Just Say No to Nuclear Socialism! Alliance for Generational Equality Urges All Elected Officials Who Have Vowed “No More Bailouts” to Be Consistent When It Comes to Nuclear Power; No Handouts Needed for Profitable Industry With Extensive Foreign Ownership.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 12, 2010) If your Member of Congress says he or she opposes more bailouts and then turns around and supports the Senate climate bill released today, they are simply not telling you the truth, according to the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equality (AGE), which represents seniors as well as Americans in other generations.

AGE wants all seniors to know that the Senate climate bill contains $54 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors, in addition to 20 years of unlimited loan guarantee authority for new reactors established in the referenced Senate energy bill (S.1462) that would leave taxpayers on the hook for what would likely be huge sums. Of particular concern: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the default rate on new reactors will be “very high – well above 50 percent.”

AGE Vice President and CEO Dave Herman said: “This is not about whether you support or you oppose nuclear power. For elected officials, it is about whether they are being sincere in saying no more federal bailouts. Whether it’s for banks, car companies, investment firms or nuclear reactors, a bailout is a bailout is a bailout. In fact, this is even worse than the earlier bailouts since the nuclear loan guarantees are unlimited, meaning there is literally no limit to how deeply the industry could reach into taxpayers’ pockets.”

Herman added: “How can Republicans in the Senate who are opposing financial reform legislation because of the fear of potential bailouts, then turn around here and dole out what are explicit bailouts for another industry? Federal loan guarantees for new reactors encourage utilities that are currently financially sound to take enormous risks and promise in advance to bail out them out with U.S. taxpayer dollars when the bets go bad. Federal loan guarantees that put U.S. taxpayers directly on the hook in advance are not only a huge drain on federal tax dollars waiting to happen, but they actually somehow manage to do the impossible by making the earlier bailouts look like good deals.”

Herman concluded: “We need a little less socialism from Washington and a lot more faith in the wisdom of the marketplace. We don’t care if the nuclear power industry wants to build more nuclear reactors. This is a very profitable industry with extensive foreign ownership that already makes a guaranteed profit in most states under utility regulation. If these companies controlled by French, Japanese and U.S. interests want to finance new reactors and find investors who want to support that, they have our blessing. But we are not prepared as taxpayers to allow seniors and other Americans to be ripped off by yet another multi-billion-dollar bailout for another industry.”

See Jerry Taylor, “Radioactive Corporate Welfare,” Cato Institute, February 18, 2010, at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/02/18/radioactive-corporate-welfare/ and “Nuclear Reactionaries,” Washington Monthly, May/June 2010 at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com//features/2010/1005.frank.html .

President Obama has demanded action and told Democrats passage of the health care reform bill was critical to the political future of the Democratic Party. That appeal is a strong push-back to the fear that is sweeping over Democrat Members of the House in marginal districts that a “yes” vote to health care reform will spell electoral defeat for them in November.

The Congressional Budget Office reported the cuts required to get the cost of this version of health care reform requires the following cuts in existing programs for seniors:

· $200 Billion in Cuts to Medicare Advantage

· $150 Billion in Cuts to Providers, including Hospitals, Nursing Homes and Hospice Care Facilities

· $40 Billion in Cuts to Home Health Care Services

· $20 Billion in Cuts to Hospitals Serving Low-Income Populations

In addition to these benefit cuts, the newest version of health care reform does not include the needed fix to the physician payment formula, and without it there will be a mass migration of doctors from treating Medicare patients. That fix is estimates to cost $340 Billion, and whether it will be passed separately, as Speaker Pelosi hopes, is in serious doubt if it is not included in the overall reform package.

The backroom deal making that attracted so much negative attention are largely still intact in the newest version of the health care reform, and more deals are being made to secure the last few votes needed in the House.

Critics claim the indirect cost to taxpayers to fund the various deals will total hundreds of billions before they are done.

