St. Louis economy shrinking under Democrats



The Unablogger

President Barack Obama and his Democratic Congress continue to crow about how the economy is expanding because of their stimulus package. The government’s multi-million dollar website, Recovery.gov, goes into great detail tracing the number of jobs created or “saved” in each congressional district by the stimulus, but their funny numbers take credit for jobs in districts that don’t even exist (e.g., Missouri’s 14th congressional district; we only have 9)! Meanwhile, unemployment (which Obama had claimed the stimulus would keep below 8%) has hit double digits (10.2% to be exact).

There are better measures of how the economy is doing, and St. Louisans are receiving one of them at our homes now. It’s the new AT&T Yellow Pages. It’s thinner, lighter, but the print isn’t any smaller (they already made that change a few years ago). What’s different is that there are fewer businesses to serve us than there were just a year ago.

The paid advertising section has 54 fewer pages, but that depends on how much businesses are willing to spend on advertising. In hard economic times, some businesses actually increase their advertising in a desperate attempt to take business away from their competitors.

A better measure of the number of businesses serving us is the white business pages, which used to be part of the white pages but are now in the Yellow Pages. These pages declined from 259 in the December, 2008 edition to 238 in the new December, 2009 version. That’s a drop of over 8% in approximately the one-year period since Obama was elected president.

So, what’s happening? There is a common thread of who’s in charge. The City of St. Louis is governed by Mayor Francis Slay, the latest in an uninterrupted 60-year string of Democrat mayors, and a board of aldermen (counting its presiding officer) with a 28-1 Democrat majority. St. Louis County is governed by Charlie Dooley, the latest in a 23-year string of Democrat county executives, and a county council with a 5-2 Democrat majority. Missouri is back under the control of a Democrat governor (Jeremiah W. Nixon V), and the United States is governed by President Obama and large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

When a business tanks, the directors dump the CEO. It’s time that voters did the same to their elected officials.

Socialists validate Right’s claims of Medicare cuts

The Unablogger

It’s not just tea party people and Republicans who are complaining about how Obamacare pays for itself on the backs of Medicare patients. While the main stream media may discount The Right’s claims because they are made by The Right, another source said the same thing today, a source with much more credibility with the main stream media: the World Socialist Web Site.

The site published an article by regular contributor Kate Randall, citing a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services stating that the House-passed universal health care bill (H.R. 3962) includes more than $570 billion in cuts to the Medicare program for the elderly. That’s about half the entire tab for the bill. The study found that these deep cuts to Medicare “would likely result in real reductions in care, resulting in some hospitals and nursing homes refusing Medicare patients altogether.”

Ms. Randall notes that the bill’s ” permanent annual productivity adjustments to price updates” for acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies would account for $282 billion of the alleged cost savings. The CMMS report states that this provision would cause Medicare payment rates to grow more slowly than health care providers’ costs of providing services to Medicare beneficiaries. This in turn would cause providers to reduce care provided under Medicare or pull out of Medicare altogether. Ms. Randall concluded that this so-called efficiency measure “would have the real effect of denying access to millions of seniors seeking health care.”

The Left and Right agree: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s health care bill should not become law.

‘House call’ protest in St. Louis

You’d never know it by relying on the main stream media, but over 200 patriotic citizens protested the proposed Obamacare bill at the Brentwood office of Rep. “Prince” Russ Carnahan (D-MO). It was St. Louis’ expression of the House Call protest in the nation’s capital led by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN).

The St. Louis event was notable as a “common man” event. I didn’t see any politicians there running to the front to take credit. I didn’t see any of the usual local tea party stars, like Bill Hennessy, Dana Loesch, Michele Moore. These were all just ordinary folks, expressing their frustration over Congress’ relentless march to approve a 2000+ page bill that none of them have read and that a majority of voters oppose.

One notable blogger who was there documenting what happened was Adam Sharp. You can see his video of the event here.