Another Obamacare Failure: $1.23 Billion Taxpayer Funds Sunk in Failed Co-Ops

A total of $1.23 billion in federal taxpayer dollars has now been sunk in 12 of 23 co-ops created under Obamacare that have gone out of business, representing another Obamacare failure, lawmakers say.

Co-ops in Arizona and Michigan went out of business last week, adding themselves to the 10 that have already failed in Utah, Kentucky, New York, Nevada, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, and a co-op that served both Iowa and Nebraska.

Experts and congressmen say the co-ops failed because of artificially low premiums, strict regulations, and too many people requiring payouts.

“This was set up for failure from day one,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R., N.Y) at a House Energy and Commerce committee hearing evaluating the failed-co-ops on Thursday. “Insurance companies knew it was going to fail, they released a product that was underpriced, they could not make money.”

“We’re here because Obamacare was set up for failure, it was set up to encourage low premiums, to deceive the American public,” Collins said. “Everyone knew these products were underpriced and they were going to make it up on the backs of taxpayers and that’s why we’re here today.”

According to experts at the Galen Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, the co-ops were established because it was believed that community members could come together to create health insurance companies. These companies would not have to answer to shareholders or be profitable.

But because the co-ops had large start-up costs, few people on their boards with insurance experience and no previous data to help them set prices for premiums, “the idealism has quickly faded,” the experts say.

While the co-ops began with artificially low premiums, which attracted many customers, data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are projecting that premiums will rise next year.

Premiums are expected to rise by 7.5 percent from last year in the 37 states that used the HealthCare.gov site. But for some states, those rates are expected to increase even higher.

South Dakota is seeing premiums skyrocket from an average of 13 percent to as much as 63percent. In Tennessee, premiums are expected to rise by 36 percent and in Iowa by 29 percent. Oklahoma’s Blue Cross Blue Shield health care exchange says it will see premiums rise by 35 percent.

In addition to premium hikes, consumers are expected to see higher deductibles, which have outpaced workers’ wages, according to a report from Kaiser Family Foundation.

“Those worker’s deductibles have climbed from a yearly average of $900 in 2010 for an individual plan to above $1,300 this year, while employees working for small businesses have an even higher average of $1,800 a year,” the New York Times said. “One in five workers has a deductible of $2,000 or more.”

While the Department of Health and Human Services touts the number of individuals who have gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act, research finds that much of the gain, about 71 percent, in enrollment is due to the expansion of Medicaid.

“Analysis of enrollment data for private health insurance plans and public programs finds that 9.25 million more Americans had health insurance coverage at the end of 2014 than at the end of 2013,” explains the Heritage Foundation. “However, the data also show that the [Affordable Care Act]’s Medicaid expansion was responsible for almost all of the net increase in coverage.”

Additionally, the Obama administration is projecting a modest number of individuals to enroll this year compared to what the Congressional Budget Office has predicted.

“The White House says it expects just 10 million people to be enrolled in Obamacare by the end of 2016,” said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “That’s up slightly from the 9.1 million who will have signed up by the end of this year, but it’s just half the most recent Congressional Budget Office projection that as many as 20 million Americans would be enrolled.”

Proponents of the Affordable Care Act say that it has increased quality coverage for more Americans while providing more choices and increasing competition.

“The co-op program was designed to give consumers more choices, promote competition, and improve quality in the health insurance market,” said Mandy Cohen, chief operating officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Though not all co-ops have proven to be successful, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, consumers have a variety of affordable health insurance coverage choices that meet the health care needs of their families.”

But experts say that consumers will have fewer choices and may have to resort to plans that are more costly.

“The closure of the co-ops will most certainly lead to higher costs for people,” says Nathan Nascimento, a senior policy adviser at Freedom Partners. “People kicked off the co-ops will now be mandated to choose a new health care plan and potentially one they turned down previously due to higher costs.”

“People may also be forced to lose their current doctor because they are out-of-network, or they will have to pay even more out of their pockets to stay with their current doctor,” he said.

For those without health insurance, the penalties imposed by the IRS are expected to climbin 2016.

Currently, an individual without health care coverage for one year is expected to pay a fine to the IRS of $325 or 2 percent of their taxable income, whichever is greater. In 2016, those fines will increase to $695 or 2.5% of their taxable income, whichever is greater.

