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I hear from other quarters the French did not throw a log in the road of Iranian discussions. Time will tell whether this is correct. Until then I will stick with my view that France did, in fact, balk. However, as I printed earlier, France does not have the military clout to be effective.
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I have oft stated the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.
There is truth in that statement but now the political wind of Republicans coming to the rescue with better alternatives is blowing and there is something to be said for this.
It is one thing to be against bad legislation but there is also the other side of offering a constructive and better alternative. If Republicans can do that perhaps the public might give them points in the next election and penalize those who voted like lemmings for 'Obamascare.'
Bailing our Democrats could also be seen as steering the ship of state away from dangerous shoals which could sink it.
Once again the ball is on the Republican side of the net and it could be their's to lose. Thus, taking a pro active stance could be politically effective.
They have a history of blowing such chances so time will tell. (See 2 and 2a below.)
The other side of the coin is the inherent danger of debating from a position of first accepting your adversary's premise.
Obama's healthcare proposal was actually a wealth transference scheme where government inherited control over 16% of our economy on the premise America's health care system was entirely broken and inherently unfair. (See 2b below.)
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ETU BILL! (See 3 below.)
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Off to Orlando!
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Dick
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1)
China: The Next Phase of Reform
A policeman stands outside the Great Hall of the People, where the Communist Party held its Third Plenary Session, on Nov. 12. (FENG LI/Getty Images)
Summary
The commitment and ability of China's leaders to follow through on new policies and to meet rising expectations will be tested as they strive to balance competing social, economic, political and security challenges. Three decades ago, China embarked on a new path, creating a framework that encouraged the country's rapid economic rise. The successes of those policies have transformed China, and the country's leadership now faces another set of strategic choices to address China's new economic and international position.
The much-anticipated Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee concluded Nov. 12 after four days of closed-door deliberations among top political elites. The full document containing the policy proposals will not be released for days or even a week, but the initial information suggests China's leaders are seeking more significant changes in their policies to try to stay ahead of the challenges the country faces.
Analysis
According to the communique broadcast by state mouthpiece China Central Television, important policy changes include the establishment of a committee to guide the country’s comprehensive reform agenda, the establishment of an integrated National Security Committee responsible for coordinating public safety and national strategy, and the easing of the country's 33-year-old family planning policy to allow more couples to have a second child. The communique also stressed that Beijing is committed to carrying out comprehensive economic reform over the next decade in accordance with China's economic, social and political transformation.
In light of China's imminent demographic imbalance, the changes to family planning were expected. The country's massive pool of cheap labor previously underpinned its economic and social transformation, but as China prepares to transition toward a consumer-based economy, its aging population is a problem.
No details have been given on the structure of the National Security Committee. The goal was to merge different institutions in charge of diplomacy, security, military and intelligence into a coordinated agency under the authority of the president. However, the decision -- which is far more than an institutional change -- came after a re-evaluation of China's internal and external security environment and of the country's emerging role in the international community. Beijing recognizes the need for a more delicate and coherent team to handle the country's strategic issues and pursue its national interests.
China is now at a turning point. The country's economic growth has firmly cemented Chinese businesses and national interests around the globe. It has raised the living standards, but also the expectations, of China's citizens. There is a growing sense of Chinese patriotism that exists beyond the confines of the Communist Party. The emerging educated middle class has traveled the world, has seen multiple systems in action and is taking a greater interest in local and national political decisions. Modern forms of communication such as social media give Chinese citizens the ability to rapidly share successes and grievances across the country, to identify and single out cases of political corruption and to more actively keep the Party and leadership under scrutiny. At the same time, the expanded Chinese imports of raw materials and exports of commodities have substantially expanded China's active foreign interests, requiring a more nuanced and potentially a more activist foreign policy.
Beijing wasted no time ratcheting up public expectations over its reform agenda prior to the meeting. Proposals included financial liberalization, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, the readjustment of fiscal structures between central and local government, steps to counter official corruption, the expansion of property taxes and pricing reform. At the same time, top leaders were busy setting expectations for a new economic transformation. This led many to believe that the meeting would bring the country to the next stage of economic prosperity and social development, like Deng Xiaoping did in the post-Cultural Revolution meeting in 1978.
