The candidate?

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High Obamacare deductibles actually DEPRIVE people of insurance

The mantra that progressives used to pass ObamaCare was the constant call for “universal coverage.” Everyone, it was argued, should have a health insurance policy, and this goal was considered important enough to force everyone in the country to buy a product whether they wanted it or not.

But focusing on one goal to the exclusion of all others can lead to unexpected pitfalls, and now, as ObamaCare turns five, we are seeing that universal coverage is meaningless without taking into account the price and quality of the – now mandatory – insurance policies.

By now, we’ve all heard about the cancelled policies and the rising premiums, which the administration has tried to justify with the unprovable claim “it would have been worse without ObamaCare.” We’ve heard about the coming doctor shortage, and the declining attendance at medical schools. And we’ve heard about the rising penalties for those who choose not to buy health insurance. But there is one aspect of insurance that has not received enough attention, and that is more devastating to people’s actual access to care than almost anything else: rising deductibles.

The deductible on an insurance policy is the amount you, the customer, have to pay out of pocket before the insurance company starts picking up the tab. Obviously, low deductibles are preferable to high ones, but some people may opt for a higher deductible in exchange for lower monthly premiums. Or at least, they used to back when they actually had a choice.

Under the Affordable Care Act, choice has been discarded in favor of uniformity, and the practical result is the worst of both worlds: higher premiums, and outrageous deductibles all at the same time!

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a study showing just how few people are actually able to afford ObamaCare’s deductibles. On average, just 63 percent of non-poor, non-elderly households have enough money to afford a mid-range deductible of $1,200 to $2,400. Most mid-priced ObamaCare plans fall into this category, meaning that more than a third of people who are forced to buy these plans cannot actually afford to use them.

For less well-off individuals, the news gets worse. For higher deductible plans, between $2,500 and $5,000, only 51 percent of households have enough money to pay. This is particularly grim, considering the individual deductible for ObamaCare’s cheapest plan, the Bronze Plan, has been set at an astonishing $5,181 for 2015.

People who opt for the Bronze Plan are not likely to be rolling in cash. These are the people who do not have employer-provided health insurance, and who want to pay as little per month as possible, while gambling that they remain healthy enough to avoid any serious hospital visits. In short, young people and those working temporary or part-time jobs, and not exactly the type to have $5,000 just lying around. Unaffordable insurance might as well be no insurance at all, except, of course, that anyone trying to opt out will be punished with steep penalties from the IRS.

And even without making these kinds of assumptions about Bronze Plan users, the fact that fully half of households cannot afford such high deductibles should be cause for concern for anyone who cares about actually lowering the cost and increasing the quality of medical care, rather than just ticking symbolic “universal coverage” box.

All this reveals what we have known all along. ObamaCare was never about helping people. There is no point in having insurance at all if the deductibles will bankrupt you, and universal coverage becomes a meaningless shibboleth for progressives more concerned with legacies and talking points than with actual governance.

Anyone actually interested in making health care in America better, rather than simply scoring political points, would do well to follow the principles of free markets and patient-centered care. It’s time to dismantle a broken federal bureaucracy, and let doctors go back to serving the interests of patients, not of the government.

SOURCE

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The latest Doc Fix will shaft the really sick and the elderly

When the Senate returns from recess this week, it will consider the “Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act” (MACR). The bill has acquired many names such as “The Doc Fix Fix” and “Budget Buster,” but a more appropriate one is “IPAB-lite.”

IPAB — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — was created as part of Obamacare to cut Medicare expenditures whenever those expenditures grew too quickly. Thankfully, IPAB’s unpopularity has thus far prevented it from getting off the ground. Unfortunately, the changes MACR makes to Medicare’s payment system seem very much along the lines of what IPAB would do. After all, the new payment system within MACR is consistent with IPAB’s mission, incentive structure, and likely outcomes.

IPAB is the sort of grandiose scheme one would expect from social engineers. Its mission includes producing proposals “aimed at extending the solvency of Medicare, lowering Medicare cost-growth, improving health outcomes for beneficiaries, [and] promoting quality and efficiency.” Of course, whether IPAB could achieve such goals is dubious given its incentive structure.

The incentives that IPAB’s board members would face would give them little reason to be concerned about the adverse outcomes of their proposals. IPAB members would likely pay little to no cost if they made decisions that harmed patients. The most they might suffer is public criticism and a resignation before their term is up — assuming, of course, that the consequences of their decisions become apparent before their term expires. Given how long it can sometimes take for policy decisions to be linked directly to bad consequences, IPAB members may be long gone from the board before the consequences of their decisions become apparent. If IPAB members are unaccountable for being wrong, odds are their decisions will have adverse outcomes.

One of the most likely effects of IPAB’s cost-cutting authority is that sicker patients would suffer the most. The reason is that such patients have the hardest time fighting back. More specifically, they have little ability to influence Congress to overturn IPAB’s proposals. Relatively few people become seriously ill each year, not enough to have much impact at the ballot box. Furthermore, people who are ill are generally not engaging in the networking, meetings and other activities necessary to influence Congress. As such, IPAB’s proposals could harm the sick with little political fallout.

The new payment system MACR creates for Medicare is eerily similar to the IPAB model. Dubbed the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), it will reward or penalize physicians who treat Medicare patients based on various metrics. Two of the metrics that MIPS will use to grade physicians are how well physicians’ patients score on quality measures and how many medical resources physicians use to treat patients. Under MIPS, a physician will receive a composite score, between zero and 100, based on how well he meets the MIPS criteria. Each year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will choose a “threshold” number. If a physician minimizes the use of medical resources while his patients score well on quality measures, he will likely score above that threshold and he will receive a bonus. If he scores below it, he will be penalized with a cut to his Medicare reimbursement.

The intent behind MIPS is consistent with the IPAB mission of lowering Medicare’s cost growth and improving quality. The quality measures and resource use components of MIPS are supposed to promote those goals by rewarding physicians who provide quality care at a lower cost.

But it is unlikely MIPS will achieve those goals without also harming the sickest patients. First, MIPS will be run by people with incentives similar to IPAB. The various metrics and thresholds will be devised by CMS bureaucrats, most of whom will have civil service protection. Thus, it will be all but impossible to fire them, even if MIPS does harm patients. Additionally, CMS will be advised by professional medical organizations on which quality measures to use. They, too, will pay little cost for being wrong since they receive their funding from health-care professionals and not patients.

Second, MIPS will incentivize physicians to avoid the sickest patients. For physicians, the easiest way to have patients who score well on quality measures and limit the use of resources is to treat patients who are only moderately ill. Patients who have their diabetes or their heart conditions under control will generate better scores on quality measures such a blood sugar level or blood pressure. Keeping such patients healthy will involve fewer resources. These factors will increase the chances that a physician gets a bonus on his Medicare fees.

By contrast, sicker patients will score poorly on quality measures. Treating them will require more resources. A sicker caseload likely means a physician will fall below the MIPS threshold and see his Medicare fees cut. In short, the sickest Medicare patients will have a harder time finding physicians who will treat them thanks to MIPS.

Yet it is the sicker patients who are most in need of a physician’s care. Indeed, they are the patients that a program like Medicare is supposed to serve in the first place. When President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965 he said, “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”

Yet the MIPS program could do exactly that, at least for the Medicare patients with the most serious health problems. And changing it will prove exceedingly difficult as the sickest patients lack the political clout necessary to influence Congress

One of the goals of MACR, eliminating the unworkable Sustainable Growth Rate, is a worthy one. Getting rid of this perennial problem, however, should not come by way of a new payment system that will make it harder for sicker patients to obtain physician care. The Senate should remove MIPS. Otherwise, lawmakers risk installing an IPAB-style payment system in Medicare.

SOURCE

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Is ISIS Islamic, and Other “Foolish” Debates

“Do they think we are Jewish now? LOL,” responded one ISIS fighter in Syria when asked for his thoughts on the current public debate about whether the Islamic State is actually Islamic. He went on to make an argument, as many of these fighters often do when interviewed, that not only is the Islamic State Islamic but it is the purest and most pristine form of Islam, the kind most in line with what God and His Prophet had intended all along. Another ISIS fighter from South Africa, when asked how he knew that the Islamic State was legitimate, remarked that “I just used my brain.”

“The truth is never endorsed by the masses,” he said. “It’s always the smallest groups that are firm in truth. Migration becomes compulsory when a caliphate is established on the foundations of Sharia Law, and Muslims around the world have no valid excuse to remain amongst the infidels in enemy lands.”

