The U.S. coal industry is facing a grim outlook in 2012, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pollution rules are one big reason.

The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule have contributed to the premature shutdown of several coal plants and the idling of coal mines across the country. The EPA’s attack on coal is sending electricity bills skyrocketing as more expensive sources of energy take coal’s place. While anti-coal protestors cheer, American families are paying the price.

Alpha Natural Resources, a major Appalachian coal producer, announced plans to lower coal production last Friday as demand for coal by electric utilities is dropping:

Alpha subsidiaries in Kentucky and West Virginia will idle four mines immediately and two others between now and early 2013, while several other mines will alter work schedules or reduce the number of production crews. Altogether 10 mining operations are affected, four in eastern Kentucky and six in southern West Virginia.… Alpha’s Central Appalachian businesses are seeing more electric utilities switch from thermal coal to natural gas to take advantage of gas prices at 10-year lows. A series of federal regulatory actions also have prompted utilities to implement plans for shutting down a number of generating stations that have traditionally run on coals sourced from Central Appalachia.

Just a week earlier, Ohio-based FirstEnergy directly cited the impact of environmental regulations as the basis for retiring six coal plants by September of this year:

Its generation subsidiaries will retire six older coal-fired power plants located in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland by September 1, 2012. The decision to close the plants is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations.

Natural gas prices are currently at a decade low, but as demand continues to grow, natural gas prices will likely rise. The switch from coal to natural gas by electric utilities in response to the EPA regulations is thus a boon to both environmentalists and the natural gas industry. As Charles Blanchard, the U.S. power sector analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, explains:

The interests of fossil fuel producers and environmentalists are (unusually) aligned: higher domestic gas prices would bode well both for gas producers and higher-cost renewable energy projects.… The impetus for [rising gas prices] will emanate from within the United States, as old age and EPA regulation force the closure of dozens of gigawatts of coal power plants.

Household electricity bills, which skyrocketed in 2010, will continue to rise as Americans are forced to use more expensive sources of energy to power their businesses and homes. This in turn will result in higher prices for other goods and services as higher electricity prices increase production costs.

Those most hurt by policies that increase the price of energy are lower-income households, which spend a much larger portion of their income on energy, and senior citizens, who have the highest per-capita residential energy consumption.

Source material can be found at this site.

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3. Climate Change Is Still About Chinese Coal

The Obama Administration’s mandate under the Obamacare statute that many religious employers provide health care coverage for contraception, abortifacients, and human sterilization tramples upon their constitutionally guaranteed free exercise of religion.  Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced the Administration policy.  Many faiths have united in opposition to the Obama Administration attack on religious liberty.

On January 20, 2012, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.”  Also on that day, the National Association of Evangelicals commented that “The HHS rules trample on our most cherished freedoms and set a dangerous precedent.”

On January 26, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America stated, “In declining to expand the religious exemption within the healthcare reform law, the Obama Administration has disappointingly failed to respect the needs of religious organizations such as hospitals, social welfare organizations and more.”  On the same day, Agudath Israel of America stated:

The Obama Administration had an opportunity to declare that there is a fundamental American value at stake here — religious freedom — and provide strong and unequivocal protections to religious employers.  Instead, it took a step backwards by imposing religiously-objectionable mandates on countless religious entities, and by devising a cramped limitation on what “religious groups” are and what their public mission in society should be.

On February 3, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod said, “This action by HHS will have the effect of forcing many religious organizations to choose between following the letter of the law and operating within the framework of their religious tenets.”  The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America noted that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and that “This freedom is transgressed when a religious institution is required to pay for ‘contraceptive services’ including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization services that directly violate their religious convictions.”

The Obamacare statute has concentrated in the hands of the federal government broad power over the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care.  Obamacare purports to invest in the federal government the power to force religious institutions, such as religious hospitals, charities, and schools, to provide health care insurance for contraception, abortion-inducing drugs, and human sterilization, contrary to the faiths of those religious institutions.

As Ronald Reagan said, “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”  The concentration of nearly all power over health care in the hands of the federal government has proved to be a drastic and dangerous experiment.  Congress should repeal the Obamacare statute, allow the country to have market-based, patient-centered health care, and restore our religious liberty.