Admittedly, China has moved well beyond the massive economic mismanagement and social disorder of the post-Cultural Revolution period. However, the inevitable loss of the demographic advantages that sustained the country's economic miracle, combined with the prevailing social inequality and regional disparities as well as the rising political awareness of the middle class, mean the new leadership is facing even greater challenges to preserve its legitimacy. Doing so requires a constant commitment by political leaders to respond to China's changing internal and external environments. It also requires a path toward reform that meets public expectations while overcoming anti-reform elements. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Escape From ObamaCare
The GOP starts to offer Americans a better alternative.
The Affordable Care Act appears to be misfiring in every imaginable way, and Democrats are having second thoughts about serving as human shields for White House ineptitude. If they really want to make amends, they'll join Republicans in trying to repair some of the damage they caused.
The first act of penance is modest legislation the House will vote on Friday that would try to honor President Obama's promise that people who liked their insurance could keep it. The one-page bill would allow insurers to continue offering for sale in 2014 the policies thatObamaCare terminated, exempting them from federal regulatory edicts.
The Keep Your Plan Act is poorly titled. Nearly all 2013 plans cannot be renewed next year even in the absence of federal obstacles. Insurers obeyed the law, and unlike the feds they prepared competently for years for ObamaCare's debut.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.) after a meeting on health care in Washington on Wednesday. Associated Press
They thus shut down the plans they were told to shut down and set new rates in expectation of the new rules and mandates—a complex process that takes months to plan, negotiate with doctors and hospitals and earn state approval. Reinstating plans, to the extent possible, would be difficult to price amid the insurance market convulsions ObamaCare is causing.
Still, insurance regulation was largely a state obligation before ObamaCare, and the GOP bill is a useful federalist housekeeping. Insurance commissioners in states with refugee crises in their individual markets could work with the companies they regulate to make a stopgap accommodation.
Given the lead times that insurance contracts require, Congress would need to act quickly. Every day of delay waiting on the website to work or another excuse makes a potential solution less likely before year-end.
The results are likely to be modest, but the bill could help some people, as well as prevent the millions of additional cancellations that will start to emerge over the coming year. House Republicans are obeying the axiom that Democrats read as a suggestion to do the opposite: First, do no harm.
Over in the Senate, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and fellow Democrats including a new cosponsor, Oregon liberal Jeff Merkley, aren't changing their habits as they try to inoculate themselves from a midterm backlash in 2014. Their bill would order insurers to continue to offer the dumped plans that in many cases no longer exist. This is also a substantive due process violation for business and unconstitutional commandeering of state regulators.
The particular irony of this Democratic flight for the exits is that their bill would make ObamaCare even less viable. If people are allowed to choose a competitive insurance alternative, the exchanges are unlikely to survive financially. That's why the White House is trying to stuff in as many people as possible, however unsuccessfully (see editorial below).
House Republicans have the better argument. There's a substantive difference between letting people keep their plans through deregulation and through a new mandate that is supposed to counteract the damage from the old mandates. They should build on this insight and promote more ways for people to elude ObamaCare if they prefer.
To the extent Republicans can, at the state and federal level, they should try to revitalize and improve the old individual insurance market as one escape route. If Republicans want to get ambitious, they could even propose redistributing the government's existing health-care subsidies instead of other people's income. The tax benefit for employer-based insurance totals about $250 billion in foregone revenue a year, but individuals get no such subsidy.
Putting a cap on this open-ended benefit could fund universal tax credits for people of all ages, incomes and job situations to buy insurance outside of the ObamaCare exchanges. Four of five workers would do better than they do now.
Mr. Obama isn't about to endanger his place in liberal history by agreeing to any of this, much less to save a Louisiana Senate seat, but then ObamaCare is unlike any previous entitlement. It passed with no GOP votes, so Democrats own it in toto and the rank and file are figuring out they are being volunteered as sacrifices.
Republicans have an opportunity to poach the health-care issue that liberals have dominated for decades. Amid the rollout debacle, the polls show Democratic credibility and trustworthiness are in free fall, and voters may be open to innovative market reforms. Health choices and incentives are no longer abstractions but tangible things consumers are losing.
Instead of a backward-looking promise to let Americans hold on to what they had, Republicans could offer the opportunity to buy a new plan that they like.
2a.) A Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare
To avoid a lurch to the left if the current law fails, the time is right to present sensible, market-oriented reforms.