Senator McCain announced on May 5, 2010 that he was withdrawing his support for the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010, S. 3002, that he and Senator Dorgan filed in February.  Senator McCain announced he will now collaborate with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on a new bill that will enhance transparency and safety within the supplement industry, but McCain will abandon his support to impose new and onerous regulatory scheme on the dietary supplement industry.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the maverick political gunslinger who pillories his colleagues when they play fast and loose with the facts, apparently has a huge blind spot when it comes to dietary supplements.  Equally odd is that McCain is facing an already tough primary race against former Congressman J.D. Hayworth who has cut his teeth on opposing overreaches by the federal government, and McCain’s proposed legislation will essentially punish a large part of the senior population in Arizona who regularly use dietary supplements.

Senator McCain has joined forces with Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) in another attack on the dietary supplement industry with wild and unsubstantiated claims of hospitalization and deaths resulting from adverse reactions experienced by users of dietary supplements.  McCain has obviously taken a page from former Senator William Roth (R-DE) who embarrassed himself and the Senate in 1985 with a series of Senate Hearings on claims of deaths and hospitalizations resulting from use of weight-loss products that, when fully scrutinized, were exposed as more fiction than fact.

The McCain-Dorgan bill, mis-branded itself as the "Dietary Supplement and Safety Act of 2010," would dramatically expand the powers of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to ostensibly identify and withdraw from the market dietary supplements adulterated with steroids or other illegal substances.

That sounds good, but there is an elephant of a problem for McCain-Dorgan.

The FDA and DEA already have sufficient authority to remove either misbranded or mislabeled drugs, or to remove any product from the market that contains a steroid that is not approved as a drug.

But McCain-Dorgan grants enormous new powers and completely replaces the current definition of what "new dietary ingredients" are.  If anyone is unable to decipher what a "new dietary ingredient" is, then the Secretary of HHS gets to decide.  That should make consumers very happy.

Other provisions of the McCain-Dorgan bill impose onerous reporting requirements on dietary supplement manufacturers, and subjects manufacturers to being shut down by federal marshals if a mistake is made by a retail establishment or marketer of their product.  It is the kind of authority that McCain sharply criticizes in the health care reform debate as "big government control" over consumer choices.

When questioned, Senator McCain points to the abuses of professional athletes who use performance enhancing supplements as the basis for his dramatic expansion of federal regulations over the dietary supplement industry and to put a tourniquet on consumer access to these health promoting products.  The abuse of some products by pampered, overpaid, and impulsive professional athletes hardly justifies stripping consumer access to these safe dietary supplements, but Senator McCain sees no distinction between average consumers and those abusive professional athletes.

Even sports experts agree that strengthening existing rules on what products athletes can use, utilizing more technologically advanced testing procedures, and strengthening penalties for offenders is the right solution for abuses by professional athletes.

Senator Reid, who is not right very often these days, is dead on with his observation that Senator McCain is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

"Find common ground with Democrats in the next six weeks or we’re moving on without you and letting voters decide in November who was wrong."

The highly-touted health care summit convened by President Obama was conceived as a political bridge to allow for the public blame to be diffused and provide the foundation for moving forward with a scaled back health care reform package.  It didn’t quite turn out that way.

In the end, the President bluntly told the Republicans to get in line, or they would be steamrolled by the "reconciliation" procedure that even the venerable Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) claims would be highly abusive of the Senate process.

More important, there are a lot of Democrats in the House who may not be on board with that ultimatum because they fear voters will decide who is wrong, and it will be the Democrats.  Many insiders are shaking their heads about the insular arrogance displayed by the President and his Chicago White House Thugs.

For a few highly visible minutes, Obama turned his carefully scripted political theatre into a WWF cage fight with former campaign foe Senator John McCain, and smacked McCain down hard for daring to remind the public about the unseemly back-room deals struck with Louisiana, Nebraska and Florida, and other lucrative "carve-outs" for Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Michigan and Connecticut.

