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Thursday, July 19, 2007
Michael Vick; subprime loans fiasco
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic: • Gambling’s weekly highlights: Michael Vick is indicted in a dog-fighting/gambling enterprise. The Georgia Lottery reports our gambling enterprise raked in $3.4 billion in the 2007 fiscal year ending June 30, $244 million ahead of the previous year. There’s a major difference. We don’t shoot the losers. We simply try new marketing strategies.
• Quote of the week, this from Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, who will be 70 when his resignation is effective later this year: “I feel it is time for me to get back into business while I still can.”
• Regulation may be needed to force lenders to be more prudent in making subprime loans. But the market is doing a superb job of conveying that message. More than 30 subprime lenders have gone bankrupt. And subprime losses could reach $50 billion to $100 billion.
• Don’t call now. I can’t talk. I’m eating my prediction that former state Sen. Jim Whitehead of Evans was a shoo-in for the 10th Congressional District. Little did I know that physician Paul Broun of Athens, who may be more conservative than Charlie Norwood, and from the light side of the district — light in terms of voters — would win. Perdue. Cagle. And now Broun. Underdogs soar. Pundits perish.
• While commuting sentences, President Bush should heed the plea of U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and commute the sentences of two border patrol agents imprisoned for 11 and 12 years for shooting a fleeing Mexican drug smuggler. The two, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, wounded smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete Davila in the buttocks after he abandoned a van containing 743 pounds of marijuana.
• Yes, allow toll roads to be built by the private sector. But do it to fill the gap between genuine congestion-relief needs and available funding, not to free up money for transportation boondoggles.
• A news story confirms it: Turkeys live in Druid Hills. Their brethren in D.C. pull all-night stunts on the floor of the U.S. Senate, trying to force a withdrawal deadline for troops in Iraq. Notice, though, that two Georgia congressmen who came close to losing in 2006 — John Barrow of Savannah and Jim Marshall of Macon — were among just 10 House Democrats who voted against the House version of legislation to require troops to be out of Iraq by April. The Senate’s 52-47 vote was well shy of the 60 needed. Four Republicans deserted.
• Headline: “Rally urges racial justice.” Racial justice, as applied to the Genarlow Wilson case, means “let him go and imprison the DA.”
• My gosh. Illegal aliens awaiting deportation — some of whom have committed violent crimes here — are not happy to be incarcerated in rural Stewart County south of Columbus. And they’re really put out with the Georgia Legislature for passing a law requiring a valid Georgia driver’s license or ID card to register a car in Georgia. To get a license, they have to prove they’re in the country legally.
• The driver’s license requirement does reveal a loophole that should be closed in the next session of the General Assembly. Illegals who overstayed visas and may already have Georgia licenses can order tags online for themselves and others.
• The need always in assessing threats to our safety and security is to determine which pose immediate danger. The threat represented by a too-short commercial jet runway in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is so immediate and obvious that both the airlines using it and the government officials responsible should be indicted in the deaths of 189 people. The TAM plane crashed while trying to land in a rainstorm. In the United States, advocacy groups, combined with the 30-second sound bite, reduce all threats to the same level. We’re losing the ability to draw distinctions.
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Hillarycare?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush on Wednesday vowed to veto Senate legislation that would increase spending on the federal program that funds 70 percent of Georgia’s PeachCare spending. The President had recommended an increase of $4.8 billion over the next five years. Democrats want it expanded by $50 billion.
At the heart of the dispute is the broader ideological dispute over health care financing in this country — whether it’ll be Hillarycare or a system that relies on the private sector. Since the defeat of Hillarycare, the left has moved to get there by gradually expanding taxpayer-financed coverage. PeachCare provides coverage to children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, the taxpayer-provided health care program for the poor.
The program, called the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, was targeted to the children of families earning up to 200 percent of poverty. Georgia has expanded it to 220 percent. In other states adults are included and proposals have been floated to extend it to all children under the age of 18.
“If Congress continues to insist upon expanding health care through the SCHIP program - which, by the way, would entail a huge tax increase for the American people - I’ll veto the bill,” the President said Wednesday. Democrats plan to pay for the expansion with a 61-cents-per-pack tax on cigarettes.
“Members of Congress have decided … to expand the program to include … families earning [up to] $80,000 a year, which would cause people to drop their private insurance in order to be involved with a government insurance plan,” said Bush.
A group of Democrats and some Republicans indicate they’ll support a $35 billion expansion to a total of $60 billion over five years. The Democratic proposal would have raised spending from $25 billion over the previous five years to $75 billion.
One reason the PeachCare debate now underway in Georgia is so important is that it is a test of whether conservatives can rein-in spending for a non-entitlement. It shouldn’t grow into something that entices parents to drop medical coverage for their children in favor of a more attractive taxpayer-financed plan.
The responsible course for state officials is to deal with the problem at hand, not to appeal to Washington for more and more money.
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