The Obamacare Train Wreck Three Years In

Obamacare is in trouble, a victim of its own complexity.

Enacted in 2010 as a 2,700 page bill, the law called for the creation of more than 150 new federal boards, commissions, panels and programs. It has spawned more than 20,000 additional pages of regulation so far—and that’s after only three years of an eight-year implementation schedule. Welcome to the future!

There’s a reason for this mind-numbing complexity: Obamacare is the boldest attempt at government central planning in American history. The law gives federal officials power over all major decisions in American health care: what kind of health plans, benefits and levels of coverage Americans must buy; what is permissible for insurers in terms of administrative costs, profit levels, or premiums; what’s acceptable as preventive care; what benefits business owners, religious organizations and charities must offer; how states must run their new, untested health insurance exchanges… the list goes on and on, including new mandates and hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes and fees—not to mention fines and penalties for noncompliance.

In the era of Obamacare, what you want in health care is irrelevant; you will get what government officials tell you that you must have. This is classic central planning.  And history teaches us that central planning on this large a scale is doomed to fail.

Official Washington already is struggling with the economics of this monster. Last year, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Katherine Sebelius announced her department could not implement the long-term care component of Obamacare. Financially, she said, it was simply not workable. And just this month Sebelius announced that she was postponing a program designed to allow small businesses to offer more than one plan for their workers. Meanwhile, more than half the states have declined to set up a ‘health insurance exchange” under the burdensome terms and conditions of the law, leaving it to Washington to do it for them.

Enrollment starts on October 1, 2013. But can Washington figure out how to do it without a monumental managerial mess?

Henry Chao, an HHS official involved with implementing the health insurance exchanges, says he is hoping that in setting up and enrolling millions of Americans in the exchanges that we all don’t have a “Third World Experience.” That may turn out to be an even bigger insult to the Third World than Chao intended.

Bet on more excuses. “We need more time” is the ultimate bureaucratic plea (edging out even “not enough money,” “not enough staff” and “the software doesn’t work right”). But time is not the real issue here. Indeed the problems that HHS is trying to tackle will become even more complex with the passage of time, making future planning and implementation even more difficult. The problem is that central planning in any complex sector of the economy is unworkable—a lesson that Washington progressives either cannot or will not learn.

And, yes, look for Obamacare apologists to launch the blame game. It’s always somebody else’s fault. None of this would be happening if the governors would just be more compliant, if the doctors would enroll in obedience school, or if the people would just stop squawking and accept what the bureaucrats are jamming down their throats.

But the progressives miscalculated the politics as well as the economics of Obamacare. In the run up to passage, poll after poll showed the proposal losing in the court of popular opinion. But the president and his allies in Congress did not care. They knew what was good for us, and they were determined to give it to us—whether we liked it or not. And so, they passed a purely partisan bill, chock full of broken promises, with the full support of big corporate lobbyists whose clients gained greater access to taxpayers’ money.

Three years on, the polls show Obamacare remains a loser. And lawmakers who created this monstrosity are getting as nervous as Dr. Frankenstein. Distancing themselves from the implementation, they are using words like “train wreck” (Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.) and  “ beyond comprehension” (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV).

Perhaps blaming the bureaucrats may yet prove a successful strategy.  But in passing Obamacare, it was the lawmakers themselves who guaranteed higher costs, massive disruption of Americans’ existing insurance coverage, and a level of federal intervention into health care decisions that is unprecedented. And they own it – all of it.

-Robert E. Moffit Ph.D is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-author of ‘Why Obamacare is Wrong for America.’

First appeared in The Blaze.

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New Bird Flu Cases Rise in China, Three Deaths

China has found two more cases of a new strain of bird flu and one of the victims has died, state media said on Wednesday, bringing to nine the number of confirmed human infections from the previously unknown flu type.

A 38-year-old cook fell ill early last month while working in the province of Jiangsu, where five of the other cases were found. He died in hospital in Hangzhou city on March 27, the Xinhua news agency reported. Samples tested positive on Wednesday for the new bird flu strain, H7N9.

