Obama the oblivious
By Charles Krauthammer
In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”
An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.
Most people become aware of the hopeless inefficiency of sclerotic government by, oh, age 17 at the department of motor vehicles. Obama’s late discovery is especially remarkable considering that he built his entire political philosophy on the rock of Big Government, on the fervent belief in the state as the very engine of collective action and the ultimate source of national greatness. (Indeed, of individual success as well, as in “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”)
This blinding revelation of the ponderous incompetence of bureaucratic government came just a few weeks after Obama confessed that “what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Another light bulb goes off, this one three years after passing a law designed to force millions of Americans to shop for new health plans via the maze of untried, untested, insecure, unreliable online “exchanges.”
This discovery joins a long list that includes Obama’s rueful admission that there really are no shovel-ready jobs. That one came after having passed his monstrous $830 billion stimulus on the argument that the weakened economy would be “jump-started” by a massive infusion of shovel-ready jobs. Now known to be fictional.
Barack Obama is not just late to discover the most elementary workings of government. With alarming regularity, he professes obliviousness to the workings of his own government. He claims, for example, to have known nothing about the IRS targeting scandal, the AP phone records scandal, the NSA tapping of Angela Merkel. And had not a clue that the centerpiece of his signature legislative achievement — the online Obamacare exchange, three years in the making — would fail catastrophically upon launch. Or that Obamacare would cause millions of Americans to lose their private health plans.
Hence the odd spectacle of a president expressing surprise and disappointment in the federal government — as if he’s not the one running it. Hence the repeated no-one-is-more-upset-than-me posture upon deploring the nonfunctioning Web site, the IRS outrage, the AP intrusions and any number of scandals from which Obama tries to create safe distance by posing as an observer. He gives the impression of a man on a West Wing tour trying out the desk in the Oval Office, only to be told that he is president of the United States.
The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. The sweep and scope of his health-care legislation alone are unprecedented. He’s spent billions of tax money attempting to create, by fiat and ex nihilo, a new green economy. His (failed) cap-and-trade bill would have given him regulatory control of the energy economy. He wants universal preschool and has just announced his unwavering commitment to slaying the dragon of economic inequality, which, like the poor, has always been with us.
Obama’s discovery that government bureaucracies don’t do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself. How does his Olympian vision coexist with the lassitude of his actual governance, a passivity that verges on absenteeism?
What bridges that gap is rhetoric. Barack Obama is a master rhetorician. It’s allowed him to move crowds, rise inexorably and twice win the most glittering prize of all. Rhetoric has changed his reality. For Obama, it can change the country’s. Hope and change, after all, is a rhetorical device. Of the kind Obama has always imagined can move mountains.
That’s why his reaction to the Obamacare Web site’s crash-on-takeoff is so telling. His remedy? A cross-country campaign-style speaking tour. As if rhetoric could repeal that reality.
Managing, governing, negotiating, cajoling, crafting legislation, forging compromise. For these — this stuff of governance — Obama has shown little aptitude and even less interest. Perhaps, as Valerie Jarrett has suggested, he is simply too easily bored to invest his greatness in such mundanity.
“I don’t write code,” said Obama in reaction to the Web site crash. Nor is he expected to. He is, however, expected to run an administration that can.
18 December, 2013
05 December, 2013
Reid exempts staff from ObamaCare
Amazing. I don't usually post articles calling out specific individuals, but this is just too ridiculous not to publicize...
Reid exempts some staff from having to buy insurance on ObamaCare exchange
Published December 04, 2013
FoxNews.com
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is allowing some staffers to keep their health insurance instead of making them buy it through an ObamaCare exchange, although he was one of the strongest Capitol Hill supporters of the 2010 law.
The Nevada Democrat is exercising his discretion under the president’s signature law to designate which staffers can keep their federal insurance plan and which must now purchase a policy through the District of Columbia’s health-care exchange.
However, he purportedly is the only top congressional leader to exercise that option, which resulted in sharp criticism Wednesday from Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the staunchest ObamaCare opponent on the Hill.
"Sen. Reid's decision to exempt his staff … is the clearest example yet of ObamaCare's failures and Washington hypocrisy,” he said. “His staff worked to pass it and continue to promote it, now they don't want to be part of it because it's a disaster.”
The distinction is between personnel staff, forced onto the exchange, and leadership and committee staff, who are allowed to keep their federal plan.
However, drawing a distinction is difficult because some duties overlap, a Reid staffer told Fox News.
The staffer could not give a breakdown. But Reid is going on the exchange and says he is happy with its options.
