoped for fruitful peace negotiations. In 1980 Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the late shah of Iran, proclaimed himself the rightful successor to the Peacock Throne. In 1984 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh security guards. In 2000 American astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts rocketed into orbit aboard a Soyuz rocket on a quest to become the first residents of the International Space Station.

CNN's Tami Luhby reports:

The largest stimulus program in the nation's history has created or saved just over 640,000 jobs, the Obama administration said Friday.

Based on approximately $150 billion in spending from the $787 billion recovery package, the tally is the first broad, concrete look at the stimulus program's impact on the economy. The numbers are drawn from 57,000 reports from state and local recipients and include as many as 30,000 jobs from private companies.
...

"Every dollar being spent from Recovery Act is helping put someone back to work," said Vice President Joe Biden, citing 80,000 construction jobs and 325,000 education positions created or saved by stimulus funds. "My message today is that we're on track."

$230,000 per job. How efficient.

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger:

In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.

The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark?all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington's Forever Land. But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive?all the things people hate nowadays.
...

If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care?a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.

No chance of that. Our outdated political software can't recognize trial and error. ... People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big-box politics.

Caroline Baum:

... the government has no money of its own to spend; only what it borrows or confiscates from us via taxation. Oops.

"Government job creation is an oxymoron," said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. It is only by depriving the private sector of funds that government can hire or subsidize hiring.

That's why "jobs created or saved" is such pure fiction. It ignores what's unseen, as our old friend Frederic Bastiat explained so eloquently 160 years ago in an essay.

October 30 ...

In 1735 the second president of the United States, John Adams, was born in Braintree, MA. In 1938 the radio play The War of the Worlds, starring Orson Welles, aired on CBS. (The live drama, which employed fake news reports, panicked some listeners who thought its portrayal of a Martian invasion was true.) In 1945 the US government announced the end of shoe rationing. In 1953 Gen. George C. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Albert Schweitzer received the Peace Prize for 1952. In 1961 the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb with a force estimated at 58 megatons; also on this day, the Soviet Party Congress unanimously approved a resolution ordering the removal of Josef Stalin's body from Lenin's tomb. In 1975 the New York Daily News ran the headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead" a day after President Ford said he would veto any proposed federal bailout of New York City. In 1995 Federalists prevailed over separatists in Quebec in a secession referendum by a vote of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. In 2004 the decapitated body of a Japanese backpacker (Shosei Koda) was found wrapped in an American flag in northwestern Baghdad; the militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi later claimed responsibility.

America, land of innovation.

The Chicago Tribune's Erika Slife reports:

"The brilliance of my idea is that it's very simple," said [Dr. Elena] Bodnar, of Chicago, who is director of the nonprofit Trauma Risk Management Research Institute.

To use the bra-mask, the wearer unsnaps the brassiere from under her shirt, which breaks it in two. Because each cup has hooks on its side, the strap is wrapped around the head and hooked to the cup, which goes over the mouth. Bodnar said an experienced user can don the mask in mere seconds.

The bra-mask could be used during such disasters as fires, terrorist attacks, dust storms or a swine flu outbreak, Bodnar said. Indeed, she first thought up the idea while treating victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster as a medical university graduate in her native Ukraine.

Bodnar is now pursuing commercialization of her bra-mask. She hopes all women will eventually have one.

From AP:

An early progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, or one in six, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

William Galston:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that unified Democratic government has sparked a conservative counter-mobilization. Because we cannot rerun history as a controlled experiment, we will never know whether this could have been avoided had the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats adopted a different strategy. In any case, it?s too late to reverse it.

Still, Democrats must ask themselves whether there?s anything they can do over the next year--for example, a meaningful shift toward fiscal restraint--to reduce the intensity level of the conservative assault. If not, the combination of an energized opposition and an electorate battered by high unemployment, slow growth, and the perception of out-of-control spending could set the stage for an ugly outcome. This wouldn?t mean that Republicans had regained credibility as a governing party; odds are that it will take more than two years to erase the public?s sour memories of the Republican congressional majority and George W. Bush?s presidency. It would mean that a substantial portion of the electorate wanted to send Democrats a message that they had gone too far.

Thomas Sowell:

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

Read the whole piece.

October 29 ...