Source material can be found at this site.

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1. Adding Insult to Injury: Obama Admin Refuses to Protect Religious Liberty
2. Religious Liberty, Obama’s Surprising Soft Spot
3. 2011 Victories and Challenges for Religious Liberty

Cybersecurity Solutions

Think back 20 years ago. What were you doing? Whatever answer you came up with, it probably had nothing to do with the Internet, which was just coming of age. As James Carafano points out in his article in the Washington Examiner today, the discovery a valuable new world brings with it the need to protect that world.

Nearly everything in our lives today is connected to the Internet. You possibly woke up to your iPhone buzzing from an e-mail from your boss and then turned on the lights that are powered by an electrical grid that is intricately connected to the Internet. You needed to transfer money to your checking account, so you quickly jumped on your computer, and a couple minutes later you were out the door. On the way to work, you stopped to get a bite to eat at a restaurant that orders all its food and advertises heavily via the Internet. When you finally got to work, you sat down to a computer and sifted through dozens of e-mails. On your break, you ordered a birthday gift off of eBay or Amazon, and then you searched for and read countless articles for a project you are working on without even moving from your chair.

With so many widespread uses, the Internet is also very hard to defend. There are always going to be holes in security somewhere, and any people who tell you that they know how to fix the problem would probably also have told you that Corzine’s MF Capital was a great buy. Right on cue, members of our government come forward with “comprehensive,” bureaucratic command-and-control cyber security bills.

The Internet is a dynamic environment, and announcing countless new regulations or giving government bodies vast new powers over the Internet flies in the face of that reality. Most crooks and enemies can easily get around these proposed solutions. For example, before the Stop Online Piracy Act could even be voted on, free software was released that would have rendered most of the bill worthless.

Our answer to online security should be one that seeks to match our quick opponents with equally quick, creative solutions. The proposal from Representatives Mike Rogers (R–MI) and Dutch Ruppersburger (D–MD) is a solid start. It establishes the framework for government and private-sector cooperation and better enables our private sector to create new adaptive solutions to fight cyber crime and defend against cyber attacks.

New cyber threats will emerge, and just like in any other conflict, we should not get caught preparing to the fight the last war. Instead, we should give our greatest minds the best opportunity to come up with creative answers to protect this new world.

Source material can be found at this site.

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U.S. single-family home prices fell more than expected in November, highlighting a sector that continues to struggle to make a meaningful recovery, a closely watched survey showed on Tuesday.

A home for sale in Winchester, CA

The S&P/Case-Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas declined 0.7 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, a bigger drop than the 0.5 percent economists had expected.

The decrease added on to the 0.7 percent decline seen in October. The new data suggest the home price index has “taken a turn for the worse,” Ellen Zentner, an economist at Nomura, said in a research note.

Home prices continue to decline “despite continued low interest rates and better real GDP growth in the fourth quarter,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s. “The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.”

While there had been some improvement in the foreclosure picture there are still some foreclosures out there, Blitzer told CNBC, noting that the number of foreclosures may be accelerating. There are some encouraging signs out there when it comes to home prices, but home prices will be “the last thing to turn,” he said. First, supply has to tighten and loan availability needs to improve, Blitzer added.

Prices in the 20 cities also steepened their year over year decline, falling 3.7 percent compared to a 3.4 percent decline the previous month.

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Remember VHS? Imagine this:

VHS has been a staple of the American way of watching television and movies. VHS has supported countless manufacturing jobs, and even though there are better products out there, let’s face it: We need a variety of ways to watch our programs. The states and local economies that have VHS production facilities have experienced and benefited from VHS production, but without a little help from the taxpayers, jobs will be lost and the industry will atrophy. VHS production has bipartisan support, will be good for American manufacturing jobs, and will diversify our program-watching ability. America needs VHS, and VHS needs the taxpayers’ help.

The above plea isn’t real, but this extremely flawed style of economic rationale is what’s driving the justification for wind energy production tax credits (PTC).

With enough taxpayer dollars, you can prop up just about any industry. But it doesn’t mean those jobs are adding value and growing the economy. Still, politicians use this nonsensical thinking to justify projects that benefit them at the expense of the rest of America. The latest is the push to extend wind energy’s subsidies through 2016.

Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas (R) and Terry Branstad of Iowa (R) sent a letter to the House and Senate committees negotiating the payroll tax extension asking to include an extension of the PTC for wind energy. Unsurprisingly, they use VHS-style thinking that wastes taxpayer dollars and destroys economic value. The letter urges that “The wind energy sector is an American success story that is helping us build our manufacturing base, create jobs, lower energy costs and strengthen our energy security.”

One might wonder how the wind industry can be considered a success story if it needs taxpayer handouts to survive.

Nonetheless, the governors write that “As a country we should support energy diversity and the development of all domestic resources, creating an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy. In order to prevent the nation from being too heavily reliant on a single energy source, our state and national energy plans have long relied on varying policies and incentives, such as the PTC, to deploy technologies that ensure a diverse, domestic energy fleet.”

There are major flaws here. First, an “all of the above” energy strategy does not justify subsidizing all of the above. Second, we have a diverse, competitive electricity sector that includes coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and oil (about 1 percent). And finally, that diverse energy mix is produced almost entirely domestically.

The only “all of the above” strategy America should embrace is the answer to this question: Which of these energy sources should we not subsidize? A.) Fossil Fuels B.) Nuclear C.) Renewables D.) All of the Above.

The main argument for extending the wind subsidy is that failure to do so will result in job losses. The letter goes on to say, “Unfortunately, the leading wind project developers and manufactures are canceling their plans for 2013 and wind development will grind to a halt due to the uncertainty of a PTC extension.” It goes on to point out that “A recent report completed by Navigant finds that an expiration of the PTC would lead to a nearly fifty percent decrease in the number of wind energy jobs.”

If Navigant’s numbers are accurate, it means two things: 1.) The subsidy has been artificially propping up jobs in the industry and shifted labor and capital away from other, more productive sectors of the economy; and 2.) Wind can compete without subsidies and the industry won’t entirely disappear.

Removing the subsidies could actually benefit the wind industry in the long term. Rather than having the subsidies promote technological stagnation in the industry, investments and resources would flow toward the most promising wind companies and technologies. This would allow for a strong wind industry that that can compete without subsidies. If the result is more wind energy without subsidies, all the better.

Policies like the production tax credit concentrate benefits on a few recipients and disperse the costs among the rest of us through higher taxes and energy costs. If wind energy is not economically viable without the crutch of taxpayer money, then we’re propping up a market loser. If wind energy is a market winner, then the subsidy is taking money out of the taxpayers’ wallets and simply padding the bottom line for the politically connected.

An extension of the wind energy tax credit makes as much sense as a VHS production tax credit.

Source material can be found at this site.

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3. Why Ethanol and Natural Gas Don’t Deserve Subsidies

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook for years 2012 to 2022 yesterday, and as Heritage’s Patrick Knudsen shows, the numbers add up to a dismal fiscal future. As the government continues its fiscal irresponsibility, 2012 will be the fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits. This trend is on track to continue as a result of increasing federal spending on health care, which will more than double between 2012 and 2022.

The CBO estimates that by 2022, the government will spend $1.8 trillion on health care, 7.3 percent of our total economy. CBO breaks down the portions of the spending each program will account for: “Rising spending for Medicare accounts for about one-half of that growth, rising spending for Medicaid accounts for roughly one-third, and the remaining growth stems primarily from the new subsidies to be provided through health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014.”

Medicare Spending

As the population ages and health care costs continue their upward trend, Medicare spending will become unsustainable. CBO projects that “gross Medicare outlays in 2022 will exceed $1 trillion, almost 90 percent more than they are expected to be this year.” But that projection includes cuts to Medicare reimbursements for doctors and hospitals included in current law that are highly unlikely to happen. For example, doctor payment reductions are scheduled to be cut by 27 percent under the flawed sustainable growth rate (SGR). This affects the CBO’s baseline greatly:

If future legislation overrides the scheduled reductions (as has happened in every year since 2003), spending on Medicare might be significantly greater than the amount that is projected in CBO’s baseline. For example, if payment rates for physicians remained at their 2011 amounts through 2022, net Medicare outlays over the next 10 years would be about $316 billion (or roughly 4 percent) higher than in CBO’s baseline projections.