As ObamaCare's failures and victims mount by the day, Republicans have so far mostly been watching in amazement. They expected the law to fail, but even among its most ardent opponents few imagined the scale and speed of the fiasco.
Seeing the pileup, Republicans might be tempted to step aside and let ObamaCarecontinue to disappoint and infuriate Americans. After all, the GOP doesn't have the power to repeal the law, or even to make meaningful changes to undo its worst effects. So why not just watch the Democrats pay the price for their folly?
But such passivity would actually protect the Democrats from paying that price. What Republicans can and should do is offer the public something better. Now is the time to advance a conservative reform that can solve the serious, discrete problems of the health-care system in place before ObamaCare, but without needlessly upending people's arrangements or threatening what works in American medicine. That the Democrats are now making things worse doesn't mean the public wants to keep that prior system, or that Republicans should.
The biggest Republican misconception about health care is that the system before ObamaCare was a free-market paradise. On the contrary: It has consisted chiefly of massive and inefficient entitlements that threaten to bankrupt the nation; the lopsided tax treatment of employer-provided coverage that creates incentives for waste and overspending; and an underdeveloped individual market struggling to fill the gaps.
David Gothard
Exploding health-care costs and millions left needlessly uninsured are a result of misguided federal policies. Solutions require targeted reforms to those policies.
The outlines of such reforms have been apparent for years. The key is to enable all Americans to purchase coverage and to approach health care as consumers: with an interest in quality and an eye on cost.
The first step of a plan to replace ObamaCare should be a flat and universal tax benefit for coverage. Today's tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage should be capped so that people would not get a bigger tax break by buying more extensive and expensive insurance. The result would be to make employees more cost-conscious; and competition for their favor would make insurance cheaper.
That tax break would also be available—ideally as a refundable credit sufficient at least for the purchase of catastrophic coverage—to people who do not have access to employer coverage. This would enable people who now choose not to buy insurance to get catastrophic coverage with no premium costs. It also would give those who want more-comprehensive coverage in the individual market the same advantage that people with employer plans get.
Medicaid could be converted into a means-based addition to that credit, allowing the poor to buy into the same insurance market as more affluent people—and so give them access to better health care than they can get now.
All those with continuous coverage, which everyone could afford thanks to the new tax treatment, would be protected from price spikes or plan cancellations if they got sick. This guarantee would provide a strong incentive to buy coverage, without the coercion of the individual mandate. People who have pre-existing conditions when the new rules take effect would be able to buy coverage through subsidized, high-risk pools.
By making at least catastrophic coverage available to all, and by giving people such incentives to obtain it, this approach could cover more people than ObamaCare was ever projected to reach, and at a significantly lower cost.
The new alternative would not require the mandates, taxes and heavy-handed regulations of ObamaCare. It would turn more people into shoppers for health care instead of passive recipients of it—and encourage the kind of insurance design, consumer behavior and intense competition that could help keep health costs down. Redesigned and directed this way, the flow of federal dollars and tax subsidies would do much less to distort health markets than it has for the last several decades, while getting far more people insured.
Conservative policy experts have long proposed such approaches, but congressional Republicans, with a few honorable exceptions, have not taken them up in recent years. In 2009, for instance, House Republicans offered an alternative to ObamaCare that did nothing about today's market-distorting tax policy and thus did not do much to help the people whom that policy—by inflating premiums—has locked out of the insurance market.
Some Republicans think that political success requires nothing more than watching ObamaCare fail. But if the new system quickly implodes, that would be all the more reason to have an alternative on hand—other than another leftward move toward single payer. And it might not implode so quickly.
Other Republicans fear that any alternative would amount to ObamaCare Lite, just another big government health-care program. But a real market-oriented conservative reform would take us toward an actual functioning consumer market in coverage—and so to the right not only of ObamaCare but of the system that preceded it.
There has also been a fear among some Republicans that proposing an alternative would give Democrats a target and distract the public from the expected and now real failures of ObamaCare. But the absence of a credible alternative has been the GOP's greatest weakness in the fight against ObamaCare, and it is probably why polls show that even many people who are skeptical and concerned about ObamaCare do not support full repeal.
Defenders of ObamaCare are using the absence of a Republican alternative to suggest that their law is the only answer to the grave problems of American health care and that without it millions of Americans would continue to lack access to coverage. That argument is their final trump card. It is time for Republicans to take it away.