The second patient, also in Hangzhou, is a 67-year-old who is having treatment. Xinhua said no connection between the two cases had been discovered, and no one in close contact with either patient had developed any flu-like symptoms.

(Read More: For China, New Era Brings New Set of Problems)

The World Health Organization said it was "following the event closely" and was in contact with Chinese authorities, which it said were actively investigating the cases amid heightened disease surveillance.

Flu experts across the world are studying samples isolated from the patients to assess H7N9'S human pandemic potential.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

Of the seven other cases of the new strain, two have died, both in the business hub of Shanghai. The other five are in a critical condition in hospital in Nanjing. Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou are all close to each other in eastern China.

(Read More: China's Urbanization Leaves Migrant Workers in the Cold)

China's Agriculture Ministry said it had yet to find any animals infected with H7N9, though added it was possible it had been brought to China by migratory birds.

The WHO says so far it has seen no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but there are questions about the source of the infection and about how it may be being transmitted to people.

"We still don't know the mode of transmission or host (of the virus)," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl. "Those are the two most important pieces of information we would need. In order to control it, we need to know where it is coming from."

The WHO said in a statement it was also focusing its efforts on encouraging collaboration between researchers to ensure information and materials are available for scientists wanting to develop diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines.

No vaccine is currently available for H7N9 flu, but preliminary test results provided by the WHO Collaborating Centre in China suggest it is susceptible to the antiviral drugs Tamiflu, sold by the Swiss drugmaker Roche, and Relenza, sold by Britain's GlaxoSmithKline.

Chinese authorities dismissed speculation on some websites that the H7N9 outbreak may be related to more than 16,000 pig carcasses found dumped in rivers around Shanghai.

(Read More: China's 'Internationalization' Won't Be Painless: WTO's Lamy)

Yin Ou, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Agricultural Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that the city had tested 34 dead pigs found in the city's Huangpu River for the H7N9 virus, but the tests had all come back negative.

China has a chequered record when it comes to tackling disease outbreaks, which some officials have previously sought to cover up. However, since the H7N9 cases have been identified, China has stepped up its alert level and said it is being transparent in dealing with them.

In 2003, authorities initially tried to cover up an epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China and killed about a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

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Doubling Of CO2 Levels In End-Triassic Extinction Killed Off Three Quarters Of Land And Sea Species

“There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record.” That’s from a 2010 special issue on climate change and biodiversity from the UK’s Royal Society.

In 2011, a Nature Geoscience study found humans are spewing carbon into the atmosphere 10 times faster now than 56 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a time of 10°F warming and mass extinction.

An even more ancient extinction is the subject of a new study in Science (subs. req’d), with the tongue-twister title, “Zircon U-Pb Geochronology Links the End-Triassic Extinction with the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province.”

As the MIT News release puts it:

Some 200 million years ago, an increase in atmospheric CO2 caused acidification of the oceans and global warming that killed off 76 percent of marine and terrestrial species on Earth.

Whereas human activity is the source of the rapid surge in CO2 emissions today, the source of the surge 200 million years ago is now widely thought to be volcanoes:

… most scientists agree on a likely scenario: Over a relatively short period of time, massive volcanic eruptions from a large region known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) spewed forth huge amounts of lava and gas, including carbon dioxide, sulfur and methane. This sudden release of gases into the atmosphere may have created intense global warming and acidification of the oceans that ultimately killed off thousands of plant and animal species.

Now researchers at MIT, Columbia University and elsewhere have determined that these eruptions occurred precisely when the extinction began, providing strong evidence that volcanic activity did indeed trigger the end-Triassic extinction.

Today, of course, notwithstanding the claims of some disinformers, “Humans emit 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes,” as Skeptical Science explains in one of their classic myth-debunking posts.

So what is the connection between what happened in the End-Triassic Extinction and our current mass extinction? As ClimateWire (subs. req’d) explains:

“In some ways, this event is analogous to the present day,” said study lead author Terrence Blackburn, of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Morgan Schaller, a research associate in earth systems history at Brown University, has previously published work in Science showing that these massive eruptions led to a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 2,000 parts per million to 4,400 ppm.