An amendment to ObamaCare by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley forced staffers onto the exchanges, but additional changes allow for some flexibility. Still, the final rules, put forth by the Office of Personnel Management, leave some discretion with the lawmaker.
“The only fair path forward is to repeal ObamaCare, in its entirety, for everyone," Cruz added.
Reid exempts some staff from having to buy insurance on ObamaCare exchange
Published December 04, 2013
FoxNews.com
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is allowing some staffers to keep their health insurance instead of making them buy it through an ObamaCare exchange, although he was one of the strongest Capitol Hill supporters of the 2010 law.
The Nevada Democrat is exercising his discretion under the president’s signature law to designate which staffers can keep their federal insurance plan and which must now purchase a policy through the District of Columbia’s health-care exchange.
However, he purportedly is the only top congressional leader to exercise that option, which resulted in sharp criticism Wednesday from Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the staunchest ObamaCare opponent on the Hill.
"Sen. Reid's decision to exempt his staff … is the clearest example yet of ObamaCare's failures and Washington hypocrisy,” he said. “His staff worked to pass it and continue to promote it, now they don't want to be part of it because it's a disaster.”
The distinction is between personnel staff, forced onto the exchange, and leadership and committee staff, who are allowed to keep their federal plan.
However, drawing a distinction is difficult because some duties overlap, a Reid staffer told Fox News.
The staffer could not give a breakdown. But Reid is going on the exchange and says he is happy with its options.
An amendment to ObamaCare by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley forced staffers onto the exchanges, but additional changes allow for some flexibility. Still, the final rules, put forth by the Office of Personnel Management, leave some discretion with the lawmaker.
“The only fair path forward is to repeal ObamaCare, in its entirety, for everyone," Cruz added.
27 November, 2013
Thankful for Property
Thankful for Property
By John Stossel - November 27, 2013
Had today's politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate "Starvation Day" this week, not Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told:
"Share everything, share the work, and we'll share the harvest."
The colony's contract said their new settlement was to be a "common." Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property.
That wasn't the only thing about the Plymouth Colony that sounds like it was from Karl Marx: Its labor was to be organized according to the different capabilities of the settlers. People would produce according to their abilities and consume according to their needs. That sure sounds fair.
They nearly starved and created what economists call the "tragedy of the commons."
If people can access the same stuff by working less, they will. Plymouth settlers faked illness instead of working the common property. The harvest was meager, and for two years, there was famine. But then, after the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote that they should "set corn every man for his own particular," they dropped the commons idea. He assigned to every family a parcel of land to treat as its own.
The results were dramatic. Much more corn was planted. Instead of famine, there was plenty. Thanks to private property, they got food -- and thanks to it, we have food today.
This doesn't mean Pilgrims themselves saw the broader economic implications of what they'd been through. "I don't think they were celebrating Thanksgiving because they'd realized that capitalism works and communal property is a failure," says economist Russ Roberts. "I think there were just happy to be alive."
I wish people understood. This idea that happiness and equality lie in banding together and doing things as a commune is appealing. It's the principle behind the Soviet Union, Medicare, the Vietnam War, Obamacare and so on. Some communal central planning is helpful, but too much is dangerous. The Pilgrims weren't the first settlers on the East Coast of the New World to make this mistake.
Just a few years before, the colony of Jamestown was almost wiped out by the same idea.
Historian Edmund S. Morgan, in "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia," describes what happened in 1609-1610: "There are 500 people in the colony now. And they are starving. They scour the woods listlessly for nuts, roots and berries. And they offer the only authentic examples of cannibalism witnessed in Virginia. One provident man chops up his wife and salts down the pieces. Others dig up graves to eat the corpses. By spring only sixty are left alive."
After that season, the colony was abandoned for years.
The lesson that a commons is often undesirable is all around us. What image comes to mind if I write "public toilet"? Consider traffic congestion and poor upkeep of many publicly owned roads. But most people don't understand that the solution is private property.
When natural resources, such as fish and trees, dwindle, the first impulse is to say, "Stop capitalism. Make those things public property." But they already are public -- that's the problem.
If no one owns the fishing rights to a given part of the ocean -- or the exclusive, long-term logging rights to part of the forest -- people have an incentive to get there first and take all they can before the next guy does. Resources are overused instead of conserved. We don't maintain others' property the way we maintain our own.
Colonists in Plymouth nearly starved because they didn't understand that. In Jamestown, some were driven to cannibalism.
But no one starves when ranchers are allowed to own land and cattle. Or turkeys.
