And yet Obama and the Democrats use any GOP attempt at reforming both Medicare and Social Security as opportunities to kick the fear mongering into overdrive. Via Philip Klein: Medicare and Social Security, the nation’s two largest programs, have long-term deficits of $63.3 trillion, according to annual reports from the programs’ trustees released today. The reports underscore
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Annual Reports Show Long-Term Medicare And Social Security Deficit Tops $63 Trillion…
Yesterday Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) unveiled a budget proposal that differs in many details than the House-passed budget sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). The Toomey plan balances the budget faster, but is also leaves Medicare and Social Security largely untouched. Toomey would knock non-defense discretionary spending back to 2006 levels for 2012. He calls for block granting Medicaid to the states and spending just $14 billion more on the program than pre-stimulus levels by 2019. The budget calls for streamlining the tax code to include just three tax brackets rather than the current six. The corporate tax rate would be reduced from 35 percent to 25 percent. The alternative minimum tax is indexed to inflation, Obamacare and its tax increases are repealed. Toomey projects that his budget would achieve balance in 2020 and run a “modest surplus” the following year. The biggest contrast with Ryan is that it balances the budget within a ten-year window without the political risk of tackling Medicare. In fact, the budget actually spends more on Medicare than President Obama’s. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told reporters that nothing in the budget was incompatible with Ryan-style reforms, however: “This is a ten-year budget and certainly it could accommodate structural changes that save Medicare.” Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rubio, and Ron Johnson (R-WI) were on hand for the press conference announcing the Toomey budget. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Richard Burr (R-NC), and David Vitter (R-LA) are also co-sponsors. DeMint and Lee have also signed on to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) budget, which addresses Medicare, eliminates departments, and balances the budget even faster. Paul told me yesterday that he still needed to look at the details of Toomey’s proposal, but noted that he had voted for the Toomey budget last year,.
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Pat Toomey’s Budget Offers Different Focus
The computer systems of a major credit card payment processing company called Global Payments have been hacked, reportedly compromising information on up to 1.5 million credit card account numbers. Two of my credit cards (one MasterCard and one American Express) are among the numbers stolen, as proven by Amex and Citibank calling me to verify charges on my cards (2 through Yahoo, 1 to Google AdWords, and 1 to EasyJet) which I did not make. Those cards have been canceled. I’m impressed by and grateful for how seriously and effectively the card companies and banks work to prevent fraudulent charges. Although 1.5 million represents less than one percent of the total number of debit and credit cards issued to United States cardholders, don’t assume that your data is safe. I encourage you to get online if you can to check activity on your credit cards and make sure the charges you see are valid, and keep checking for a few weeks. If you can’t or don’t check your activity online, make sure to check your statement very carefully when it arrives. Generally, you will not be liable for charges you didn’t make, though if you wait a long time to report the charge to your card company, your risk of being stuck with the charge may increase. One of the disturbing aspects of this story is that the public was only notified of this hack at the end of March (on Friday). The company became aware of the data breach in early March, and the breach itself apparently lasted for more than a month, from January 21, 2012 to February 25, 2012, according to the Krebson Security blog which has a good timeline of the release of information. However, the company claims that they discovered and reported the breach themselves; it was not found or reported first by customers or banks. They also say that they reported the breach to federal law enforcement immediately upon discovery in early March. Perhaps law enforcement asked the company not to disclose the breach to the public in order to try to make their initial investigations easier by not alerting the criminals to the fact that the data theft had been discovered. Visa has dropped Global Payments from their list of approved providers. Global Payments held a conference call on Monday morning to discuss the issue (as well as their earnings report.) The company has posted a webcast of the call. They claim that only “Track 2″ data (relating to the tracks on the magnetic stripes on the backs of credit cards) was taken, and that other key information, including Social Security numbers, names, and addresses were not stolen. According to the Chicago Tribune , “A person improperly using Track 2 information can transfer the account number and expiration date of a card to a magnetic stripe on a fraudulent card and then try to use it to make online purchases. The attempt could be blocked, however, if an online merchant asks for the CVV code, or the three or four digits usually located on the back of card.” If Track 1 data was also taken, which is possible, that would include the cardholder’s name. It was disappointing to hear the company say that they were unaware of any fraudulent transactions on any of the stolen accounts. Perhaps someone at the company will read this blog note and change their answer… The company is also launching a web site to update the public with information on the data breach. It should be operational later today at http://www.2012infosecurityupdate.com/ Global Payments stock (NYSE: GPN ) plunged from $52 to $47.50 per share on Friday, and is down about another $1.50 to just below $46 in early trading on Monday.