Although researchers are not sure how quickly this doubling occurred, it could have been within a period as short as 1,000 years.

This leads them to draw analogies between today’s rapid CO2 increase and the past. Even though the base-line levels of CO2 were much higher 200 million years ago, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations leads to a 3 degree Celsius increase whether it’s from 2,000 to 4,000 ppm or from 280 to 560 ppm, Schaller said….

Paul Olsen, a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a co-author on the paper released yesterday, said the extinction, however it happened, occurred in 20,000 years or less — but like the speed of the carbon dioxide doubling, it could have been a lot less.

In any case, what humans are doing to the biosphere today is mostly without precedent in the geologic record and poised to be far worse than most previous extinctions, according to recent research:

Study finds “mass biodiversity collapse” at 900 ppm, and possibly a “threshold response … to relatively minor increases in CO2 concentration and/or global temperature.”Nature Climate Change: “The proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80% of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms“Scientist: “When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans”A 2009 study in Nature Geoscience warned that global warming may create expanding “dead zones” in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and “remain for thousands of years.”“Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century.”

There will always be zoos … won’t there?

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The Obamacare Train Wreck Three Years In

Obamacare is in trouble, a victim of its own complexity.

Enacted in 2010 as a 2,700 page bill, the law called for the creation of more than 150 new federal boards, commissions, panels and programs. It has spawned more than 20,000 additional pages of regulation so far—and that’s after only three years of an eight-year implementation schedule. Welcome to the future!

There’s a reason for this mind-numbing complexity: Obamacare is the boldest attempt at government central planning in American history. The law gives federal officials power over all major decisions in American health care: what kind of health plans, benefits and levels of coverage Americans must buy; what is permissible for insurers in terms of administrative costs, profit levels, or premiums; what’s acceptable as preventive care; what benefits business owners, religious organizations and charities must offer; how states must run their new, untested health insurance exchanges… the list goes on and on, including new mandates and hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes and fees—not to mention fines and penalties for noncompliance.

In the era of Obamacare, what you want in health care is irrelevant; you will get what government officials tell you that you must have. This is classic central planning.  And history teaches us that central planning on this large a scale is doomed to fail.

Official Washington already is struggling with the economics of this monster. Last year, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Katherine Sebelius announced her department could not implement the long-term care component of Obamacare. Financially, she said, it was simply not workable. And just this month Sebelius announced that she was postponing a program designed to allow small businesses to offer more than one plan for their workers. Meanwhile, more than half the states have declined to set up a ‘health insurance exchange” under the burdensome terms and conditions of the law, leaving it to Washington to do it for them.

Enrollment starts on October 1, 2013. But can Washington figure out how to do it without a monumental managerial mess?

Henry Chao, an HHS official involved with implementing the health insurance exchanges, says he is hoping that in setting up and enrolling millions of Americans in the exchanges that we all don’t have a “Third World Experience.” That may turn out to be an even bigger insult to the Third World than Chao intended.

Bet on more excuses. “We need more time” is the ultimate bureaucratic plea (edging out even “not enough money,” “not enough staff” and “the software doesn’t work right”). But time is not the real issue here. Indeed the problems that HHS is trying to tackle will become even more complex with the passage of time, making future planning and implementation even more difficult. The problem is that central planning in any complex sector of the economy is unworkable—a lesson that Washington progressives either cannot or will not learn.

And, yes, look for Obamacare apologists to launch the blame game. It’s always somebody else’s fault. None of this would be happening if the governors would just be more compliant, if the doctors would enroll in obedience school, or if the people would just stop squawking and accept what the bureaucrats are jamming down their throats.

But the progressives miscalculated the politics as well as the economics of Obamacare. In the run up to passage, poll after poll showed the proposal losing in the court of popular opinion. But the president and his allies in Congress did not care. They knew what was good for us, and they were determined to give it to us—whether we liked it or not. And so, they passed a purely partisan bill, chock full of broken promises, with the full support of big corporate lobbyists whose clients gained greater access to taxpayers’ money.