Mr. Ponnuru is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor at National Review. Mr. Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
2b) How Republicans Can Lose on ObamaCare
By Jeffrey T. Brown
It is a tactic as old as argument itself. The person seeking to accomplish something he knows to be dishonest and unjust sets the parameters of the argument, and invites his opponent to debate the predetermined memes. If the debater does not first disown the false premise, and reset the terms, he has effectively lost from the outset. In the case of ObamaCare, the premise is that our healthcare system was irretrievably "broken." Congress had to step in and "fix" healthcare.
Of course, this was a ruse for the easy marks. No one but the utter simpletons among us believes ObamaCare was ever about healthcare or improving upon its delivery. One does not cure an illness by shooting the patient in the head. If the goal had been addressing certain imperfections, even assuming the government had a place in that equation, this could have been easily achieved with relatively minor modifications imposed upon the existing system. I do not advocate government intrusion, but we cannot deny that it has become an unfortunate reality. The less of it, however, the better.
The goal, as it always is with the left, is ownership of the citizenry. Before now, this was being accomplished in smaller increments. Restrictions and eventual recisions of Constitutionally protected individual liberties were accomplished with much less fanfare than ObamaCare, and much less scrutiny. The left's belief in the duty of the citizen to serve the state, indeed to become a serf of the state, has always been imposed by false premises. Unjust seizure of private property is accomplished through punitive taxation, under the false premise that the wealthy don't pay their "fair share". Redistribution to the left's preferred beneficiaries is achieved through welfare, supposedly meant to rescue the less fortunate. Who is heartless enough to argue the false premise that the "needy" should be deprived of help from a beneficent people?
As with all premises asserted by the left, there is a nearly complete lie, with just enough of a scintilla of partial truth that the leftist can feign integrity. Once the left has invested in a false premise, they will not abandon it on penalty of death, especially yours. In the case of ObamaCare, we see this reliably played out by the left's media tools challenging those on the right to propose ways to improve upon the mess that is ObamaCare, and offer solutions to the disaster unfolding before us. This is an unwinnable premise for the right.
To argue on those terms is first to accept that ObamaCare was ever necessary in the first place, so that it should be preserved by repair or improvement. This is the fundamental premise of the left's ongoing efforts in the media to buck up their reliably dim followers. Any discussion that does not proceed upon the premise that ObamaCare was necessary and morally justified is a non-starter for the leftist. They certainly cannot afford to admit that healthcare was merely the vehicle for their most aggressive embrace of socialism to date. They can't admit that they exploited the naivete of the most gullible among us to promise the impossible.
They cannot admit that it never mattered to the president or his fellow Marxists that millions of Americans would be sacrificed on the altar of "progress", if that's what you call the efforts of the few to enslave the many. He knew what he was doing, and what would happen, and he lied to ensure that the slow-witted would not catch on until it was too late. Time was needed to fully bait the trap, and guarantee the inability of the prey to escape.
They cannot afford, even now, with the lies of the president and his worshipers fully exposed, to admit that this defective law, and its myriad assaults on personal freedoms, was never about improving the delivery of health care. The premise is always the unquestioned good will and inspiring charity of the leftist.
If they can get Republicans, and others actually to the right, to adopt the premise that ObamaCare is about healthcare and good intentions, they know they will eventually succeed in the long campaign to trick the country into adopting socialized, government-controlled health care, even if some concessions are necessary for appearance' sake. They will have succeeded in protecting the holy grail of involuntary serfdom and government ownership of its people.
We see these efforts being played out now in interviews and performances by dutiful foot-soldiers on television and media. Republicans and conservatives are being asked what they propose to "fix" ObamaCare, and address the flaws with which they are so unfairly obsessed. They are never asked, of course, whether ObamaCare was ever the correct solution. The left's unyielding premise is always implicit in the theme and scope of the questions or interview: ObamaCare was the only solution, even if it wasn't implemented perfectly. In other words, the premise is that there is no solution, and never was any solution, other than an unprecedented usurpation of power and personal liberties that makes the citizens beggars to the government for their own physical salvation.
To discuss how to fix ObamaCare is to accept the lie of its necessity. To accept that it can be fixed, or that Republicans or conservatives should participate in doing so, is to become complicit in its preservation. Every elected Republican who speaks of delays, or fixes, or amendments, cancels his or her refusal to vote for this unconstitutional act of governmental betrayal of our founding principles. To accept and adopt an act of unabashed socialism is to condone, and be a supporter of, socialism. It is no different in effect than being an accessory-after-the-fact to a bank robbery. If one gives aid, support, and protection to a known bank robber, he becomes an accessory to the crime.