This line of argument by members of the Islamic State and, to be sure, numerous other Salafi-Jihadi movements creates a major dilemma for Muslim communities around the world. How are they supposed to deal with violent movements within their faith, tiny in number but claiming greater religious authenticity, and greater claim to the truth? While this question and the debate surrounding it has been a persistent undercurrent in Western societies since 9/11 at least, the most recent spike in the conversation occurred after Graeme Wood’s cover story in the Atlantic and the numerous responses that followed. It was a welcome conversation, even if, as Wood himself recently noted, the “debate is mostly foolish.”

It is indeed foolish for a few different reasons. Firstly, the debate is largely between an “academic” view of Islam and the divisions within it, peaceful or otherwise, and a normative view of Islam, which seeks to distance the rigid, conservative, and violent forms of the religion from the one practiced by the vast majority of Muslims around the world. To argue that ISIS isn’t “Islamic” in a normative sense is to argue, to some degree, that Salafism isn’t a branch of Islam and that jihad isn’t a noble concept in the religion, arguments that are false and misleading, and severely hinder attempts to understand these movements properly.

While there was some discussion following 9/11 about whether “Al-Qaeda was Islamic”, the debate wasn’t as heated as it is today with the Islamic State. Al-Qaeda was in many ways easier to set aside – they were strange men with beards living in far off caves. When Muslim youth in Western countries join in significant enough numbers, it raises the question of Islamic authenticity more acutely. This happens even though Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are not all that different in their commitment to violent Salafi theology. The only difference, as Cole Bunzel recently pointed out, is that ISIS practices it “with greater severity.”

Secondly, what has been missing from virtually all the articleswritten on the topic thus far is a sustained analysis of ISIS primary documents and actual interviews with jihadi fighters in Syria and Iraq. Looking at ISIS documents, murals, billboards, media releases, and other publications, as well conducting interviews with fighters themselves, offers the best insight into the sources of inspiration for the group’s ideology, which defies simple characterizations. Most broadly, ISIS’ ideology is based on a narrative that is well-known, that the Muslim world has been in decline due to the lack of a Caliphate under which Muslims can fulfill their faith by living according to Islamic Law. The state of the Muslim world today is contrasted with an idealized period of history – the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Islam, not only referring to the ‘rightly-guided’ caliphs who immediately succeeded Muhammad but also the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates extending through the medieval period that saw the Muslim world further ahead in scientific and human development than the West.

As a result of this projection onto an idealized medieval period, ISIS documents and publications do not adopt a mere ‘back to basic sources’ approach (in this case, the Qur’an and Sunna embodied in the hadith and life of the Prophet). Rather, great emphasis is placed on showing respect for the rulings and opinions of authorities of the four traditional schools of Sunni jurisprudence developed during the medieval period. To be sure, that does not mean no authority is given to modern jihadist thinkers or the Salafi-Wahhabi purist ‘reform’ trend dating back to the 18th century often invoked to describe ISIS’ inspiration.

While statements by Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, Sayyid Qutb, and Wahhabi scholars can all be found in detail in ISIS documents and publications, there are also considerable documents citing opinion from the four schools of Islamic legal tradition. For example, in a statement distributed in the Fallujah area on offering prayers on Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr, three differing categories of opinion are given on whether the prayers are obligatory, citing all four schools to illustrate the range. In other instances, the concept of ijmaa (consensus) among the Ahl al-’Ilm (theologians, jurists etc.) is stressed, such as in a Friday sermon for Ninawa province mosques on the division of the world into the abodes of Islam and disbelief.

One could go on, but it is in the realm of IS fatwas in particular – issued by its Diwan al-Eftaa wa al-Buhuth – where the impressive ability to find opinions from medieval jurists and theologians is laid bare. Many of them are unknown to most of the outside world, including contemporary Muslims. The best example is the fatwa ISIS issued to justify burning alive the Jordanian pilot, deemed an ‘apostate’. Many were quick to say this practice is absolutely condemned in Islam, but ISIS cited Hanafi and Shafi’i jurist opinion to claim it is permissible, including specific citation of a 15th century Egyptian Shafi’i jurist.

Though the Islamic State’s approach can be dismissed as “selective quoting” of tradition, the fact remains that ISIS’ critics can be accused of the same thing. The problem is that with such a huge corpus of Islamic literature and no central infallible authority like the Pope to regulate teachings, many of ISIS’ actions, seen as heinous in this day and age, can find a place within the vastness of Islamic tradition.

We may dismiss such evidence by claiming that ISIS is only citing them in order gain legitimacy and credibility among its followers, but that’s precisely the point: they feel reassured that they have a coherent theological basis in their actions. Of course it is inaccurate to say that ISIS is Islam en bloc, but to label the movement un-Islamic is to take a normative, and ultimately self-defeating, stance. It is an argument which ignores some very basic evidence regarding the movement and its history, and impedes proper understanding of what they believe and where they are heading.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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It's not poverty after all!

The Left's all-purpose explanation won't do for sex crimes. Latest academic findings below. And it's "whole of nation" data, not requiring sampling, which makes the findings exceptionally firm. Sex offending is 40% genetic and only 2% related to home background. 58% is all other causes -- so the genetic influence stands out.

As findings in the life sciences go, the effect of genetics reported below is huge. Medical researchers greet odds ratios of less than 1.00 with celebrations and ululations (e.g. here). The odds ratio of 5.1 reported below would leave them gasping. Many would never in their entire research career see a ratio that high

So let me summarize the findings below in plain language: Some people are born bad

Out of political correctness (All men are equal, you know), the authors below would no doubt object to that formulation -- but that is what their numbers show

Sexual offending runs in families: A 37-year nationwide study

By Niklas Långström et al.

Abstract

Background: Sexual crime is an important public health concern. The possible causes of sexual aggression, however, remain uncertain.

Methods: We examined familial aggregation and the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to sexual crime by linking longitudinal, nationwide Swedish crime and multigenerational family registers. We included all men convicted of any sexual offence (N = 21,566), specifically rape of an adult (N = 6131) and child molestation (N = 4465), from 1973 to 2009. Sexual crime rates among fathers and brothers of sexual offenders were compared with corresponding rates in fathers and brothers of age-matched population control men without sexual crime convictions. We also modelled the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors to the liability of sexual offending.

Results: We found strong familial aggregation of sexual crime [odds ratio (OR) = 5.1, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 4.5–5.9] among full brothers of convicted sexual offenders. Familial aggregation was lower in father-son dyads (OR = 3.7, 95% CI = 3.2–4.4) among paternal half-brothers (OR = 2.1, 95% CI = 1.5–2.9) and maternal half-brothers (OR = 1.7, 95% CI = 1.2–2.4). Statistical modelling of the strength and patterns of familial aggregation suggested that genetic factors (40%) and non-shared environmental factors (58%) explained the liability to offend sexually more than shared environmental influences (2%). Further, genetic effects tended to be weaker for rape of an adult (19%) than for child molestation (46%).

Conclusions: We report strong evidence of familial clustering of sexual offending, primarily accounted for by genes rather than shared environmental influences. Future research should possibly test the effectiveness of selective prevention efforts for male first-degree relatives of sexually aggressive individuals, and consider familial risk in sexual violence risk assessment.

SOURCE

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Practical Thoughts on Immigration

This is a long article below but it covers the issues very well so I have decided to put it up holus bolus -- JR

The lesson from the last 20 years of immigration policy is that lawlessness breeds more lawlessness. Once a people or a government decides to normalize one form of lawbreaking, other forms of lawlessness will follow until finally the rule of law itself is in profound jeopardy. Today, we have a constitutional crisis on our hands. President Obama has decided that because Congress has not granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S., he will do so himself. Let us ponder for a moment just how shameless this assertion of power is.

Article 2, Section 3, of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision assumes that there is a law for the president to execute. But in this case, the “problem” that Obama is purporting to fix is the absence of a law granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Rather than executing a law, Obama is making one up—arrogating to himself a function that the Constitution explicitly allocates to Congress. Should this unconstitutional power grab stand, we will have moved very far in the direction of rule by dictator. Pace Obama, the absence of a congressional law granting amnesty is not evidence of political failure that must somehow be corrected by unilateral executive action; it is evidence of the lack of popular consensus regarding amnesty. There has been no amnesty statute to date because the political will for such an amnesty is lacking.

On February 16, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen halted President Obama’s illegal amnesty with a temporary injunction. The proposed amnesty program, Judge Hanen found, went far beyond mere prosecutorial discretion not to enforce the law against individuals. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security proposed to confer on illegal aliens a new legal status known as “legal presence.” But Congress has not granted DHS the power to create and bestow legal status. The amnesty program represented a “complete abdication” of DHS’s responsibility to enforce the law, Judge Hanen declared. Indeed, DHS was actively thwarting the express will of Congress.

