Governing by Pen and Phone

Obama used to sigh that he was not a dictator who could act unilaterally. No more.

Lately a weakened President Obama has fashioned a new attitude about consensual government: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama boasted Tuesday as he convened his first cabinet meeting of the year. At least he did not say he intended to govern by “pen and sword.” If Obama used to sigh to supporters that he was not a dictator who could just implement progressive agendas by fiat, he now seems to have done away with the pretense of regret.

Obama has all but given up on the third branch of government since he lost control of it in 2010: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”

There are lots of creepy things about such dictatorial statements of moving morally backward in order to go politically “forward.” Concerning issues dear to the president’s heart — climate change, more gun control, de facto amnesty, more massive borrowing supposedly to jump-start the anemic, jobless recovery — Obama not long ago had a Democratic supermajority in the Senate and a strong majority in the House. With such rare political clout, he supposedly was going to pass his new American agenda.

Instead, all he got from his Democratic colleagues was more borrowing and Obamacare. In the case of the latter, the bill passed only through the sort of pork-barrel kickbacks and exemptions to woo fence-sitting Democratic legislators that we hadn’t seen in the U.S. since the 1930s. And for what? Obamacare (be careful what you wish for) is proving to be the greatest boondoggle in American political history since Prohibition. If Obama sincerely wished to work in bipartisan fashion with Congress, he probably could easily get a majority vote to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a backup sanction plan against Iran in case his own initiatives fail.

Note as well that Obama says he will bypass Congress for “our kids.” Politicians usually cite the “kids” when promoting something that is either illegal or unethical. Meanwhile, apart from Obama’s support for late-term abortion, no president has waged a greater war against those under the age of 30 — passing on to them an additional $9 trillion in debt, socializing the economy and presiding over near-record youth and minority unemployment rates, taxing far poorer youth who will not use much health care to pay for more affluent baby boomers who will, or floating easy federal student loans to facilitate mostly liberal universities’ jacking up tuition at well above the rate of inflation (currently a $1 trillion bubble).

We are reentering Nixonian times, or perhaps worse, given that a free press at least went after Nixon’s misdeeds and misadventures. Now it has silenced itself for fear of harming a once-in-century chance for a fellow progressive’s makeover of America. We live in an age when a CNN moderator interrupts a presidential debate to help her sputtering candidate, and when a writer for the often ironic and sarcastic New Yorker sees no irony in doing a fawning interview with the president, tagging along on a shakedown jet tour from one mansion of crony capitalists to the next — as Obama preaches to the head-nodders about inequality and fairness in order to ensure that the bundled checks pour in.

Without the media acting as a watchdog, the administration has with impunity found the IRS useful in going after political opponents. When Obama’s IRS appointees were exposed, he for the moment called their deeds outrageous; when the media did not pursue the outrage, he wrote it off as a nothing story.

The media certainly thought it was nothing, given that none of the obsequious Washington press corps will be unduly audited or indicted. But the administration has also monitored Associated Press reporters. Most of what it initially said about the National Security Agency snooping proved untrue — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s flat-out lie to Congress while under oath, when he testified that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. All we know for now about Benghazi is that everything the administration alleged about the murders was false — from why Americans were there, to what prompted the violence, to why no help was sent before or during the attack, to the aftermath promises to hunt down the perpetrators.

The filmmaker and arch-critic of Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza, is now under indictment for improper campaign contributions. If he deliberately violated campaign-finance laws and compounded the violation by conspiring with others, then by all means he should face the full force of the law. The problem, though, is that even if D’Souza proves to be guilty as charged, others with far greater culpability — but with the correct political views — have not met the same degree of administration scrutiny.

Note, for example, what D’Souza did not do: He did not, as an Obama insider in the heat of the reelection campaign, leak classified information about vital national-security secrets like the Stuxnet virus attacks, the bin Laden raid, the drone protocols, or a double agent in Yemen in order to bolster the anti-terrorism credentials of the president; he did not, as a high-level Obama official, lie under oath to Congress about the NSA program; he is not a former Democratic governor who defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Apparently none of that will get you arrested by this administration.

Mr. D’Souza also did not, as did Obama himself, have a soon-to-be-jailed felon sell him a lot next to his own house at below-market rates, without paying gift taxes on it, in exchange for perceived political favors. He did not pass illegally into the United States and reside here illegally by habitually lying on documents about his resident status. He did not go to the polls with clubs to intimidate voters. He did not bundle $500,000 to buy an ambassorship to Norway without knowing much of anything about Norway. He did not pitch green ideas to friends now in the Obama administration in order to land millions of dollars in federal loans that he would default on.

He did, though, make a movie critical of Barack Obama, and this is most likely what brought him under administration scrutiny, as did the activities of a video maker arrested for producing a politically incorrect video about Islam, or those of unduly audited Tea Party groups or Hollywood conservatives who have criticized the president. All of that, in this age of pen and phone, can get you arrested, audited, or on the IRS watch list.

Note the ripple effect, as partisans appreciate a new climate and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to even scores and advance the cause. The governor of New York announces that there is no place in his state for those whom he derides as “extreme conservatives” — only to be seconded by the new mayor of New York City. (Imagine the governor of Utah suggesting to liberal residents that their support for gun control, late-term abortion, and gay marriage might be good reasons for them to leave the state — and being seconded by the mayor of Salt Lake City. Or imagine a Republican president arbitrarily deciding that he does not like the DREAM Act component of a recently passed comprehensive immigration-reform bill, and so simply choosing to ignore it and deport students who are illegal aliens anyway.)

The first black senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction is blasted by a state NAACP official as a “dummy,” only to have that slur seconded by the national organization. On MSNBC, one newscaster hopes Sarah Palin ingests feces and urine; another takes a jab at Mitt Romney for having an African-American adopted grandchild; still another labels radio personality Laura Ingraham a “slut” — all convinced that the periodic presidential sermon about a new civility empowers their crudity and deters critics.

Under Obama, who you are and what you represent rather than what you have done are becoming the selective criteria for pen-and-phone legal enforcement. For the first time since 1974, America is no longer quite a lawful place.

More HERE

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Hollywood, Propaganda and Liberal Politics

Jonah Goldberg

The legendary media tycoon William Randolph Hearst believed America needed a strongman and that Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit the bill. He ordered his newspapers to support FDR and the New Deal. At his direction, Hearst's political allies rallied around Roosevelt at the Democratic convention, which some believe sealed the deal for Roosevelt's nomination.

But all that wasn't enough. Hearst also believed the voters had to be made to see what could be gained from a president with a free hand. So he financed the film "Gabriel Over the White House," starring Walter Huston. The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander in chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. "The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress and brings about world peace. The bad news: He's Mussolini."

Hearst wanted to make sure the script got it right, so he sent it to what today might be called a script doctor, namely Roosevelt. FDR loved it, but he did have some changes, which Hearst eagerly accepted. A month into his first term, FDR sent Hearst a thank-you note. "I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in 'Gabriel Over the White House,'" Roosevelt wrote. "I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help."

I bring up this tale to note that Hollywood has never been opposed to propaganda. When Hollywood's self-declared auteurs and artistes denounce propaganda as the enemy of art, almost invariably what they really mean is "propaganda we don't like."

Consider the film "Lone Survivor," which tells the true story of heroic Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. The film has been denounced by some critics; a "jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda," in the words of one reviewer. Richard Corliss of Time chimed in: "That these events actually happened doesn't necessarily make it plausible or powerful in a movie, or keep it from seeming like convenient propaganda." Similar complaints (from non-conservatives, at least) about antiwar films made during the George W. Bush years are much harder to find.

