Stephen Moore, an economist with the Wall Street Journal, appeared on Fox News recently to discuss the ramifications of the president’s new healthcare law…and his analysis is sure to come as a shock to those who haven’t been following the matter closely.

Though Barack Obama assured the middle class he would not raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 a year, Moore’s research shows that in reality, a significant percentage of the burden will be shouldered by those making $120,000 or less by the year 2016.

Link to Video:

The White House released its annual report to Congress on staff salaries. At 4:39 p.m. on Friday.

A quick review found the White House payroll appears to have grown since last year, going from $37.1 million in 2011 to $37.8 million in 2012. The number of employees listed also grew -- from 454 last year to 468 in 2012.

Abound Solar Inc., a U.S. solar manufacturer that was awarded a $400 million U.S. loan guarantee, will suspend operations and file for bankruptcy because its panels were too expensive to compete.

Abound borrowed about $70 million against the guarantee, the Loveland, Colorado-based company said today in a statement. It plans to file for bankruptcy protection in Wilmington, Delaware, next week.

The failure will follow that of Solyndra LLC, which shut down in August after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the same U.S. Energy Department program. Abound stopped production in February to focus on reducing costs after a global oversupply and increasing competition from China drove down the price of solar panels by half last year.

“Aggressive pricing actions from Chinese solar-panel companies have made it very difficult for an early stage startup company like Abound to scale in current market conditions,” the company said in the statement.

U.S. taxpayers may lose $40 million to $60 million on the loan after Abound’s assets are sold and the bankruptcy proceeding closes, Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman, said in a statement today.

“When the floor fell out on the price of solar panels, Abound’s product was no longer cost competitive,” LaVera said.

Bankruptcy Warning

Cliff Stearns, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight panel that has held several hearings and collected thousands of administration e-mails relating to Solyndra’s guarantee, said he didn’t think Abound’s closure warranted its own investigation.

“We know why they went bankrupt. We warned them they would go bankrupt,” Stearns, a Florida Republican, told reporters today. “The larger question is why the administration was pursuing a green-energy policy in which companies are going bankrupt and wasting taxpayer money.”

Stearns said his panel would probably hold a hearing on the guarantee program. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, continues to investigate the loan-guarantee program and still hasn’t received some requested documents from the Energy Department, said Jeffrey Solsby, a spokesman for Issa.

Abound was awarded the loan guarantee to build two factories to make thin-film panels using cadmium telluride. It completed one plant, in Longmont, Colorado, and never began construction on the second, which was planned for Tipton, Indiana. The company last received money from the Energy Department in August, before Solyndra’s collapse.

Economic Boost

Representative Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, said he supported Abound because he thought the company would boost his state’s economy.

“We had a terrible economic problem. Plants were closing there in that area,” Burton told reporters in Capitol Hill today. “We thought this would be a great way to create jobs. If I had known that Abound, or Solyndra, had been in the fiscal situation it was in, I certainly would have never supported it.”

“This is not surprising at all,” Anthony Kim, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York, said today in an interview. “They were trying to sell to a competitive, over- supplied market with limited production. That keeps costs high.”

$35 Billion

The Energy Department has provided almost $35 billion in loans, loan guarantees and conditional commitments to renewable- energy companies. About 35 percent of that is for solar- generating projects, which benefit from falling panel prices, compared with less than 4 percent for solar manufacturers, according to LaVera.

Besides Abound and Solyndra, two other solar manufacturers received loan guarantees. 1366 Technologies Inc. won approval to borrow as much as $150 million to produce polysilicon for solar panels and SoloPower Inc. was awarded a $197 million guarantee to make rolls of flexible solar panels using a copper-indium- gallium-selenide composite.

Neither 1366 nor SoloPower have drawn funding under the Energy Department program, LaVera said.

While spending on the food stamp program has increased 100 percent under President Barack Obama, the government continues to push more Americans to enroll in the welfare program.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has embraced entire promotional campaigns designed to encourage eligible Americans to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.

A pamphlet currently posted at the USDA website encourages local SNAP offices to throw parties as one way to get potentially eligible seniors to enroll in the program.

“Throw a Great Party. Host social events where people mix and mingle,” the agency advises. “Make it fun by having activities, games, food, and entertainment, and provide information about SNAP. Putting SNAP information in a game format like BINGO, crossword puzzles, or even a ‘true/false’ quiz is fun and helps get your message across in a memorable way.”

The agency’s most recent outreach effort targets California, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and the New York metro area with radio ads.

The ads have been running since March and are scheduled to continue through the end of June — at a cost of $2.5 million — $3 million, CNN Money reported Monday.

CNN Money further noted that the USDA began running paid radio ads in 2004, under President George W. Bush, who oversaw a 63 percent increase in average food stamp participation.