There are few opportunities given to the right to explain how the evils of this administration and its goals directly impact almost every citizen. The IRS scandal damaged conservatives, so non-conservatives looked away, choosing to ignore the bigger picture regarding what such abuse portends for all. Benghazi was successfully misrepresented by the media, so their base came to see it as mere political theater, rather than seeing the bigger picture of a president ensuring the preventable deaths of Americans acting on his orders. But ObamaCare has the potential to adversely affect almost everyone in a very direct, personal way. It will be hard to ignore the loss of one's own affordable, perfectly suitable healthcare.
Republicans did not destroy our effective healthcare system to cure it. They have no duty to rescue Socialists from their own stupidity, or malice. ObamaCare should be clearly spoken of as what it was, an attempt to place Americans in a position of final, irrevocable dependence on their government to make even basic decisions, particularly the most personal ones involving life and death. Republicans must remind the country that the president has made clear that his control of their lives is so necessary to his plans that he has said he will never allow this disaster to be cured. He provoked a government shutdown to emphasize this determination. They should never miss a chance to remind the country that this is a destruction of rights and freedoms that the right voted against, and would never have taken from them. Democrats, and only Democrats, saw Americans as so gullible and stupid that they could be corralled into pens on the basis of outright, unmitigated lies.
Rather than speak of helping Democrats out of the tar pit, Republicans should hold their heads under. Let the reality of Communism-Lite unfold for all to see and feel, with the message that this is only the beginning of the Democrat vision of the New America. They should remind people every day that what happened to them at the hands of the Democrat Party in five short years was no accident. Let it sink in without mitigating its impact too soon. The future of the country hangs in the balance. There are elections in a year. There is time to talk of alternatives, instead of how we can rewrite the nation's death warrant.
This is an opportunity for Republicans to fight to the death from the moral high ground at a time when it was needed most. It's time they fought as if they intended to win.
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That antagonism was on display today as Bill Clinton joined the growing chorus of criticsof the ObamaCare rollout in an interview published in a web magazine. Speaking much as if he was one of the angry red-state Democrats who think the president’s lies about ObamaCare can sink their hopes of reelection next year, the 42nd president stuck a knife into the 44thpresident by saying the law should be changed to accommodate the demands of those who are losing their coverage despite the president’s promises to the contrary:
“I personally believe even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”
In doing so, the former unofficial “explainer in chief” for Obama has helped undermine the notion that the president’s signature health-care legislation can be kept intact. But he has also begun the process by which Hillary will begin to disassociate herself from an administration that is beginning to take on the odor of lame-duck failure.
White House spokesmen Jay Carney tried to represent Clinton’s defection as somehow consistent with the president’s comments during his cribbed “apology” for the false information about the bill that he repeated ad nauseum during the last three years (“If you like your health care plan…”) during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd last week. The president said his team would study how to make it up to the millions who are losing their coverage and being hit with huge increases in their premiums. But he knows very well that to do that would essential destroy the system on which ObamaCare is based. The point is there is no way for responsible citizens who pay for their insurance not to be the losers in this scheme since without bilking them (as well as the recruitment of vast numbers of young, healthy people who will pay for more insurance than most will want or need) it will be impossible to carry off the vast redistribution of wealth that is at the core of ObamaCare.
That’s why the willingness of Democrats to embrace the bill proposed by Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (one of those endangered red-state Democrats) to legislate a fix that would allow Americans to keep their existing coverage is so dangerous for ObamaCare. It’s not clear such a fix is even possible, but the willingness of Democrats like California’s Dianne Feinstein to jump at that wagon shows that the ground is slipping away from underneath the president’s feet. While the White House has said their concern is eliminating substandard insurance policies, this is another barefaced lie as the whole point here is roping in more people to pay for those who are currently uninsured, not improving their coverage.
This may be a turning point in the history of ObamaCare as the dysfunctional website now appears to be the least of the president’s problems. But it is also a sign that his would-be successor now believes that she must detach herself from what appears to be a disastrous second term. If we needed an official notification that the future of the Democratic Party wants no part of the problems of the present, Hillary’s husband just delivered it.
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