In last year’s 2015 filing season, 7.5 million taxpayers paid the penalty for not having health insurance, which came to $1.5 billion in total, according to data from the IRS.

The post Another Obamacare Failure: $1.23 Billion Taxpayer Funds Sunk in Failed Co-Opsappeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

MARCO RUBIO DISTANCES HIMSELF FROM TPP AS ‘PILLAR’ OF HIS PRESIDENCY

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

80%

—who declared the Trans-Pacific Partnership to be one of three essential “pillars” of a Rubio Presidency—is now taking issue with a Wall Street Journalnews report that lists Rubio as supporting the unpopular Obamatrade pact he voted to fast-track.

The Wall Street Journal article observed that: “Still backing the trade legislation are the party’s establishment wing candidates: Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey.”

Indeed, it was in the very pages of the Wall Street Journal that on April 29th Rubiowrote: “We must rebuild our own military capabilities, conclude and pass TPP, and renew our support for freedom and the rule of law in Asia.”

Then, on May 13th, Rubio declared: “It is more important than ever that Congress give the president [Barack Obama] trade promotion authority so that he can finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Moreover, Rubio cast a vote for the final passage of the Trade Promotion Authority—also known as fast-track—all but guaranteeing formation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as no deal placed on a fast-track has ever been blocked. That is because fast-track eliminates all amendments, eliminates the filibuster and treaty vote, and authorizes the President to finalize and sign the agreement. As Obamatrade opponent 

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

82%

 wrote: “A vote for fast-track is a vote to authorize the President to ink the secret deal contained in these pages—to affix his name on the Union and to therefore enter the United States into it.”

But after the Wall Street Journal listed Rubio as supporting the pact, a new paragraph suddenly appeared at the end of the piece stating that “Mr. Rubio’s spokesman said that although he backed the bill granting Mr. Obama fast-track trade authority this summer, he has not decided whether to support TPP legislation.”

Contrary to the spokesman’s statement, however, Rubio has explicitly articulated his support for TPP. In his April op-ed, Rubio affixed his name to an editorial declaring that we “must… pass TPP.”

Rubio wrote:

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), discussed between President Obama and Prime Minister Abe this week, will further our strategic goals in Asia and increase prosperity at home. It will advance economic liberty and unleash free-market forces in the world’s most dynamic region… We must rebuild our own military capabilities, conclude and pass TPP, and renew our support for freedom and the rule of law in Asia. Too often over the past six years, U.S. leaders have spoken of their attention to Asia but failed to back up the rhetoric with action.”

Similarly, in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in May of this year, Rubio described TPP as the “second pillar” of his three-pillar foreign policy strategy.

“My second pillar,” Rubio declared, “is the protection of the American economy in a globalized world…  It is more important than ever that Congress give the president [Barack Obama] trade promotion authority so that he can finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”

Following these pronouncements, Rubio voted to fast-track TPP. Sen. Rubio cast the 60th and deciding vote for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), a controversial fast-track mechanism for ramming trade treaties through Congress with minimum scrutiny, to clear the Senate’s filibuster.

In a message warning Senators to oppose the fast-track mechanism, Jeff Sessions specifically cited the fact that it would speed the creation of a TPP Commission. He explained: “This nation has never seen an agreement that compares to the TPP, which forms a new Pacific Union. This is far more than a trade agreement, but creates a self-governing and self-perpetuating Commission with extraordinary implications for American workers and American sovereignty.”

Sessions is one of the few Senators to visit the basement room in the Capitol where lawmakers had to go read the provisions in question. After the text was made public, Sessions pointed to the now-public chapter 27 “Administrative And Institutional Provisions” and article 27.1 “The Establishment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission,” which contains the very language Sessions warned about. In a statement on November 5th, Sessions quoted at length from this chapter and observed that:

This new structure is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission – a Pacific Union – which meets, appoints unelected bureaucrats, adopts rules, and changes the agreement after adoption… This global governance authority is open-ended… It covers everything from the movement of foreign nationals… to climate regulation… At bottom, this is not a mere trade agreement. It bears the hallmarks of a nascent European Union.