Similarly, if Demi Moore proclaimed, "I pledge to be a servant to our president," at the dawn of the Bush presidency, it would have created a career-ending firestorm.

When it was owned by GE -- a company with billions of dollars invested in subsidy-dependent alternative energy technologies -- NBC began its "Green Week," seven days of sitcoms, sports shows and even news programs doing their part for the cause. There was nary a word of protest from TV critics or supposedly independent writers and producers about the corruption of art. I wonder, if Fox announced a "pro-life week," whether the same crowd would yawn as conspicuously.

In the book, "Primetime Propaganda," author Ben Shapiro quotes many TV producers boasting about blacklisting conservative actors and shilling for liberal issues. As Shapiro notes, perhaps no figure was more upfront -- or successful -- at yoking art to political proselytizing than Norman Lear, the creator of "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" and other shows.

Which is fitting. Last fall, the California Endowment, which is spending millions to promote the Affordable Care Act, gave $500,000 to the Norman Lear Center at USC to work on ways to get Hollywood to do its part. In February, the center will cosponsor with the Writer's Guild of America an event in New York titled "The Affordable Care Act: Comedy, Drama & Reality," about portraying Obamacare in TV and film. The Obama administration, naturally, will be sending an emissary to help.

It's doubtful this will have any significant effect. The rollout has made its impression, and the changes wrought by Obamacare in the individual lives of millions of Americans won't be erased by a very special episode of "The Big Bang Theory." But it's a useful reminder that Hollywood is always eager to lend its services -- for the right president.

SOURCE

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Income gap? Not many are obsessed

by Jeff Jacoby

THOUGH PRESIDENT Obama keeps insisting that income inequality is the "defining challenge of our time," most Americans beg to differ.

"What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" asked Gallup in a nationwide survey this month. Dissatisfaction with the federal government — its incompetence, abuse, dysfunction, venality — topped the list, with 21 percent of respondents saying it was their key concern. The overall state of the economy was second, at 18 percent. Unemployment and health care were tied for third, with each cited by 16 percent as the nation's most pressing problem.

How many shared Obama's view that the gap between rich and poor is the issue that should concern us most? Four percent.

The president has been banging this populist drum for years. As a candidate in 2008, he famously told "Joe the Plumber" that it was good for everybody when the government acts to "spread the wealth around." In 2011 he went to Osowatomie, Kan., site of a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier, to condemn the "gaping inequality" in modern America, where those at the top of the economic ladder are "wealthier than ever before," while everyone else struggles with growing bills and stagnant paychecks. He told the Center for American Progress last December that "increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream," and warned that America's basic bargain — "if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead" — is disintegrating.

Class-war rhetoric excites the Democratic base. There have always been some voters for whom nothing is more repellent than a growing gap between the rich and the non-rich, or a stronger justification for more government regulation. But most Americans don't react that way. "When is the last time you heard a shoeshine person or a taxicab driver complain about inequality?" asks economist John C. Goodman. "For most people, having a lot of rich people around is good for business."

Obsessing over other people's riches isn't healthy. In a relatively free society, wealth is typically earned. There are exceptions, of course. Some people cheat their way to a fortune; some are just lucky; some pull political strings.

But on the whole, Americans with a lot of money have usually produced more, worked harder, aimed higher, or seen further than the rest of us. Inequality is built into the human condition, and the world is generally better off when people of uncommon talent and industry are free to climb as high as their abilities will take them.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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.

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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Having sisters: Another elephant discovered

An NYT writer, Charles Blow,  has come across some survey findings by Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra to the effect that people who have sisters are more "sexist" and more likely to vote Republican. There have been all sorts of efforts to turn that finding into something discreditable to conservatives.  One theory is that where there are girls around boys get let off from helping with housework and think that is a good racket for the rest of their lives.

The key to understanding the finding is however the word "sexist".  It is of course largely a term of abuse.  The factual content to it is however that the "sexist" person thinks men and women are different.  Thinking that way does of course have all the evidence on its side but what Leftist ever cared about evidence?  So, to the Leftist, people who think that way are evil and are rightly referred to with a term of abuse.

Once we get past the abuse, however, the implications of the finding become self-evident:  Growing up with girls leaves you in no doubt about how different they are.  It is a reality check.  Those evil sexists are simply more in touch with how things actually are.

And that also explains the Republican orientation.  It is in fact probably more an anti-Democrat orientation.  Democrats are always preaching feminist nonsense so people who know from experience how much nonsense it is turn to the realistic party  -- the Republican party.

So I am once again a discoverer of elephants in rooms.  I have only pointed out the bleeding obvious -- but nothing as simple as "sexism" being realistic can enter a Leftist mind, of course.  To them the elephant is invisible.

Steve Sailer has some useful notes on the matter

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The Poison of Postmodern Lying

All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore -- a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.

Postmodernism (the cultural fad "after modernism") went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like "truth" were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society -- and now they have.

Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her Harvard Law School education.

When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead, she lamely offered that, "My language should be tighter." Apparently, only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood -- period. In contrast, Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is "truth," and she only needs to be "tighter" about her fabrications to neutralize her reactionary critics.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for years falsely claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume that they serve the greater truth of social change.

In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it matter if the president of the United States promised that Obamacare would not alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters.

For that matter, the "law" that requires a president to enforce legislation passed by the Congress is likewise a construct. If ignoring bothersome laws -- whether the individual mandate and timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law -- serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes "truth." Blindly enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes.

Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don't become lies -- the facts are irrelevant. When Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2007 heard the factual details of the successful Iraq surge as related by Gen. David Petraeus, she said it required a "suspension of disbelief." In her postmodern sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth -- and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply an irrelevant narrative.

Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation, "What difference does it make?" She had a postmodern point. If President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and Clinton herself all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected? How could that good intention be a lie?

If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Congress that the National Security Agency does not snoop on American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper's goal was to silence Obama's right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that the radical Muslim Brotherhood was "largely secular"?

By what arbitrary rules can one claim that "Piss Christ" or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly pernicious religion? Was Obama's autobiography truth or fiction, or something in between -- as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just "composites"?

Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up. Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible.

But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become "it depends." Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they serve the correct cause -- and damn any reactionary discrepancies.

To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others.

SOURCE

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Progressives Without Progress

There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to redistribute everything.

The progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.

There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living. Both the quest and the way of living become as unchallengeable as any theological utopia founded not on bad economics and political parochialism, but on a deeply spiritual faith.

The progress of progressives is not a rocket to the stars, but a slow elevator climbing up a constricted shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive in the same sense that a television channel that moves from one show to the next within the confines of its programming is. It's programmed progress, not the progress of exploring infinitely expanding possibilities.

The left is actually deeply conservative. It is difficult for people in countries being contested by the left to see this because they observe the left as revolutionary and destructive. But every attempted conquest is accompanied by violent disruptions. The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war; not because it seeks an open society of perpetual creative ferment.

Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward. There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and North Korea were not producing compelling new cultural products for export the way that their sympathizers in Hollywood did and do. It's the same reason that they don't keep having revolutions.

The creative energies harnessed by the left are a revolutionary tool for achieving an ideal society. Once that miserably ideal society is achieved, everything is regimented and unplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned. Science and culture are forcibly slowed down. Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces mediocrity in all fields. Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.


