Obamacare's Achilles' Heel

"Insurance exchanges constitute the key to success or failure of the law," writes David Catron, adding "states have an opportunity to shoot a poison arrow directly into Obamacare's Achilles' heel."

• Obamacare can't work with insurance exchanges — i.e., new bureaucracies whose ostensible purpose will be to provide "marketplaces" in which people with no employer-based health insurance can shop for coverage at competitive rates.
• The law assumes states will create insurance exchanges, but it doesn't actually require them to do so.
• States have no rational incentive to create exchanges, since exchanges will cost states from $10 million to $100 million per year to operate.
• The Feds can set up an insurance exchange, but then it would bear the operational costs, which it can't afford. Worse, state-based exchanges may distribute credits and subsidies, but a federal exchange may not. That's a huge problem for Obamacare zealots.

There's one more twist in the law. Not creating an insurance exchange protects a state's businesses from job-killing penalties:

Debunking the US-in-permanent-decline Conventional Wisdom

"We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs," writes Victor Davis Hanson, and none of the conventional US-is-in-permanent-decline wisdom "now seems very wise." Consider the "political, demographic and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable:"

• The European Union, until recently thought to be an emerging powerhouse, is unraveling.
• The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world's cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West. Now the Arab Middle East is in free fall.
• Tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference. Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable, and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies, but will instead become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society.
• China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably look modern sooner than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society -- given that free markets did not make China democratic.
• Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil-fuel reserves in the world — in theory, with enough gas, oil, and coal, we will soon never need any imported Middle Eastern energy again. “Peak oil” is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras. 

If the United States utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside. 
These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Walmart.

Gallup: Eroding Confidence in MSM

Only 21 percent of Americans have a "great deal/quite a lot" of confidence in TV news, according to a July Gallup poll, and only 25 percent have that level of confidence in newspapers.  "Liberals and moderates lost so much confidence in television news this year," reports Gallup, "that their views are now more akin to conservative views" (see third graphic below).

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Trillions in Economic Growth, Prosperity

We hear "trillions," and we think national debt these days. Now a new report uses "trillions" to describe our potential for new economic growth and prosperity.

The energy world has been turned upside-down—but not in the way that many expected. ... The United States, Canada, and Mexico are awash in hydrocarbon resources: oil, natural gas, and coal. The total North American hydrocarbon resource base is more than four times greater than all the resources extant in the Middle East. And the United States alone is now the fastest-growing producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

"Change" for the Worse

"Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority," The Hill reported yesterday.

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.

Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.

Too Many Teachers in Public Schools

"Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled — to 6.4 million from 3.3 million — and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides," writes Andrew Coulson. "Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs."

Taxpayers were promised that hiring teachers to reduce class sizes would improve student achievement. Did it work?

Hennessey: Strategy to Undo Obamacare

"In 2009 and 2010 the nation took huge steps down a path toward more government control of health care," writes Keith Hennessey in the WSJ. "A shift to the consumer-based reform path is still available—if voters want it."  It begins by repealing Obamacare in specific steps, then replacing it with these market-based reforms:

• replace the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a flat tax deduction or credit;
• allow consumers to buy portable health insurance sold anywhere in the nation, through their employer or on their own;
• expand contribution limits for health savings accounts;
• enact national medical liability reform; and
• enact Medicare [senior] and Medicaid [welfare] reforms such as the bi-partisan Wyden0Ryan Medicare reform plan, which provides a stronger system of competing private health plans as opposed to government-run "fee-for-service" Medicare.