Sessions also said that the enormous length of the TPP— 5,554 pages— was “by definition, anti-democratic”:

No individual American has the resources to ensure his or her economic and political interests are safeguarded within this vast global regulatory structure. The

predictable and surely desired result of the TPP is to put greater distance

 between the governed and those who govern. It puts those who make the

rules out of reach of those who live under them, empowering   unelected regulators who cannot be recalled or voted out of office.  In turn, it diminishes the power of the people’s bulwark: their constitutionally-formed Congress.

In his statement, Sessions also observed, “because this deal lacks currency protections, it will further the bleeding of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas, allowing our mercantilist trading partners to take advantage of our continued refusal to protect our own workers.” This has prompted the opposition of Ford Motors as well.

Thus, if Senator Rubio no longer believed that we “must… pass” TPP, or if he regretted casting the 60th vote to fast-track it, it would be easy for him—like Sessions—to put out a statement explaining his opposition to TPP. Rubio could easily say that he did not want to form a new international regulatory structure, or that he believed currency manipulation would hurt U.S. workers, or that he thought—like Sessions—that an agreement so long would undermine democracy. But Rubio has issued no such statement at all to retract any of his prior support.

Breitbart News reached out to Rubio’s office and asked if the Senator continues to stand by his April 29th and May 13th comments in which he expressed his support for TPP. Breitbart News asked if, in light of Sen. Sessions findings on TPP’s impact on U.S. sovereignty, Sen. Rubio was “prepared to reverse his longstanding support of TPP and oppose the deal.” In response, Rubio’s spokesman directed Breitbart News to an interviewwith CNBC’s John Hardwood, in which Rubio expressed his “very positive” feelings about Obamatrade in the days after Obama reached the agreement.

Rubio’s tactic here—once supporting a top donor class priority while working to mitigate conservative criticism long enough to achieve it—is not new.

When Rubio dropped the Gang of Eight immigration bill, he was just as effusive as he was in the early days about TPP. He declared it to be the “toughest border security and enforcement measures in U.S. history.” Yet when conservatives became enraged at the contents of the bill, Rubio did a conservative media tour to head off his critics by pledging to fix any issues with the legislation.

As National Review wrote at the time:

“It is painful to watch Marco Rubio’s maneuverings on immigration. He is refusing to say whether he will vote “yes” on his own Gang of Eight bill after spending months drafting, defending, and helping shepherd it to the floor. He has supposedly discovered that the enforcement provisions are inadequate, although he has done countless interviews touting that the bill contains the “toughest immigration-enforcement measures in the history of United States” (which is what his website still says). At the same time, Rubio declares the bill 95–96 percent perfect.”

Rubio’s delay tactics worked—the bill passed with 68 votes—an achievement which had eluded Ted Kennedy and 

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

41%

 in 2007.

ICE Union President Chris Crane has explained: “Senator Rubio left unchanged legislation that he himself admitted to us in private was detrimentally flawed and must be changed… Legislation written behind closed doors by handpicked special interest groups which put their political agendas and financial gains before sound and effective law and the welfare and safety of the American public.” On the day of the final vote, Rubio gave perhaps his most passionate speech yet in favor of the Obama-backed measure to hand out 33 million green cards.

A recent Politico report revealed that GOP leadership may delay the up-or-down vote on TPP until after the 2016 election during the lame duck session. Talk radio host Laura Ingraham has described this as “criminal” and is “clearly out of [the GOP establishment’s] desire to help Rubio and hurt Donald Trump.”

While Rubio has supported the unpopular trade pact, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump—by contrast—has declared war on Obamatrade, and has made his opposition to globalist trade pacts a signature issue of his presidential campaign. Sessions has demanded that the vote on TPP not be delayed and instead “be held when voters can hold their lawmakers accountable—not during an unaccountable lame duck session.”

If Rubio becomes President, he will inherit Obamatrade’s fast-track powers and similarly be able to pass any globalist trade pact without a filibuster, amendment, or treaty vote.

The War On Cash Is Advancing On All Fronts: "First They Came For The Pennies..."

Submitted by Don Quijones via WolfStreet.com,

The War on Cash is advancing on all fronts. One region that has hogged the headlines with its war against physical currency is Scandinavia. Sweden became the first country to enlist its own citizens as largely willing guinea pigs in a dystopian economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society. As Credit Suisse reports, no matter where you go or what you want to purchase, you will find a small ubiquitous sign saying “Vi hanterar ej kontanter” (“We don’t accept cash”):

Whether it’s for mulled wine at the Christmas market, a beer at the bar, even the smallest charge is settled digitally. Even the homeless vendors of the street newspapers Faktum and Situation Stockholm carry mobile card readers.