Americans had trouble believing that the left of the counterculture had much in common with the conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley Weird, is not revolutionary. It's traditionalist.

Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the way that they used to be.

On the opposite coast, the old radical artists and poets complain that the East Village isn't what it used to be and landmark everything in sight. Men and women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every bar liquor license with the outraged spleen of suburbanites threatened with a landfill.

The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that weird then just becomes another tradition and another proprietarian cultural impulse to avert a changing world by clinging to the way things used to be when you were young and everything made sense. It's not really keeping things weird, it's keeping the weird things that come from a changing outside world, out.

Utopians always carry that narrow-minded fragility with them. Their perfect society is always doomed by the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men. The more they try to hold on to it, the more it breaks apart right in front of their eyes. The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.

Progress is confidence in human capabilities. The progressive movement however is tragic. It depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism; but it firmly believes that only the collective can make society work. And only the collective can lock it in.

Progressive utopians project their sense of fragility onto all material things. Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need. And that includes any and all human activities which might cause the warming of the planet.

Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth finite (except when they're spending it) but so is everything from education to employment.

The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a static society in which everything is "fair", rather than a rapidly progressing society society that is unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating, rather than sharing, and produces more for all.

Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of progress is achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never come, utopia becomes an economic police state.

The progressive idea of progress is a sack race with a hundred feet in one sack. Progress must be communal. It must meet the needs of all stakeholders. It must comply with every detail of the plan. And so it is no wonder that we hardly build big things anymore or dream great dreams. Vision is individual and it's deeply disruptive. It changes the way that everyone lives.

Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is achieved, there is no more room for vision. Visions, like viruses, are competitive creatures. When a Vision achieves a static order by killing all other visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains with its dead hand on the wheel of history.

The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a tradition of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one lockbox before the sky falls. The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.


Utopia believes the worst of everyone and everything. It fears its own mortality and scents the taste of death on everything. It is convinced that the sky will fall, that everyone will starve and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.

Progressives lock everyone into their narrow regimented and regulated idea of progress because they distrust people and they even distrust the universe. They are children certain that everything they love is about to be taken away from them and closet fascists obsessed with their moment of heroism when they rush out of the phone booth, biodegradable cape blowing in the wind, and save humanity from itself through a benevolent police state that extends into absolutely every area of human activity.

There is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of progress. Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.

Progressives view every element of the world, from the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute intersections of human society as too fragile and limited for unregulated progress. Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.

The only way to resume progress is to fight the progressive movement.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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.

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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The growing distance between Washington and the public it dominates

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year's innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

I watched at home and thought: They hate it. They being the people, whom we're now supposed to refer to as the folks. But you look at the polls at how people view Washington—one, in October, had almost 9 in 10 disapproving—and you watch a kabuki-like event like this and you know the distance, the psychic, emotional and experiential distance, between Washington and America, between the people and their federal government, is not only real but, actually, carries dangers. History will make more of the distance than we do. Someday in the future we will see it most vividly when a truly bad thing happens and the people suddenly need to trust what Washington says, and will not, to everyone's loss.

In the country, the president's popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it's at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it's good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in "The Hunger Games," the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents' Dinner, "Scandal" and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.

Supposedly people feel great rage about this, and I imagine many do. But the other night I wondered if what they're feeling isn't something else.

As the president made his jaunty claims and the senators and congressmen responded semirapturously I kept thinking of four words: Meanwhile, back in America . . .

Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered. They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don't—and of course they can't, being Catholic, and nuns—they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw "Philomena," suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don't see the form as meaningless; they know it's not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.



Everyone who says that would never have happened in the past is correct. It never, ever would have under normal American political leadership, Republican or Democratic. No one would've defied religious liberty like this.

The president has taken to saying he isn't ideological but this mandate—his mandate—is purely ideological.

It also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn't tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they'll be ruined. You don't make the Little Sisters bow down to you.

This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

Meanwhile, back in America, disadvantaged parents in Louisiana—people who could never afford to live in places like McLean, Va., or Chevy Chase, Md.—continue to wait to see what will happen with the state's successful school voucher program. It lets poor kids get out of failed public schools and go to private schools on state scholarships. What a great thing. But the Obama Justice Department filed suit in August: The voucher system might violate civil rights law by worsening racial imbalance in the public schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal, and the parents, said nonsense, the scholarship students are predominately black, they have civil rights too. Is it possible the Justice Department has taken its action because a major benefactor of the president's party is the teachers unions, which do not like vouchers because their existence suggests real failures in the public schools they run?

Meanwhile, back in America, conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service still await answers on their years-long requests for tax exempt status. When news of the IRS targeting broke last spring, agency officials lied about it, and one took the Fifth. The president said he was outraged, had no idea, read about it in the papers, boy was he going to get to the bottom of it. An investigation was announced but somehow never quite materialized. Victims of the targeting waited to be contacted by the FBI to be asked about their experience. Now the Justice Department has made clear its investigation won't be spearheaded by the FBI but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and the Democratic Party. Sometimes you feel they are just laughing at you, and going too far.

In the past five years many Americans have come to understand that an agency that maintained a pretty impressive record for a very long time has been turned, at least in part, into a political operation. Now the IRS has proposed new and tougher rules for grassroots groups. Cleta Mitchell, longtime attorney for many who've been targeted, says the IRS is no longer used in line with its mission: "They're supposed to be collecting revenues, not snooping and trampling on the First Amendment rights of the citizens. We are not subjects of a king, we are permitted to engage in First Amendment activities without reporting those activities to the IRS."

All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting of conservative groups—all these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

They call it rage. But it feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you'd lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

SOURCE  

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Politics of Hate and Envy

Walter E. Williams

Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation's chief executive officer's earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in "Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries"

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf's annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf's salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke's $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt's $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let's look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.

Forbes lists the "Highest-Paid Football Players 2013". Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees' salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.

But the "unfair" salaries of sports players pale in comparison with movie stars. According to Forbes' listing of the highest-paid actors, Robert Downey Jr. earned $75 million from June 2012 to June 2013. Channing Tatum: $60 million. Hugh Jackman: $55 million. Let's suppose the cameraman working with Downey earned $60,000. It would take the salaries of 1,250 of them to equal his salary. Oprah Winfrey's 2012 salary came to $165 million, thousands of times what the earnings of people who work for her are.

Though sports and Hollywood personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you'll never find leftists and progressives picketing and criticizing them. Why? The strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That's the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre's promoting hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks.

I'm not equating America's progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. Do you think President Barack Obama would stoke the fires of hate and envy by remarking that he thinks that "at a certain point, you've made enough money" -- as he did in a 2010 Quincy, Ill., speech -- in regard to the salaries of Winfrey, Brees and Hollywood celebrities?

Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million?

There's another important issue. If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the only company that would like to have him on the payroll. In order to keep him, the company must pay him enough so that he can't be lured elsewhere.

SOURCE

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The case against early voting

To the delight of anyone who’s ever waited in line to cast a vote, a bipartisan election commission convened by President Obama concluded last week that states across the country should increase their use of early voting.

But early voting run amok is bad for democracy. The costs to collective self-governance — which the report refers to only in passing, in a single sentence — substantially outweigh the benefits. Instead of expanding the practice, we should use this moment as an opportunity to establish clear limits on it before it becomes the norm.

