June 14, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement urging Senate Republicans to block John Bryson from being confirmed as the next Secretary of Commerce:

“While the Obama Administration says it wants to create jobs, the American people can no longer listen to what Obama says; they must look at what he is doing. John Bryson is a radical environmentalist who has explicitly advocated for policies that will have the effect of destroying jobs in the nation’s energy sector and raising energy prices for American families, including supporting the 2009 proposal to legislatively cap carbon emissions.

“Bryson also co-founded the radical Natural Resources Defense Council and even helped spearhead the United Nations climate change movement. If Bryson has his way, the U.S. will be restricted from producing energy domestically, and that will cost the economy even more jobs at a time when unemployment is already unacceptably high.

“Senate Republicans should do all in their power to block Bryson for Commerce Secretary, including placing legislative holds on his nomination and forcing a cloture vote. There is no place in the Commerce Department for an appointee who is explicitly against traditional sources of energy that are essential to a healthy American economy.”

Attachments:

“Obama’s Commerce Department—‘Spreading The Wealth Around’ Globally,” by ALG Chairman Howard Rich, June 6, 2011 athttp://netrightdaily.com/2011/06/obama%E2%80%99s-commerce-department%E2%80%94%E2%80%98spreading-the-wealth-around%E2%80%99-globally/

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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June 8, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement blasting the Obama Administration for offering that the U.S. would contribute to another bailout to debt-plagued Greece said to total €80 to €100 billion:

“Leaving the absurdity aside of the world’s largest debtor, the U.S., pledging financial assistance to troubled sovereigns like Greece, it is no less outrageous. The real reason for the U.S. intervention may be that American financial institutions like AIG may have sold credit-default swaps to some European institutions that bought Greek debt as insurance against default. If Greece defaults, then the swaps would pay out, and that would put companies like AIG and whoever else sold swaps on Greek debt in hot water.

“Moreover, German and French banks own about €15.5 billion and €10.28 billion of Greece’s €340 billion debt, meaning a default would hit them particularly hard, too. The European Central Bank too is on the hook directly for €45 billion in Greek debt, not to mention tens of billions of Greek debt it accepted as collateral when making loans. Of course these banks want another bailout. They cannot afford to take losses of that magnitude.

“Really, this is less about bailing out Greece than it is about bailing out international banks that have bet extremely poorly on sovereign debt in Greece and elsewhere. It must be made perfectly clear that American taxpayers ought not to be on the hook for the mistakes of European bankers and profligate spenders in Greece. Bailing out Europe is a crime against American taxpayers that will not soon be forgiven.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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June 6, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement in support of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to reform Medicare:

“The House Republican plan to phase out the current Medicare program, whereby those 55 years and older would stay in the current system, but those younger would be given more options to buy insurance policies across state lines will extend the solvency of the program. If nothing is done, the Trustees are reporting that the Medicare trust fund will be exhausted in 2024. At that point, benefits will automatically be cut 10 percent, increasing to 25 percent reductions by 2045, say the Trustees. So, it’s certainly better than the alternative.

“The reality will probably be much worse than that, since those projections are based on the premise of a robust economic recovery that still has not happened. Every year the economy continues to flounder, and revenues fail to recover to the Treasury, the life of Medicare is lessened. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan deserves credit for putting a proposal on the table that seeks to foster the program’s long-term solvency before it is too late and we simply run out of money to pay for it.

“It is irresponsible to demagogue potential solutions to the Medicare insolvency crisis when all of the alternatives discussed lead invariably to its insolvency. The House Republican budget, if it is to be criticized, can be said to not do enough to restore order to the nation’s fiscal house. But its proposals on Medicare are a good enough starting point. The alternative of doing nothing and kicking the can is no longer an option.

“The Obama Administration claimed that it ‘saved’ Medicare when it adopted ObamaCare. But as the Trustees report notes, the program is still on an unsustainable trajectory. Moreover, all ObamaCare does is take $57 billion a year in Medicare revenues and use it to expand government-run health care to more than 30 million non-seniors. In other words, all it did was to exacerbate the situation by attempting to provide similar services to millions of more people.

“The only alternative on the table at the moment besides doing nothing that Democrats appear interested in is raising taxes to pay for a program that even then will still not be sustained. That’s not a good investment in the future when reforms can be made today that will make tax increases unnecessary. Moreover, raising taxes into the teeth of this current recession will harm growth, destroy jobs, and worsen the nation’s fiscal picture by slowing the date of recovery.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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June 3, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson released the following statement on the unemployment situation in our nation:

“There should not be any remaining doubters that Obama’s big government spending and the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies are two of the most disastrous economic policies in American history.