A similar situation is unfolding in Denmark, where nearly 40% of the paying demographic use MobilePay, a Danske Bank app that allows all payments to be completed via smartphone. With more and more retailers rejecting physical money, a cashless society is “no longer an illusion but a vision that can be fulfilled within a reasonable time frame,” says Michael Busk-Jepsen, executive director of the Danish Bankers Association.

World’s Biggest Cashless Laboratory

While Sweden and Denmark may be the two nations that are closest to banning cash outright, the most important testing ground for cashless economics is half a world away, in sub-Saharan Africa.

In many African countries, going cashless is not merely a matter of basic convenience (as it is in Scandinavia); it is a matter of basic survival. Less than 30% of the population have bank accounts, and even fewer have credit cards. But almost everyone has a mobile phone. Now, thanks to the massive surge in uptake of mobile communications as well as the huge numbers of unbanked citizens, Africa has become the perfect place for the world’s biggest social experiment with cashless living.

Western NGOs and GOs (Government Organizations) are working hand-in-hand with banks, telecom companies and local authorities to replace cash with mobile money alternatives. The organizations involved include Citi Group, Mastercard, VISA, Vodafone, USAID, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In Kenya the funds transferred by the biggest mobile money operator, M-Pesa (a division of Vodafone), account for more than 25% of the country’s GDP. In Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, the government launched a Mastercard-branded biometric national ID card, which also doubles up as a payment card. The “service” provides Mastercard with direct access to over 170 million potential customers, not to mention all their personal and biometric data.

The company also recently won a government contract to design the Huduma Card, which will be used for paying State services. For Mastercard these partnerships with government are essential for achieving its lofty vision of creating a “world beyond cash.”

A New Frontier

In India an even more ambitious project is under way: the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which aims to create a centralized voter enrolment system for 1.2 billion people. It will be the largest identity platform and biometric database in the world. There’s only one snag: according to its creators, the only way to make the system work effectively will be through the widespread adoption of electronic payment systems, side by side, as always, with biometric recognition systems.

Given that cash is still king on the subcontinent, the government may have its work cut out. Finance minister Arun Jaitley has repeatedly underscored the need to transform India into a cashless economy, supposedly to “rein in the problem of black money.” However, with its huge informal economy, India remains the largest producer and consumer of currency notes after China (as well as the biggest consumer of gold).

Here’s more from India’s Financial Express:

Currently less than 5% of all payments are done electronically. Results from the ICE 360 Cash Survey 2014 show that cash is the preferred mode of payment even in Delhi, the most affluent and developed metropolis. Nearly 73% of all purchases by Delhi consumers are paid for in cash and only 17% by card.

Naturally the Indian government will do all it can to change this situation. In an article in the Daily Mail Nandan Nilekani, one of the technocrats behind UIDAI, urges the government to lead the way. “The government must be the initial driver, using the heft and reach of its social security schemes to drive the adoption of an electronic payments model,” Nilekani asserts. “As momentum grows, private players can step in.”

Those private players will no doubt include banks. After all, in a world where every transaction – or at least every “official” transaction – must be electronic, the power of banks over individuals is likely to dramatically increase, as Brett Scott warns in an article for The Guardian:

With this comes the specter of bank surveillance, where every transaction you ever partake in is authorized and recorded by a privately run commercial bank, giving it a transaction-by-transaction history of your entire commercial life. If such a bank does not like an enterprise – such as Wikileaks – it can just freeze it out.

The New Cost of Doing Business

An oft-overlooked benefit of cash transactions is that there is no intermediary. One party pays the other party in mutually accepted currency and not a single middleman gets to wet his beak.

In a cashless society there will be nothing stopping banks or other financial mediators from taking a small piece of every single transaction. They would also be able to use – and potentially abuse – the massive deposits of data they collect on their customers’ payment behavior. This information is of huge interest and value to retail marketing departments, other financial institutions, insurance companies, governments, secret services, and a host of other organizations.