Why? For all its conveniences, early voting threatens the basic nature of citizen choice in democratic, republican government. In elections, candidates make competing appeals to the people and provide them with the information necessary to be able to make a choice. Citizens also engage with one another, debating and deliberating about the best options for the country. Especially in an age of so many nonpolitical distractions, it is important to preserve the space of a general election campaign — from the early kickoff rallies to the last debates in October — to allow voters to think through, together, the serious issues that face the nation.

The integrity of that space is broken when some citizens cast their ballots as early as 46 days before the election, as some states allow. A lot can happen in those 46 days. Early voters are, in essence, asked a different set of questions from later ones; they are voting with a different set of facts. They may cast their ballots without the knowledge that comes from later candidate debates (think of the all-important Kennedy-Nixon debates, which ran from late September 1960 until late October); without further media scrutiny of candidates; or without seeing how they respond to unexpected national or international news events — the proverbial “October surprise.”

The 2008 election, for example, could have ended differently had many voters cast their ballots before the massive economic crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. Similarly, candidates often seek to delay the release of embarrassing information, or the implementation of difficult policies, until after votes have been cast. A wave of votes starting months before the election date makes this easier.

Early voting not only limits the set of information available to voters; to the extent that it decreases the importance of debates, it might also systematically help incumbents and quasi-incumbents like vice presidents, who generally have the advantage of having been in the public eye longer.

More fundamentally, early voting changes what it means to vote. It is well known that voters can change their minds — polls always go up and down during a campaign season. A single Election Day creates a focal point that gives solemnity and relevance to the state of popular opinion at a particular moment in time; on a single day, we all have to come down on one side or the other. But if the word “election” comes to mean casting votes over a period of months, it will elide the difference between elections and polls. People will be able to vote when the mood strikes them — after seeing an inflammatory ad, for example. Voting then becomes an incoherent summing of how various individuals feel at a series of moments, not how the nation feels at a particular moment. This weakens civic cohesiveness, and it threatens to substitute raw preferences and momentary opinion for rational deliberation. Of course, those eager to cast early will be the most ideological — but these are precisely the voters who would benefit most from taking in the full back and forth of the campaign.

Moreover, there are other ways of achieving some of the benefits of early voting, such as old-fashioned absentee ballots or setting up more polling places. Even a limited few-days-early voting period could convey most of the advantages of the practice while limiting the most severe democratic costs.

Early voting is a matter of degree: Even Election “Day” lets people cast ballots at different times. But at the moment, there is no upper bound at all on the growing practice, and the president’s commission made no mention of such an option. With the group’s report opening a new round of discussion over voting policy, now is the time to consider whether the “quiet revolution” of early voting has gone too far.

SOURCE  

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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.

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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If Obamacare Doesn't Kill Small Medical Practices, Bureaucratic ICD-10 Coding Requirements Might

News headlines have focused on the bureaucratic mandates, financial looniness, and unlikely assumptions that seem designed to drive medical providers away from the Affordable Care Act or out of business entirely. But this year, a non-Obamacare bureaucratic car bomb is set to explode in the medical world in the form of ICD-10—a new coding system for patient diagnoses and inpatient procedures. Mandated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the coding system standardizes communications among providers and insurers. Well, it standardizes them more, since ICD-9 has been in place for 30 years. Uncertainty over hitches in replacing the old coding system with a brand new one has industry experts advising practices to keep several months worth of cash on hand to cover lags in reimbursement. Practices lacking that much liquidity under the mattress may be truly screwed.

Theoretically, the new coding system covers inpatient care involving Medicare, Medicaid, and "everyone covered by the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act." The government says up and down that the new codes aren't really necessary for private practices providing outpatient care. A handy FAQ insists:

Will ICD-10 replace Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) procedure coding?

No. The switch to ICD-10 does not affect CPT coding for outpatient procedures. Like ICD-9 procedure codes, ICD-10-PCS codes are for hospital inpatient procedures only.

But as EHRIntelligence points out, "While it’s true that CPT/HCPCS codes will continue to be the gold standard for outpatient procedures, providers will be required to include ICD-10 diagnostic codes with their claims in order to receive reimbursements from payers."

So, if doctors want to be compensated by anybody other than cash-only patients, they need to adopt the new codes, too.

The problem is that glitches are anticipated in switchover to the new coding system, since nobody is allowed to use it before October 1, 2014, and everybody is required to use it after that day. That's right, another government-mandated healthcare industry hard launch, exactly one year after Healthcare.gov debuted.

Actually, ICD-10 and Healthcare.gov were originally scheduled to launch on the same day in 2013. That would have been fun.

The Healthcare Billing & Management Association warns that "it is possible that not all payors will be ready for ICD-10 on October 1, 2014," so "it will be important that you are able to submit in both ICD-9 and ICD-10 formats." The group further recommends that practices "establish a line of credit to tide the office over during the first months following the implementation of ICD-10" to acommodate reimbursement delays.

The CMS itself notes in its Implementation Guide for Small and Medium Practices:

The transition to ICD-10 will result in changes to physician reimbursements. ... [C]hallenges with billing productivity combined with potential payer claim processing challenges may result in signicant impact to cash flow. This may require the need for reserve funds or lines of credit to offset cash flow challenges.

According to HealthcareITNews:

Healthcare providers may face disruptions in their payments even if they are on target to operate using ICD-10 codes on Oct. 1, 2014. 

Since providers will, and indeed need, to be able to pay rent and staff salaries if the transition does not flow as smoothly as testing has indicated, experts advise having up to several months' cash reserves or access to cash through a loan or line of credit to avoid potential headaches.

"Just figure that with the transition to ICD-10 there will be delays in reimbursement," said April Arzate, vice president of client services at MediGain, a Dallas-based revenue cycle and healthcare analytics company.

Arzate recommends keeping enough cash on hand to cover medical supplies, payroll, rent, and the rest of a medical practice's overhead for three to six months.

A separate document on risk-mitigation strategies for implementing ICD-10, prepared by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, specifies a "minimum of six months of cash reserves to mitigate revenue impacts over the ICD-10 transformation period."

Lines of credit might step in where available cash is short, but banks issue lines of credit to good risks—not medical practices already struggling in an uncertain regulatory environment.

If you're a doctor, now is a good time to look at your cash flow, or your retirement options. If you're a patient, you might just consider buying your favorite doc a good-bye drink.

SOURCE 

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Two Utterly Banal Thoughts

Reading Michael Huemer’s paper “In Praise of Passivity” – especially given that I learned of it from my colleague Bryan Caplan – prompts two quick thoughts, neither of which is unique.  Each thought is on why we are likely, into the distant future, to continue to suffer the curse of social engineering – to have to endure what I might take to calling “collective treatment by a college of dark-agish economic proctologists.”

First, too many people continue today to cherish their superstitions.  These people want to believe that secular salvation is possible.  They refuse to accept the reality that reality is not optional.  Just as people have forever and to this day fallen prey to peddlers of snake-oil, get-rich-quick schemes, lose-weight-while-you-sleep frauds, and enlarge-your-penis-with-a-pill shysters, people have forever and to this day fallen prey to peddlers of economic salvation.  People enjoy believing in the efficacy of grand promises of quick riches through simplistic schemes such as “increase government spending,” “diminish the value of the currency,” “cure the cause of rising prices by using price controls to prevent the symptom of rising prices,” and (always especially popular) “take wealth from the rich and give it to the less-than-rich.”

None of these superstitious ‘cures’ requires much thinking beyond the childish ability to understand that if the promises came true, everyone would be better off save for the Bad Guys whose evil-doings allegedly caused reality to fall short of some imaginable ideal.