“Almost 14 million people who want a job can’t find one, as the number of unemployed jumped by 167,000 people in the past month. Almost 20 percent of the workforce is either unemployed or working part time when they want a full-time job. Obama’s economic plan has been tried and has failed the American people and now we have to return to fiscal sanity in order to get our economy moving.

“The only people who don’t understand that we can’t continue digging to get out of the debt hole that is killing our country’s future are the President and Capitol Hill Democrats, who continue to cling to the very fiscal policies that have buried our nation in debt and are threatening to consign a generation of Americans to second-class status in the world.

“I hope that the good that comes out of the pain of millions of unemployed is that our nation’s elected leaders finally come to the realization that significant cuts must be made in our federal budget, job-destroying regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) must be reigned in, and our highest in the world corporate tax must be lowered immediately to put America back to work.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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June 2, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government today warned that a new regulation being issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would dictate how Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) use their profits.

ALG President Bill Wilson said the regulators “want the right to tell a private medical provider what they can and cannot do with their own money.”

“If this doesn’t show the authoritarian, socialist inclinations of the Obama Administration and its health care takeover law, nothing will,” he declared.

“CMS is shooting itself in the foot here. It is trying to get doctors to switch from a [fee-for-services] FFS system, where the providers choose how their fees are spent, to the Shared Savings Program, where a portion of that money has to be spent according to ideals set out by government bureaucrats,” ALG’s John Vinci wrote on ObamacareWatcher.org.

“Most people, given the choice, would choose not to have restraints on how they spend their money,” Vinci explained.

The proposed regulation on the Medicare Shared Savings Program for ACOs would regulate the distributions from shared savings by requiring the ACO to determine ahead of time how the funds will be used. “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seems disappointed that it can’t control how the distributions from shared savings will be used,” Vinci wrote.

Vinci said the regulation went beyond even the intent of the law: “The purpose of the Shared Savings Program was not to direct health providers on how to spend their earnings, but to correct CMS’s distorted Medicare fee-for-services (FFS) system.”

He explained, “What makes the FFS’s financial incentives improper is not that doctors can spend the fees they earn on anything they choose. FFS creates improper financial incentives because it encourages inefficiency.”

An earlier attempt to implement ACOs from 2005 through 2010 resulted in failure of 60 percent of institutions involved in the experiment to even qualify for the shared savings, according to the Washington Post, raising questions about whether ACOs can even control the costs of Medicare as ObamaCare proponents promised.

As noted by the story, “recent studies have shown, when a medical group becomes an ACO, the financial investments it must make in record-keeping and other changes have been higher than the government has predicted, causing it to lose money for at least the first few years.”

According to the regulation, start-up costs for new ACOs would be $1.8 million in the first year, but according to the American Hospital Association, that is wildly off. The real costs, says AHA, will be anywhere from $11.6 million to $26.1 million for the first year — per ACO.

ALG President Bill Wilson said the regulation must not be implemented, “Instead of incentivizing providers to provide additional services to obtain additional fees under the FFS system, now CMS’ brilliant plan is to provide bonuses when less services are provided. That’s rationing, a scheme provided for under ObamaCare, and underscores why the entire legislation must be eliminated.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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June 1, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement of support of House Republicans after they emerged from their meeting at the White House on increasing the $14.294 trillion national debt ceiling:

“Barack Obama asked for a so-called ‘clean’ vote on a $2.4 trillion increase in the national debt, and he got it. It was overwhelmingly defeated 318 to 97. Now, the serious discussion must begin on how to cut trillions of dollars out the budget as House Speaker John Boehner has promised in exchange for any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit. House Republicans are to be applauded for standing up to Obama, following through on their commitment to the American people, and now they must hold firm.

“The Obama Administration will likely hold out until the eleventh hour in this high stakes game of chicken on the debt ceiling. The nation cannot afford for House Republicans to flinch. Increasing the debt ceiling without trillions of cuts would make it clear that Washington does not take the sovereign debt crisis here seriously, and does not care if it endangers the future prosperity of our children and grandchildren. Now is the time to rein in the explosion of borrowing and spending in Washington, before the $14.3 trillion debt gets so large that it cannot be refinanced, let alone repaid.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 31, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement on the 4.2 percent decline in home values in the first quarter as measured by the S&P/Case Shiller home price index:

“We are now officially in a double dip in housing. The Obama Administration promised that if trillions of dollars in fiscal and monetary ‘stimulus’ were injected into the economy, that it would turn the housing market around. Yet, despite the tremendous run up in government debt and money printing to prop up the economy, home values are now at their lowest point in this recession — lower than even April 2009.

