LAR: Has New Hampshire launched Ron Paul as the leading 'Anti-Romney' GOP candidate? Inbox x
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Has New Hampshire launched Ron Paul as the leading 'Anti-Romney' GOP candidate? Second place Granite State finisher may have the most likely path to mount any type of serious challenge to Romney over the long term.
Video: Does The New Hampshire Primary Count More Than South Carolina? It would appear South Carolina counts more than New Hampshire. Just check out the bottom line. There is a long line of Presidents who had good luck in the Palmetto State.
Cost of Obamacare Regulations Underestimated by Billions of Dollars Mercatus study: the cost of implementing regulations may be billions of dollars more than the Obama Administration is willing to admit.
Hatch report reveals massive public pension underfunding As stunning as the overall public pension shortfall is the fact that a key member of the U.S. Senate cannot definitively report on exactly how much debt is owed because there is little transparency for public employee pension plans. Has New Hampshire launched Ron Paul as the leading 'Anti-Romney' GOP candidate?
As attention turns away from New Hampshire to South Carolina, Ron Paul is on the move.
Not Rick Santorum. Nor Jon Huntsman. But it is now Paul who stands in the best position to become the only candidate that can challenge Mitt Romney. Paul consistently has had support in the double digits in each state that the GOP nomination contests have been held.
The results from New Hampshire show Ron Paul broke 20 percent of the vote for the second straight time, decisively winning second place. In Iowa, Paul finished strongly in third place with 21.4 percent of the vote behind Santorum and Mitt Romney who were virtually tied. And a recent poll shows Paul and Romney narrowly beating Obama nationally.
With another strong finish by Paul, a clear picture of who the leading "anti-Romney" candidate is may have emerged. And the rest of the "anyone-but-Romney" field will continue to seesaw back and forth in the upcoming contests.
Voters searching for a "conservative" alternative to Romney have been bouncing around for months with various candidates. From Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Santorum, it is becoming increasingly clear that Paul is the most organized and prepared candidate to oppose Romney in the long haul of the GOP nomination contests.
Santorum does not have a sustainable campaign operation in place. He will become the 2012 version of Mike Huckabee with his fifth place finish in New Hampshire leaving him to fight for the life of his campaign in South Carolina (click here for the most recent polling data) and possibly Florida (click here for the most recent polling data).
Get full story here. Does The New Hampshire Primary Count More Than South Carolina?
Video by Frank McCaffrey
Get full story here. Cost of Obamacare Regulations Underestimated by Billions of Dollars
By John Vinci
The Obama Administration underestimated the costs of Obamacare regulations by billions of dollars says the non-partisan Mercatus Center at George Mason University in a working paper it issued on Monday. The study examines eight Obamacare regulations issued in 2010 that became law before public comment was allowed because of the brief timeline Obamacare gave for their implementation.
Mercatus carefully studied the required cost/benefit analysis used by the Administration. And it found that the Administration's cost estimates tended to be underestimated while its benefit estimates tended to be overestimated. The result is that the cost of implementing these eight regulations may be billions of dollars more than the Obama Administration is willing to admit.
For example, Mercatus says that, "For the 'Early Retiree Reinsurance Program' rule, costs were underestimated by $9-$10 billion over four years. More accurately calculated benefits might have been about one-third as high as estimated."
This comes as no surprise to us at Americans for Limited Government. We've caught the Obama administration artificially inflating Obamacare's benefits before.
For instance, on September 7, 2010 we submitted a public comment that criticized the Obama Administration for "describ[ing] [the preventive services regulation] as having a cost-savings benefit while supplying insufficient evidence to back such a claim and ignoring evidence to the contrary."
The Mercatus study confirms our criticism: "The selective review of the literature provided in the RIA gives the uninformed reader a false impression of the extent to which preventive health services are cost-saving. Literature reviews consistently have concluded that most clinical preventive services typically are not cost-saving."
Get full story here. Hatch report reveals massive public pension underfunding
By Rick Manning
U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch released a shocking report on Jan. 10 on the outstanding public debt that threatens to sink our state and local governments in a sea of red ink.
Hatch, who serves as the Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee rings alarm bells over the public pension debt shortfalls that beset state and local governments which may exceed $4 trillion. Perhaps as stunning as the overall public pension shortfall is the fact that a key member of the U.S. Senate cannot definitively report on exactly how much debt is owed because there is little transparency for public employee pension plans.
Adam Bitely of Americans for Limited Government reported in July of 2011 how the Commonwealth of Virginia was manipulating their budget to appear to have a surplus while underfunding the public employee pension fund writing, "Each year, the General Assembly is supposed to make payments to the Virginia Retirement System (VRS), a pension fund for state employees. For the past two years, the General Assembly, along with Governor McDonnell, have neglected making these payments in full, allowing VRS to be underfunded. Currently, the state owes around $620 million to the VRS. Conveniently, the payments are being skipped until 2013, the year that Governor McDonnell leaves office. As Virginia political blogger Doug Mataconis put it, "Here in Virginia we have a 'surplus' of $311 million. That money will go, by law, in to education funding and into the state's 'rainy day' fund. In reality, though, is what we've got a cooked set of books that says '+$311,000,000' with a little entry at the bottom of the page that says 'I.O.U. $620,000,000.00.'"
But Virginia is hardly alone in facing a future public employee pension funding crisis as the Hatch report states that 31 states have underfunded plans and eleven states are projected to have exhausted all of their pension assets by 2020.
Get full story here. |
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