Second, just as peddlers of snake oil, Ponzi schemes, sugar tablets labeled ‘diet pill,’ and penis-enlargement treatments do personally profit from their victims’ gullibility, superstitions, and desire to believe that reality can be suspended, so, too, do peddlers of the likes of minimum-wage legislation, Keynesian ‘cures,’ and ‘income redistribution’ profit personally from widespread economic ignorance and too-many people’s desire to have their economic woes, real or imagined, ‘solved’ by god-like miracle workers housed in government offices.  History has no shortage of ‘leaders’ who’ve profited (and, to this day, continue to profit) handsomely from selling social-engineering snake oil to the general public.

With so many eager buyers and so many eager sellers, dark-age-ish economic policies will always be with us.

 SOURCE 

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The Market is Taking Over Sweden’s Health Care

While contemporary mythology has it otherwise, the market is not a distinct phenomenon: it is what exists when people interact and otherwise voluntarily transact with each other. The broad definition of the market is simply what people (choose to) do when they are not forced to do otherwise. So it is not surprising that even the Soviet Union, “despite” its anti-market rhetoric, fundamentally relied on markets: foreign markets for prices to guide planners’ economic calculation, and domestic black markets for resource allocation and goods distribution according to people’s real needs and preferences. The black market, indeed, was “a major structural feature” of the Soviet economy.

In other words, we should expect to see markets wherever governments fail. Or, to put it more accurately, markets exist where government cannot sufficiently repress or otherwise crowd out voluntary exchange.

So it should be no surprise that, as The Local reports, Swedes en masse get private health care insurance on the side of the failing welfare systems. This is indirectly a result of the relatively vast liberalization of the Swedish economy over the course of the past 20 years (as I have noted here and here), which has resulted in the “experimental” privatization of several hospitals (even one emergency hospital is privately owned). While previously only the political elite (primarily, members of the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament) had access to private health care through insurance, the country now sees a blossoming and healthy insurance market.

Private health care insurance was initially offered to employees as part of employers’ benefits packages, since this ensured direct access to care when needed, and a faster return to work. This trend was easily recognizable in service sectors heavily dependent on the skill and knowledge of individual employees. Working as a professional consultant in Sweden in the late 1990s and 2000s, I personally experienced and benefited from such private health care insurance through my employer. This type of very affordable insurance provided same-day appointment with GPs and specialists alike, whereas going to the public hospital would have entailed waiting in line during the overcrowded “open access” times or waits of perhaps a week or more to see a GP.

My experience is first-hand with both alternatives, and they were at the time as different as night and day. While talking heads in the media cried out that private insurance created a “fast track” for “the rich,” the net effect for the already overwhelmed public health care system was relief through decreased demand. As we should expect from any shift toward market, everybody was ultimately better off thanks to this (limited) marketization of Swedish health care (perhaps excepting bureaucrats who previously enjoyed the power to directly control health care).

Waiting for Care

Swedes maintain that they get good (they mean great) health care, and the statistics partly confirm this. In fact, Sweden’s health care was recently noted as the tenth most efficient in the world (excluding smaller countries). The decentralized regional system of government (regional governments, taxing incomes in the range 10-12 percent, are primarily responsible for health care, public transport, and cultural subsidies) has undoubtedly contributed to this, especially since the national voucher/guarantee system enacted in 1992 has increased competition between regions and thereby placed pressure on politicians and hospital administration.

The fact that one in every ten people voluntarily foregoes care even though they need it, according to the regulating authority Socialstyrelsen's status report 2011 (3 percent of whom could not afford care, p. 64), should also lessen the pressure on the health care system. It should also be noted that Swedish bureaucracy overall is comparatively effective and efficient (likely a result of the country being very small and having a long tradition of both governmental transparency and a hardworking population), so why would this not also be the case in health care?

The main problem is naturally due to the central planning of health care, whether or not it is planned by regional “competing” governments. While access and quality are guaranteed by national law, Swedes usually have to line up for care. As noted above, wait times may be days or weeks for appointments with GPs while several (or many, and increasing) hours for ER care, but the real problem is apparent in specialist care such as surgery where wait times are not uncommonly several months, or even years.

Swedish media frequently reports on cases of mistreatment, extreme wait times, and deaths due to not being offered care in time. An increasingly common phenomenon is denying the severely ill ambulance for all sorts of symptoms, for example severe burns, blood poisoning, myocardial infarction (1, 2), or stroke.

Even an otherwise laudatory article in The New York Times notes how wait times are the problem in Swedish health care. This remains a major shortcoming despite the national “health care guarantee” (guaranteed care within 90 days). As in any market where consumption is subsidized through artificially low (or no) fees, demand skyrockets and there is simply no way for suppliers of the service to keep up with it.

Private insurance and (semi-)private hospitals in this sense offers relief for an otherwise unsustainable system; their net effect is lower demand on public hospitals, which should make life easier for many in Sweden. Access used to be more difficult, except for those who could skip the regular system by taking advantage of personal relationships or family bonds with physicians, nurses, and other hospital personnel. My personal experience speaks to this latter fact, though it generally is dismissed by Swedes wanting to believe in the system. The fact that “knowing the right people” can open doors is irrefutable, however. And it is important in socialized systems.

A Constant Lack of Funds

As in the NYT article, all problems including the wait times are generally blamed on a “lack” of funds. As Jonsson and Banta note, “limited resources do result in waiting lists and other restrictions.” In the media and political discourse, this is discussed as “cutbacks,” but yet the funds seem to never be enough.

This is symptomatic for any public system — the allocated funds are never (and can never be) sufficient. There is simply too much waste due to lack of incentives and market prices. In order to deal with health care’s runaway costs (or pressure to cut costs, depending on one’s view), health care providers tend to employ the same techniques as others subjected to a public primarily one-payer system. These techniques may vary over time and can be different in different places, but they all amount to exploiting loopholes or in other ways circumvent the system’s limitations. One such technique includes a type of “creative” accounting to up the hospital’s cash inflow by indicating in the patient’s medical records a more expensive treatment than the one actually given. One treatment on the books, another off the books.

This is of course an expected outcome of a centrally planned system with relatively limited health care user fees (contrary to popular myth, Sweden’s health care is not “free”). When Swedes get health care, it is generally of quite good quality. But to get it, they need the right connections, or insurance. The former offers no guarantee but only a relative improvement, while the latter is a proper market contract. No wonder Swedes take advantage of their newfound opportunity to have health care insurance.

The Future: Sweden or the United States?

Liberals tend to point to Sweden as a good example of how well an extensive welfare state functions. They are not completely wrong, since Sweden is a rather well-functioning country. But this is despite the welfare state; these live in the past, and assert that Sweden today is one part in the 1970s and two parts their own imagination. The fact is that the Swedish welfare state imploded in the early 1990s; it was crushed under its own weight after more than two decades of rapid decline.

The reason Sweden is doing so well at present is partly an illusion and partly a market story. It is an illusion since what other countries we have to compare with are also welfare states (or, as in the case of the United States, a warfare-welfare state); being best of the worst does not mean one is actually good. It is a market story since Sweden has for more than two decades consistently rolled back the welfare state, introduced market prices and private ownership, “experimented” with market-like incentives for public providers, and cut taxes

What Sweden has done is hardly sufficient, but it appears to be in the right direction. More importantly, it is in a direction not taken by many other countries — and this explains the country’s relatively strong financial condition.

