Some Clear Thinking on the American Hostage Crisis

The US hostage crisis—also known as the government shutdown—has been going on for a month now.

I’m all for limited government, but this shutdown feels incredibly vindictive, petty, and wildly unprofessional. When politicians can’t manage to compromise on something as basic as keeping the government open, it’s just a really bad look.

Plus, the shutdown continues to erode the waning confidence that foreigners have in the US government.

This is important because foreign governments and central banks own $10 trillion of US government bonds and agency securities. The Treasury Department depends heavily on foreign lenders to finance the government deficits, which now run around $2 trillion annually.

As you’re probably aware, the House passed what’s known as a “clean continuing resolution” to keep the government funded at a basic level while further negotiations take place.

It contains no conservative priorities or crazy pet projects—just a basic 20-page funding bill, as opposed to the thousands of pages they usually contain.

The Senate has attempted at least 13 times to approve the continuing resolution and send it to the President for signature. They’ve only been able to garner around 52-54 votes—which, for most things in the Senate, is not enough for a bill to pass.

This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Current Senate rules require at least 60 votes require just to end debate and bring most legislation to a final vote. Short of 60 votes, any senator can filibuster the motion—i.e., talk endlessly and run out the clock until the motion fails.

Bizarrely, almost all senators favor keeping this rule even though there’s nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster—or in any foundational document of the United States.

In fact, the Federalist Papers argue explicitly against allowing a tyranny of the minority to hijack control of Congress or the Senate. And that’s exactly what the filibuster does. It allows the minority party to drive the agenda and dictate terms.

Last I checked, that’s not what a democratic system is supposed to be about.

The Senate does have the ability to get rid of the filibuster. But they refuse to do so out of concern that it would be used against them when they are out of the majority.

I find this an absurd argument. Anyone who thinks the Left—given how vicious they’ve been over the past several years—won’t undo it themselves when they are in power is just being naive.

All that said, the reason we’re being told the government is shut down is over these Obamacare tax credits and subsidies.

This, too, is a farce. Even if it were true, it lays bare how Obamacare—aka the Affordable Care Act—has been a complete failure.

It’s literally called the Affordable Care Act, and yet healthcare and the insurance plans themselves are so unaffordable that they require tax credits and subsidies just to make them financially palatable to consumers.

Since its inception, a household health insurance plan for a family of four has nearly doubled, with total costs now around $35,000 per year.

And as the “open enrollment” period begins, the health research nonprofit KFF has found that the average cost of a plan will be up an additional 26% next year.

It will be up 114% if Congress doesn’t extend the “enhanced tax credits” to make the Affordable Care Act less un-affordable.

Premiums have skyrocketed, deductibles have skyrocketed, and quality, in many ways, has gone down.

To add insult to injury, the number one reason Obama even went on this crusade 15 years ago was that too many Americans were without health insurance.

That was the main metric by which the program was meant to be judged.

No one ever asked why so many Americans were without insurance—or why care was so expensive to begin with as to require insurance.

The focus was simply on one very narrow metric: the number of uninsured Americans.

That’s what they tried to solve, even though it was the wrong problem.

They should have tried instead to figure out all the things the government was doing wrong that drove healthcare costs so high in the first place.

Nevertheless, they focused on the wrong problem—and while on the surface it looks successful, dig a little deeper and you realize they didn’t even solve that.

Officially, the number of uninsured Americans dropped from 45.2 million in 2013 to 26.4 million in 2022.

But the number of Americans on Medicaid ballooned from 51.5 million in 2010, to around 77.7 million today (after peaking around 96 million).

In other words, ALL the uninsured— PLUS around 6 million others— went on Medicaid.

Medicaid is a government welfare program for people who can’t afford healthcare and health insurance!

If you are being intellectually honest, you need to include people on Medicaid in the “uninsured” category when measuring success by that metric.

So in effect, the Affordable Care Act not only made care less affordable, but it also increased the number of uninsured.

Which means the entire premise of this government shutdown is based on a blatant and abject failure.

Source

Simon Black is an international investor, entrepreneur and permanent traveler. His daily letter is both educational and entertaining, and we suggest that those who want unbiased, actionable information about global opportunities sign up for Sovereign Man’s free, actionable newsletter at http://www.SovereignMan.com.

From Simon Black of SovereignMan.com

Source: https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/some-clear-thinking-on-the-american-hostage-crisis-153830/