"Let me make this point John, because we’re not campaigning anymore.  The election’s over."

But McCain pressed on, and even forced Obama to concede how disingenuous it is to publicly flog abuses of the Medicare Advantage programs yet grant waivers for politically potent senior voters in Florida.

"I think you make a legitimate point."

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) followed the opening statement of Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) with the strong rebuke, invoking the knuckle-rapping comment of former Senator Moynihan (D-NY).  Here is the actual statement:

"I say to my friend, Lamar, who I have great respect and admiration for, you’re entitled to your opinions, but not your own facts. Your opinion is something that is yours, and you’re entitled to that, but not your own set of facts. Senator Moynihan said that many years ago, and that’s what we have to do here today. Let’s make sure that we talk about facts."

Getting the facts would be a refreshing change, but then President Obama jumped on the Reid bandwagon to thrash Senator Alexander on his claim that the Congressional Budget Office had concluded the Senate health care plan would increase premiums.  Here is the first part of that verbal sparring:

"THE PRESIDENT:  But here’s what I want to emphasize is that even without the subsidies it’s estimated by the Congressional Budget Office that the plan we put forward would lower the costs in the individual market for the average person who’s just trying to buy health insurance and they don’t — they’re not lucky enough to work for a big company, would lower their costs by between 14 and 20 percent.

So, Lamar, when you mentioned earlier that you said premiums go up — that’s just not the case, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: Mr. President, if you’re going to contradict me, I ought to have a chance to — the Congressional Budget Office report says that premiums will rise in the individual market as a result of the Senate bill.

THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no, no — let me — and this is an example of where we’ve got to get our facts straight.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: That’s my point.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, exactly. So let me respond to what you just said, Lamar, because it’s not factually accurate. Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office says. The costs for families for the same type of coverage as they’re currently receiving would go down 14 to 20 percent. What the Congressional Budget Office says is, is that because now they’ve got a better deal because policies are cheaper, they may choose to buy better coverage than they have right now and that might be 10 to 13 percent more expensive than the bad insurance that they had previously. But they didn’t say that the actual premiums would be going up. What they said was they’d be going down by 14 to 20 percent. And I promise you, I’ve gone through this carefully with the Congressional Budget Office. And I’ll be happy to present this to the press and whoever is listening, because this is an important issue.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: Well, may I — may I –

THE PRESIDENT: Let me just finish, Lamar. Now, the — what we’ve done is we’ve tried to take every single cost containment idea that’s out there. Every proposal that health care economists say will reduce health care costs, we’ve tried to adopt in the various proposals. There are some additional ideas that Republicans have presented that we think are interesting and we also tried to include. So, let me give you an example.

You mentioned the idea of buying across state lines, insurance. That’s something that I’ve put in my proposal that’s actually in the Senate proposal. I think that it shows some promise. You mentioned that as — that Mike Enzi has previously said, that he’s interested in small businesses being able to pool in the equivalent of some sort of exchange. So that’s where there’s some overlap.

But I just think it’s very important to understand that what we’ve done is to try to take every single cost containment idea that’s out there and try to adopt it in this bill. What I’d like to do is to see if we can proceed and have a very concrete conversation about what are the ideas that you guys have that you don’t think are in our bill to contain costs. And what I want to do is to see if maybe we can adopt some of those or refine what we’ve already done in order to further reduce costs.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: Mr. President, I’ve had my time –

THE PRESIDENT: And what I’d like to do also is to make sure that you maybe suggest some of the ideas that are currently in the bill that you think are good, because, Lamar, in your opening introduction, what I saw was sort of a — the usual critique of why you thought it was bad. But as I said, we’ve adopted a lot of the ideas that we’ve heard from your side of the aisle. So I hope maybe you could say, well, those are the ones that we think are good ideas; here are the things that we think are bad ideas, as opposed to just painting in broad brush. Go ahead.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: Mr. President, let me — let me show some respect for my colleagues here. They’re all here eager to speak, all sure they could do a better job than I could on any of these points. And what I would like to do is get back directly to you with why I believe — with respect — you’re wrong about the bill. Your bill would increase premiums, I believe; you say it wouldn’t. So rather than argue with you in public about it, I’d like to put my facts down, give them to you. Maybe other colleagues will say that. As far as Mike Enzi’s proposal, he is ready to talk about it; others are.