Pursuant to traditional canons of judicial interpretation, Judge Hanen ruled against the Obama administration on
the narrowest possible grounds in order to avoid reaching the constitutional
question. He based his decision on the law governing agency rulemaking, rather than on separation of powers grounds. But his rebuke was just
as scathing.

The administration will likely fight the ruling through the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, all the way to the Supreme Court. Democrats should hope that the administration loses. They are assiduously pretending that Obama’s executive amnesty is merely an innocuous exercise of prosecutorial discretion. But if Obama’s power grab is upheld, they will rue the day that they acceded to this travesty when a Republican president decides, say, to privatize Social Security because Congress has failed to do so.

Obama’s executive amnesty is the most public and egregious example of immigration lawlessness to date. But beneath the radar screen has been an equally telling saga of cascading lawlessness that is arguably as consequential: an ongoing attack on the Secure Communities program and on deportation more generally. Because of this attack, the rallying cry of so many conservatives that we must “secure the borders” is a naïve and meaningless delusion.

***

The Secure Communities program is a commonsensical response to illegal alien criminality. Whenever an illegal alien is booked into a local jail on suspicion of a crime, an alert is automatically sent to federal authorities in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. ICE agents can then ask that the jail or prison briefly hold the illegal alien after he has served his time rather than releasing him, so that ICE can pick him up and start deportation proceedings. This is known as a detainer.

You would think that such a program would be wholly uncontroversial. An alien who crosses into our country illegally already has no claim to undisturbed presence here. He has voluntarily assumed the risk of deportation. But an illegal alien who goes on to break other laws has even less claim to protection from deportation. Yet Secure Communities has been the target of incessant protest from illegal alien advocates since its inception. Those advocates make the astonishing claim that it is unfair to remove an illegal alien who commits other crimes.

Even more astonishing, nearly 300 jurisdictions agree, including New York State, California, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They have openly refused to honor ICE’s requests for detainers, but instead have released tens of thousands of criminals back on to the streets where they easily evade detection. Not that ICE would be likely to try to pick them up! Indeed, the irony regarding the agitation against Secure Communities is that ICE rarely uses its power under the program. In 2012—the last year for which we have complete figures—the agency was notified of over 400,000 illegal jail detainees, but removed only 19 percent of them. And about 50 percent of the criminal illegal aliens whom ICE chooses not to deport reoffend upon release.

***

There are two aspects of the campaign against Secure Communities that bear particular notice: the hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the campaign’s advocates, and the hypocrisy of big city police chiefs.

In 2012, Arizona became the target of universal contempt among the country’s elites for passing a law that encouraged local law enforcement officers to assist ICE with immigration enforcement. According to illegal alien advocates and the Obama administration, this law, known as SB 1070, was an unconstitutional state usurpation of the federal government’s plenary power over immigration matters. The Obama administration sued Arizona for allegedly interfering with federal authority over immigration and won an injunction against SB 1070. Yet now these same advocates are urging states and localities to defy the federal government’s requests for immigration assistance, resulting in the creation of local sanctuary zones where federal immigration authority cannot reach.

If ever there were a lawless usurpation of the federal government’s power over immigration, the open revolt against Secure Communities is it. Yet the Obama administration, rather than hauling these recalcitrant jurisdictions to court, has lain supine and chastely looked the other way. And late last year, it threw in the towel completely. It dismantled the Secure Communities program except in a few narrow instances, agreeing with the activists that it was unfair to worry illegal alien criminals about deportation.

There is another aspect of the campaign against Secure Communities that shows the corrosiveness of our tolerance of lawlessness. Major police chiefs in high immigration jurisdictions are under enormous political pressure to protect illegal aliens. And that has meant tossing aside everything that they know about public safety and policing. One of the great insights of policing in the last two decades was the realization that low level misdemeanor offenses like graffiti, turnstile jumping, drunk driving, and drug sales have an outsized impact on a community’s perceptions of public safety and on the actual reality of crime. Enforcing misdemeanor offenses is an effective way of incapacitating more serious criminals. And even when an offender does not go on to commit more violent felonies, such allegedly minor offenses as shoplifting and illegal street vending create a sense of lawlessness and disorder that breaks down the fabric of a community. Police chiefs like New York’s William Bratton and Los Angeles’s Charlie Beck know this. Yet they have fiercely opposed cooperating with the federal government on Secure Communities, on the ground that misdemeanor offenses are too trivial to worry about and should not subject illegal aliens to deportation. This is pure hypocrisy—the result of the enormous pressure of demographic change on our principles.

The ultimate goal of the campaign against Secure Communities is to delegitimate deportation entirely as a response to illegal immigration. If it is morally unacceptable to repatriate even a convicted illegal alien criminal, then it is all the more unacceptable to repatriate someone who has “merely” crossed the border illegally. This undermining of alien-removals is behind the constant protests demanding to “stop deportations now.” It is behind the claim that it is Americans who are to blame for separating families, rather than the alien who knowingly came into the country in violation of our laws and assumed the risk of being sent home.

The campaign against deportation does not name itself as such, but it has been highly successful. Despite the false rhetoric of the Obama administration, deportation has basically disappeared from the interior of the country. The removal rate in 2014 for illegal aliens who were not explicit ICE priorities was one-half of one percent. If aliens cannot be removed for illegal entry, then there is no more immigration law. Deportation is the only remedy for illegal entry that corrects and deters the original lawbreaking. That is why Mexico, along with virtually every other country, practices it unapologetically. Lose deportation, as we are doing, and the U.S. will have formally ceded control of its immigration policy to people living outside its borders. National sovereignty will have become meaningless.

The delegitimizing of deportation makes the conservative rallying cry to secure the borders sadly naïve. An utterly secure border is impossible; people will always find a way to cross. But if, once they cross, nothing can be done to them, then we may as well not have borders. That’s why the advocates have spent all their energy fighting deportation rather than fighting increased border security—because they know that eradicating the former is far more important.

***

The erosion of the rule of law is bad enough. But the social consequences of mass illegal immigration are equally troubling. We are importing poverty and educational failure. If you want to see America’s future, look no further than my home state of California, which is a generation ahead of the rest of the country in experiencing the effects of unchecked low-skilled immigration.

Nearly 50 percent of all California births are now Hispanic, and the state’s Hispanic population is now almost equal to the white population. The consequences of this demographic shift have been profound. In the 1950s and ’60s, California led in educational achievement. Today, with a majority Hispanic K-12 population and the largest concentration of English language learners in the country, California is at the bottom of the educational heap. Over a third of California eighth graders lack even the most rudimentary math skills; 28 percent are equally deficient in reading. The mathematics performance gap between Hispanic and white eighth-graders has not budged since 1990; the reading gap has narrowed only slightly since 1998.

California is at the epicenter of the disturbing phenomenon of “long-term English learners.” You would think that an English learner would be someone who grew up in a foreign country speaking a foreign language, and who came to the U.S. only later in life. In fact, the vast majority of English learners are born here, but their cognitive and language skills are so low that they are deemed non-native English speakers. Nationally, 30 percent of all English learner students are third-generation Americans.

In 2013, California Governor Jerry Brown pushed through a controversial law to try to close the achievement gap between California’s growing Hispanic population and its Anglo and Asian populations. That law redistributes tax dollars from successful schools to those with high proportions of English learners and low-income students. It remains to be seen whether this latest effort to raise the education outcomes of the children of low-skilled immigrants will prove more effective than its predecessors. Working against that possibility is Hispanics’ high dropout rate—the highest in the state and the nation—and their equally unmatched teen pregnancy rate.

To be sure, many illegal Hispanic aliens possess an admirable work ethic and have stabilized some moribund inner-city areas like South Central Los Angeles. But thanks to their lack of social capital, many of their children and grandchildren are getting sucked into underclass culture. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate in California and the U.S. is 53 percent—twice what it was in the black population in 1965 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his prescient warning about the catastrophe of black family breakdown. The incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans in California shoots up eight-fold between the first and second generations, to equal the black incarceration rate. Gang involvement is endemic in barrio schools, giving rise to a vast taxpayer-supported army of anti-gang counselors serving the children of single mothers.

This social service bureaucracy in barrio schools is just the tip of the iceberg. Welfare use among immigrants and their progeny is stubbornly high, because their poverty rates are stubbornly high. Hispanics are the biggest users of government health care and the biggest supporters of Obamacare. They favor big government and the higher taxes necessary to pay for it. The claim that low-skilled immigration is an economic boon to the country as a whole is false. It fails to take into account the government services consumed by low-skilled immigrants and their children, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons.

