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Tuesday, October 1, 2024

US sends second aircraft carrier group to Middle East

The US ordered its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to remain in the Middle East and a second vessel is en route with Middle East tensions at a fever pitch following Iran’s attack on Israel, officials said.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the USS Abraham Lincoln will stay in the Middle East as the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier speeds along to the region, according to the Pentagon.

The ship will join America’s already large military arsenal in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, which helped defend Israel from Tehran’s latest attack against the Jewish state.

The USS Abraham Lincoln

The Lincoln was rushed to the Middle East in August to relieve the USS Theodore Roosevelt amid the rising tensions between Israel and Iran’s terror proxies.

The Lincoln is America’s fifth Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, among the largest warships in the world, with F-35 fighter jets on board, according to the US Navy.

The aircraft carrier is currently patrolling the Arabian Sea, just east of the Gulf of Aden where the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been attacking military and merchant ships allegedly tied to Israel.

The USS Harry S. Truman

The Truman, another Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, was originally set to replace the Lincoln before Austin ordered the presence of two warships in the region.

The vessel was previously in the Middle East during the early years of America’s war in Iraq and later oversaw 2,900 combat missions during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

How Israel's Iron Dome works

Israel’s Iron Dome is a high-tech missile defense system designed to shoot down incoming rockets and missiles before they can hit populated areas.

Detection: Radar scans the skies, tracking incoming rockets or missiles.
Assessment: The system calculates the threat — where the missile will hit.
Targeting: If the missile is heading for a populated area, Iron Dome locks on.
Interception: A missile is fired from an Iron Dome launcher, speeding to intercept.
Neutralization: The interceptor destroys the incoming rocket mid-air, preventing it from reaching its target.

USS Georgia

The USS Georgia guided-missile submarine arrived in the Middle East earlier this month specifically to aid Israel in the event of an attack from Iran or Hezbollah.

The nuclear-powered sub is armed with cruise missiles capable of intercepting attacks from the looming attacks from Iran and its terror proxies.

The Wasp Amphibious Ready Group

The Wasp Amphibious Ready Group has been stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean since June, with the fleet led by the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship.

The Wasp is joined by the USS New York amphibious transport dock and USS Oak Hill dock landing ship, which are in the region in the event of a mass evacuation operation from Lebanon, USNI News reported.

US officials have already called on citizens in Lebanon to flee the country over fears that a war between Israel and Hezbollah is inevitable.

American guided-missile destroyers

Along with the aircraft carriers and evacuation ships, the US has large guided-missile destroyers in the Middle East, three of which came under attack from the Houthi rebels last Friday.

The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS Spruance and USS Stockdale, along with the Portland-class USS Indianapolis, are operating in the Mediterranean and Red Sea quelling the Houthi attacks.

Also in the Mediterranean are the USS Cole and USS Bulkeley, which helped intercept Iran’s attacks on Israel.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/01/us-news/all-the-us-military-assets-in-the-middle-east-as-israel-iran-tensions-flare/

Medicaid expansion cost $1 trillion, double the estimate — Harris would make it worse

Kamala Harris’ plans for America’s health-care system are, like the rest of her agenda, a mysterious enigma.

But the biggest clue to her intentions is surely her budget-busting support for ObamaCare — and that should terrify taxpayers.

According to our new research, ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion has cost more than $1 trillion over the past 10 years — an unaffordable tab that will grow even faster under a Harris administration.

Medicaid expansion was the centerpiece of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ObamaCare. It remains the Democratic Party’s template for health-care reform, including Harris’ since-reversed 2019 promise to enact “Medicare for All.”

The policy rests on the idea that the federal government can effectively provide affordable coverage to every American. Since 2014, 40 states and Washington DC have bought into this lie by adding millions of able-bodied adults to the program’s rolls.

The Biden-Harris administration has cheered Medicaid expansion, while pushing holdout states to get on board. But neither Harris nor her boss have paid any mind to the staggering price tag.

States expected that extending Medicaid coverage to non-disabled, higher-income adults would cost taxpayers about $450 billion up to this point.

Instead, their cost overruns have reached $574 billion and counting — more than double what they anticipated.

The red ink is growing faster, too: We found that expansion cost 180% more than anticipated in 2023 alone.

For Democrats like Harris, the cost overruns are a feature, not a bug, reflecting the reality that more people are signing up for government-run coverage.

States initially estimated that only 6.5 million able-bodied adults would join the expanded program, while private estimates put the total at 8.6 million.

Yet by the end of 2023, more than 23 million able-bodied adults had enrolled.

They’re competing with the truly needy Americans who Medicaid was designed to help, leading to longer wait times and worse health outcomes in many cases.

The Biden-Harris administration has actively made this crisis worse.

In 2021, the administration began revoking waivers that allowed states to attach work requirements to able-bodied adults covered by Medicaid expansion, then told states that such requirements wouldn’t be allowed going forward.

Yet work requirements would have encouraged able-bodied adults to find jobs, saving billions of dollars by getting them onto private insurance.

Today, not a single one of those 23 million able-bodied adults is required to work — and our organization’s analysis of state data shows that 60% of them aren’t working.

If elected president, Harris is all but certain to continue this assault on taxpayers.

