The Completely Predictable Rise in Sexual Assaults in the Military

There have always been a lot of questions about the role of women in the military, and how close to the front lines they should be. One of the issues was the increased risk of sexual assault. A typical liberal response went as follows:

Then there’s the potential for sexual assault, humiliation and torture. Right, because 1) male captives are immune to such threats, and 2) women don’t already face the threat of sexual assault from their fellow soldiers?

So it’s no surprise that reality is once again smacking the libs across their collective faces:

The problem of sexual assault in the military leapt to the forefront in Washington on Tuesday as the Pentagon released a survey estimating that 26,000 people in the armed forces were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010, and an angry President Obama and Congress demanded action.

This is typical of the liberal mindset: enact a policy while ignoring fundamental issues, then demand more policy to correct those issues when they inevitably arise.

And act self-righteous when you do it.

It’s Hard to Find Good Help These Days

My Dad, who spent 4 years as Launch Control Officer at Minot AFB and 3 years as a Squadron Commander at Grand Forks AFB, must be frowning from Heaven right now:

The Air Force stripped an unprecedented 17 officers of their authority to control — and, if necessary, launch — nuclear missiles after a string of unpublicized failings, including a remarkably dim review of their unit’s launch skills. The group’s deputy commander said it is suffering “rot” within its ranks.
…
The tip-off to trouble was a March inspection of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., which earned the equivalent of a “D” grade when tested on its mastery of Minuteman III missile launch operations. In other areas, the officers tested much better, but the group’s overall fitness was deemed so tenuous that senior officers at Minot decided, after probing further, that an immediate crackdown was called for.

I don’t know why these gentlemen were so bad at their jobs, but they’re certainly an embarrassment to the generations of officers before them who were committed to doing their jobs correctly and keeping their country safe.

It’s a War on Married Couples, Not Married Women

I normally like articles from The Weekly Standard, but this one from Ashley E. McGuire was a stinker: The War on (Married) Women. The article concerns the “unfair” tax burden on married women.

Why is it unfair?

Well, because the married tax brackets average the incomes, so that the lead earner pays fewer taxes than they would have as a single person, and the second earner pays more. Apparently this arrangement means that the second earner is being ripped off somehow, despite the fact that the second earner enjoys the benefit of the first earner’s higher salary and lower taxes thereupon.

There is, of course, a very real marriage tax penalty, and it is in dire need of tax reform. But that doesn’t seem to be what she’s describing.

Then she rails on about the costs of nannies and self-employment taxes. Welcome to real life, Ms. McGuire – those real problems, which affect both people in a marriage, have been around ever since women started entering the workforce in significant numbers.

The bottom line is that a marriage is a partnership, with the couple sharing income and expenses. Any unfairness here is not directed toward women specifically, but to the partnership. Trying to turn the need for tax reform into a women’s issue is insulting to that partnership, and will lead to the wrong sort of remedies.

Consumer Savings from Obamacare are Tiny, Fleeting, and Likely to Kill Off Individual Insurance Policies

The LA Times lauds the wondrous consumer benefits of Obamacare:

‘Obamacare’ saves consumers nearly $1.5 billion

Health insurance companies passed $1.5 billion in savings mandated by ‘Obamacare’ on to consumers in 2011, a new analysis shows.
…
The study by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund also suggests that the Affordable Care Act forced insurers to become more efficient by limiting their administrative expenses, a key goal of the 2010 law.
…
The rules “appear to be producing important consumer benefits,” concluded the report’s authors

But not so fast. First of all, you’re talking about $1.5 billion in savings as compared to the $235 billion spent on insurance premiums last year. That’s a savings of 0.6%. So if your employer spent $1000/month on your health insurance last year, you’d have saved $6/month.

Second, those miniscule savings have already been swallowed up since. The article eventually gets around to noting that:

The average cost of an employer-provided family health plan jumped 4% to $15,745 between 2011 and 2012

So as a means of reducing the rate of premium inflation, Obamacare has already been a bust. Further, if you go to the actual report, you find that the area where the greatest savings were realized was individual policies, and that the individual insurance policy industry as a whole took a real beating in 2011. That led the authors of the study to provide this caveat:

On the other hand, further pressure on premium rates might cause some insurers to leave certain market segments, if they cannot maintain adequate profits.

So is Obamacare all that? Not hardly.

A Couple of Photos I Ran Across

Actually I think this one’s a photoshop: the Poseidon Undersea Resorts in Fiji (only $30K/couple for a 1 week stay):

Dubai:

New NHS Strategy: Tell Patients to Suck it Up

As I’ve said many times before, the UK is a pretty reliable canary for the US’s coal mine. They’re the go-to testing ground for our policy, and in this case they’re doing a yeoman’s work in proving just how bad things are getting for the largest and oldest single-payer healthcare system in the world:

The NHS can’t go on like this. Patients today – baby boomers, especially – bother the doctor with minor complaints when their grandparents would have grinned and borne it, and have unrealistic expectations of what the health service can provide. The system is at breaking point. The solution? We are going to have to start paying for some medical services at the point of delivery.

Those “unrealistic expectations” aren’t unrealistic in our country. We have been getting better and better treatment for more and more ailments, and nobody has ever asked us to “grin and bear” any complaint, no matter how minor.

At least so far.

Obamafail: Manufacture Much?

(cross-posted at Innocent Bystanders)

Upon accepting his nomination at the DNC convention last month, the President presented quite a list of specific accomplishments he wanted to achieve. I talked about one a couple of days ago; his promise to double exports by the end of 2014. Not gonna happen, not that he has much to do with it anyhow.

Today I’d like to address a second Obambition: adding 1 million manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016. The President is fond of claiming that he’s created 500,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2010. For example, here’s the chart that Obama for America had in the brochure they sent me yesterday:

You can see that while his claim is strictly true, his clever policy going forward is to simply extend the line from the existing data to 2016. He’s assuming that the rebound rate of job recovery will continue well into what should be a normal growth phase (that doesn’t normally happen).

But there are two additional problems with this chart. The first is that the data they use is slightly (and conveniently) outdated. Here’s the latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

You see that leveling off that started last March? Yeah, for the last 7 months manufacturing jobs have been flatlining. Since the geniuses at Obama for America stopped using data in April and projected thereafter, they haven’t noticed that in the last 6 months we’ve gained 0 manufacturing jobs. Yeah, zero.

So I took the liberty of updating their chart (without the artsy wiggles in the predicted part):

The second problem lies in their cherrypicking of the time period. The job gains they show above look impressive because they’re starting from the lowest point in the data. So let’s look at the big picture for a moment:

Now you can see that Obama’s claim that he’ll get manufacturing jobs up to 13 million by the end his second term means that they still won’t have recovered to where they were at the beginning of the recession. Yes, folks, President Obama is telling us that it will take a total of 8 years to get manufacturing jobs back to Nov 2008 – the month he was originally elected.

Remember – this is his bold new plan to resurrect manufacturing. He proudly trumpeted this completely underwhelming goal to the nation, and it’s a basic part of his platform. And of course, even with its inadequacy, he’s already failing to meet it.

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The manufacturing job sector’s recovery has been pathetic. It has taken us 4 years to recapture 14% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost. President Obama is promising us that it’ll take another 4 years to recapture the next 28%.

And after 8 years of Obamanomics, even if it’s completely successful, we still won’t be halfway to full recovery.