In 1682 the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, landed at what is now Chester, PA. In 1901 President McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted. In 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. In 1929 on Black Tuesday, prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America's Great Depression began. In 1947 former first lady Frances Cleveland Preston died in Baltimore at age 83. In 1956 during the Suez Canal crisis, Israel launched an invasion of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. In 1966 the National Organization for Women was founded. In 1969 the precursor to the Internet was created when the first computer-to-computer link was established on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). In 1979 on the 50th anniversary of the great stock market crash, anti-nuclear protesters tried but failed to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. In 1998 Sen. John Glenn, at age 77, went back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery. In 2004 in a videotaped statement broadcast on al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden directly admitted for the first time that he'd ordered the Sept. 11 attacks and told America "the best way to avoid another Manhattan" was to stop threatening Muslims' security; also on this day, European Union leaders signed the EU's first constitution.

Marathon Pundit's John Ruberry writes:

There are plenty of Chicago legislators who emit nonsensical verbiage, forcing observers to wonder, "How did that person ever get elected to office?"

Fortunately for the rest of the nation, most of those public servants are relatively powerless members of Chicago's City Council.

Then there is Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL), who was not elected, but appointed to his position during the final days of Rod Blagojevich's unhappy tenure as governor.

Burris, a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chose to speak and ask questions during a hearing last week on White House Czars.

Read it all and weep...

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (D) has personally furnished $22.6 million of the total of $24.1 million existing in his re-election campaign's coffers -- more than 90% of the total -- according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Gov. Corzine has outspent his two competitors in the state's gubernatorial race, Republican Chris Christie and independent Chris Daggett, by more than 2 to 1 combined.

This 2009 general election spending is in addition to the $100 million the former Goldman Sachs co-CEO spent in his two previous campaigns for US senator and NJ governor, in 2000 and 2005, respectively.

The Star-Ledger's Josh Margolin, Claire Heinin, and Claire Heininger report:

Corzine donated or loaned his general election campaign $22.6 million of its $24.1 million... The Democrat has now dedicated more than $120 million of his own money in his campaigns. He spent a combined $100 million on successful bids for U.S. Senate in 2000 and governor in 2005.

Corzine's old firm isn't called 'Government Sachs' for nothing, apparently.

Mark Malone: (emphasis added)

The high tech sandwich is missing the meat.

Over the last thirty years, the United States has built, in the form of the electronics business, the most dynamic, innovative and -- the petroleum industry aside -- most valuable industry in history. These strengths have in turn enabled the U.S. to create millions of jobs to absorb a growing population, kept the country competitive against new challenges in the global marketplace, and through new inventions improved the health, the quality of life, and the prosperity of its citizens.

It is an amazing achievement, and centuries from now people will look back in wonder at how we ever did it . . .and, unfortunately, with equal amazement, that we let it slip away.

And it is all now slipping away.
...

The high technology revolution that has transformed modern America (and the world) has been driven by three factors. Innovations in applied science -- the bottom slice of bread; large companies -- the top slice; and -- the meat in the middle -- new company creation.

Right now . . .and as far as I can see in the future . . . it is that middle that is missing. All of the prosperity I see returning to Silicon Valley is, in fact, something of an illusion. ... The crucial center of the tech world ? new and fast-moving companies -- the meat in the technology sandwich -- is gone. Under the press of an economic slowdown, government regulations that have handcuffed entrepreneurs and venture capitalists -- and perhaps most of all, an Administration that increasingly seems actively hostile to entrepreneurship and small business -- high tech is hollowing out.
...

Over the last couple months, I've seen some spectacular new start-up companies, some with finished products on the market. All of them are starving from lack of capital -- and their business plans, which would have attracted tens of millions of dollars two years ago, earning only shrugs and apologies from straitened venture capitalists and banks. My guess is that several hundred new start-ups in Silicon Valley have already been lost, with no sign anywhere on the horizon.

If, as has been the case in the past, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are the leading indicators of the country?s economic health, this is going to be a truly 'jobless recovery', one that rewards the few at the expense of the many in ways we haven't seen for decades, that consolidates power in Big Business at the expense of the little people, and which delays the adoption of important, life-saving, new inventions for years.

So much for 'Fair'.

Sometime soon, a hungry Washington is going to look to high tech as it last hope in restoring prosperity and employment to millions of Americans. It will see an enticing sandwich of opportunity . . .but when it bites down it will find only air.

David Brooks:

Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.

Overconfidence in government also has a characteristic form: that of highly rational Olympians who attempt to stand above problems and solve them in a finely tuned and impartial manner. In moments of government overconfidence, officials come to see society not as a dynamic and complex organism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, governance and engineering merge into one.

Examples of this overconfidence abound. But let us pick just one: the effort to cap financial compensation.

...the issue is not whether government acts, but whether it acts with an awareness of the limits of its knowledge. Sometimes we seem to have a government with no sense of those limits, no sense that perhaps government officials don?t know how to restructure General Motors, pick the most promising battery technology, re-engineer the health care system from the top, or fine-tune the complex system of executive pay.