Three years on, the polls show Obamacare remains a loser. And lawmakers who created this monstrosity are getting as nervous as Dr. Frankenstein. Distancing themselves from the implementation, they are using words like “train wreck” (Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.) and  “ beyond comprehension” (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV).

Perhaps blaming the bureaucrats may yet prove a successful strategy.  But in passing Obamacare, it was the lawmakers themselves who guaranteed higher costs, massive disruption of Americans’ existing insurance coverage, and a level of federal intervention into health care decisions that is unprecedented. And they own it – all of it.

-Robert E. Moffit Ph.D is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-author of ‘Why Obamacare is Wrong for America.’

First appeared in The Blaze.

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Fed Chairman: Unemployment To Remain Above 6 Percent For Three More Years

Unemployment is likely to remain above 6 percent for at least three more years, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said during testimony in front of the House Financial Services Committee today. Responding to questions from Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Bernanke said a “reasonable guess” for when unemployment will finally come down to 6 percent is 2016:

FITZPATRICK: The Fed has indicated it believes long-term unemployment rates will settle at around 5.2 percent or 6 percent.

BERNANKE: That’s our best guess.

FITZPATRICK: An understanding I heard your testimony earlier about predicting the future. When would you say we might get to around 6 percent? And also, the American people, they believe natural unemployment is actually much lower than that given what we experienced in the 1990s. Maybe your suggestion as to how we address that expectation.

BERNANKE: Again, it’s hard to predict. But a reasonable guess for 6 percent would be around 2016.

Watch it:

That unemployment remains high and will continue to do so for at least three more years would seem yet another argument against sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that will begin taking effect Friday. Indeed, Bernanke was outspoken in his opposition to further fiscal contraction during his testimony, repeatedly saying the budget cuts could damage the economic recovery and that the Federal Reserve, which has been acting to stimulate the economy through monetary means for months, could use help from Congress.

Instead of offering that help, Congress remains focused on deficit reduction, even as evidence mounts that the only spending problem America has right now is that the government isn’t spending enough. But Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to further stimulate the economy, choosing instead to push spending cuts that have held back the recovery. The looming round of cuts will only make that worse: the Congressional Budget Office projects that sequestration will knock 0.6 percentage point off economic growth while resulting in the loss of more than 700,000 jobs.

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Three Problems Contributing To Americans’ Sky High Medical Bills — And Three Ways To Fix Them

This week’s issue of Time Magazine takes a deep dive into Americans’ medical bills and the roots of the U.S. health care industry’s rampant inflation — costs that force one in four American seniors into bankruptcy and over one in three Americans to forgo care.

The investigative piece highlights the exorbitant costs of the most commonplace procedures and medications, and how insurance coverage often falls through for Americans who encounter unaffordable out-of-pocket costs due to the rising price of health care technology and services. Furthermore, it is often impossible for patients to ascertain why they are being charged what they are for care — a pricing opacity that is truly unique to the service-centered health care industry. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the Time exposé on the unsustainable foundations of American health care costs — and some ideas for shifting the U.S. medical landscape towards a more equitable system:

The indefensible costs of medical testing, technology, and drugs. Much of the report focuses on the costs of receiving basic care and testing, such as diabetes tests, drawing blood samples, or even taking plain old Tylenol — which one hospital in the report marked up to $1.50 per pill, approximately 100 times its general market price, for a cancer patient. Hospitals are largely able to get away with this because they are, as the article puts it, “sellers in what is the ultimate seller’s market,” so device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains — even technically “nonprofit” ones — are free to run up the tabs on Americans’ care. Use market competition and price negotiations to lower costs. In its Senior Protection Plan, the Center for American Progress (CAP) advocates tying relatively low Medicare drug rebates to more generous Medicaid drug rebates, and enforcing competitive bidding for all health care products in both the public and private sectors, as well as intrastate price negotiations in the private medical sector that constrains annual spending to a predesignated cap. All told, such reforms would reduce American health care spending by at least $180 billion.People usually don’t know why they get charged what they do for care. It’s a common mantra among health care reform advocates — America doesn’t have a health care system, it has a sick care system. Services are charged after the fact, often in the form a hefty, inscrutable bill that tells patients very little about why they are being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to receive care that can mean the difference between life and death. This opacity allows providers to get away with jacking up the price of services even as medical technology makes huge strides — which should theoretically lower costs. One GAO report states that “the lack of price transparency and the substantial variation in amounts hospitals pay for some IMD [implantable medical devices] raise questions about whether hospitals are achieving the best prices possible.”Make hospitals issue easily understandable receipts for all health care services.This is a relatively simple fix that would help facilitate further cost reductions by rooting price negotiations in easily-available, verifiable, and uniform data. As the CAP health policy team’s Topher Spiro states in an email to ThinkProgress, “We propose full price transparency—so it wouldn’t take a seven month investigation by a reporter to find out what prices are being charged.” The best possible outcome would be for hospitals and insurers to provide a comprehensive list of services to all patients and beneficiaries that let Americans know exactly how much a particular disease treatment or procedure will cost them.Americans get care at expensive hospital chains that don’t necessarily provide the best service. As Time’s article points out, national and multi-national hospital chains rule the American medical industry — but that doesn’t mean they provide the cheapest, highest quality, or most efficient care. For instance, at the Texas giant MD Anderson, hospital administrators charged Sean Recchi over ten times as much for a chest x-ray as they would have been reimbursed by Medicare, which is required by law to approximate the price of services rendered. Why? Because Sean Recchi had subpar private insurance, and MD Anderson could get away with it.Encourage patients to visit high-performing hospitals with insurance incentives. Americans might believe that such hospitals are their only recourse — but that doesn’t have to be true. One approach to encouraging providers to provide more efficient, quality, and affordable care would be the creation of tiered insurance plans that reward patients — through lower premiums and deductibles — who use low-cost, high-quality hospitals for their care instead of the highest-cost brand name hospitals.

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Three Charts Reminding The GOP That Domestic Spending Is Already Headed Toward Historic Lows

Republicans like to portray President Obama as a big government spender, despite the fact that government spending under Obama has grown at its slowest pace since the Eisenhower administration. The GOP is also trying to pretend the spending cuts that Obama has signed into law over the last two years simply didn’t happen.

In fact, under its current trajectory, non-defense discretionary spending — everything from education to food safety to transportation to housing to veterans’ benefits — will hit historic lows in the next decade, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden showed in these charts:

If the so-called “sequester” comes into force in March, which House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says it will, domestic spending will fall even more. “Instead of totaling 3.2 percent of GDP in 2017, nondefense discretionary spending would total less than 3 percent of GDP and would be on its way down to 2.6 percent by 2022. This is less than two-thirds of what was previously its lowest level,” Linden wrote.

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Huffington: Three Big Media Trends of 2013

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoThu 17 Jan 13 | 07:44 AM ET "Stress is one of the main reasons for why health care costs have been rising," said Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post founder, discussing how business are beginning to realize that stress reduction is actually a performance enhancement tool. Also, a look at how new technology is changing the face of media.

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Three Things The NRA Wants You To Believe About Biden’s Gun Safety Task Force That Aren’t True

On Thursday, the National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted the Obama administration for undermining Americans’ Second Amendment rights just moments after its representatives met with Vice President Joe Biden and the White House task force to reduce gun violence.

Two years ago, the NRA wouldn’t even meet with President Obama and the group’s CEO and executive vice president Wayne LaPierre warned that he would confiscate “our firearms” and undermine America’s greatness. In a statement following Thursday’s meeting, the group demonstrated that it’s still not interested in reducing gun crimes, offering three misleading claims about its intentions:

1. The NRA was “prepared to have a meaningful conversation.” The NRA claimed that it’s willing to consider “school safety, mental health issues, the marketing of violence to our kids and the collapse of federal prosecutions of violent criminals.” The glaring omission in that list is any action involves the sale of guns and ammunition. It’s the same tactic they tried in their widely-panned press conference where they went so far as to blame hurricanes, but not guns. The resistance to any gun violence prevention measures that involve actual firearms shows that the NRA really wasn’t interested in a “meaningful conversation” where all options were on the table.