THE PRESIDENT: Good.

SENATOR ALEXANDER: So I appreciate the opportunity that Mitch and John gave me to talk. You’ve made some interesting points, and why not let other members of Congress have a chance to talk.

THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s a great idea. I’d like to get this issue settled about whether premiums are reduced before we leave today, because I’m pretty certain I’m not wrong. And you give us the information — and we’re going to be here all afternoon. I promise you we’ll get this settled before the day is out. All right."

This was a seminal moment for President Obama to show his bona-fides as a fighter for truth and justice.  He believed he had caught the Republicans red-handed in a bold-faced lie, and he was not going to let them slither off the national stage without being pilloried for their indiscretion.  How dare Senator Alexander mislead the public that way.

But then, the worst of circumstances arose when an aide handed the President a note, and then Obama backtracked hard.  Okay, so Senator Alexander was right about the CBO findings.

Quoting Senator Reid (via Senator Moynihan), you are entitled to your opinion Mr. President, you are not entitled to your own facts.

Some taxes are called user fees, emission credits, or other clever euphemisms that become so misleading they would make a magician proud. President Obama demanded during his State of the Union address that the Senate deliver to his desk the climate-change legislation already passed by the House.  The Senate version of this legislation is the Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade bill (S.1733).  This bill would severely restrict greenhouse gas emissions that have become the environmentalists’ issue du jour .

The Senate has balked largely because of opposition first because of legitimate questions on the scientific data supporting the severity of the greenhouse gas issue; and second because of the significant impact passage would have on the economy and consumers. Setting aside the escalating scope of questions on the scientific accuracy of data on the human contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, the economic issues have attracted bi-partisan opposition in the U.S. Senate.

The goal of greenhouse gas emission limits is to drive up the cost of fossil-fuel energy, and since fossil fuels account for approximately 85 percent of America’s energy consumption, the cap and trade limits function as an energy tax on American consumers.  The underlying theory behind increasing prices on fossil fuel energy is to force consumers to reduce consumption because of the high prices.  Even President Obama admitted during his presidential campaign that "electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket."

The substantial increase in electricity prices without providing relief for seniors on fixed incomes to afford electricity, will endanger the health of seniors who rely on electricity for heat or cooling.  The caps will drive up the cost of gasoline by more than $1.20 per gallon, and the annual family-of-four energy costs will spike up by over $1,000.

This new tax will also have an adverse impact on younger generations because of the loss of jobs, some estimates pegging those losses at as many as 2.5 million in some years during the implementation of the greenhouse gas emission targets.  That produces crippling losses to the gross domestic product, increases the costs of goods and services used by American families, and erodes the net worth of families economic status.

All of this in the laudable effort to reduce pollution in the air.  It’s complexity proves that the solutions are not simple, or even easy to craft, even when the goal seems to be a good one.

In this case, it appears to be a good strategy for the Senate to refuse to act, and deny President Obama the opportunity to sign a tax bill that would have such disastrous consequences across all generations.

Key Democrat Senators hit the Sunday Talk Show circuit to crow about the AARP endorsement, and beat the drum hard to claim the AARP endorsement was solid proof that the Republicans were lying when they say the Democratic plan cuts Medicare spending.

But the truth is, AARP no longer advocates for seniors, except when it is convenient to claim they do.  And the truth is the Reid/Pelosi bill CUTS Medicare spending by nearly $500 billion.  How can it not cut benefits to seniors?