Her party opposes work requirements, and she’d likely push the 10 holdout states to expand Medicaid, perhaps forcing their hand through legislation or regulation.

We estimate this would cost at least another $670 billion over a 10-year span, adding another 11 million able-bodied adults to Medicaid.

If Harris pushes for more sweeping health-care changes — say, bringing back her earlier support for Medicare for All — she’ll cause even worse taxpayer pain.

Tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans would depend on poor-quality, government-run plans, inevitably costing more than expected while discouraging work.

Donald Trump has a superior track record: His first administration created the work requirements that Biden and Harris subsequently eliminated.

While few states had time to fully implement that policy, the experience of Arkansas, which got closest to doing so, shows how beneficial it is.

In roughly 10 months in 2018, Arkansas’ Medicaid-expansion population declined by 40,000 people, who either obtained jobs that offered private coverage or earned too much to qualify.

While the work requirement was suspended during litigation and the pandemic-era public health emergency, Arkansas was on track to save $300 million in its first year, with greater projected savings after that.

If Trump brought back his work requirements in a second term, dozens of states would likely enact them.

He’d also likely push Congress to enact nationwide work requirements, like those proposed in 2023 by House Republicans’ Limit, Save, Grow Act.

That bill, which would restrict the ability of able-bodied adults without young children to access Medicaid, would save $240 billion over the next decade, our analysis found — as people leave Medicaid for productive work and the superior private coverage that usually comes with it.

Taxpayers need the return of Donald Trump’s health-care policies: Under a President Harris, they can only expect a worsening health-care crisis — one that undermines America’s fiscal soundness, economic strength, and the well-being of the very people Medicaid is supposed to help.

Jonathan Bain is a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, where Jonathan Ingram is vice president of policy and research.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/01/opinion/medicaid-expansion-cost-1-trillion-double-estimate-studyaccording-to-our-new-research-obamacares-medicaid-expansion-has-cost-more-than-1-trillion-over-the-past-10-years-an-unaffordable-tab-that-will-g/

Biden won't force ports to resume operations by invoking labor law

As dockworkers strike at seaports on the East and Gulf Coasts, the Biden administration has affirmed it will not use a federal labor law known as the Taft-Hartley Act to intervene in the strike.

"We have not used Taft-Hartley, and we're not planning to," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told FOX Business' Edward Lawrence on Tuesday.

Unionized dockworkers at 36 East and Gulf Coast ports went on strike at midnight, Tuesday, amid an impasse in negotiations over a new contract with a group representing port employers.

The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which represents 45,000 dockworkers, began its first strike since 1977 after its six-year contract with the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents port employers, expired Monday night.

President Biden, whose administration has tried to facilitate talks between the two sides, has said that he won't use a federal labor law known as the Taft-Hartley Act to intervene in the strike. Under that law, Biden could take action that results in an 80-day "cooling off" period for negotiations to resume while workers are back at work.

Enacted in 1947 as an update to the National Labor Relations Act, the Taft-Hartley Act contained a variety of updates and reforms to labor laws and dispute mechanisms – including a new provision for settling labor disputes that create a national emergency.

Port strike (Left) President Biden (right)

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told FOX Business that President Biden will not invoke the Taft–Hartley Act to intervene in port strike. (Getty Images/FOX Business / Fox News)

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Taft-Hartley Act authorizes the president to intervene in a labor dispute after making a determination that there is a "threatened or actual strike or lockout."

Last month, the White House signaled that President Biden has "never invoked Taft-Hartley to break a strike," is not considering doing so now, and that the administration supports continued negotiations between the two sides.

"In your question to me about when is the president going to be involved, the president's message has been very clear," Jean-Pierre told Lawrence. "The president's going to continue to be regularly briefed. And we are urging USMX to come to the table to present a fair proposal to ILA."

U.S. seaports from Maine to Texas will be impacted by the strike, and analysis by J.P. Morgan estimated the daily cost of the port strike would cost the U.S. economy between $3.8 billion and $4.5 billion per day as operations slow.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/biden-wont-force-ports-resume-operations-invoking-labor-law

Nuclear Is Back: U.S. Closes On $1.5 B Loan To Resurrect Holtec's Palisades Nuclear Plant

Following the news of the Three Mile Island restart plans, it looks like our assertion that 'nuclear is back' is correct.

That's because this week the U.S. closed on a deal to resurrect another nuclear plant, Holtec's Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, thanks to a $1.52 billion loan from the Biden administration, according to Reuters.

A senior Biden administration official stated that reopening the plant could take up to two years—longer than the company's estimate.

The Reuters report said that the administration aims to triple U.S. nuclear power capacity as demand rises and climate concerns grow, which could include restarting decommissioned reactors like Three Mile Island, site of the nation’s worst nuclear accident. Restarting these plants is a complex and costly process that has never been done before in the U.S.

"Palisades is a climate comeback story," said White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi, emphasizing that nuclear power supports high-paying union jobs.

The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office is providing $1.52 billion in financing, along with $1.3 billion in public funding to power cooperatives Wolverine and Hoosier Energy, for the purchase of power from Palisades. Deputy Energy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small made the funding announcement.