***

So what should be done? First of all, we must reassert the primacy of the rule of law. At the very least, that means rehabilitating deportation and ceasing to normalize illegal immigration with our huge array of sanctuary policies. Liberals appear indifferent to the erosion of law, and even too many conservatives are willing to excuse immigration law-breaking in order to placate what they imagine to be a conservative voting bloc in waiting. But let us hope the rule of law is not lost.

I would not at present offer an amnesty to those who have voluntarily chosen to violate the law, since every amnesty, both in the U.S. and Europe, has had one effect and one effect only: more illegal immigration. People who come into the country illegally or overstay their visas do so knowingly. They assume the risk of illegal status; it is not our moral responsibility to wipe it away. Their children, if they are born here, are already American citizens, thanks to the misguided policy of birthright citizenship. The illegal status of their parents is a problem that will eventually fade away as that first generation dies out. The Obama amnesty, however, actually incentivizes the use of birthright citizenship, since it rewards with legal status illegal aliens who have American citizen children.

I would also radically reorient our legal immigration system towards high skilled immigrants like the parents of Google’s founder, Sergey Brin. Canada, Australia, and other countries are already benefiting from placing a priority on skilled immigrants.

Immigration policy should be forged with one consideration in mind: America’s economic self-interest. Immigration is not a service we provide to the rest of the world. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants and will continue to be one. No other country welcomes as many newcomers. But rewarding illegal immigration does an injustice to the many legal immigrants who played by the rules to get here. We owe it to them and to ourselves to adhere to the law.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Why is Northeast Asia poorer than the USA?

The statistics make it clear as crystal that IQ is a major determinant of national wealth.  Poor countries tend to be dumber, much dumber in some cases.  So it is interesting that a massive and statistically very strong article by Anatoly Karlin has just come out that asks why the USA is such an outlier. American exceptionalism really does exist in the wealth statistics.  According to their national average IQs, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan should be richer than the USA -- but they are in fact significantly poorer.  That's a puzzle.

The easy answer to the puzzle is to say that special factors are at work in each case but that is a bit of a cop-out -- though it may be true.  Karlin considers a wide range of factors that might help America and it is clear that some of them are indeed involved.  Relative size of market, more Jews in the USA etc.

Something that deepens the puzzle is that Northeast Asia is also less socialist.  Socialism, depending on its extent, clearly has a dampening effect on wealth creation.  Britain's millions of NEETs sponging off welfare are an example of how socialism can take a significant slice of the population out of the workforce.  Now that the Tory government has done a modest crackdown on "dole bludging", there has been a big increase in the size of the active workforce.  So semi-socialist USA should be poorer than the NE Asians, not richer.

And natural resources are not the answer.  Karlin has some statistics on that but there are plenty of examples of resource-poor countries doing well.

I think inherited traditions and RACE are major factors, though not perhaps in the way that one might think. As it is less incendiary, I will mention traditions first.

Yankees tend to be, to be blunt about it, self-righteous, know-it-all bastards. And they are still a substantial fraction of the US population -- and are certainly an influential fraction of the US population.  Their ancestors left Europe and Britain in rickety wooden boats absolutely convinced that they would create in the new world a religious utopia -- as soon as they threw off the silly customs and conventions of the old world.  A third of them had to die of starvation before they decided that their communism was a crock and that the silly ways of the old world were not so silly after all.  And their descendants today are not much different, still convinced of their own righteousness and wisdom  -- which is why New England is the great redoubt of the American Left.  Being a Republican in Massachusetts requires some fortitude.

And we see something similar in Australia.  The first white settlers there made a much longer journey in rickety wooden ships of the Royal Navy.  Most of them were convicts.  Two of them were my ancestors. And they HAD to become settlers.  Returning to England would get you hanged at Tyburn.  But convicts were not keen workers.  Their attitude to their jobs tended to be relaxed. And that still exists in Australia.  Australia is the laid-back country. Nobody really expects to get any job done right the first time.  Even if it takes three times to get something done that is fine, normal, even.  But such relaxed attitudes are inefficient economically.  Having three goes to get something done is wasteful.  It does however make Australia a cheerful, friendly place, which the world could surely do with much more of.  It takes Muslims to make Australians riot.

So what we see is the surprising influence of the founders of a society.  Traditions once set up are amazingly persistent.  So it is to American traditions that we should to look for at least a part-explanation of American exceptionalism.  And whatever else they were, the Pilgrim Fathers were exceptionally enterprising and brave. They took on a big challenge with scarcely a second thought.  They knew the risks and were prepared to face them.  And that is very characteristic of American business to this day.  American wealth is created by American business.  And as we recently saw, what is bad for General Motors is bad for America.  American entrepreneurs are a large part of America's success.

Now we get on to what I believe is another powerful factor:  RACE.  But I am NOT going to say  that Americans are particularly superior racially.  Not at all.  We can see that by considering the cases of Australia and New Zealand.  Both those countries are very similar to America racially  -- and in other ways too.  You don't even have to press "1" for English there.  Yet Australia and New Zealand are clustered with the NE Asian countries in terms of wealth per capita.  Despite the great similarities between the USA and the ANZAC countries, America is clearly richer.  So it is not the racial composition of the majority population that makes the difference.  It is the minority population that is the key.

OK.  Let me now say something that just about every American knows but which it is social poison to utter these days:  Blacks are a HUGE problem for the white population.  They run fast and sing well but those are just about the only good things you can say about them.  So American whites are in general pretty frantic to minimize their contact with blacks.  Living among them is just too frightening for most whites.

But how can whites minimize their contact with blacks in the present climate of political correctness?  There is really only one way: White flight.  You have to move to places where blacks don't want to go if you are to find safety for your family.  And, since their income is generally as low as their IQ, blacks are mostly poor. So it is in the more expensive suburbs and exurbs were you are safest from them. So being able to spend big money  is the only way to safeguard yourself and your family. So American whites have to struggle frantically to make as much money as possible.  And they do.  To an outsider it looks like money is their God. But in a capitalist economy the best way to make a lot of money is to deliver a lot in goods and services. And white Americans do.  Their spurred-on efforts produce America's wealth.

Japan and Korea, by contrast, are among the world's most racially homogeneous societies.  Unaccompanied women walk through the streets of Tokyo at night without fear -- somewhat different from NYC, one might say.  There is a story here about Japan that sometimes makes me sob.  I remember that it was once like that in the small Australian town where I grew up long ago.  Not all Japan's strengths are monetary.

So I think that the high money-motivation produced by America's racial tensions is the main driver behind America' unusual wealth.  I am glad I am not American. I give most of my modest income away. Radix malorum cupiditas est

UPDATE:  A reader has commented that there are many places in the USA where blacks are largely absent so there is no pressure to avoid them. I think however that overlooks the importance of the big cities -- e.g. NYC and L.A.  The big cities are a large part of America's economic dynamism and there ARE lots of blacks in most of them.  So the people there ARE driven towards affording a refuge.

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Forgotten Civil War atrocities bred more carnage

George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a practically holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized in the final year of the war.

The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred-mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can…. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Grant said that Sheridan’s troops should “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”

Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Along an almost 100-mile stretch the sky was blackened with smoke as his troops burned crops, barns, mills and homes.

War against civilians

Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree, “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg…. It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported, “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North … not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”

After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center — Dayton — was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites — a peaceful sect that opposed slavery and secession — were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.

By the end of Sheridan’s campaign the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. In his three-volume Civil War history, Shelby Foote noted that an English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” The population of Warren County, Virginia, where I grew up, fell by 11 percent during the 1860s thanks in part to Sheridan’s depredations.

Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harper’s Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert…. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley (1998), concluded, “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.”

Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”

Abraham Lincoln congratulated Sheridan in a letter on Oct. 22, 1864: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation and my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month’s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.” The year before, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had justified the Civil War to preserve a “government by consent.” But, as Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner retorted, “The only idea … ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this — that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

Some defenders of the Union military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Grant that “until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “there is a class of people — men, women, and children — who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” Lincoln also congratulated Sherman for a campaign that sowed devastation far and wide.

The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s postwar recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’s recent book, Sick from Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.

Afterward

Ironically, a war that stemmed in large part from the blunders and follies of politicians on both sides of the Potomac resulted in a vast expansion of the political class’s presumption of power. An 1875 American Law Review article noted, “The late war left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.”