Growth in Medicare spending is partially a result of an increase in the number of beneficiaries of 3 percent per year over the next decade, from 48 million beneficiaries in 2011 to 66 million beneficiaries in 2022. In addition, federal spending per beneficiary will grow. Spending in Parts A and B is projected to increase by about 30 percent, and Part D spending is expected to double.

Medicaid Spending

Federal spending on Medicaid is expected to “shoot up rapidly in 2014, 2015, and 2016 as a result of provisions in the Affordable Care Act. By 2022, under current law, federal outlays for Medicaid are expected to total $605 billion, more than twice the 2012 amount.” And this is only the federal share of Medicaid spending; state spending will also increase. Spending growth is caused by a huge increase in enrollment due under Obamacare’s expansion of the entitlement. “By 2022, about 95 million people will be enrolled in Medicaid at some point in the year,” CBO estimates. The federal share of Medicaid costs will be significantly larger in the future than it is today.

Obamacare Subsidies

Obamacare’s major provisions begin to kick in in 2014, and this will result in federal spending for health care programs other than Medicare and Medicaid rising from $26 billion this year to $161 billion in 2022. CBO predicts, “About 8 million people will receive exchange subsidies in 2014 and roughly 20 million will receive them by 2022. Outlays for providing those subsidies, operating the exchanges, and running related programs will total $104 billion by 2022.”

End It Before It Gets Worse

As expected, the CBO’s report does not show Obamacare paying for itself. In fact, it costs $54 billion more over the next 10 years than the last CBO estimate. This is because the Administration’s abandoned CLASS Act, which had a repeal vote in the House happening today, no longer offsets new spending. Also, the cost of the law increased because an additional year of its full implementation has been added to the 10-year baseline. The CBO’s estimates are going to continue to rise as the baseline captures a full 10 years of implementation.

CBO’s budget and economic outlook for America is bleak and disturbing. It reiterates the need for Congress to get serious about our nation’s debt and spending problems. It is past time to repeal Obamacare and get the country’s fiscal future back on track. To read Heritage’s full reform proposal, click here.

Source material can be found at this site.

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The dispute between the European Union and Hungary escalated temporarily when the European commission said it planned to bring suit against Hungary. The Commission generally sues member states on economic issues, such as a government restraining competition or subsidizing national champions.

Viktor Orban

The Hungarian issue involves laws that go to the heart of governing party Fidesz’ political program. One controversial law will reduce the retirement age for judges from 70 to 62 and another law weakens the president of the Hungarian Central Bank.

The law on the judiciary would allow the Hungarian government to pack the court with new appointees subservient to the government.

The law on the bank allows the Hungarian parliament, where the government of Viktor Orban commands more than a two-thirds majority, to nominate members of the Monetary Council – as well as allowing a government minister to sit on that body.  The Monetary Council sets interest rates for the country, something that is normally the prerogative of the central bank governor.

Orban flew to Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, in an attempt to placate the deputies who had called for suspending voting rights for Hungary. Hungary, already in financial straits, could also be fined if the European Court found in favor of the commission.

At the parliament in Strasburg, only the European People’s Party (EPP), allied with the Christian-Democratic group, defended the Fidesz government. The EPP noted that Hungary was the only ex-communist country that had up to now failed to revise its communist constitution. It urged an amicable resolution of tension with the Commission.

The European Liberals complained that the commission, while correct, was mistaken in focusing on technical and economic issues and ignoring the basic erosion of democracy in Hungary. This view was shared by the Socialists and the Greens, who assailed the Orban government for constricting the freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary, while seeking to erode political pluralism.

Some feared that Prime Minister Orban,  who had promised that his government would not be dictated to by international leftists, would choose to escalate the issue . However, Orban chose to fold and wrote the Chairman of the Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, that his government would work to modify the controversial legislation. In response, the Commission promised to help find a legal solution to resolve the matter.

Hungary needs the European Union to refinance nearly €5 billion of debt – giving the Commission leverage over Budapest. On the other hand. given the debt crisis. the Commission undoubtedly considers Hungary to be an unnecessary distraction from more important issues.

Source material can be found at this site.