2. The White House has “an agenda to attack the Second Amendment.” Despite LaPierre’s paranoid insistence that the White House was lulling gun owners into a false sense of security by not passing any gun laws during his first four years, the Obama administration actually expanded gun rights in its first four years by loosening restrictions for concealed carry on federal grounds. Both Biden and Obama have insisted that they have no intention of changing the right to bear arms — rather, they simply want to create restrictions that make it harder for murderers to acquire their weapon of choice.

3. The “Administration continues to insist on pushing failed solutions.” There’s really no proof that universal background checks, restrictions on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and expanded mental health services are “failed solutions.” In fact, evidence points to the opposite: Since the repeal of the assault weapons ban, mass shootings have drastically increased and studies show that the firepower of gunmen (how many rounds they shoot, and how quickly they shoot them) has jumped significantly.

Biden plans to deliver his suggestions for possible gun violence prevention laws to Obama on Tuesday. On Friday, he will meet with the entertainment and television industries. It’s likely that will be a more positive meeting, since representatives have signalled they will be more receptive to Biden’s case. In a statement, they wrote, “We welcome the opportunity to share that history and look forward to doing our part to seek meaningful solutions.” That’s despite that videogames and movies, unlike guns, can’t kill people.

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Three December Facts That Prove ‘Uncertainty’ Isn’t Plaguing The Economy

In recent months, as the United States approached the so-called “fiscal cliff,” lawmakers and business executives argued that the supposed uncertainty brought on by the cliff’s combined automatic spending cuts and tax increases was depressing America’s economic growth. It has made a convenient narrative for chief executives who want to cut government spending and corporate taxes and institute policies more favorable to their companies.

Even in the wake of the deal to avert the fiscal cliff, which adds certainty to tax rates if not to spending cuts, CEOs are making the same argument. There is only one problem: it doesn’t appear to be true. Three indicators from December — job growth, holiday sales, and housing — prove that the uncertainty argument doesn’t hold water:

JOBS REPORT: The economy added 155,000 jobs in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report released this morning. That was in line with projections and equal to the monthly average over the last year. Hourly earnings also rose, and the unemployment rate remained constant from November. In all, it offered no indication that the supposed uncertainty surrounding the end-of-year fiscal cliff drove down hiring over the month.

HOLIDAY SALES: Holiday sales over Thanksgiving weekend rose 13 percent in stores and online, not far from the 16 percent rise over the same weekend in 2011. And despite forecasts in mid-December that holiday sales were slumping, retailers reported a 4.5 percent jump that actually beat earlier projections. Auto manufacturers, meanwhile, had their strongest sales month since 2007.

HOUSING: Housing prices continued to rise in October (the latest data available) according to recent reports. The S&P/Case Shiller index showed that prices rose 0.7 percent, beating the 0.5 percent increase projected by economists. In the 20 cities the index follows, prices rose 4.3 percent from October 2011. The December jobs report also showed that 30,000 construction jobs were created last month, another indication that the housing market has rebounded. “The housing turnaround continues,” the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley tweeted. “It’s driving job growth now.”

Of course, “uncertainty” is really just the CEOs’ way of asking Congress for corporate tax cuts and massive spending cuts. But their preferred budget policies have done plenty to slow down the economy. The public sector shed another 13,000 jobs in December, and it has lost more than 600,000 jobs since the end of the recession. Nonpartisan agencies from the Congressional Budget Office to the International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, have warned Congress about the perils of further spending cuts.

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House prepares three 'milk cliff' bills

House leaders have prepared three bills to deal with the looming "milk cliff" for floor action this week.

The three bills are aimed at preventing a spike in dairy prices looming in the new year. 