The sea change was clear even before the war ended. Sherman had telegraphed the War Department in 1863, “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post–Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes downplayed U.S. military tactics in World War II that killed vast numbers of German and Japanese civilians.

The same pattern is repeating with the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is launching a major effort to commemorate its 50th anniversary — an effort that is being widely denounced as a whitewash. The New York Times noted that the Pentagon’s official website on the war “referred to the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, as the My Lai Incident.” That particular line was amended but the website will definitely not be including the verdict of David Hackworth, a retired colonel and the most decorated officer in the Army: “Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go…. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.”

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty-sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy. And the presumption of collective guilt of everyone in a geographical area exonerates current military leaders the same way it exonerated Sheridan’s 1864 torching of Mennonite homes.

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.

SOURCE

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Oh, Look, a Squirrel! Obama Denounces Conversion Therapy

Besieged by criticism for his disastrous deal with Iran, Barack Obama sought a shiny object to distract — even for just a moment — from more pressing concerns. Thus, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett issued a statement on conversion therapy for the gender disoriented.

“The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy, especially when it is practiced on young people, is neither medically nor ethically appropriate and can cause substantial harm,” the statement said, also warning of “potentially devastating effects on the lives of transgender as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer youth.”

Therefore, “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.”

Recall that until a couple of years ago, Obama was (ostensibly) opposed to same-sex marriage. Now, however, he’s riding a political wave of growing support — or should we say tired and coerced concession — to the homosexual agenda. (Oh, and by the way, the White House will now feature an “all gender bathroom,” too.)

This isn’t to evaluate conversion therapy one way or the other, but why on earth would Obama need to offer his opinion other than as a political distraction?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Is it a problem that some big companies pay little tax?

There has been a big debate about that in both Britain and the USA and it has recently heated up in Australia too. 

The British have attempted to plug the hole by a bureaucratic monstrosity that will have a main effect of increasing accountancy costs.  But the most just system would undoubtedly be to abolish company tax altogether.  Companies disburse their revenues to suppliers, workers and shareholders.  And those people are already taxed on those receipts.  Company tax is double taxation.  Australia has a unique "franking" system that reduces the burden on shareholders but the simplest system would be to abolish the tax altogether.

Politicians rarely abolish or reduce taxes, however. You almost have to be another Ronald Reagan to do that.  John Howard did but even he replaced the "lost" tax by a new tax (the GST).  Given that reality, the challenge is to  find a better system of taxation than the present one.

The simplest and most efficient change would be to impose a turnover tax as an alternative to a company tax.  A turnover tax of (say) 2% on all companies would yield similar revenue to what company taxes yield and would not be avoidable by profit shifting.  Multinationals would have no avenue of escape.  The turnover of a company (total revenue before disbursements earned in the country concerned) is readily ascertainable from existing company records  so would also require minimal bureaucracy to enforce.

It would also erode the temptation to divert profits into "fringe benefits" for company officers and employees.  Such diversion would have no effect on the tax bill. Even the temptation to retain profits in the hope of changed circumstance in the future would be minimized.  The revenue would be taxed whether it was retained or not. It would also require no international consensus or co-operation.

Why it never seems to be canvassed rather mystifies me.  Perhaps the bureaucrats don't like it because it would shrink their empires.  An excerpt from the current debate in Australia below

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Taxation experts have warned against unilateral action on corporate tax avoidance, telling a Senate Economics Committee Australia should be proactive and show leadership in the OECD and G20 tax processes already underway.

The inquiry, initiated by Greens leader Christine Milne, is exploring tax avoidance and aggressive minimisation by corporations registered in Australia and multinational corporations operating in Australia.

Treasurer Joe Hockey has hinted that a diverted profits or “Google tax”, similar to that introduced in the UK is being considered by the Australian government.

However Richard Vann, Challis Professor of Law at Sydney University told the committee he was somewhat cynical about such a tax, suggesting it would collect very little revenue in the UK.

“They don’t even know how they’re going to try to calculate the revenue that they’re going to collect from Google,” Professor Vann said.

Professor Vann said the government was sending a “mixed message” to the multinationals that presented the biggest tax avoidance problem to Australia, by suggesting in the tax discussion paper that we needed to cut our corporate tax rate, and at the same time highlighting the problem of tax avoidance by multinationals.

“There are no simple single-country solutions, it does require coordinated action, he said.

“I’m not saying the diverted profits tax or something like it is a bad idea, but if everyone introduced one that would be a problem. They would all be different, they wouldn’t be harmonised and then we would have breakout.”

QUT taxation Professor Kerrie Sadiq agreed, and said Australia must collaborate internationally and not act “hastily or unilaterally”.

“Personally, I believe we should strive to fix the current system, particularly the transfer pricing regime.”

Transfer pricing sees multinationals make intra-company transactions, such as billing a subsidiary company, for the purposes of avoiding tax in higher taxing jurisdictions.

SOURCE

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Obama's minions lie with statistics

A major reason to study statistics is so that you can't be hornswoggled by them

Take last week’s report from the Commerce Department about personal income, personal spending, and price.

The Commerce Department reported that wages increased by 0.3% and that American spending was up 0.1% in the month of February. That wasn’t much of an increase in spending, but Wall Street interpreted that as a giant victory given the heavy snow that covered the Northeast in February and sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average up by 263 points, or 1.5%.

Wall Street was impressed, but they shouldn’t have been, because those numbers were massively massaged and very misleading.
The Commerce Department used some accounting magic to come up with that positive spending number.

The Commerce Department uses something called the Price Consumption Expenditure or PCE deflator. The PCE is a mathematical attempt to factor in price changes to come up with inflation-adjusted numbers. The PCE deflator converts “real” numbers into “adjusted” numbers, and that’s where the deception lies.

More often than not, the massaged numbers are changed to fit the needs of our lovely elected officials in Washington, DC. In short, the PCE numbers are a bunch of crap. But I digress.

Since October, the magic calculator of the PCE deflator had been flat or even negative, but the Commerce Department decided to change the PCE deflator to +0.2 in February. The excuse for the change was to adjust for the drop in gasoline prices.

That seemingly small adjustment to the PCE deflator changed the “real” numbers from negative to positive. Instead of personal spending being up +0.1% in February, the original unadjusted number was -0.1%. So much for being positive.

And the PCE isn’t an isolated issue, either. There are all sorts of accounting hanky-panky going on in Washington, DC. But perhaps the biggest impact on the Bureau of Labor & Statistics inflation model is the slippery concept of “Hedonic Quality Adjustment” that attempts to adjust for improvements in quality. Here is an example from the BLS’s own website.

Item A is an old TV model that’s been discontinued, and Item B is a new, fancy plasma TV. The new TV costs five times as much as the old TV, but because the quality of the new TV is so much better, the BLS adjusts the price to factor in the higher quality.

The result of that massaging is that the BLS claimed that the “adjusted” price of the new $1,250 TV is actually 7.1% cheaper than the $250 TV. Yup. 7.1% cheaper. Really!

The BLS applies this accounting magic to everything that’s part of the CPI, so all kinds of things we buy are getting “cheaper” even though they’re going up in price. These lower prices help keep increases to things such as Social Security payments and TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) bonds low.

Love your country, like my father, but always keep a skeptical eye on everything that comes out of Washington, DC.

SOURCE

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Why Obama’s Jab at Walker’s Foreign Policy Knowledge Misses the Point

In response to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s criticism of his Iran policy, President Obama suggested that the presumed candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination “bone up on foreign policy.”

In other words, anyone who disagrees with the president on Iran’s nuclear program, or any other national security issue, is just not knowledgeable enough to understand.

Of course, there is a very serious irony at play here. The president’s foreign policy is in shambles from Ukraine to the Middle East to the South China Sea. Yet it is his critics who just don’t get it.

A great deal is certain to be written on this and other ironies in the days to come. Indeed, it takes gall for a president who came to office with negligible experience in foreign affairs, and even less apparent interest, to criticize the background of another aspirant to the office.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama’s principal claim to foreign policy experience lay in befriending the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Policy Committee, then-Sen. Dick Lugar.

Many liberals do not accept that intelligent, decent people can have honest differences of opinion.

It is also tempting to point out how little Obama appears to have grown into the job. After six years, he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in the international system.

But the cheap shot at Walker also betrays a liberal conceit too rarely commented upon. Many liberals do not accept that intelligent, decent people can have honest differences of opinion. And they are aided and abetted by a media that—whatever its differences with the president on their own access—are always eager to be seen as “smart.” As a result, the president’s critics are often portrayed as either uniformed or politically motivated.