Private ownership does good things. Be thankful for it this week
By John Stossel - November 27, 2013
Had today's politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate "Starvation Day" this week, not Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told:
"Share everything, share the work, and we'll share the harvest."
The colony's contract said their new settlement was to be a "common." Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property.
That wasn't the only thing about the Plymouth Colony that sounds like it was from Karl Marx: Its labor was to be organized according to the different capabilities of the settlers. People would produce according to their abilities and consume according to their needs. That sure sounds fair.
They nearly starved and created what economists call the "tragedy of the commons."
If people can access the same stuff by working less, they will. Plymouth settlers faked illness instead of working the common property. The harvest was meager, and for two years, there was famine. But then, after the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote that they should "set corn every man for his own particular," they dropped the commons idea. He assigned to every family a parcel of land to treat as its own.
The results were dramatic. Much more corn was planted. Instead of famine, there was plenty. Thanks to private property, they got food -- and thanks to it, we have food today.
This doesn't mean Pilgrims themselves saw the broader economic implications of what they'd been through. "I don't think they were celebrating Thanksgiving because they'd realized that capitalism works and communal property is a failure," says economist Russ Roberts. "I think there were just happy to be alive."
I wish people understood. This idea that happiness and equality lie in banding together and doing things as a commune is appealing. It's the principle behind the Soviet Union, Medicare, the Vietnam War, Obamacare and so on. Some communal central planning is helpful, but too much is dangerous. The Pilgrims weren't the first settlers on the East Coast of the New World to make this mistake.
Just a few years before, the colony of Jamestown was almost wiped out by the same idea.
Historian Edmund S. Morgan, in "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia," describes what happened in 1609-1610: "There are 500 people in the colony now. And they are starving. They scour the woods listlessly for nuts, roots and berries. And they offer the only authentic examples of cannibalism witnessed in Virginia. One provident man chops up his wife and salts down the pieces. Others dig up graves to eat the corpses. By spring only sixty are left alive."
After that season, the colony was abandoned for years.
The lesson that a commons is often undesirable is all around us. What image comes to mind if I write "public toilet"? Consider traffic congestion and poor upkeep of many publicly owned roads. But most people don't understand that the solution is private property.
When natural resources, such as fish and trees, dwindle, the first impulse is to say, "Stop capitalism. Make those things public property." But they already are public -- that's the problem.
If no one owns the fishing rights to a given part of the ocean -- or the exclusive, long-term logging rights to part of the forest -- people have an incentive to get there first and take all they can before the next guy does. Resources are overused instead of conserved. We don't maintain others' property the way we maintain our own.
Colonists in Plymouth nearly starved because they didn't understand that. In Jamestown, some were driven to cannibalism.
But no one starves when ranchers are allowed to own land and cattle. Or turkeys.
Private ownership does good things. Be thankful for it this week
Hobby Lobby - Corporations as People
You may have heard that Hobby Lobby (privately held) has objected to aspects of Obamacare that they feel violate their religious beliefs. Lower courts have been split (3-2 in favor of Hobby Lobby), and the case will now be heard by the Supreme Court. This opinion piece was on CNN today the link and full text (my comments in red) are below):
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/26/opinion/wydra-supreme-court-obamacare/index.html
Editor's note: Elizabeth B. Wydra is chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center, a public-interest law firm, think tank and action center. She regularly participates in Supreme Court litigation.
(CNN) -- Once again, Obamacare has made its way back before the Supreme Court.
The high court decided Tuesday to review two challenges by for-profit corporations and their religious owners over comprehensive contraception coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. And if the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history on what it means to enjoy the free exercise of religion in America, the court should yet again hand a victory to the act.
It had little choice but to agree to hear the cases this term.
Using unprecedented legal reasoning, three federal circuit courts of appeals have ruled that secular, for-profit business corporations and/or the individuals who own them have a valid claim that the mandate to provide no-cost, FDA-approved contraception in their employer-sponsored health plan violates their asserted right to the free exercise of religion.
Two other federal circuit courts of appeals have rejected these claims; the Supreme Court frequently steps in to resolve such disagreements among the federal courts of appeals.
Unless the Supreme Court reverses these radical decisions, the consequences could reach far beyond the Affordable Care Act, making this particular roadblock for Obamacare more problematic in the long term than the well-publicized problems associated with the health exchange website's rollout.
By accepting the religious free-exercise claims, these three federal courts have turned first principles of religious freedom, as well as fundamental tenets of corporate law, on their head.
