While Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama fight over who has the better health plan for the uninsured, they say little about a more immediate challenge that will confront the next administration: how to tame the soaring costs of Medicare and Medicaid.The programs, for older Americans and low-income people, cost $627 billion last year — 23 percent of all federal spending. With no change in existing law, the Congressional Budget Office says, that cost will double in 10 years and the programs will account for more than 30 percent of the budget.

Economists and health policy experts say the programs are unsustainable in their current form, because they are growing much faster than the economy or the revenues used to finance them. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is expected to run out of money in 11 years.

The News & Observer

23% of Federal spending.  Can you believe that?  We could eliminate these programs and cut Federal taxes by 1/4.  That would save me a few thousand well needed dollars a year and I don’t even get any benefit from either of these socialist handouts.

This is your Universal Health Care on a microeconomic scale and this is what the socialists want to do to our entire health care system.  How long will that take to reach the same unsustainable level, as is already happening in Europe?

My home district congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL), whose first campaign in 2000 was my introduction to the world of electoral politics, has become the first appropriator in the United States House of Representatives to swear off earmarks.

The Club for Growth has the full list of members of congress who support the moratorium on earmarks.

I also wrote this for International Political Economy, in response to another student’s post suggesting a litany of policies to make the market for oil “more fair.”‘

While I initially agreed with your post with regards to considering consumer interests more than demonizing oil companies, your post quickly turned down a road I don’t want to go down and some of your suggestions would actually turn out harming oil companies and consumers.

You are right that government price controls and special taxes would be a mistake because attempting to harm a company’s bottom line is only going to lead to the customer paying for it through a higher price.

While the U.S. does have huge oil reserves, it also has many sources of oil that environmental groups have pressured politicians in Washington to ignore. These include the portion of the Arctic Nation Wildlife Reserve that was set aside by Congress for oil exploration and would only have an ecological footprint the size of Dulles Airport! Also, the United States is not drilling offshore in many places (such as along Florida’s coast) that could also help increase oil supply while other countries have jumped at the opportunity to do the same thing not far from our shores (a Chinese company recently snagged some oil-rich waters, for example).

You are right that it is a problem of demand and not supply, but increasing supply to meet the increased demand could only help oil prices.

Your next argument, for Congress to rescind all existing tax breaks for the oil industry, would ironically enough also harm oil companies though you advocated a different approach in your first paragraph. Once again, attempting to hit the companies where it hurts (the wallet) will only be passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Then you go even further off the deep-end with increased government regulation of the industry with a call for a windfall profits tax. As much as people love to demonize the big bad oil companies for their “outrageous” profits, if you look at their profit margins they average about 8-10%, meaning for every dollar the company spends they get back 8-10 cents on that dollar. This is not an unreasonable profit margin and is lower than other industries; for example pharmaceutical companies have margins much higher, around 20%. And yet again, taxing “windfall” profits will only end up hurting the consumer in the end and will not serve to help the situation but to harm it.

The market for oil may not be fair with regards to the cartel of OPEC manipulating oil prices, but to suggest that we need more regulation on the domestic industry because it isn’t “free” or “fair” is counterproductive. Politicians would do well to decrease, rather than increase, government regulation of the industry so the market can be more free. A more free market benefits the consumer and allows for competition and innovative research.