Obama used this dynamic to excellent effect in the 2012 campaign when he mocked another “inexperienced” state government chief executive, Mitt Romney, for his concern about Russia and the deteriorating state of America’s armed forces.

Yet Romney was right about both. But the gotcha moments were too good for the press to resist. Obama was smart; Romney not so much. The story was written. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., (a graduate of Harvard Law School, by the way) and the 46 other senators who signed the open letter to Iran’s leaders concerning Congress’ constitutional authorities fell afoul of the same dynamic.

Criticism of Obama’s Iran policy is not a matter of who’s smarter. It should be a question of who’s right. Questioning the foreign policy credentials of critics with a cute turn of phrase cannot substitute for substantive defense of an already highly controversial policy choice.

SOURCE

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Framework for Iran Deal Collapses

To those with common sense, and to those who have followed the continuing comedy that is our nuclear negotiation with Iran, this will come as no surprise. But it seems the Obama administration was caught flat-footed when it was learned that the Iranians expect all economic sanctions against them to be lifted once a deal is concluded in June.

Even more grating to Iranian leaders, the American summary of the deal states that “sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses, and ballistic missiles will remain in place under the deal.” For that, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali “Yes, Of Course, Death To America” Khamenei claimed the fact sheet was “wrong on most of the issues.” Of course, Khamenei also revealed he “was never optimistic about negotiating with America,” and this tends to reflect our opinion about Iran as well. Yet the Obama administration is choosing to believe that the sheer force of their negotiating skills can keep Iran one year away from going nuclear for the next decade.

Skeptical as well, for different reasons, are former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. They penned a stinging op-ed in The Wall Street Journal dismantling the deal. In it, they noted, “Absent the linkage between nuclear and political restraint, America’s traditional allies will conclude that the U.S. has traded temporary nuclear cooperation for acquiescence to Iranian hegemony.”

The pair also point out that the two sides have divergent interests elsewhere, even when ostensibly working together as they are against the Islamic State. “Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives,” write Kissinger and Shultz. Iran’s goal in Iraq, for example, is one of spreading its influence all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, putting Israel in peril. On the other hand, one of the strategic interests to our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was to place American allies to either side of Iran, which we’ve known to be a bad actor ever since the Shah was deposed in 1979.

That same grand game is being played in Yemen, which had often been touted as a success by the Obama administration until it no longer was successful or even a viable state. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are now the target of a Saudi-led coalition for whom we’re playing a minor support role.

Given the ramshackle framework for the current nuclear “deal,” it seems Iran is using its typical delaying tactics to edge closer to arming itself with nuclear weapons. The mullahs realize the sanctions won’t return once lifted, giving them a final victory in their quest to go from a rogue nation the world determined would never be nuclear to joining the North Korea club.

As for the rest of the region, Kissinger and Shultz warn the future’s not bright. “Some of the chief actors in the Middle East are likely to view the U.S. as willing to concede a nuclear military capability to the country they consider their principal threat. Several will insist on at least an equivalent capability. Saudi Arabia has signaled that it will enter the lists; others are likely to follow. In that sense, the implications of the negotiation are irreversible.”

Age-old differences in religious belief are one thing when fought with conventional armaments, but add nuclear weapons to the mix and the unthinkable becomes much more probable.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Exercise doesn't help much

Medical researchers tend to get very excited even when they detect a very small effect of something.  Below is such a case.  When everything was controlled for in their analyses, they found a pathetic .66 hazard ratio ("the adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.66").  Statisticians don't usually conclude that something real is going on until the ratio exceeds 2.0.  So the lifespan benefits of taking regular exercise are somewhere between tiny and negligible.  Pity that.

What we see below is another example of the failure of theory.  It seems obvious that we are designed for an active life so therefore we should live longer if we are active.  But we don't -- not to any appreciable extent, anyway


Effect of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity on All-Cause Mortality in Middle-aged and Older Australians

By Klaus Gebel et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  Few studies have examined how different proportions of moderate and vigorous physical activity affect health outcomes.

Objective:  To examine whether the proportion of total moderate to vigorous activity (MVPA) that is achieved through vigorous activity is associated with all-cause mortality independently of the total amount of MVPA.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  We performed a prospective cohort study with activity data linked to all-cause mortality data from February 1, 2006, through June 15, 2014, in 204 542 adults aged 45 through 75 years from the 45 and Up population-based cohort study from New South Wales, Australia (mean [SD] follow-up, 6.52 [1.23] years). Associations between different contributions of vigorous activity to total MVPA and mortality were examined using Cox proportional hazards models, adjusted for total MVPA and sociodemographic and health covariates.

Exposures:  Different proportions of total MVPA as vigorous activity. Physical activity was measured with the Active Australia Survey.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  All-cause mortality during the follow-up period.

Results: During 1 444 927 person-years of follow-up, 7435 deaths were registered. Compared with those who reported no MVPA (crude death rate, 8.34%), the adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.66 (95% CI, 0.61-0.71; crude death rate, 4.81%), 0.53 (95% CI, 0.48-0.57; crude death rate, 3.17%), and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.43-0.49; crude death rate, 2.64%) for reporting 10 through 149, 150 through 299, and 300 min/wk or more of activity, respectively. Among those who reported any MVPA, the proportion of vigorous activity revealed an inverse dose-response relationship with all-cause mortality: compared with those reporting no vigorous activity (crude death rate, 3.84%) the fully adjusted hazard ratio was 0.91 (95% CI, 0.84-0.98; crude death rate, 2.35%) in those who reported some vigorous activity (but <30% of total activity) and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.81-0.93; crude death rate, 2.08%) among those who reported 30% or more of activity as vigorous. These associations were consistent in men and women, across categories of body mass index and volume of MVPA, and in those with and without existing cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Among people reporting any activity, there was an inverse dose-response relationship between proportion of vigorous activity and mortality. Our findings suggest that vigorous activities should be endorsed in clinical and public health activity guidelines to maximize the population benefits of physical activity.

JAMA Intern Med.

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Profit Margins, Public Perception and Progressive Causes

The stigma plaguing today’s Republican Party on matters of economic policy is the result of a craftily orchestrated attack on capitalism. By associating the entrepreneurial free market with “corporate greed,” the Left frames conservatives as being against middle class America.

It’s a strategy that has a long record of success. Recall that in 2009, Democrats approved another massive entitlement program – ObamaCare – in part by rallying behind a false narrative: that millions of Americans were uninsured because “selfish” insurers were swimming in massive profits. In truth, insurers were operating on a 2% profit margin.

Democrats knew their PR stunt was a lie, but they successfully swayed public perception at a pivotal moment. Indeed, every progressive cause has traces of gross distortion, and, similar to how leftists overhauled the health care industry, they’re fabricating the war on corporate America.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry writes, “When a random sample of American adults were asked the question ‘Just a rough guess, what percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average company makes after taxes?’ for the Reason-Rupe poll in May 2013, the average response was 36%!”

The reality? Memo to Occupy Wall Street: “Not surprisingly they are off by a huge margin,” Perry notes. “According to [a] Yahoo!Finance database for 212 different industries, the average profit margin for the most recent quarter was 7.5% and the median profit margin was 6.5%.” If this teaches us anything, it’s that Republicans must dismantle the Left’s big lies. The propaganda machine is not conquered by twiddling thumbs.

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Maya Angelou's quote on USPS stamps is "fake but accurate"‏

A stamp commemorating author and poet Maya Angelou was unveiled Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. And while the ceremony featured addresses by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, a matter not addressed at the ceremony was the apparent misattribution of the quote on the "Forever" stamp.

Next to a photo of Angelou reads the text, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

Those words may recall the title of Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but they were actually written by Joan Walsh Anglund, 89, in the 1967 book A Cup of Sun, according to the Washington Post.

Living in New York around 2005, I once saw a flyer advertising Maya Angelou's appearance before NYU students that had exactly the same "bird" quote. The flyer was posted at the entrance to one of the left-wing churches around NYU that lends its space to events held by communists and other progressives, including a party to celebrate the release of Lynn Stewart from prison, which I attended undercover with a video camera.

At the time I thought it was a fairly good line coming from a poet, but coming from a prog it leaps into a completely different paradigm. I rephrased it in my head to say, "A prog doesn't talk because he/she/it has an answer, a prog talks because he/she/it has a Party-approved narrative."

It so happened that I was on my way to give a speech to the NYU Young Republicans Club about the People's Cube, so I started my speech by talking about Maya Angelou's flyer I had passed a few doors down the block. I gave them my translation from the prog language - how it would have sounded if Maya Angelou were high on truth serum. This is why I still remember this line almost ten years later.

