A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – A new report from government actuaries has revealed that the Congressional Budget Office was scandalously off in its estimates of the impact of Obamacare’s individual mandate, a miscalculation that has had significant ramifications for healthcare and tax policy over the past decade.

CBO estimates about the importance of an individual mandate to a national healthcare scheme prodded President Barack Obama into including the unpopular provision into the law in the first place. The mandate projections also played a key role in President Trump’s two major legislative initiatives. The fact that the CBO assumed 14 million could lose coverage mainly due to the elimination of mandate penalties helped kill the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, while its later assumption that 13 million fewer insured individuals would mean less spending on subsidies from the federal government helped get the 2017 Republican tax cut across the finish line by improving the budgetary math. Yet those incredibly influential estimates now appear to have been wildly off. [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The United States Consulate General in Jerusalem, which serves Palestinians, will be absorbed into the new US Embassy to Israel in March, a US official said on Tuesday, giving a date for a merger that has been condemned by Palestinians.

The decision to create a single diplomatic mission was announced last October by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who did not say at the time when this would take place.

“The merger of the consulate and the embassy will take place on March 4th or 5th, at which point the position of the consul-general will end, said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the date has not been announced yet by Washington. [ Source: Ynet News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Democratic National Committee passed a resolution last week calling on the US to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, a sign that the party’s 2020 presidential candidates will run on returning America to the landmark pact from which US President Donald Trump withdrew.

At the February 16 meeting in Washington, DC, the DNC adopted a motion solidifying the party’s position that US should rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the deal is formally known, according to a text of the resolution obtained by The Times of Israel.

“The United States should return to its obligations under the JCPOA and utilize multilateral and bilateral diplomacy to achieve political solutions to remaining challenges regarding Iran,” the document says. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Iran’s foreign minister accused Israel of “adventurism,” with its campaign of airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria and said he could not rule out the possibility that they could lead to a war between the Mideast arch foes.

Speaking to the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, Mohammad Javad Zarif said Israel constantly violated Syrian and Lebanese sovereignty, while Iran was in Syria at the invitation of the Assad government.

Israel has carried out dozens of airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria in a bid to prevent Iran from entrenching itself in the country and transferring advanced weapons to the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – After marathon, all-night talks, the leaders of the two top-polling centrist parties, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, announced Thursday that they had agreed to forge a centrist alliance to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the upcoming elections.

The announcement, just after dawn, said that Gantz’s Israel Resilience party and Lapid’s Yesh Atid had agreed that should they win and form a government, Gantz would be prime minister first for a period of two years, before Lapid would take over.

The announcement also said that popular former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi had agreed to join the united list in the wake of the merger, further adding to their broad centrist appeal. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Representatives of European Union governments have voted in favor of a plan in the EU Parliament to rewrite copyright rules, which critics say would effectively kill the Web there.

But the final few steps to implement the measure face strong opposition.

A key issue is a demand for a link tax, which would require any company linking to another source, a news site for example, to pay for that link. [ Source: World Net Daily (Read More…) ]

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