AMERICA!!ARE YOU LISTENING?

Reported Thursday, February 28, 2008 on MSNBC NEWS TODAY

4:00 a.m.

A short segment on illegal immigration and what position the candidates take reported by David Gregory

John McCain - “HOW DO YOU DEPORT 20,000,000 ILLEGAL ALIENS?”

Hillary Clinton - “HOW DO YOU DEPORT 20,000,000 ILLEGAL

ALIENS?”

And these two want us to let them take over and run the most dysfunctional government in America’s history????????

Barack Obama - HIS COMMENTS ON DRIVERS LICENSES FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS…

“UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS DON’T COME HERE TO DRIVE”

Mr. Obama tell that to these families:

Dustin Inman - Georgia

Edward Landry - Tennessean returned from IRAQ, Nov. 2005

On a night in February 2006, he and his 15 year old daughter were hit by a drunken illegal alien and his daughter Brandi died from injuries

From TNRip - Tennesseans for Responsible Immigration Reform website comes the following list

Tennesseans Murdered by Illegal Aliens (Sadly, this is an incomplete list. We will be adding more news stories as we are able to track them down):

06/16/07 Police say TSU senior athlete killed by illegal alien driving drunk
06/22/07 Police say drunk illegal alien tried to leave scene of accident

03/06/07 Parents charged after infant’s autopsy shows many injuries

11/18/06 Coffee County toddler killed by drunk driving illegal alien

10/21/06 Driver in fatal wreck is an illegal immigrant

10/20/06 6 Car Wreck with 2 dead caused by drunk driving illegal alien in Nashville

09/14/06 Greenville woman killed by illegal alien who fled the scene of the 'accident'

09/05/06 Metro (Nashville) Cops Plan to begin checking IDs of jailed immigrants (finally)

City (Nashville) looks to deport criminal illegal aliens via program

08/28/06 Jackson teen killed by drunk driving illegal alien

08/30/06 Grand jury to hear Bellevue murder case
08/30/06 $40 Check one clue to murder
08/22/06 Grandmother murdered in Bellevue

08/21/06 Illegals Murder Illegal in Polk County, Tennessee

08/07/06 Grandmother killed in Chattanooga by unlicensed, un-insured Illegal Aliens who fled the scene

08/02/06 Mandolin maker murdered by drunk driving illegal alien
FOLLOW UP:
07/20/07 Killer of mandolin maker had been deported 14 times

06/08/06 Mt. Juliet couple murdered by drunk driving illegal alien (read more here)
FOLLOW UP:
04/09/07 Illegal immigrant to plead guilty in fatal DUI case

05/13/06 Mother & daughter in Nashville brutally stabbed by an illegal alien

10/07/05 Would-be terrorist arrested in Nashville (thankfully, no one was killed)

04/10/05 Man slain by illegal alien living in closet

01/07/04 Pregnant woman murdered by illegal aliens

ARE YOU CONVINCED MR. OBAMA?

What Obama and Clinton don't tell you about health care, the economy, illegal immigration

« HEALTH SPENDING: The Problem Is Government, Not The MarketThe Boomers Are Coming, But Don’t Panic Yet »

Blog Home
HEALTH SPENDING: A Growing Economic Crisis

——————————————————————————–
February 26th, 2008

by Jim Cooper Jim Cooper
View Author Bio

Editor’s Note: The following post by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) comments on the projections of national health spending from 2007 through 2017, published today by Sean Keehan and his colleagues in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary as a Health Affairs Web Exclusive.

Although there’s a lot of explosive material in the latest National Health Expenditures forecast, policymakers will probably continue to ignore the dangers it presents. The few lawmakers who worry about health spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) will see little new: as expected, the health sector will grow to nearly 20 percent of the economy over the next ten years. Of course, most lawmakers will never see the article in Health Affairs or understand the threats it contains.

Continuation of current trends in health spending is shaking the U.S. to its fiscal foundations by damaging federal credit. Annual growth rates in health spending of 6.7 percent — 1.9 percentage points higher than the rest of the economy — are almost universally agreed to be “unsustainable.”

When you dig into the numbers, it becomes harder to justify that one sector of our economy, health care, gets to absorb so much more of our resources than any other sector, while not doing more to improve our health. Although the projected 1.9 percentage point increment is smaller than the annual 2.5 percentage points that the health sector took for most of the last several decades, it will still crowd out many vital nonhealth care needs. This extra slice for health care is not a legislated entitlement but, in a sense, is the greatest “entitlement” problem we face: how to wean the bloated health sector from decades of juicy subsidies.

Virtually every policy expert will tell you that our health care spending is our biggest budget problem, yet Washington continues to be strangely silent and passive in its budgets. No major presidential candidate mentions the pending catastrophe for fear of depressing the electorate. Of course, it’s always easier to say that you will think about tough subjects after the next election. And besides, our entitlements have been unsustainable for so long, perhaps they can hold on a little bit longer.

The private sector is making these federal budget problems harder to ignore. Both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s are projecting that the U.S. Treasury bond could lose its AAA rating within the next five to ten years as a result of financing problems with Medicare and Medicaid. Such a downgrade could make today’s subprime problems look trivial because the T-bond is, as Moody’s says, “the anchor to the world’s financial system.” And losing the AAA rating is just the beginning of trouble unless underlying trends are altered. S&P projects that by 2015 the U.S. could have the same credit rating as Estonia, by 2020 a Mexican credit rating, and, by 2025 junk-bond status.

To an economist, higher levels of taxation may always be assumed in order to fund growing benefits. But in Congress, taxes may not be so flexible upward. After dipping sharply during the initial years of the Bush administration, federal revenues are now back above 18.4 percent of GDP, the bipartisan, 50-year average for U.S. taxation. To permanently raise taxes above these levels risks grave damage to the political party that advocates the change, unless perhaps the public feels that they are getting their money’s worth. This is very difficult to achieve when the favorite political maxim is, “What have you done for me lately?” Economists may not feel it, but the tradition of American exceptionalism extends to our lower relative levels of taxation. I doubt that most of my colleagues will vote for European levels of taxation, even for a promise of European-style benefits.

While these projections take us into the future, problems that we are facing are in fact just around the corner. Already cracks can be seen that stretch underneath the most important and most popular federal programs in America: Medicare and Social Security. As the Health Affairs article notes, without congressional intervention, official U.S. policy will be to cut physician Medicare reimbursement by 25 percent over the next ten years. This is news to most physicians who call on my office, none of whom has been briefed by their medical society about the implications of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. The annual Band-Aids that Congress has been applying only worsen the long-term problem, which the Treasury has estimated to be $5 trillion in size.

I am glad that Health Affairs is continuing its tradition of alerting its readers to the important health care issues of the day. These issues are so large that they cloud the future of the nation.