Most importantly, Maya Angelou was still alive and well then; she must have seen and approved of the flyer with the "fake" quote, or her agent did. That means the line had been attributed to her for many years, she knew about it, and did nothing to stop it.

Putting the quote on a stamp wasn't simply an error on the part of the Postal Service. It has become a logical extension of her disingenuous legacy as a mediocre poet who was promoted and celebrated due to her politics and who is mostly remembered by one line that wasn't even hers.

The symbolic falseness of the stamp makes an appropriate monument to such a legacy - one of the many insignificant and unsightly monuments to progdom in arts that are littering America's artistic graveyard, with the exception that Michelle Obama's and Oprah Winfrey's participation in its unveiling take this symbolism to a whole new level.

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VA Reform: Another Obama 'Success Story'

Eight months ago, President Obama put on a grand show for the troops. Surrounded by new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald, assorted politicians, military leaders and a bevy of TV cameras, the commander in chief signed the "Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act." He's good at inking things.

Obama condemned the "inexcusable conduct" at VA hospitals across the country (and under his own watch).

He vowed to "do right by all who served under our proud flag." He promised America's veterans new "reform," "resources," "timely care" and an end to the disgraceful disability backlog.

The bill he signed, in case you'd forgotten, included $10 billion in emergency funding to pay for veterans to go outside the chronically dysfunctional VA system if they are facing long wait times or live 40 miles or more from a VA facility, plus another $6.3 billion to set up 27 new clinics and hire doctors, nurses and other medical staff.

So, how's it all working out? About as well as every other "success story" Obama has signed his name to: abysmally, ineffectually and incompetently.

Take Obama's hyped plan to expand health care access to those who live far from a VA facility. Obtuse federal bureaucrats interpreted "40 miles" in the narrowest way possible, applied an "as the crow flies" distance rule inconsistently, and excluded untold numbers of vets. It took more than a year — and concerted pressure from veterans groups and GOP lawmakers — for the administration to "clarify" its confused eligibility standards just two weeks ago.

What about "accountability"? Obama bragged last August that "we've already taken the first steps to change the way the VA does business. We've held people accountable for misconduct. ... We should have zero tolerance for that." Looks like the VA bosses in Shreveport, La., didn't get the memo. As Tori Richards of Watchdog.org reported last month, a mental health services worker who exposed use of a secret appointment waiting list there was ignored for a year.

Instead of accountability for the wrongdoers, the VA employee who blew the whistle, Army vet Shea Wilkes, became the subject of a criminal investigation.

And how's that new facility construction campaign going? The VA's atrocious complex has been a problem for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Nothing's changed under the era of hope and change.

Here in Colorado, the new Aurora VA hospital has become another in a long line of government spending cesspools. The $600-million 184-bed facility is now estimated to cost at least $1.7 billion after a reckless parade of design changes, cost overruns and mismanagement — and may not be ready until 2017. "Accountability"? Pfffft. The head of the VA's Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction responsible for the waste was allowed to resign with a full federal pension and retention of nearly $60,000 in bonuses earned during the fiasco.

In Colorado Springs, a sparkling new "cutting edge" VA outpatient clinic opened last year on the promise of reducing wait times. But according to the Colorado Springs Gazette, "11.5 percent of veteran appointments for care in Colorado Springs are delayed by 30 days or more," which is "up from 7 percent" before the $10-million facility opened.

What's next? You know the drill: more congressional hearings, more grandstanding, another "reform" campaign, more posturing in front of cameras, and more screwed-over vets.

Throwing more money and platitudes at the VA to cover up its deadly scandals is a bipartisan Beltway recipe for failure. Recently retired Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., one of the few to object to last year's kabuki "VA reform," was right. "The culture is one of looking good, protecting those in the VA and not protecting our veterans," he said at the time. "You have to have a bill that fixes that. I don't believe this is going to do it."

Mission not accomplished.

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Obama Admits Iran Won't Be Far From Nukes

Barack Obama may like to insist that his deal ensures Iran will never obtain nuclear weapons, but even he admitted the opposite in an interview with NPR. “Most of [Iran’s] enriched uranium is supposed to be set off to the side and diluted; it may, however, remain inside Iran,” Obama said. “Eventually, the deal expires. Perhaps the uranium is still there, which is why … where the regime changes is a significant question.”

He then said, “They’re not going to have been able to hoard a bunch of uranium that somehow they then convert to weapons-grade uranium. What is a more relevant fear would be that in year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”

Not to worry, though. He said, “[C]urrently, the breakout times are only about two to three months by our intelligence estimates. So essentially, we’re purchasing for 13, 14, 15 years assurances that the breakout is at least a year … that – that if they decided to break the deal, kick out all the inspectors, break the seals and go for a bomb, we’d have over a year to respond. And we have those assurances for at least well over a decade.” Everything is awesome. But he just put his seal of approval on a future Iranian nuke.

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Economic freedom, not socialism makes you rich

IQ is important too. The very successful East Asian countries all have average  IQs about half a standard deviation above the European norm

Today’s Third World poverty is mostly self-inflicted – indigenously created. The growth-promoting characteristics of the non-poor countries that are all but absent in poor countries are protected private property rights, personal liberty, enforcement of contracts, rule of law and a market-oriented economic system.

A country need not be rich to create these wealth-enhancing institutions. That’s much of the story of the U.S. In 1776, we were a poor nation, but we established the institutional structure to become rich. That institutional structure attracted not only foreign investment but talented, hardworking immigrants, as well. Contrast that with today’s poor countries, whose policies and institutional structure do just the opposite – repel investment and export their most talented and ambitious people to freer and richer countries.

People with limited understanding make the mistake of making a link between economic freedom and democracy. There is no such necessary link. India, for example, politically is a democracy. Economically, it is mostly unfree and poor, ranking 128th on the 2015 Index of Economic Freedom. There are countries much higher on the economic freedom index that do not have much of a history of democracy, such as Chile, now ranking seventh, and Taiwan, 14th, yet these countries are far wealthier than some of their more democratic counterparts. Why? It’s because their economic systems are free or mostly free, something that is not guaranteed by a democratic political system.

The bottom line for why some countries are rich while others are poor is best-explained by the amount of economic freedom.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Britain: More anti-democratic Leftist elitism

Tony Blair's dramatic intervention in the election backfired last night after he said the British people could not be trusted to decide if they want to stay in the EU.

The former Prime Minister was widely condemned after saying that membership of the European Union was 'too important' to be put to a public vote.

In a carefully choreographed speech, Mr Blair praised Ed Miliband for showing 'real leadership' in refusing to offer voters a say on the issue.

But Mr Blair did not deign to appear on a stage alongside the Labour leader – about whom he is said to harbour grave doubts – and refused to endorse any of his other policies. His ringing endorsement of the EU also left him at odds with Mr Miliband, who recognises it is hated by millions of voters.

And in highlighting Labour's refusal to offer a referendum, he presented an open goal for the Tories, who are the only party to commit to a vote.

Speaking in his former Sedgefield constituency, Mr Blair said of the EU debate: 'The Prime Minister will be spending more energy, will have more sleepless nights about it, be more focused on it than literally any other issue.  'He knows the vastness of the decision. And, following the Scottish referendum, he knows the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice. This issue, touching as it does the country's future, is too important to be traded like this.'

In a furious response, David Cameron said Mr Blair was 'the last person' who should be lecturing the country on Europe. He said Mr Blair had presided over a massive transfer of power from Westminster to Brussels and broken his own promise to hold a referendum.

Mr Cameron told the Mail: 'It is deeply condescending to say that the British people can't be trusted to make a choice. I believe they can be and they should be.

'Tony Blair has just highlighted that there is a choice: there will be no renegotiation, no referendum with Ed Miliband. I have said I want to stay in a reformed EU – but we need to get that referendum and the choice will be for the British people, not for me.'

He pointed out that, as Prime Minister, Mr Blair passed a series of treaties that ceded power to Brussels. Mr Cameron said: 'This is the man who passed the Amsterdam Treaty, the Nice Treaty, who negotiated the EU constitution, promised a referendum and didn't deliver a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. He is the last person who should be giving this lecture.

'Frankly the British people need a choice. They haven't had one since 1975, and all these treaties have been passed since – including many when Tony Blair was prime minister.

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The Great Worker Shortage

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000-35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs – a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022.

While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful; one can often find a job in 48 hours. As Bob Funk, the president of Express Services, which matches almost one-half million temporary workers with employers each year, “If you have a useful skill, we can find you a job. But too many are graduating from high school and college without any skills at all.”