In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today one our of every seven receive the benefit. After the recession, the ratio is expected to hover around one out of every nine, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Despite the high rate of food stamp participation, the USDA has numerous blueprints posted on their website aimed at getting more people to enroll in SNAP. A 2009 State Outreach Plan Guidance explains why the agency believes states should adopt strategies to get more people on the rolls:

Outreach Can Help Increase Participation in SNAP Resulting in Multiple Benefits for Participants, States, and Communities: SNAP is the cornerstone of the nation’s nutrition safety net and an investment in our future. SNAP offers the opportunity for improved nutrition and progress toward economic self-sufficiency for participants who become stronger members of the community. However, too many low income people, especially seniors, working people, and legal immigrants, who are eligible for SNAP do not participate and thus forego assistance that could stretch their food dollars and help improve their nutrition.

According to the USDA, greater food stamp usage can be an economic plus for states and communities.

“Every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.20 in an additional community spending,” the USDA contends in their outreach guidance. “If the national participation rate rose five percentage points, 1.9 million more low-income people would have an additional $1.3 billion in benefits per year to use to purchase healthy food and $2.5 billion total in new economic activity would be generated nationwide.”

During debate on the 2012 farm bill earlier this month, Senate Republicans pushed for amendments aimed at reducing the cost and participation in the food stamp program.

The Democratically controlled Senate voted down Republican efforts — denying amendments targeting the swelling rolls that were introduced by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and others from Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions — arguing they could reduce access to those in need.

“The vast majority of current programs are focused on making poverty more comfortable … rather than giving people the tools that will help them escape poverty.”

The government is not making much headway reducing poverty despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute.Despite an unprecedented increase in federal anti-poverty spending the national poverty rate has not declined, it finds.

“[S]ince President Obama took office, federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year.” the study says.

Federal welfare spending this year now totals $668 billion, spread out over 126 programs, while the poverty rate that remains stubbornly high at nearly 15 percent – roughly where it was in 1965, when President Johnson declared a federal War on Poverty.

While the study concedes that some of the increased spending under Obama is a result of the recession and the counter-cyclical nature of anti-poverty programs, it also finds that some of the increase is deliberate, with the government having expanded eligibility for welfare programs.

“But the dramat­ically larger increase also suggests that part of the program’s growth is due to conscious policy choices by this administration to ease eligibility rules and expand caseloads,” the Cato report says. “For example, income limits for eligibility have risen twice as fast as inflation since 2007 and are now roughly 10 percent higher than they were when Obama took office.”

In fact, the study points out that according to the administration’s own projections, federal welfare spending is unlikely to decline even after the economy recovers – further evidence that not all of the increase in spending is recession-related.

“All this spending has not bought an ap­preciable reduction in poverty,” the study says. “[T]he poverty rate has remained relatively constant since 1965, despite rising welfare spending.”

The study faults the way poverty programs are designed, saying that the increase in spending and largely unchanged poverty rate showed that the issue is not a matter of money, but a matter of what the programs aim to achieve.

“The vast majority of current programs are focused on making poverty more comfortable – giv­ing poor people more food, better shelter, health care, and so forth – rather than giving people the tools that will help them escape poverty.”

Instead, the study recommends refocusing anti-poverty efforts on keeping people in school, discouraging out-of-wedlock births, and encouraging people to get a job – even if that job is a low-wage one.

“It would make sense therefore to shift our anti-poverty efforts from government programs that simply provide money or goods and services to those who are living in poverty to efforts to create the condi­tions and incentives that will make it eas­ier for people to escape poverty.

Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent.

Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.

But the government won’t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn’t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.

Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets.

As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.

As the House debates the once-every-five-years farm bill, the majority of which goes to food stamps, there is a renewed and fervent call from a broad spectrum of camps that the information - some of the most high-dollar, frequently requested and closely held secrets of the government - be set free.

“We can’t release it based on federal rules. If it were up to us, I wouldn’t have a problem releasing the information. It’s taxpayer money,” said Tom Steinhauser with the division of benefit programs for the Virginia Department of Social Services.

The District said it would be illegal to tell the newspaper how many food stamp dollars were flowing to each local vendor, but first offered to sell The Washington Times the information for $125,000.

“Why don’t you just pay the charges? Your paper has a lot of money,” said David Umansky, spokesman for the District’s chief financial officer.

Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO’s office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

States instructed not to tell

Maryland denied The Times’ request for data under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the information belonged to the federal government, which instructed states not to release it.

Legislation seemingly designed to protect the industry goes so far as to say that anyone who releases the amount of food stamp dollars paid to a store can be jailed.