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1.5 Million Credit Card Numbers Stolen
From the diaries. There’s a lot to like about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. It cuts some spending. It flattens the tax code down to just two individual marginal tax rates. It also includes some innovative policies designed to halt the unsustainable growth of health care entitlement spending. However, on balance, the budget is disappointing for fiscal conservatives for two main reasons: It waives the spending restraint that was agreed to in last year’s debt limit deal, and it doesn’t balance the budget until 2040. Broken promises and unbalanced budgets as far as the eye can see are neither good policy nor a good campaign rallying cry. Last year, an agreement was reached in which Republicans gave President Obama a massive increase in the debt ceiling, in exchange for promised spending cuts that supposedly had “real teeth.” As part of the deal, Congressman Ryan and most Republicans voted to require an annual spending cap and $110 billion in automatic spending cuts for next year – otherwise known as “sequestration” – if the so-called “super-committee” failed to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Since the predictable collapse of the super-committee, the House GOP should have been working toward a budget proposal that allows for the sequester to take place for the coming year. Such a budget would include the $110 billion in reductions. Ryan’s budget achieves vastly less. It contains $19 billion in discretionary savings and, at most, $53 billion in cuts to mandatory spending — $38 billion short. Thus, it leaves House Republicans breaking the terms of the deal they agreed to just seven months ago. That debt ceiling agreement provided that half of those cuts would come from defense spending, and half from non-defense spending. Some conservatives object to that level of defense cuts. Fine. The key to the agreement was securing the total $110 billion reduction in spending, not which part of the budget was cut. If some want to rearrange the location of the cuts, that would be fine, as long as the overall magnitude of the spending restraint was sustained. House leaders claim they are making more overall cuts. However, they are clearly short of the requirements for next year and are pushing the deepest cuts out into the future. We’ve seen this movie before. Lots of times. In other words, they are kicking the can down the road . . . again. No matter how you slice it, the Ryan budget breaks the promise of spending restraint that was agreed to in exchange for raising the debt limit. And make no mistake, we’re not just arguing over $38 billion. Now that this budget breaks that deal, both parties will work to unravel the entire $1.2 trillion in sequestered cuts. Don’t be surprised if the full unraveling happens later this year. A group of fiscal conservatives in the House, the Republican Study Committee, has proposed a budget that balances in five years. It contains strong tax reform and spending restraint. In addition, the RSC deals with Social Security, an entitlement program left untouched by the Ryan budget. And just like the Ryan budget, the RSC plan shifts the burden of the sequester away from defense, but preserves, and in fact exceeds, the overall spending reduction level agreed to last year. That is the right way forward. By waiving the sequester and refusing to balance the budget until 2040, the Ryan budget and the Republican Party are playing a dangerous game. It is hard to have confidence that our long-term fiscal challenges will be met responsibly when the same Congress that passed the August debt deal wants to ignore it less than one year later. America does not have thirty years to balance the budget. We may not have ten. We hope that fiscal conservatives will take a harder look at the House GOP budget, and ask themselves if they can and should demand more. Chris Chocola President – Club for Growth
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The Republican Party is playing a dangerous game
[Posted by Karl] Yesterday’s questions from Justice Kennedy have the left fearing and the right hoping the Supreme Court will strike down Obamacare’s mandate. People may be getting ahead of themselves . Indeed, people are jumping aheard to discuss the one scenario in which the mandate is struck, but the rest of the law remains. The speculation is intriguing, however premature. According to the New York Times , house organ of establishment progressivism, Democrats and Republcians have given little thought to the possibility: White House officials said that they remain confident that the Supreme Court will uphold the law, and that they have done no planning for the possibility of its full or partial demise. Congressional leaders in both parties also said there had been no significant contingency planning. The cynic in me finds that hard to believe. However, reading Dalia Lithwick or Michael Kinsley would suggest that liberals simply could not conceive of an unfavorable Court decision on Obamacare. For reasons I may write about later, the idea that Democrats are this much in denial about the possibility seems more plausible to me than it did a year or even a month ago. The odd couple of Steven Den Beste and Robert Reich think that if only the mandate is truck down, Dems will push for a single-payer system. As Den Beste explains: Single Payer is what they always wanted. The bill wasn’t originally written that way, though, because they knew that even with twin Democratic majorities, there was no chance of passing it. So they included the mandate instead. If the mandate is struck down, then Congress will have to act. There won’t be any way to repeal the rest of the law because Obama will veto, and the Senate will sustain the veto. The only thing he will agree to is implementation of single payer. Reich expands: If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions. When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes. I think Den Beste and Reich are mistaken here, for a number of reasons. Both recognize Obama embraced the mandate because he could not get single-payer, even with an overwhelmingly Democratic House and 60 Democratic Senators. Yet, after this unpopular law is further discredited by the Supreme Court, there is going to be some surge of momentum for full-on government-run healthcare? Not in a GOP Congress elected in large part on opposition to Obamacare — and there is little reason to believe both chambers will not remain under GOP control after the election. Indeed, Obama will lose the ability to veto changes to Obamacare if he loses reelection, and Congress will have time to see whether that happens. Even if Obama were to be reelected, there are a number of reasons why a GOP Congress likely would hold the upper hand. First, the reason Democrat super-majorities had difficulty passing Obamacare and rejected single-payer is because insurers, phramaceutical companies, and the healthcare industry generally have a lot of clout. None of the so-called “stakeholders” want single-payer and they donate to politicians across the spectrum. Second, the spectre of insurers going bankrupt — or being nationalized — would not play well for the president who promised you could keep the coverage you have. Third, while the mandate is particularly offensive to conservatives and libertarians as as the embodiment of the idea that the federal government can force you to buy things, it is offensive to the mushy middle primarily as the mechanism by which they are forced to pay. Robert Reich may think these people are excited to shell out payroll taxes to finance Social Security and Medicare; I am less convinced of that. Indeed, while polls tell us most do not want to “cut” these entitlement programs, one lesson of Obamacare ought to be that people know our public finances cannot afford another costly entitlement. –Karl
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Post-mandate politics?