In contrast, the United States is moving toward the liberal distorted image of what Sweden is supposedly like. While Sweden is embracing a system including what appears to be real health care insurance, the U.S. is moving from a hybrid third-party payer system (inaccurately described as private health care insurance) to an all-out public health care system following ObamaCare.

When the United States is firmly going down the road to serfdom, the market appears to be taking over Sweden’s health care.

 SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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. 

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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Obama's SOTU buries immigration up front without any detail

I'm inclined to say it was the least bad statement on immigration that he or George W. Bush have made in the SOTU addresses. It felt buried.

And despite the fact that the news media has been making it seem like immigration is about 60% of Mr. Obama's agenda for this year, he gave it only a perfunctory paragraph.  Here it is:

"Finally, if we are serious about economic growth, it is time to heed the call of business leaders, labor leaders, faith leaders, and law enforcement – and fix our broken immigration system. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have acted. I know that members of both parties in the House want to do the same. Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits by almost $1 trillion in the next two decades. And for good reason: when people come here to fulfill their dreams – to study, invent, and contribute to our culture – they make our country a more attractive place for businesses to locate and create jobs for everyone. So let’s get immigration reform done this year.  Let's get it done. It's time."

Of course, we know the absolutely horrible things Mr. Obama would do under the term "immigration reform."

But it seems a good sign that he thought it would be harmful to his cause to tell Americans anything specific that he wants on immigration.

We had been told ahead of time that he would play nice with his immigration statement so as not to offend House Republicans who he is trying to win over. Still, I was a bit surprised -- and I think encouraged -- by his timidity.

Republicans picked one of the House's top party leaders -- Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-Wash.) -- to deliver the response.

Because many news media have practically declared the inevitability of House Republicans helping pass an amnesty this year, I was much more interested to hear what she would say.

Since she didn't really mention that many issues, it wasn't a good sign that she and her colleagues thought she should make such a big deal about immigration reform. Still, hers was also just a paragraph and more vague than specific:

"And yes, it’s time to honor our history of legal immigration.  We’re working on a step-by-step solution to immigration reform by first securing our borders and making sure America will always attract the best, brightest, and hardest working from around the world."

But her rhetoric is vague enough that the Republicans at their Chesapeake Bay retreat Wednesday through Friday won't have to embarrass her or seem to reject her when they show no enthusiasm for the GOP leadership's definition of "imigration reform."

Back when I was a congressional correspondent sitting in the press box overlooking the SOTU proceedings, I took a lot of notes on how and when particular Members responded to parts of the speech. I had to depend on the camera feed for the TV networks, but I was intrigued with what I saw from the top 3 House Republican leaders during the President's immigration paragraph.

After his first sentence ending in "fix our broken immigration system," Vice President Biden quickly moved to his feet as did all Democrats in a pretty resounding ovation.

That certainly put Speaker Boehner in a tough position. He knew the cameras were on him. His corporate donors want him to give Mr. Obama what he wants. But Mr. Boehner also had earlier this morning seen a strong negative reaction from his Republican Members to the news reports about a possible GOP legalization plan. Does the Speaker rehearse his reactions ahead of time?  What would he do on this one?

I was relieved that Mr. Boehner didn't seem to have the slightest inclination to stand the way leaders of the "other party" sometimes feel they have to when baseball, mom and apple pie are being lauded.  Instead, Mr. Boehner gave a non-commital facial expression and slowly applauded while remaining seated.

The camera swung to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who was giving a moderate applause while looking very serious.  At the edge of the camera shot was the No. 3 House Republican Kevein McCarthy also being careful not to look too enthusiastic, despite recently saying that he looked forward to moving legislation that gives work permits and legalization to most illegal aliens.

It looked like maybe a half-dozen Republicans were confident enough of their constituents to stand with the Democrats in the ovation.

At the end of the President's immigration paragraph, there was more heavy applause.  The camera caught Mr. Cantor not joining at first and then offering a pretty slow clap.

I'm not going to read too much into what the various body language tells us about where these GOP leaders stand but I think tells us worlds about where they think their constituency stands.

More HERE

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Some more Reactions to Obama’s State of the Union Address

“The president says that the economy is improving substantially. Sadly, the average worker does not believe that. As President Barack Obama enters his sixth year in the White House, 68 percent of Americans say the country is either stagnant or worse off since he took office, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

“There is good reason for the pessimism. In 2007, 66 percent of Americans over age 16 either had a job or were looking for one. Today, that is down to 62.8 percent, the lowest labor-force participation rate since 1978.”

“In his meandering mess of a speech tonight, President Obama managed to completely gloss over the relevant facts regarding the failures of his signature health care law. Rather than admit the problems and apologize for them, the president chose to ignore the millions of Americans who’ve learned that even if they like their plan they can’t keep it, or even if they like their doctor they can keep him. Instead, he based his metric of success on the number of Americans signed up for Medicaid, an already overburdened and failing entitlement system which offers the false promise of care to millions of Americans.

“President Obama has made health care unaffordable for millions of citizens while needlessly disrupting our economy. At most, his health care exchanges are signing up 15 percent of the uninsured Americans they were supposed to enroll. And why? Because the American people are finding that the promises he made about bringing down the price of health insurance for individuals and families were complete and utter lies. If all the promises he’d made about Obamacare had come true, the president’s speech tonight would’ve been a victory lap. Instead, it’s a grim insistence that his broken policy will endure, despite how much it has hurt Americans across the country.”

“President Obama dares to say ‘research shows government preschool is a great investment’ just a few months after yet another highest-quality study shows it’s fool’s gold. The president apparently prefers only the poor-quality research that supports his agenda of saddling kids with debt while failing to equip them to pay it off.

“The president is quite bold to claim his micromanaging, dictatorial education policies are already improving student achievement when the statistics show his penchant for making laws without congress has slowed poor and minority kids’ achievement growth. The common core education standards and tests his administration has illegally pushed on schools still have no positive track record despite millions spent, and millions more to come.”

“It seems to me if there was a theme that ran through his talk, it’s that executive orders will fall from his pen like leaves from trees on a breezy day in late fall. Congress should grow a spine and remind the president that its job is to make the laws, and the president’s job is to see that the laws are faithfully executed. That’s why Congress is called the legislative branch of government and the presidency is called the executive branch.

“Apart from throwing a few crumbs to his base, President Obama produced nothing novel or interesting in his speech. But he did sadly reaffirm his commitment to a virtually Utopian society in which government takes the initiative on nearly all fronts. And that is plainly not in the spirit of what is distinctively American or just.

“I had hoped for some learning from the president — to the effect that the private sector is where solutions lie to nearly all our real problems. Government’s only role must be, as Jefferson said, to ‘secure [our] rights’ — not to train Americans for anything other than, perhaps, defending the country from potential aggressors. It is not the job of government to ‘give us a chance,’ since our form of government doesn’t include some monarch handing out favors to subjects.”

“From the SOTU, you’d never guess that we have a record low in number of people employed, record levels of debt, abysmal international standing in education, chaos in the Middle East, and millions losing their health insurance. But we’re going to the Olympics, finding natural gas (on private lands only), and planning (still) to close Gitmo (thereby upholding our constitutional ideals). Amanda in Arizona got health coverage, a small business opened in Detroit, and carbon emissions are way down (no attribution given to our dismal economy). All we need to do now is extend unemployment insurance, raise the minimum wage, and end gun violence. That last bit is one of a number of things Obama promises to do single handedly if Congress won’t cooperate.

“Now that ObamaCare has fixed health care, and reduced al Qaeda to a mere remnant, we can move on to fixing education.