From the nation's founding until today, the Constitution's protection of religious liberty has been seen as a personal right, inextricably linked to the human capacity to express devotion to a God and act on the basis of reason and conscience.
Business corporations, quite properly, have never shared in this fundamental constitutional tradition for the obvious reason that a business corporation lacks the basic human capacities -- reason, dignity and conscience -- at the core of the right to free exercise of religion. Obviously not "persons" in the usual sense of the word, these corporations are also not religious organizations, which have historically received some constitutional protection and are, in fact, given exemptions from the contraception mandate.
(CNN) -- Once again, Obamacare has made its way back before the Supreme Court.
The high court decided Tuesday to review two challenges by for-profit corporations and their religious owners over comprehensive contraception coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. And if the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history on what it means to enjoy the free exercise of religion in America, the court should yet again hand a victory to the act.
It had little choice but to agree to hear the cases this term.
Using unprecedented legal reasoning, three federal circuit courts of appeals have ruled that secular, for-profit business corporations and/or the individuals who own them have a valid claim that the mandate to provide no-cost, FDA-approved contraception in their employer-sponsored health plan violates their asserted right to the free exercise of religion.
Two other federal circuit courts of appeals have rejected these claims; the Supreme Court frequently steps in to resolve such disagreements among the federal courts of appeals.
Unless the Supreme Court reverses these radical decisions, the consequences could reach far beyond the Affordable Care Act, making this particular roadblock for Obamacare more problematic in the long term than the well-publicized problems associated with the health exchange website's rollout.
By accepting the religious free-exercise claims, these three federal courts have turned first principles of religious freedom, as well as fundamental tenets of corporate law, on their head.
From the nation's founding until today, the Constitution's protection of religious liberty has been seen as a personal right, inextricably linked to the human capacity to express devotion to a God and act on the basis of reason and conscience.
Business corporations, quite properly, have never shared in this fundamental constitutional tradition for the obvious reason that a business corporation lacks the basic human capacities -- reason, dignity and conscience -- at the core of the right to free exercise of religion. Obviously not "persons" in the usual sense of the word, these corporations are also not religious organizations, which have historically received some constitutional protection and are, in fact, given exemptions from the contraception mandate.
The author needs to check her constitutional history - as far back as 1888(!) (Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania) the Supreme court ruled "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution."
These businesses do not hire employees on the basis of their religion and their employees are not required to share the religious beliefs personally held by the corporation's owners. This is particularly misleading, as "discriminating" during hiring is illegal - that's why these business do not hire employees based on their religion or personally held beliefs" Meanwhile, speak out against the personally held belief in Diversity in corporate America do and see how long you last. In all of American history, secular, for-profit corporations have never been understood to "exercise" religion -- have you ever seen Exxon Mobil in the pew next to you at church? -- and have never been protected by the right to free exercise. Again, the author seems to struggle to understand the difference between public and private companies. Seeing as she isn't stupid, I have to believe she is overlooking this distinction purposely.
To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare's contraception coverage requirement. Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity. Classic misunderstanding here - there is no such thing as the "corporation" paying. The corporation is owned by individuals - it is these individuals who pay for all costs and reap all profits.
To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.
When business owners create a corporation as the means of carrying out their business, they create a distinct legal entity with rights, obligations, privileges and liabilities that are different from the individuals who set up the corporation. This generally works to the benefit of the individual owners, which is why people choose to incorporate in the first place. And it means that certain rights specific to individuals do not carry over to the corporate form.
For example, the Supreme Court has held that an individual acting in his personal capacity has the right to "plead the Fifth" and refuse to turn over documents that could incriminate him, but that same individual acting in his official capacity as a corporate owner has no such right against self-incrimination. Like the right to the free exercise of religion, the right against self-incrimination has always been understood to be a personal right of freedom and conscience that artificial corporate entities simply do not share. These two paragraphs are the strongest sections of her argument, but I suspect she again is failing to distinguish between public and private corporations, as well as criminal vs. civil proceedings.
A business owner simply does not have the right to move back and forth freely between individual and corporate status to obtain all the advantages and avoid any of the disadvantages of the respective forms.
Whether you have cheered the misfortunes Obamacare has suffered over the past month or bemoaned them, the distortion of basic principles of corporate law and free exercise jurisprudence by the three federal courts that have endorsed the corporate challenges to the ACA's contraception mandate should be troubling.
The Supreme Court, as always, will have the final say.
If the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history, not to mention basic principles of corporate law, the court should hand another victory to Obamacare.