But the real question is this:  Why would AARP risk making such a public stand when all public opinion polls show seniors are solidly against the Reid/Pelosi health care package?

AARP has come under fire recently for its alleged conflicts of interest in supporting the Reid/Pelosi Health Reform Bill because it will essentially eliminate some competitors in the health insurance marketplace where AARP generates a substantial portion of its annual revenues.

AARP royalties from auto, health and life insurers, credit cards, and other branded products recorded a huge jump from 2007 to 2008, dramatically increasing from $500 million to $652 million. AARP’s annual financial report reveals that 63% of that annual revenue — about $400 million — is generated from AARP MediGap insurance policies that are underwritten by UnitedHealth Group.

AARP changed its name several years ago from the "American Association of Retired Person" to "AARP" in an attempt to re-brand itself to take on an identity more attractive to the younger "Boomer" population.   Now, AARP seems to be struggling through another identity crisis on whether it is an advocacy group, or an insurance company.

Either way, seniors who thought AARP was an advocate for them started leaving AARP in droves early this year when reports circulated that AARP had endorsed the Obama Health Reform agenda.  More than 60,000 seniors terminated their membership in AARP, and the announcement AARP has officially endorsed the Reid/Pelosi Health Reform plan will surely accelerate that membership loss.

With more than 15 million identity theft victims already on the books, and a new victim added every 2 seconds, Congress needs to act now to protect American consumers from these pernicious criminals.

Congress needs to act immediately to make the use of Social Security numbers by businesses illegal; impose stiff prison sentences for identity theft; require Credit Bureaus to adhere to a Consumer Bill of Rights; require financial institutions to adhere to national standard for fraud alerts to protect consumers; establish a National Credit Registry; require verbal authorization for any transaction that impacts a consumer credit file; and establish tough federal standards for lost or stolen consumer credit data.

AGE will deliver your petition directly to your Member of Congress and to your Senators. The petition will include your name and the city and zip code where you live to validate that you are a constituent of those Members of Congress. The other identifying information will only be used by AGE to update you on issues of concern to your generation. Thanks for speaking up.

Medical liability, driven by rampant abuse by trial lawyers, is costing Americans billions of dollars, particularly driving health care costs through the roof.  Congress needs to act now to cap non-economic damages; cap attorney’s fees to limit frivolous lawsuits; cap punitive damages to a reasonable formula; impose a statute of limitations; and limit the liability of each party to the share of damages attributable to their individual conduct.

Stop the rip-off of American consumers and enact Medical Liability Reforms Now!

AGE will deliver your petition directly to your Member of Congress and to your Senators. The petition will include your name and the city and zip code where you live to validate that you are a constituent of those Members of Congress. The other identifying information will only be used by AGE to update you on issues of concern to your generation. Thanks for speaking up.

AMD is a dibilitating vision disease that demands full coverage by Medicare.  Congress should act immediately to require coverage for low-vision therapy and mandate an annual AMD screening for every Medicare beneficiary.

AGE will deliver your petition directly to your Member of Congress and to your Senators. The petition will include your name and the city and zip code where you live to validate that you are a constituent of those Members of Congress. The other identifying information will only be used by AGE to update you on issues of concern to your generation. Thanks for speaking up.

Economic growth and job creation in America depends on American companies competing effectively in world markets. Congress must immediately ease the current shortage of highly skilled workers available to American companies by substantially increasing the the cap on H-1B visas; increasing the number of permanent residency visas issued annually; and removing arbitrary restrictions on the number of visas issued to applicants from individual countries.

These reforms need immediate attention, and I am asking Congress to act now!

AGE will deliver your petition directly to your Member of Congress and to your Senators. The petition will include your name and the city and zip code where you live to validate that you are a constituent of those Members of Congress. The other identifying information will only be used by AGE to update you on issues of concern to your generation. Thanks for speaking up.