Because Congress has failed to renew farm programs, an underlying 1949 law is slated to kick in. This would force the government to buy up American milk at inflated prices and the purchases are expected to possibly double the price of milk at the grocery store as supplies dwindle.

Late Saturday night, House Republicans posted the three bills on the House Rules Committee website, setting up possible Monday votes under layover procedures put in place in this Congress.

One bill would extend the expired 2008 farm bill, which expired Sept. 30, for one year. The second would provide for a farm-bill extension through January and a third would just extend dairy programs through January.

"Clearly, it is no longer possible to enact a five-year farm bill in this Congress.  Given this reality, the responsible thing to do – and the course of action I have long encouraged if a five-year bill was not possible – is to extend the 2008 legislation for one year. This provides certainty to our producers and critical disaster assistance to those affected by record drought conditions," said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) in a Sunday statement. 

"The legislation posted is the result of discussions with Ranking Member [Collin] Peterson [D-Minn.] and my colleagues in the Senate.  It is not perfect – no compromise ever is – but it is my sincere hope that it will pass the House and Senate and be signed by the President by January 1," he added.

The first bill abolishes existing dairy price supports in favor of a reformed system included in House and Senate draft farm bills that failed to pass both houses this year. The new dairy system is aimed at guaranteeing profit margins rather than supporting prices and is favored by milk producers who argue that the rising cost of inputs like feed makes the existing system too weak for dairy farmers.

The dairy changes may face significant opposition in the House. This summer Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), long a farm bill skeptic, described existing dairy programs as "Soviet-style." The changes may be key to getting House Agriculture Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and other rural Democrats to support a one-year extension, however. Peterson was instrumental in killing a one-year extension when House leaders tried to pass one in July.

Peterson instead favored a five-year bill that appears all-but-dead in this Congress. 

"These reforms are the primary reason that I am even willing to consider any extension." Peterson said Sunday, regarding the dairy program changes.

The Senate passed such a bill, as did the House Agriculture Committee, but the House never brought it to the floor. The House 2012 farm bill faced opposition from conservatives opposed to farm subsidies and liberals opposed to the $16 billion in cuts to food stamps contained in the House bill. 

On Friday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) revealed to reporters that she was bowing to reality and working on a 2008 farm bill extension instead of continuing to push for a five-year bill to be included in a "fiscal cliff" grand bargain.

Lucas and Stabenow had hoped that the $23 billion to $35 billion in deficit savings in their farm bills could have been used as part of a broad debt deal to avoid the $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts looming in January. It now appears that a mini-deal on the fiscal cliff focused only on turning off some of the tax increases will appear this week. 

“If a new farm bill is not passed in the next few days, Agriculture Committee leaders in both chambers and both parties have developed a responsible short-term farm bill extension that not only stops milk prices from spiking, but also prevents eventual damage to our entire agriculture economy. It is critical that we pass a five-year farm bill that gives farmers and ranchers the certainty they need to plan for the future. If a new farm bill doesn’t pass this Congress we’ll soon hold another mark-up and just keep working until one is enacted next year," Statebnow said in a statement Sunday.

Updated at 5:54 p.m.

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West Antarctica Warming Three Times Faster Than Global Average, Threatening To Destabilize This Unstable Ice Sheet

This is a repost of a National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) news release (plus links and excerpts from other recent studies at the end).

BOULDER—In a finding that raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise, a new study finds that the western part of the continent’s ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought.

Researchers have determined that the central region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is experiencing twice as much warming as previously thought. Their analysis focuses on the  temperature record from Byrd Station (indicated by a star), which provides the only long-term temperature observations in the region. Other permanent research stations with long-term temperature records (indicated by black circles) are scattered around the continent. On this map, the color intensity indicates the extent of warming around Antarctica. (Image by Julien Nicolas, courtesy of Ohio State University.) 

The temperature record from Byrd Station, a scientific outpost in the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), demonstrates a marked increase of 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 degrees Celsius) in average annual temperature since 1958. The rate of increase is three times faster than the average temperature rise around the globe for the same period.