“From the enthusiastic applause, it would appear that Congress is persuaded by this fantasy, though a few audience shots showed some dour-looking Republicans. They’re the ones getting blamed for ‘creating crises.’ Otherwise, all is well, and God bless America.

“How can anyone take this charade seriously?”

“Richard Nixon was called ‘Tricky Dick.’ Bill Clinton was called ‘Slick Willy.’ Perhaps Obama will be referred to as ‘Smoothie Barack’? The State of the Union Speech is theatre, a one-time performance, delivered for its quotability on wide range of issues, but almost instantly forgotten. All that remains of it is the memory of how smooth Obama’s delivery was because, if there is one thing he can do, it’s deliver a speech.

“What Obama delivered was a list of the same policies that have ill-served the nation. After five years, we know that what he cannot do is provide leadership sufficient to govern America. Foreign or domestic, his policies have been marked by failure.

“He made reference to the global warming hoax, saying ‘The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.’ The debate is not settled. It has raged since the later 1980s when the hoax was introduced. Global warming is such a failed hoax it has had to be renamed climate change. He then referred to ‘carbon pollution,’ but carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is vital to all life on Earth. The fundamental truth remains of no importance to the president.

“On the long roster of issues he addressed, he placed an emphasis on putting Americans to work again, but that remains a difficult goal to achieve when his administration is scaling new heights in the production of regulations that choke the nation’s business community, from large corporations to small businesses. There was no mention of the Keystone XL pipeline which his own State Department estimated could produce 42,000 jobs.

“He advocated raising the minimum wage when all that will accomplish will be to reduce jobs and drive up costs to consumers.

“He dramatized Obamacare by using examples of people he said benefitted from it, but made no mention of the millions who have or will lose their healthcare plans and even their choice of a personal physician. He’s smooth, but he is also an accomplished liar.

“By the end of the week, it will be back to normal in Congress. The president will be ignoring it, issuing executive orders when he can. Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, will continue to obstruct more than 150 pieces of legislation sent by the Republican controlled House to aid the economy and address other issues.

“Obama is a smooth talker, but talk is not enough. We were treated to a long speech, but one that had as little real substance to suggest its content will ever be fulfilled and, in many cases, that is a very good thing.”

SOURCE/

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UK: Catholics lean to Left as Anglicans go Right: Study finds how each denomination of Christianity is likely to vote

Catholics are more likely to vote Labour while Church of England worshippers most consistently back the Conservatives, according to new research.

Think tank Theos said they have carried out the first in-depth analysis into the relationship between religion and politics in Britain.

Catholics were found to be the most left-wing of Christian groups and more pro-welfare than Anglicans, who were said to be more authoritarian in their political values.

Non-religious people are most consistently libertarian, taking a strong line against censorship and are sceptical about management and the fair distribution of wealth.

Nick Spencer, Theos’s research director and co-author of the report, said that while there are clear alignments between religious views and voting, 'block votes' do not exist in Britain.

'Every five years or so, someone claims that this or that religious (or non-religious group) might swing the election,' he said.

'Politics isn’t like that, however, and this report shows that religious block votes do not exist in Britain as many claim they do in America.

'It does show, however, that there are clear and significant alignments between various religious and political camps, of which politicians should be aware.

'At a time when mass party membership, political ideology and party tribalism are at a low ebb, we should pay attention to the big political values that shape our voting behaviour.'

The report ‘Voting and Values in Britain: Does religion count?’ was based on data from the latest 2010 census.

Researches said non-Christian groups were harder to analyse because of small samples.

However, in 2010 Muslims tended to strongly vote Labour, as did Hindus and Sikhs to a lesser extent.

By contrast, the Jewish vote was more likely to go to the Conservatives and Buddhist to the Liberal Democrats.

All groups, irrespective of religion, rated the economy, immigration, the budget deficit and unemployment as their most important issues.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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.

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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Federal Government Has Declared War on Work

While 50 years ago the federal government declared war on poverty, I would submit that in recent years it has led an undeclared but real new war: a War on Work. The government increasingly is using its coercive powers to punish people who want to work, creating a vast class of able-bodied Americans dependent on the government—and politicians—for their daily bread.

The statistics are startling. A smaller proportion of working-age Americans works today than when the recession officially ended 4-1/2 years ago (June 2009).

But this trend is not just a failure of policies to encourage economic recovery, such as the stimulus package and the ineffective, highly expansionary Federal Reserve monetary policy. The decline in work has been going on since at least 2000, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Suppose today we had the same proportion of Americans working that we did in 2000—the end of the Clinton administration. We would have 14.6 million more workers in America—4 million more than the number of unemployed.

Making reasonable assumptions about the productivity of these lost workers, the annual national output today would be over $2,500 per person higher—over $10,000 for a family of four. The actual recent recorded decline in real median income per household almost certainly would not have occurred. Much of the 21st-century growth dearth—the fall in growth rates from above 3% to only 2% a year—would have been averted.

While a vast number of government policies cause a decline in work, let me mention just six:

 *  Extended unemployment benefits.

 *  Expansion of food stamps.

 *  Higher taxes on workers, especially the most productive ones.

 *  Increases in Social Security disability payments.

 *  Increases in Pell Grants and other forms of federal higher education aid.

 *  Increases in minimum wage laws at local, state and federal levels.

Extended Unemployment Benefits

For almost eight decades, the federal-state unemployment insurance system provided 26 weeks of benefits for unemployed workers, with occasionally a modest short-term extension of those benefits (to typically 39 weeks) during recessions. In 2013, those benefits were given for 73 weeks—four years after the recession ended.

You pay people not to work—and many respond accordingly. In the month with the highest unemployment (10.8%) since the Great Depression, December 1982, the average duration of unemployment was 18.0 weeks; in December 2013, it was 37.1 weeks.

The 73-week benefit provision ended recently, but President Obama and the Senate want it extended—preventing the creation of many jobs.

Food Stamps

If the government subsidizes the purchase of life’s most critical essential—food—it reduces the need to work. In 2000, 17.1 million Americans received food stamps; in October 2013, 47.6 million did.

Higher Taxes on Workers

A decade ago, in 2004, the top marginal federal income tax rate was 35%; today, it is about 43%, counting ObamaCare-related taxes. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that high income taxes impede economic growth. There has been a vast migration of Americans, for example, from the 41 states with state income taxes to the nine states that do not tax work income.

Social Security Disability

In 1990, about 4 million Americans and their dependents received Social Security disability payments—today 11 million do. At a time when health care is improving, and more Americans work in relatively less-risky nonindustrial settings, there has been an explosion in the number of people paid not to work because of alleged inability to do so.

Federal Student Financial Aid

In 2000, fewer than 4 million Americans received Pell Grants to attend college; by 2012, nearly 9 million did. From 2002 to 2012, total federal aid more than doubled, going from $83 billion to $170 billion. Yet large portions of those recipients never graduate, and many that do are truly underemployed—we increasingly have college-educated taxi drivers, janitors, bartenders and retail sales clerks.

Minimum Wage

Seven years ago today, the federal minimum wage was $5.15. By the end of this year, if Obama gets his way, it will be $9.25. Many cities and states have enacted huge minimum wage increases, at a time when the unemployment rate of black teenagers exceeds 35%.

Future Nobel laureate George Stigler noted in 1946 that minimum wage laws caused unemployment, and subsequent empirical evidence overwhelmingly shows that they kill jobs for the most vulnerable unskilled workers.

No nation ever achieved greatness when vast portions of its productive workforce were idle. America will not regain its economic vitality until it ends this war on work.

