Sunday, February 09, 2014

Here's Proof: the Obama Administration Doesn't Care Whether You Work Or Not
...Perhaps when President Obama’s acolytes and mouthpieces frame joblessness as liberation they’re thinking of some future Jobses and Wozniaks, freed from hourly drudgery to retreat to the garage and change the world with their brilliance. Or maybe he has in mind a J.K. Rowling, living off welfare and dreaming up a boy wizard while doodling in cafes.

Such thinking is consistent with the elite character of the Obama administration — some 40 percent of the president’s men and women hold Ivy League degrees, with more of them receiving degrees from Oxford than from any American public school. When they shrug off jobs as limitations, Obama and Co. have in mind their gifted and talented friends.

This is magical thinking. Most people are not entrepreneurs, geniuses or novelists. Most people don’t have big ideas. Most people get by and advance in small steps, not giant leaps. Jobs are the principal way people improve themselves, their lives and the lives of their families, and leave their children better off than they were.

The White House response to the CBO report is in direct opposition to its supposed stance on inequality and class mobility. More long-term unemployment, even the unemployment of people who leave the workforce willingly in order to “pursue their dreams,” in the Oprah Winfrey-style phrasing of Jay Carney, means more people stuck on the lower rungs of the economic ladder...

Obama admin looking at extending “administrative fix” for noncompliant individual plans — for three years?
Last November was a particularly — ahem — messy time for President Obama’s crowning legislative achievement. The rollout of the law’s federal exchange website was showcasing newly-plumbed depths of big-government incompetence and obfuscation while millions of insurees in the individual market were balking at notices informing them that their not-comprehensive/expensive-enough healthcare plans were getting cancelled in order to comply with the new standards that ObamaCare had laid down for their guidance. The president’s very own Democrats were desperately floating legislation to enforce the oft-repeated “If you like your plan, you can keep it”-promise that was soon after deemed “The Lie of the Year,” but rather than bother with messy legislation, the Obama administration followed their unilateral employer-mandate delay with an “administrative fix” for these individual plans that would allow insurers to un-cancel cancelled plans for another year.

They hoped that would calm things down for awhile and at least temporarily cushion the spreading revelation that forcing insurees off of inexpensive plans is in fact a feature and not a bug of the law, but that means that a lot of those same uncomfortable conversations are going to be coming due right about the time of the midterms this fall.

Heck, they did it once already — why not extend the “fix” through 2016, really? So what if the decision plagues the already-tottering system with insurance plans that don’t pull their redistributive weight? That’s what risk corridors are for! ...