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Oil and Gas

At this State of the Union address, President Obama proudly stated that “American oil production is the highest it’s been in eight years” and declared that his Administration would “open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.” While President Obama spoke favorably of the role that oil and gas development play in America, the President’s and his Administration’s actions don’t match with his words.

There are several areas where the President and his Administration are unreasonably hindering access to more oil and gas for Americans and threatening the industry with punitive measures:

• Keystone permit rejection. The Keystone XL pipeline would deliver oil from our Canadian ally, relieve some of the pain of high prices at the gas pump, and create jobs in America. Nevertheless, and despite a State Department environmental review concluding that the project poses no significant environmental risk, the President chose to reject TransCanada’s permit application to build the pipeline.
• Targeted tax hikes. The President continues to threaten the oil industry with targeted tax hikes. Under the rhetoric of eliminating subsidies for the industry, the President’s proposal would eliminate certain tax treatments for oil that are available to many industries, effectively singling out the oil industry for a tax hike.
• Slowdown of production on federal lands. While American oil production has been increasing, the vast majority of that production is taking place on private lands. Production on federal lands is actually 40 percent lower than it was 10 years ago. The House Natural Resources Committee also reports that under the Obama Administration, 2010 had the lowest number of onshore leases issued since 1984.
• Fracking regulation. Hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) is a proven oil and gas extraction process that should not be subject to overly burdensome regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently considering federal regulation of the fracking process under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The problem is that the agency is following a procedure that even the Department of Energy criticized for its “selective focus” on “negative outcomes.”

Words alone will not make energy more abundant and affordable, nor will they create the energy-related jobs that would make the American economy stronger. If the President is truly concerned about increasing America’s energy access, he certainly has a funny way of showing it.

For policies in that direction, Heritage policy analyst Nick Loris explains in two papers how to make gas and electricity prices more affordable and how to create jobs and raise government revenue through energy exploration.

Source material can be found at this site.

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Billionaire financier George Soros thinks that, if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, there will be “little difference” between him and Barack Obama in the White House.

Soros offered the reassuring news to liberals across Europe during an interview this week in Davos, Switzerland.

As policymakers from Hong Kong to Canada pressed Greece and its creditors to strike a deal to cut the nation’s debt, Soros pressed in on GOP presidential candidate Romney:

“Well, look, either you’ll have an extremist conservative, be it Gingrich or Santorum, in which case I think it will make a big difference which of the two comes in,” Soros told Reuters in a videotaped interview.

“If it’s between Obama and Romney, there isn’t all that much difference except for the crowd that they bring with them.”

Soros added, “Romney would have to take Gingrich or Santorum as a vice president and you probably have some pretty extreme candidates for the Supreme Court.”

“So it won’t be that great a difference,” he concluded, if Romney becomes president.

Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh described Soros’ move this way: “He’s endorsing Romney. ‘Romney, that’s cool, no difference, I could go either way that way.’”

Soros also told Reuters that many hedge fund managers in the United States are backing Romney because Obama wants to raise their taxes.

Soros predicted that “there won’t be a great deal of enthusiasm on either side of the battleground. It will be more civilized than the previous elections have been.”

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

From Newsmax

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In the end, the Republican primary is about who will beat Barack Obama and who we want to beat Barack Obama. Before you decide, watch the video. And consider, what else don’t we know?

Debating in Tampa, Florida in late-January, while falsely characterizing Newt Gingrich’s income from his government consulting work, Mitt Romney denied that Bain did “any work with the government like Medicaid and Medicare”. Now we learn that Bain, under Romney’s “supervision”, purchased and ran the Damon Corporation, who pled guilty to Federal conspiracy charges as a result of tens of millions of dollars in systemic Medicare fraud committed under Romney’s and Bain’s control. Damon was fined over $119-million which was, at the time, the largest criminal healthcare fine in Massachusetts history and Mr. Romney’s participation was characterized in 1996 by Corporate Crime Reporter thusly: “As manager and board member of Damon Corp, Mitt Romney sits at the center of one of the top 15 corporate crimes of the 1990’s.” Watch the substantiated mini-documentary, BLOOD MONEY: MITT ROMNEY’S MEDICARE SCANDAL, to learn the truth about Mitt Romney.

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