The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience ["Central West Antarctica among most rapidly warming regions on Earth" (subs. req'd)]. It was conducted by scientists at Ohio State University (OSU), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding coming from the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor.

“Our results indicate that temperature increases during the past half century have been almost twice what we previously thought, placing West Antarctica among the fastest warming regions on Earth,” says NCAR scientist Andrew Monaghan, a co-author. “A growing body of research shows that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is changing at an alarming rate, with pressure coming from both a warming ocean and a warming atmosphere.”

This study reveals warming trends during the summer months of the Southern Hemisphere (December through February), notes co-author David Bromwich, professor of geography at Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

“Our record suggests that continued summer warming in West Antarctica could upset the surface mass balance of the ice sheet, so that the region could make an even bigger contribution to sea level rise than it already does,” Bromwich says.  “Even without generating significant mass loss directly, surface melting on the WAIS could contribute to sea level indirectly by weakening the West Antarctic ice shelves that restrain the region’s natural ice flow into the ocean.”

Researchers consider the WAIS especially sensitive to climate change because the base of the ice sheet rests below sea level, making it vulnerable to direct contact with warm ocean water. Its melting currently contributes 0.3 millimeters to sea level rise each year. This is second only to Greenland, whose contribution to sea level rise has been estimated as high as 0.7 mm per year.

Due to its location some 700 miles from the South Pole and near the center of the WAIS, conditions at Byrd Station are an important indicator of climate change throughout the region.

In the past, researchers haven’t been able to make much use of the Byrd Station measurements because of incomplete temperature observations. Since its establishment in 1957, the station has not been occupied continuously. A year-round automated station was installed in 1980, but it has experienced frequent power outages, especially during the long polar night when its solar panels can’t recharge.

The new study fills in the data gaps with a powerful computer model of the atmosphere and a numerical analysis method

In addition to offering a more complete picture of warming in West Antarctica, the new study shows for the first time that significant melt is occurring during summer.  Monaghan says the summertime warmth is particularly troubling because that is the season in which enhanced surface melting could most affect the WAIS and potentially weaken the ice shelves that buttress it.

“We’ve already seen enhanced surface melting contribute to the breakup of the Antarctic’s Larsen B Ice Shelf, where glaciers at the edge discharged massive sections of ice into the ocean that contributed to sea level rise,” he says. “The stakes would be much higher if a similar event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous WAIS glaciers.”

“West Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing regions on Earth, but it is also one of the least known,” says Bromwich. “Our study underscores the need for a reliable network of meteorological observations throughout West Antarctica, so that we can know what is happening—and why—with more certainty.”

– NCAR

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In new ad, Obama admits he didn’t get it done in three years

"If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition." - President Barack Obama, February 2, 2009:

Today President Obama’s reelection campaign launched a new ad campaign attempting to deal with Obama’s failed economic policies.

As the headline for an article by Yahoo News White House correspondent Olivier Knox, put it:

“New Obama ad strikes ‘don’t blame me’ tone on economy.”

The new ad plays right into the hands of the Republican National Committee’s effort to re-brand the 2008 Obama campaign “hope and change” theme with “hype and blame.” Worse, after attempting to avert blame by once again talking about the “inherited” recession, and another reminder about getting bin Laden, the ad ends with this admission:

“Instead of losing jobs, we’re creating them. Over 4.2 million so far. We’re not there yet. It’s still too hard for too many. But we’re coming back.”

This is a huge mistake for Obama. Having said that if he doesn’t have this “done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition,” admitting that after three years “we are not there yet,” is the same as admitting that he is going to be a one term president. Perhaps Obama was paying attention when Romney said, the presidential campaign is “still about the economy…and we’re not stupid.”

The new Obama ad is also notable for the fact that it fails to mention Obama’s signature still unpopular ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank financial reform, and $831 billion-dollar so-called stimulus package.

The new ad will air in the battleground states of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado. You can watch Obama’s “Go” ad here.

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