SOURCE

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The ObamaCare Carnival of Perverse Incentives

Cities With Unfunded Health-Care Commitments Are Getting Ready to Dump Their Retirees On the State Exchanges

With fewer glitches to deter them, millions of Americans are now logging on to the ObamaCare health-insurance-exchange websites. When they get there, many are discovering some unpleasant surprises:

The deductibles are higher than what most people are used to, the networks of doctors and hospitals are skimpier (in some cases much skimpier), and lifesaving drugs are often not on the insurers’ formularies. Even after the government’s income-based subsidies are taken into account, the premiums are often higher than what people previously paid.

Why is this happening? Because the new law gives insurance buyers and sellers perverse incentives to behave in ways that create these problems. Things will only get more out of whack as more and more unhealthy people enter a system designed to be paid for by premiums from healthy people.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the benefits insurers must offer are strictly regulated. The law piles on benefits for which everyone must have coverage, whether they could ever use the benefits or not. At the same time, insurers set their own premiums and choose their own networks of doctors and hospitals.

To keep premiums as low as possible, the insurers are offering very narrow networks, often leaving out the best doctors and the best hospitals. In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that Blue Shield will have only about half the doctors in its exchange plan as it has in its traditional plan. One of the exchange plans in Colorado includes only a single Denver hospital, the one that usually treats Medicaid patients.

Narrow networks can be good or bad. Wal-Mart  has selected a half-dozen centers of excellence around the country for its employees, places carefully chosen for their high quality and low costs. The exchange health plans, by contrast, appear to care only about cost. They are offering low fees—sometimes even lower than the rock-bottom fees Medicaid pays health-care providers—and accepting only those providers who will take them.

Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers are required to charge the same premium rate to anyone who wants to sign up, regardless of health status; and they are required to accept anyone who applies. This means that to make ends meet they must overcharge the healthy and undercharge the sick. It also means insurers have strong incentives to attract the healthy (on whom they make a profit) and avoid the sick (on whom they incur losses) by, in effect, making their plans less appealing to the sick.

Here’s how they seem to be doing it: In structuring the plans they offer on the ObamaCare exchanges, the insurers apparently assumed that the healthy will choose the plan they buy based on its price, while ignoring other features of the plan. It makes sense: If I am healthy why wouldn’t I shop for the lowest price? If I later develop cancer, I can move to a plan that has the best cancer care. By law, these plans will be prohibited from charging me more than the premium paid by a healthy enrollee.

Insurers also assume that people who already are ill or otherwise expect to use a lot of health care pay much closer attention to the cost of deductibles and which doctors and hospitals are in the insurer’s network. To have any hope of balancing their books, insurers must then attract the maximum number of customers who are likely to stay healthy and thus not use so much of the care they paid for, while unhealthy people in effect use more than they paid for. This is why most plans are apparently designed to attract people willing to overlook high deductibles and less access to health care in return for lower premiums.

Yet no matter how narrow the provider network, health plans are going to cost more if they enroll more people with above-average health-care costs. And that is what is about to happen.

For some years, the federal government and some states have operated and subsidized risk pools. These allowed the chronically ill and other high-cost people who were “uninsurable” to purchase insurance for the same premium healthy people pay. Under ObamaCare, however, the pools are due to shut down and send their enrollees to the exchanges, where the above-average cost of their care will be implicitly borne by higher premiums charged to everyone enrolled in the plans.

To make matters worse, cities and towns with unfunded health-care commitments are getting ready to dump their retirees on the state exchanges. Since retirees are above-average age, they have above-average expected costs. The city of Detroit, for example, is planning to dump the costs of about 10,000 retirees on the Michigan exchange.

Then there are the job-lock employees —people who are working only to get health insurance because they are uninsurable in the individual market. Under ObamaCare, their incentive will be to quit their jobs and head to the exchanges.

In sum: A lot of high-cost patients are about to enroll through the exchanges. This will force up premiums further for all other buyers.

At some point, politicians of both parties will realize that we can do better than this. That will require a real market for health insurance with premiums that reflect real risks. There is a role for government in helping people with severe health problems. That is why risk pools exist. What we didn’t need was to destroy the market for the many in order to give aid to the few.

SOURCE

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Affordable Housing: Rhetoric versus Reality

Lessons from California

Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent veto of Assembly Bill 1229, which authorized cities and counties to impose mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinances, sent a positive signal to the housing market and may help solve the housing shortage in California. Unfortunately some are still trying to modify a failing policy.

On Tuesday, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors will consider revising its current inclusionary zoning ordinance, which requires builders to set aside a certain number of units at discounts for low-income families.

Passed in 2004, the policy has been a complete failure when compared to nearby surrounding jurisdictions. To cite one example: Sacramento County has produced only 263 subsidized units, compared to 1,528 units in less populated Elk Grove.

The current county program requires setting aside 15 percent of new housing for sale or rent at subsidized rates. County staff members concluded that the current ordinance was detrimental to the creation of market-rate housing, so they are now suggesting lowering the subsidy for new-home construction to 8 percent. Unfortunately, this rate is still higher than many other regional fees and will continue to place the county at a competitive disadvantage in producing new housing.

Inclusionary zoning is actually exclusionary because it raises housing prices and reduces the growth rate of new housing stock, making it more difficult and less affordable for individuals struggling to find housing in this area. The only winners are the few lucky lottery winners who get to purchase new units at subsidized rates.

Contrary to popular opinion, it is the homebuilder—and ultimately the new-home buyer—that bear the burden of this policy.

The ordinance is like a tax on new housing because it forces builders to sell some units at significantly lower prices or to pay an in-lieu fee, reducing overall revenues. The supply of new housing will decrease, causing prices to increase. Some potential buyers, facing higher prices, will go elsewhere and increase the demand and prices of homes in nearby cities or far flung “exurbs,” where the costs of development are lower. Overall prices rise and new home production falls, placing homes out of the reach of many middle-class families.

Politicians like inclusionary zoning because it allows them to raise taxes indirectly. It also allows them to point to a new “affordable” project in their jurisdiction to show off to their constituents. As a former city council member and mayor, I am aware of the allure to act like you are doing something to solve a problem. Unfortunately, this is a problem created by local politicians.

California law only requires that jurisdictions plan for their housing needs. There is no requirement to provide subsidized housing and create artificial housing shortages.

Recent court decisions have required municipalities to demonstrate that a reasonable nexus exists between new-housing development and the demand for subsidized housing. Many municipalities have hired consulting firms to provide such a nexus. Unfortunately, these studies are performed by consultants with backgrounds in urban planning and very little training in economics. As a result, these studies reflect a lack of clear economic thinking using established economic models. They suggest a market failure for subsidized housing because more housing means more demand for subsidized units. Their approach could easily be applied to the purchases of cars, food and clothing, requiring a tax on all newly produced goods. Not surprisingly, none of these studies have been vetted by academic economists or published in respectable economic journals.

If county residents want to support subsidized housing, there are less costly ways of doing so. Voucher programs, down-payment assistance, and other programs allow qualified low-income individuals the freedom to choose where to locate, the type of housing they prefer and the amount of housing they can afford.

Regardless, any solutions for providing subsidized housing should be paid by all taxpayers rather than singling out new homebuyers. If that approach (which would require a popular vote to authorize broad taxation) is too politically risky, at the very least the board should make certain that the cost of the revised Affordable Housing Ordinance is competitive within the Sacramento region.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  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.

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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