Profiting from the poor’s taxpayer-funded purchases has become big business for a mix of major companies and corner bodegas, which have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the USDA to keep the money flowing freely.

The National Association of Convenience Store Operators alone spends millions of dollars on lobbying yearly, including $1 million in the first quarter of this year.

In February, 7-Eleven hired a former aide to House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, to lobby on “issues related to the general application and approval process for qualified establishments serving SNAP-eligible recipients.”

The USDA is notoriously secretive about who receives its money, relying on weak legal reasoning, said Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“USDA hides behind a specious proprietary data argument: The public doesn’t want to know internal business decisions or information about specific individuals’ finances,” he said. “The USDA sees retailers, junk food manufacturers and the big ag lobby as their customers, rather than the taxpayer.”

The agency also has no idea what type of food the benefits are buying, even though the combination of universal bar codes and benefit cards makes that entirely feasible.

“It’s one of those questions that frankly those of us who have been working on this issue have been struggling with a long time because we need to see the data. The industry looks at it as proprietary. The USDA doesn’t track where that money goes,” said Beth Johnson, a former Senate Agriculture Committee and USDA staffer who now consults for the Snack Food Association.

She noted that stores have breakdowns of products bought with food stamps but declined to share them with the USDA.

The junk food lobby appreciates the informational void.

‘Anecdotal info’

Susan Smith of the National Confectioners Association, a candy trade group, dismissed assertions that food stamp recipients commonly buy candy and soda as “anecdotal info,” while declining to call for the collection of statistics.

The government is “keenly interested” in what types of food the $80 billion purchases, but has not made an effort to track it.

“USDA is preparing to update a study of the feasibility of capturing detailed purchase data from over 200,000 retailers that redeem SNAP benefits, and continue to explore other options to gather information on SNAP participants’ diet quality,” Jimmie Turner, a spokesman for the USDA, said by email.

The demand for the information has been festering for years.

Last year, the Argus Leader, a South Dakota newspaper, sued the USDA for the information, and the USDA has fought fiercely in court filings that have stretched through this month to prevent disclosure.

This month, the public-interest group Eat Drink Politics called on the USDA to release the totals by retailer and for Congress to require the USDA to determine what types of food are purchased.

In a few cases, states have released subsets of the information, triggering the anger of the USDA.

In two years, Wal-Mart received about half of the $1 billion in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma, the state revealed to the Tulsa World, as Eat Drink Politics noted.

In the District and other urban areas, much more is likely spent at corner stores where junk food is more abundant and fraud is more common. If a small corner store reported high levels of food stamp sales, that could be an obvious indicator that it was accepting customers’ food stamps and giving back cash, a common scheme.

Eat Drink Politics called on the House to mandate that the USDA begin tracking food types and release store totals, calling them “critical to effective evaluation.”

The Senate passed a version of the farm bill Thursday that lowers food stamp spending by $4.5 billion. But no one in either chamber has proposed an amendment to require the USDA to reveal where the remaining money is going.

Democrat Debbie Stabenow helped secure $744.2 million in earmarks for her home state of Michigan at the start of her second term in the Senate. But doling out pork is no longer allowed, so in Stabenow’s current reelection campaign she’s had to find other ways to look out for her constituents. The lawmaker included expanded crop assistance programs in the $969 billion farm bill she wrote as chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee and persuaded Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) to let her open debate on the legislation early, some four months before the current one expires.

Sponsoring a big bill can afford the same kind of bragging rights that lawmakers used to score for piggybacking their pet spending projects on someone else’s work. For Stabenow, the timing was also brilliant, given the crippling crop losses Michigan farmers suffered this spring because of extreme weather.

Two years after federal lawmakers banned earmarks amid an outcry that they were bloating the country’s deficit, Democrats up for reelection are getting creative when it comes to convincing voters they’ve got their backs. Enter Reid, who’s trying to defend 23 seats by doling out plum sponsorships and other opportunities for members in competitive races. He tapped Senator Bob Casey as the lead sponsor of the successful 2012 payroll tax cut extension, a measure popular with middle-class workers in Pennsylvania, a presidential battleground. Washington Senator Maria Cantwell got to take credit for sponsoring an amendment to extend the Export-Import Bank’s charter, a measure backed by Boeing (BA), which builds airplanes in her state that are supported by Ex-Im loans. Reid also cleared the way for a vote on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s amendment to extend a moratorium on closing post offices, including one in Manchin’s Republican-leaning state.

“They’re clearly being somewhat politically strategic in how they are scheduling the floor,” says South Dakota Senator John Thune, a member of the Republican leadership. “There’s no question about that.” Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson, doesn’t take that as a compliment: “I think it’s a little silly to pick these out and say they’re different from other bills just by virtue of the fact that 2012ers are involved.” It’s standard practice for any senator “who has an issue that’s important to them” to enlist Reid’s help in getting attention, Jentleson says.