“That means 3.3 million people who used the $22 billion homebuyer’s tax credit, which temporarily juiced the market, are now likely already in negative equity on their new homes. What sort of ‘recovery’ is this? It’s a failure. We should have just let prices hit the bottom in the first place. Instead of bailing out banks, it would have been better to let investors that bet poorly on housing to fail. If government had just gotten out of the way, we would already be in recovery.

Obama has prolonged the recession he swore to pull us out of, wasting over $2 trillion on a lie. Obama has been given everything he wanted — everything he said would turn the economy around. The ‘stimulus’ has failed. Now is the time for a new direction for America, and that will only come with new leadership on the economy, before we go bankrupt trying to ‘stimulate’ it.”
Attachments:

S&P/Case-Shiller housing price index chart shows double-dip, May 31st, 2011 at http://www.getliberty.org/content_images/Case-Shiller5-31-11.PNG.

“Double Dip in House Threatens Obama Recovery,” by ALG Senior Editor Robert Romano, May10th, 2011 athttp://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?display=3317.

“Double-Dip in Housing, Rising Inflation, and Soaring Debt Disprove ‘Stimulus,’ Threaten Ship of State,” by ALG Senior Editor Robert Romano, April 27th, 2011 at http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?display=3281.

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 27th, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President (ALG) Bill Wilson today issued the following statement urging the Maine legislature to adopt a measure that would give public sector employees the option of whether or not to join a union:

“All employees, whether public or private, ought to have a choice if they wish to join a union. The Maine legislature is simply taking the same step that New Hampshire has in considering passing right-to-work legislation for public sector workers, to bring an end to the dominance that the unions have wielded in making the cost of government unsustainable at a state level.

“This is about fairness to workers, and their freedom to choose, but it is also about reining in the spiraling costs of public sector pension and health care benefits. The Maine legislature is taking the responsible step to help bring its fiscal house into order.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 26, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued a statement urging House Speaker John Boehner to use his Article I, Section 5 powers to keep Congress in session to block recess appointments by Barack Obama:

“Barack Obama has demonstrated with the recess appointments of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board and Donald Berwick to the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is willing to do whatever it takes to get his most radical nominees into the bureaucracy, even when they fail at Senate confirmation.

“There can be no more radical recess appointments allowed. Becker is committed to compulsory unionism, and now is proving that in his actions to block Boeing from setting up shop in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. And Berwick is dedicated to a government-run health care system that rations limited care in place of a private system that innovates and creates new cures and new medicines that everyone depends on.

“Senate Republicans are now urging House Speaker John Boehner to use his constitutional authority to keep Congress in session to prevent any more radical recess appointments from being made. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the same trick in 2007 and 2008 to keep the Senate in session, effectively blocking Bush Administration recess appointments. Now it is time for Republicans to return the favor.

“The last thing the American people want are extremists like Goodwin Liu, who is dedicated to reading welfare ‘rights’ into the Constitution, put on the federal bench via recess appointment. If recess appointments are the only way Obama can get these radicals appointed, then it is up to Speaker Boehner not to allow Congress to go into recess.”

Attachments:

“Republican Senators call on GOP House to block Obama recess appointments,” By Philip Klein, The Washington Examiner, May 25, 2011 at http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/05/republican-senators-call-gop-house-block-obama-recess-appointment#ixzz1NP5NkMat

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 25, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued a statement praising House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Chairman Rep. Phil Roe for holding a hearing on the NLRB’s attempt to block Boeing from opening a new plant in South Carolina on May 26:

“Representative Phil Roe deserves the thanks of the people of South Carolina, and all Americans who oppose a federal agency from trying to tell a company which state it must do business in. The House Subcommittee on Labor hearing will bring the NLRB’s overreach against Boeing under much-needed scrutiny, and ascertain why the NLRB is favoring closed shop union states like Washington over right-to-work states like South Carolina. The NLRB is willing to kill new jobs unless they are union jobs. This out-of-control rogue agency needs to be brought to heel.”

Attachments:

“NLRB to Boeing: Shut up!” By ALG President Bill Wilson, The Daily Caller, May 13, 2011 at http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/13/nlrb-to-boeing-shut-up/

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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