Dangling the Stick in Front of the Donkey and Beating Him with the Carrot

Gov. Bob McDonnell has resisted expanding Medicaid in Virginia, despite decisions by GOP governors in six states, including, most recently, Michigan and Ohio, to expand their programs. However, The Virginia Senate has cleared the way for the state to expand its Medic­aid program to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Virginians, but the House of Delegates stands firmly in the path.  On a voice vote, the Sen­ate approved a budget amendment that would al­low Virginia to expand Medicaid on Jan. 1 if the state is able to make signif­icant reforms in how it delivers and pays for health care under the pro­gram.

Virginians should oppose any legislation that will expand Medicaid coverage in the Commonwealth and support the Federal government’s expansion of medical healthcare exchanges.  Proponent’s arguments are the moral equivalent of “dangling a stick in front of a donkey, and beating him with a carrot” in order to encourage him to move.

The carrot is the federal government’s promise to provide $23B over nine years to expand Medicaid in Virginia.  The stick is Virginia must opt into the federal health care exchanges.  According to the Richmond Times Dispatch (http://bit.ly/XsLGLR), opting in will ostensibly expand Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of people, while providing politicians with a politically expedient path to balance the budget by “saving” $51 million next year and $114 million the following year.

Unfortunately, the facts are these.  The United States government borrows forty-six cents on every dollar it spends: it is broke.   There is no guarantee that $23B will be there over nine years.  Second, as humanitarian as expanding the program seems, it only provides access to health care: it does not create one new doctor.  Neither benefit will be realized, and the citizens of the Commonwealth will be left with hundreds of thousands of more dependent people, relying on a broken health care system, and no way to pay for it.

It's time to take our medicine and deal with these issues on a state level and not a federal level.

Exactly what problem are we trying to solve, Mr. President?

“Mr. Obama is likely to signal he wants to move beyond proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules on emissions from new power plants and tackle existing coal-fired plants, people familiar with the administration's plans said. 

The EPA has prepared rules for existing plants to minimize pollution from particulate matter, mercury and other toxins. But this would be the first time the agency regulates existing plants to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases scientists believe contribute to global warming.” - WSJ

So what problem are we trying to solve, Mr. President?  Is it to protect and defend the earth from man or is it simply the next step in your administration’s managed decline of America?  It cannot be the first, because engineering science does not support your prospective actions. So it must be the second.

The Engineering Science Says

Man-made carbon is not the driver of global warming (climate change).   The sun is.  

In the book Unstoppable Global Warming, by Dr. Fred Singer, the history of climate science is presented.  In it, Dr. Singer chronicles the discovery of a 1500 year warming-cooling cycle (plus or minus 500 years) for at least a million years.  Discovered by Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland, their analysis of oxygen isotopes in the ice cores extracted from Greenland was first published in 1984.  In 1996, they and Clyde Lorius were awarded the Tyler Prize (the “environmental Nobel") for their work.  They found a clear cycle occurring about every 2,550 years, which was later clarified to be 1,500 years.  The global heating and cooling cycle was correlated to other physical evidence: (a) ice cores in the Antartic’s Vostok Glacier, (b) advance and retreats of glaciers in the Arctic, Europe Asia, North America, Latin America, New Zealand, and the Antartic, (c) seabed sediment cores in the North Atlantic, Sargasso Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Arabian Sea; (d) cave stalagmites from Ireland, Germany, South Africa, New Zealand; (e) fossilized pollen; (f) tree rings, et cetera.  Statistical correlation of the warming-cooling cycle data to atmospheric CO2 content shows that CO2 rise follows a warming trend. In other words, the earth contains large amounts of CO2 in solution, much like carbonation in a soda can which is driven out of solution when a chilled can of soda can is opened and left on the counter.  Similarly, as the earth heats, CO2 is driven out of solution. Man’s contribution to these huge cyclical changes is minimal (it is estimated that man-made carbon represents 0.16% of all carbon). Last, these cycles have been occurring for a million years … long before coal fired generation.  So if man-made CO2 is the source of all our ills, what caused that?

The Political Science Says

If the engineering science suggests that man-made generation of carbon gases is an immaterial contribution to global warming and climate change, what does the political science say?

To misquote Al Gore, the “convenient truth” is that the public’s irrational fear over climate change gives our progressive government a reason to regulate energy production, the life blood of a free, productive people.  But why regulate it?  If it is not because of the engineering science, it is because of the political science.

Progressive ideology demands control.  Control requires large government.  Large government requires a lot of money and a dependent population.   Where do you get a lot of money?  You borrow it and secure the loan against assets: the country’s oil, gas, and uranium natural resources.  So you tell the American people the earth has a temperature. To secure the assets, you set aside “open space” to mitigate the nasty carbon based technologies. You shut down productive sources of energy for non- productive sources of energy. You acquire large expanses of natural resources by transferring private property rights through regulation and conservation easements and converting large expanses of wilderness to protected habitats. You do all this while telling the people that this property taking is necessary to mitigate the effect of phantom man-made climate change.  You continue to promise the American people things they cannot afford until the system can no longer support itself.

You see, this is not about climate change.  This is about whether we will remain a free and independent people or a dependent, socialist state.