In Michigan, abnormally warm temperatures in mid-March were followed by a freeze that ravaged the state’s fruits, wiping out an estimated 90 percent of its cherries, peaches, and other crops. They would have more protection under the expanded insurance program in Stabenow’s proposed farm bill, which was to come up for a vote by June 22. The senator’s spokesman, Cullen Schwarz, stresses that the measure “helps farmers and business owners in all 50 states continue to create agriculture jobs.” That message is likely to come through loud and clear, says John Truscott, an aide to Michigan’s former Republican governor, John Engler. “You can bet when this agriculture bill is done, she will probably be on every radio station in the state.”

The bottom line: Without earmarks to tout in their home states, Democratic Senators up for reelection have secured plum assignments from Harry Reid.

This was a good week for the welfare state (and a bad one for taxpayers) as the Senate approved a farm bill that will spend over $750 billion in the next 10 years on food stamps. One of every seven Americans is on the food dole, and that depressing number isn't likely to change much in the coming years.

The senator most responsible for shielding the program from even modest cuts and reforms was Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democrat from New York, who is now Washington's new queen of food stamps. Ms. Gillibrand recently declared that "food stamps are an extraordinary investment because for every dollar that you put into the SNAP program, you get out $1.71."

When Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama had the temerity to challenge Ms. Gillibrand's economic logic, she scoffed: "If he doesn't understand what a return on investment means, maybe we can spend time explaining it to him." And her explanation came down to this: "This is money that is literally going to feed children. And I don't know if he's ever heard a young child say to him: 'I'm still hungry.'" Under Ms. Gillibrand's economic thinking, if only we could double the number of Americans in the bread lines, the GDP would grow so fast we wouldn't have any more unemployment in America.

Ms. Gillibrand not only blocked reforms, such as an asset test to make sure families who can afford to buy their own food aren't scamming the system, she even sponsored an amendment to cancel $4 billion of savings reported out by the Democrat's own Agriculture Committee. This would trim the program spending by 0.5%. Her amendment was too much for many Senate Democrats and it failed with only 33 yes votes.

Ms. Gillibrand even invoked the Bible in her plea to save the welfare program from cuts reminding her colleagues that God wants us to "feed the poor." But she is opposed to any work requirements in exchange for the free food. The Bible also says "he who shall not work shall not eat," but Ms. Gillibrand never mentioned that since it doesn't support her argument that having more Americans on food stamps is great for the U.S. economy.

The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).

Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.

As explained in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“economic stimulus”) of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.

The 1603 program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and also help them to achieve “ ‘the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs’ in the renewable energy sector.”

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EREL) tracked the grant program from its inception in 2009 through Nov. 10, 2011. Its report is entitled, Preliminary Analysis of the Jobs and Economic Impacts of Renewable Energy Projects Supported by the 1603 Treasury Grant Program.

The report explains that the program provided “approximately $9.0 billion in funds to over 23,000 PV and large wind projects.”  PV stands for photovoltaic, which is the method by which solar power is turned into electricity, usually with solar panels or solar cells.  There were specifically 197 large wind projects and 23,692 PV projects that received funds, according to the EREL report.

For calculating the number of green jobs created, the EREL did not actually count the people working at the facilities but instead relied upon Jobs and Economic Development Impact, or JEDI, computer models.

In its summary, the EREL report states that for the 2009-11 timeframe there were an average 52,000-75,000 “direct and indirect jobs per year” created for the construction, installation, and related work on the wind and solar projects.

These were temporary jobs, construction and installation work at the facilities, not long-term positions at the green energy sites.

The number of  these “indirect,” temporary construction jobs averaged between 43,000 and 66,000, according to the EREL, and the “direct” jobs “supporting the design, development, and construction/installation of systems” averaged out to about 9,400 per year.

For the operation and maintenance (O&M) of the photovoltaic and large wind systems, however, the report states there are “between 5,100 and 5,500 direct and indirect jobs per year on an ongoing basis over the 20- to 30-year estimated life of the systems.”

The report further clarifies that from that number there are 910 direct jobs and 4,200-4,600 indirect jobs per year.

The 910 jobs are “directly supporting the O&M of the systems” and  that number “is significantly less than the number of [indirect] jobs supporting manufacturing and associated supply chains.”

Through the grant program, $9 billion was spent to, in the end, establish 910 jobs that will last upwards of 30 years. That means those jobs cost, in the end, about $9.8 million to create.

Add in the indirect jobs -- high estimate of 4,600 -- and there are 5,510 total jobs (direct and indirect). Starting with the $9 billion in grants, the end result to establish 5,510 jobs averages out to $1.63 million per job.