Another very important perk of cash is that it significantly limits central banks’ ability to continue conducting arguably the greatest financial heist of the modern age, i.e., negative interest rate policy (NIRP). The only way that central banks can maintain negative interest rates ad infinitum is by abolishing cash altogether, as the Bank of England chief economist Andrew Hadlaine all but admitted. As long as cash exists, there’s no way of preventing depositors from doing the logical thing – i.e. taking their money out of the bank and parking it where the erosive effects of NIRP can’t reach it.

So in order to save a financial system that is morally beyond the pale and stopped serving the basic needs of the real economy a long time ago, governments and central banks must do away with the last remaining thing that gives people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives.

The biggest tragedy of all is that the governments and banks’ strongest ally in their War on Cash is the general public itself. As long as people continue to abandon the use of cash, for the sake of a few minor gains in convenience, the war on cash is already won.

A war conducted by bankers, politicians, academics, even startup guys.

Direct Experience: The One Benefit of Accepting Muslim Migrants

Islam’s Rule of Numbers: women and children will be exploited and raped; the elderly will be mugged; churches and other institutions will be attacked; terror will set in

—Raymond Ibrahim
A silver lining exists in the dust cloud being beat up by the marching feet of millions of Muslim men migrating into the West: those many Europeans and Americans, who could never understand Islam in theory, will now have the opportunity to understand it through direct and personal experience.
Perhaps then they will awaken to reality?
The fact is, most Western people have had very little personal interaction with Muslims.  Moreover, because Muslims in the West are still a tiny minority—in the U.S., they are reportedly less than one percent of the population—those few Muslims that Westerners do interact with are often on their best behavior, being surrounded as they are by a sea of infidels (according to thedoctrine of taqiyya).

And although there are a few media outlets and websites that document the hard but ugly truths of Islam, these are drowned out by the overarching “Narrative” that emanates from the indoctrination centers of the West (schools, universities, news rooms, Hollywood, political talking heads, et al).

According to the Narrative, there is nothing to fear from Islam.  If violence and mayhem seem to follow Muslims wherever they go—not to mention plague the entire Islamic world—that is because Muslims are angry, frustrated, and aggrieved, usually at things the West has done.
Although Islamic doctrine calls on Muslims to have enmity for and strive to subjugate non-Muslims whenever possible; although Muslims initiated hostilities against and were the scourge of Europe for a thousand years, until they were defanged in the modern era; although most of the so-called “Muslim world” rests on land that was violently seized from non-Muslims; although reportedly some 270 million non-Muslims have been killed by the jihad over the centuries; and although many modern day Muslims maintain the same worldview that animated their ancestors—most people in the West remain ignorant.
In this context—or absolute lack thereof—how is the average Western person to know the truth about Islam?
Enter mass Muslim migrations.  That is, let the barbarians at the gate in.

Hordes of young and able bodied Muslim men; the ones shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as they barge into Europe

I speak not of the true refugees—women and children—but of the hordes of young and able bodied Muslim men; the ones shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as they barge into Europe.

When discussing Western and Muslim interactions in the modern era, it’s my custom to provide historical precedents to show that Muslim hostilities—whether hate for Christians and their churches and crosses, or whetherviolent lust for “white” women—are not aberrations but continuations.

In this case, however, I have none to give.  For never before in history have the peoples of one civilization been so divorced from reality as to welcome millions of people from an alien civilization—one that terrorized their ancestors for centuries—to come and dwell among them.

The only “history” one can cite is the modern day experiences of those European regions that already have significant Muslim populations, and are taking more in.

In Germany and the United Kingdom, crime and rape have soared in direct proportion to the number of Muslim “refugees” accepted.  Sweden alone—where rape has increased by 1,472%since that country embraced “multiculturalism”—is reportedly on the verge of collapse.

Islam’s Rule of Numbers: women and children will be exploited and raped; the elderly will be mugged; churches and other institutions will be attacked; terror will set in

The price of the Islamic influx into Western lands is violence and chaos, in accordance withIslam’s Rule of Numbers: women and children will be exploited and raped; the elderly will be mugged; churches and other institutions will be attacked; terror will set in.  Look to the plight of non-Muslims living alongside Muslims to get an idea of what is coming.

But alas, at this late hour, such appears to be the price that must be paid for decades of willful ignorance.  If the West cannot learn the truth about Islam from theory, from doctrine, from history, and now even from ongoing current events, then let it learn from up close and personal contact.