The lesson, to play off of the famous Waylon Jennings song: Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be philosophy majors.

Three years ago the chronic disease of the economy was a shortage of jobs. This shortage persists in many sectors. But two other shortages are now being felt – the shortage of trained employees and of low-skilled employees willing to work. Patrick Doyle, the president of Domino’s Pizza, says that the franchises around the country are having a hard time filling delivery and clerical positions. “It’s a very tight labor market out there now.”

This shortage has an upside for workers because it allows them to bid up wages. When Wal-Mart announced last month that wages for many starter workers would rise to $9 an hour, well above the federal legal minimum, they weren’t being humanitarians. They were responding to a tightening labor market.

The idea that blue collar jobs aren’t a pathway to the middle class and higher is antiquated and wrong. Factory work today is often highly sophisticated and knowledge-based with workers using intricate scientific equipment. After several years honing their skills, welders, mechanics, carpenters, and technicians can, earn upwards of $50,000 a year – which in most years still places a household with two such income earners in the top 25 percent for income. It’s true these aren’t glitzy or cushy jobs, but they do pay a good salary.

So why aren’t workers filling these available jobs – or getting the skills necessary to fill them. I would posit five impediments to putting more Americans back to work:

First, government discourages work. Welfare consists of dozens of different and overlapping federal and state income support programs. A recent Census Bureau study found more than 100 million Americans collecting a government check or benefit each month. The spike in families on food stamps, SSI, disability, public housing, and early Social Security remains very high even 5 years into this recovery. This should come as no surprise given the combination of the scaled back welfare work requirements and the steep phase-out of benefits as a recipient begins earning income.

Economist Peter Ferrara argues in his new book “Power to the People,” that if “ we simply required work for all able-bodied welfare recipients, the number on public assistance would fall dramatically. This is what happened after the work for welfare requirements in 1996.”

Second, our public school systems often fail to teach kids basic skills. Whatever happened to shop classes? We have schools that now concentrate more on ethnic studies and tolerance training than teaching kids how to use a lathe or a graphic design tool. Charter schools can help remedy this. Universities are even more negligent. Kids commonly graduate from four year colleges with $100,000 of debt and little vocational training. A liberal arts education is valuable, but it should come paired with some practical skills.

Third, negative attitudes toward “blue collar” work. I’ve talked to parents who say they are disappointed if their kids want to become a craftsman – instead of going to college. This attitude discourages kids from learning how to make things, which contributes to sector-specific worker shortages. Meanwhile, too many people who want to go into the talking professions: lawyers, media, clergy, professors, and so on. Those who can’t “do,” become attorneys and sociology professors.

Fourth, a cultural bias against young adults working. The labor force participation rate is falling fastest among workers under 30 (see chart). Anytime a state tries to change laws to make it easier for teenagers to earn money, the left throws a tantrum about repealing child labor laws. The move to raise minimum wages in states and at the federal level could hardly be more destructive to young people. My own research finds that the higher the minimum wage in a state, the lower the labor force participation rate among teenagers.

Anecdotally, I’ve always been struck by how many successful people I have met who grew up on farms and started working – milking cows, building fences, cleaning out the barn – at the age of 10 or 11. They learn a work ethic at a young age and this pays big dividends in the future. Many studies document this to be true.

Fifth, higher education has become an excuse to delay entry into the workforce. I always cringe when I talk to 22 year olds who will graduate from college and who tell me their next step is to go to graduate school. Maybe by the time they are 26 or 27 they will start working. Here’s an idea: Colleges could encourage kids to have one or two years of work experience before they enroll.

Here’s an even better idea: Abolish federal student loans and replace the free government dollars with privately sponsored college work programs. For instance, schools like College of the Ozarks require kids to work 15 hours a week to pay their tuition. It’s hardly a violation of human rights if a 21 year old works to fund for their own education – and they will probably get more out of their classes if they do work. Anything easily attained is lightly valued. This would drive down tuition costs too, because students would start demanding more financial accountability and less waste. After all, federal subsidies have increased college costs.

These may seem like old-fashioned and even outmoded ideas. But the decline in work among the young bodes ill for the future. Many European nations have removed the young from the workforce and the repercussion appears to be lower lifetime earnings. A renewed focus on working would also help erode the entitlement mentality ingrained in so many millennials. Instead of more benefits and handouts, this generation needs to get a job.

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One small step against tyranny

The tide is turning against asset forfeiture and Loretta Lynch

Do you think the government should be able to seize your property if you have not been convicted of any crime? Most people are not aware that one of the most odious activities of federal, state and local tax and police authorities is that of “asset forfeiture.” Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to seize and keep property of individuals and businesses without a criminal conviction.

The practice has been rife with abuse by law enforcement officials, often using seized property of innocent individuals for their own use. As a result of the outcries about the abuse, there was a unanimous vote by both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate in New Mexico to end the practice of civil asset forfeiture in the state. The bill now awaits the signature of Gov. Susana Martinez. An unlikely coalition supported the measure to repeal asset forfeiture, ranging from the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico to the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice. Former federal prosecutor and director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office, Brad Cates, now a resident of New Mexico, is one of the leading advocates of repeal of asset forfeiture laws at both the state and federal levels. Mr. Cates and the first director of the federal Asset Forfeiture Office, Judge John Yoder, in an article in The Washington Post last September, wrote: “We find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.”

Many states and the federal government still allow asset forfeiture, even though they appear to fly in the face of the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which clearly protect any person from being deprived of property without due process. Where are the judges who are supposed to protect us from unconstitutional abuses?

It is particularly troubling that President Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the current U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, strongly defended civil asset forfeiture during her Senate confirmation hearings, despite major abuses by her own office. One case is described by my Cato colleague and attorney, Alan Bates: “In May of 2012 the Hirsch brothers, joint owners of Bi-County Distributors of Long Island, had their entire bank account [of $446,651.11] drained by the Internal Revenue Service working in conjunction with Lynch’s office without so much as a criminal charge.” Ms. Lynch’s office simply sat on the money for more than two years. The Institute for Justice, acting on behalf of the Hirsch brothers, was finally able to get the money returned earlier this year, after Ms. Lynch’s office admitted there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

In January, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan reintroduced the “Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, which would revise the federal civil forfeiture law to give property owners more protection and reduce the profit incentive that encourages law enforcement to seize assets.” The provisions in this proposed legislation would go some distance toward stopping many of the worst abuses even though, in my judgment, it does not go nearly far enough in ending asset forfeitures. Nonetheless, support for this legislation should be a no-brainer for members of Congress from both parties.

Loretta Lynch’s office has, by her own admission, confiscated over $100 million from people who have not been charged or convicted of anything. Mr. Paul has announced that he will oppose her confirmation because he doesn’t “think she’s shown any compassion, or understanding of the law, but particularly compassion for people who are victims of civil forfeiture. People who are victims of civil forfeiture are often poor, African-American or Hispanic, and people who can’t afford an attorney to try to get the money that’s taken by the government.”

It is rather basic, “Thou shall not steal.” Most people understand that commandment, and it doesn’t matter if it is the government doing the stealing or just a common miscreant. It is very troubling that Ms. Lynch and many others in law enforcement, particularly at the IRS, seem to have so little understanding of the Constitution and the basis of a civil society. To confirm Ms. Lynch for attorney general, without passing serious reform of the asset forfeiture law as Mr. Paul has proposed, will endanger the property and even the liberty of many Americans.

Former federal prosecutor Brad Cates and Judge John Yoder said it best: “Civil asset forfeiture and money-laundering laws are gross perversions of the status of government amid a free citizenry. The individual is the font of sovereignty in our constitutional republic, and it is unacceptable that a citizen should have to ‘prove’ anything to the government. If the government has probable cause of a violation of law, then let a warrant be issued. And if the government has proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt, let that guilt be proclaimed by 12 peers.”

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Obama Won't Say Murdered Kenyans Were Christians

Last week, Islamic militants murdered 150 Christians in Kenya, explicitly because of their faith. According to the Associated Press, “The attackers separated Christian students from Muslim ones and massacred the Christians.” But Barack Obama couldn’t be bothered to mention faith at all. The White House statement denounced “terrorist atrocities” against “men and women” and “students,” but there was nary a peep about “Muslims” or “Christians.” Likewise, Obama neglected to mention the 21 Egyptian Christians beheaded by ISIL earlier this year were anything but “citizens.” It would seem the only time Obama doesn’t mind mentioning Christians is when he’s lecturing them about the Crusades.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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