And if after such firsthand experiences, any Western nation is still too politically correct to act in the name of self-preservation, then let it die.  For it will be evident that there is little left worth saving.

Raymond Ibrahim -- Bio and Archives | Click to view Comments
RAYMOND IBRAHIM (RaymondIbrahim.com) is a widely published author, public speaker, and Middle East and Islam expert.  His books include Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings, translations, and observations have appeared in a variety of publications, including Fox News, Financial Times, Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard; scholarly journals, including the Almanac of Islamism, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, and Middle East Review of International Affairs; and popular websites, such as American Thinker, the Blaze, Bloomberg, Christian Post, FrontPage Magazine, Gatestone Institute, the Inquisitr, Jihad Watch, NewsMax, National Review Online, PJ Media, VDH’s Private Papers, and World Magazine. He has contributed chapters to several anthologies and been translated into various languages.

The Western media has only two tools.One is the outrageous lie.The otheris keep the dumbshit americans dumb

The Western media has only two tools.

One is the outrageous lie. This overused tool no longer works, except on dumbshit Americans.

The pinpoint accuracy of the Russian cruise missiles and air attacks has the Pentagon shaking in its boots. But according to the Western presstitutes the Russian missiles fell out of the sky over Iran and never made it to their ISIS targets.

According to the presstitute reports, the Russia air attacks have only killed civilians and blew up a hospital.

The presstitutes fool only themselves and dumbshit Americans.

The other tool used by presstitutes is to discuss a problem with no reference to its causes.Yesterday I heard a long discussion on NPR, a corporate and Israeli owned propaganda organ, about the migrant problem in Europe. Yes, migrants, not refugees.

These migrants have appeared out of nowhere. They have decided to seek a better life in Europe, where capitalism, which provides jobs, freedom, democracy, and women’s rights guarantee a fulfilling life. Only the West provides a fulfilling life, because it doesn’t yet bomb itself.

The hordes overrunning Europe just suddenly decided to go there. It has nothing to do with Washington’s 14 years of destruction of seven countries, enabled by the dumbshit Europeans themselves, who provided cover for the war crimes under such monikers as the “coalition of the willing,” a “NATO operation,” “bringing freedom and democracy.”

From the Western presstitute media you would never know that the millions fleeing into Europe are fleeing American and European bombs that have indiscriminately slaughtered and dislocated millions of Muslim peoples.

Not even the tiny remnant of conservative magazines, the ones that the neocon nazis have not taken over or exterminated, can find the courage to connect the refugees with US policy in the Middle East.

For example, Srdja Trifkovic writing in the October issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, sees the refugees as “the third Muslim invasion of Europe.” For Trifkovic, the refugees are invaders who will bring about the collapse of the remnant of Western Christian Civilization.

Trifkovic never mentions that the Europeans brought the millions of Muslim refugees upon themselves, because their corrupt political bosses are Washington’s well-paid vassals and enabled Washington’s wars for hegemony that displaced millions of Muslims. For Trifkovic and every other conservative, only Muslims can do wrong. As Trifkovic understands it, the wrong that the West does is not defending itself against Muslims.

Trifkovic believes that Europe will soon live under Sharia law. He wonders if America will “have the wherewithal to carry the torch.”

A majority of Americans live in a fake world created by propaganda. They are disconnected from reality. I have in front of me a local North Georgia newspaper dated October that reports that “a Patriot Day Memorial Service was held at the Dawson County Fire Headquarters on September 11 to remember the terrorist attacks that shook America 14 years ago.” Various local dignitaries called on the attendees to remember “all of those who have died not only on that day, but since that day in the fight to keep America free.”

The dignitaries did not say how murdering and dislocating millions of Muslims in seven counries keeps us free. No doubt, the question has never occurred to them. America runs on rote platitudes.

The presidents of Russia and China watch with amazement the immoral stupidity that has become America’s defining characteristic. At some point the Russians and Chinese will realize that no matter how patient they are, the West is lost and cannot be redeemed.

When the West collapses from its own evil, peace will return to the world.

The Death Of Europe

How The Mohammed Reitrement Plan Will Kill Europe

European leaders talk about two things these days;preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

But the problem isn’t one of modernization, it’s medievalization.

27% of Moroccans and 21% of Turks in the Netherlands are unemployed. It’s 27% in Denmark for Iraqis. And even when employed, their average income is well below the European average.

Critics pointed out in the past that a multicultural America can’t afford the welfare states that European countries have. Now that those same countries are turning multicultural, they can’t afford them either.

Europe invested in the values of its welfare state. The Muslim world invested in large families. Europe expects the Muslim world to bail out its shrinking birth rate by working and paying into the system so that its aging population can retire. The Muslim migrants however expect Europe to subsidize their large families with its welfare state while they deal some drugs and chop off some heads on the side.

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Mohammed doesn’t share European values. Nor are they likely to take hold of him no matter how often the aging teachers, who hope he gets a job and subsidizes their retirement, try to drill them into his head. Europeans expect Mohammed to become a Swede or a German as if he were some child they had adopted from an exotic country and raised as their own, and work to subsidize their European values.

The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging Europe. They’re supposed to keep its ramshackle collection of economic policies, its welfare states and social programs rolling along.

But they’re more like a final solution.

Mohammed is Fritz’s retirement plan. But Mohammed has a very different type of plan. Fritz is counting on Mohammed to work while he relaxes. Mohammed relaxes and expects Fritz to work.  Fritz is not related to him and therefore Mohammed sees no reason why he should work to support him.

European social democracy reduces society to a giant insurance plan in which money is pooled together.  But insurance is forbidden in Islam which considers it to be gambling. European social democracy expects him to bail it out, but to Mohammed, European values are a crime against Islam.

Mohammed’s Imam will tell him to work off the books because paying into the system is gambling. However taking money out of the system is just Jizya; the money non-Muslims are obligated to pay to Muslims. Under Islamic law, it’s better for Mohammed to sell drugs than to pay taxes.

That’s why drug dealing and petty crime are such popular occupations for Salafis in Europe. It’s preferable to steal from infidels than to participate in the great gamble of the European welfare state.

Mohammed isn’t staking his future on the shaky pensions of European socialism. He invests in what social scientists call social capital. He plans his retirement by having a dozen kids. If this lifestyle is subsidized by infidel social services, so much the better. And when social services collapse, those of his kids who aren’t in prison or in ISIS will be there to look after him in his golden years.

 As retirement plans go, it’s older and better than the European model.

Mohammed doesn’t worry much about the future. Even if he doesn’t make it past six kids, by the time he’s ready to retire the European country he’s living in will probably be an Islamic State. And he is confident that whatever its arrangements are, they will be better and more just than the infidel system.

Sweden will take in 180,000 migrants this year. Germany may take in 1.5 million. Most of them will be young men following the Mohammed retirement plan.

Europeans are being assured that the Mohammeds will balance out the demographic disparity of an aging population with too many retirees and too few younger workers. But instead the Mohammeds will put even more pressure on the younger workers who not only have to subsidize their elders, but millions of Mohammeds, their multiple brides and their fourteen child Islamic retirement plans.

Retirement ages will go further up and social services for the elderly will be cut. The welfare state will collapse, but it will have to be kept running because the alternative will be major social unrest.

Among the triggers of the Arab Spring were rising wheat prices and cuts to food subsidies. Prices went up and governments fell as street riots turned into civil wars. Imagine a Sweden where 50 percent of the young male population is Muslim, mostly unemployed, turning into Syria when the economy collapses and the bill comes due. Imagine European Muslim street riots where the gangs have heavy artillery and each ghetto Caliph has his own Imams and Fatwas to back up his claims.

Europe is slowly killing itself in the name of European values. It’s trying to protect its economic setup by bankrupting it. European values have become a suicide pact. Its politicians deliver speeches explaining why European values require mass Muslim migration that make as little sense as a lunatic’s suicide note.

Islamic values are not compatible with European values. Not only free speech and religious freedom, but even the European welfare state is un-Islamic. Muslims have a high birth rate because their approach to the future is fundamentally different than the European one. Europeans have chosen to have few children and many government agencies to take care of them. Muslims choose to have many children and few government agencies. The European values so admired by American leftists have no future.

Europe is drinking rat poison to cure a cold. Instead of changing its values, it’s trying to maintain them by killing itself. The Mohammed retirement plan won’t save European Socialism. It will bury it.