I'm sure the administration -- and more importantly, the women and their families who risk losing important health benefits to which they are legally entitled -- would welcome the win.
These businesses do not hire employees on the basis of their religion and their employees are not required to share the religious beliefs personally held by the corporation's owners. This is particularly misleading, as "discriminating" during hiring is illegal - that's why these business do not hire employees based on their religion or personally held beliefs" Meanwhile, speak out against the personally held belief in Diversity in corporate America do and see how long you last. In all of American history, secular, for-profit corporations have never been understood to "exercise" religion -- have you ever seen Exxon Mobil in the pew next to you at church? -- and have never been protected by the right to free exercise. Again, the author seems to struggle to understand the difference between public and private companies. Seeing as she isn't stupid, I have to believe she is overlooking this distinction purposely.
To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare's contraception coverage requirement. Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity. Classic misunderstanding here - there is no such thing as the "corporation" paying. The corporation is owned by individuals - it is these individuals who pay for all costs and reap all profits.
To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.
When business owners create a corporation as the means of carrying out their business, they create a distinct legal entity with rights, obligations, privileges and liabilities that are different from the individuals who set up the corporation. This generally works to the benefit of the individual owners, which is why people choose to incorporate in the first place. And it means that certain rights specific to individuals do not carry over to the corporate form.
For example, the Supreme Court has held that an individual acting in his personal capacity has the right to "plead the Fifth" and refuse to turn over documents that could incriminate him, but that same individual acting in his official capacity as a corporate owner has no such right against self-incrimination. Like the right to the free exercise of religion, the right against self-incrimination has always been understood to be a personal right of freedom and conscience that artificial corporate entities simply do not share. These two paragraphs are the strongest sections of her argument, but I suspect she again is failing to distinguish between public and private corporations, as well as criminal vs. civil proceedings.
A business owner simply does not have the right to move back and forth freely between individual and corporate status to obtain all the advantages and avoid any of the disadvantages of the respective forms.
Whether you have cheered the misfortunes Obamacare has suffered over the past month or bemoaned them, the distortion of basic principles of corporate law and free exercise jurisprudence by the three federal courts that have endorsed the corporate challenges to the ACA's contraception mandate should be troubling.
The Supreme Court, as always, will have the final say.
If the justices follow more than 200 years of constitutional law and history, not to mention basic principles of corporate law, the court should hand another victory to Obamacare.
I'm sure the administration -- and more importantly, the women and their families who risk losing important health benefits to which they are legally entitled -- would welcome the win.
01 November, 2013
Obamacare laid bare
Obamacare laid bare
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 31
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head.
I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance.
Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false?
The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.
And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a “prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.
(b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea.
Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.
Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use.
It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear: “We’re the government and we’re here to help.”
You hide.
(c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 31
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head.
I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance.
Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false?
The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.
And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a “prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.
(b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea.
Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.
Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use.
It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear: “We’re the government and we’re here to help.”
You hide.
(c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.
31 October, 2013
The judiciary and free speech
The judiciary and free speech
By George F. Will
“The First Amendment does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance attorney, conduct demographic marketing research, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing the most salient political issues of our day.”
— U.S. Supreme Court,
Citizens United (2010)
Brick by brick, judges are dismantling the wall of separation that legislators have built between political activity and the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and association. The latest examples, from Mississippi and Arizona, reflect the judiciary’s proper engagement in defending citizens from the regulation of political speech, a.k.a. “campaign finance reform.”
In 2011, a few like-minded friends and neighbors in Oxford, Miss., who had been meeting for a few years to discuss politics, decided to work together to support passage of an initiative amending Mississippi’s Constitution. The amendment, restricting the power of the state and local governments to take private property by eminent domain, was provoked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo ruling that governments could, without violating the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”), take property for the “public use” of transferring it to persons who would pay more taxes to the government.
The Mississippi friends and neighbors wanted to pool their funds to purchase posters, fliers and local newspaper advertising. They discovered that if, as a group, they spent more than $200 to do these simple things, they would be required by the state’s campaign finance law to register as a “political committee.” And if, as individuals, any of them spent more than $200 supporting the initiative, they must report this political activity to the state.
Mississippi defines a political committee as any group of persons spending more than $200 to influence voters for or against candidates “or balloted measures.” Supposedly, regulation of political activity is to prevent corruption of a candidate or the appearance thereof. How does one corrupt a “balloted measure”?
Granted, there is some slight informational value in knowing where money supporting a voter initiative comes from. But surely not enough to burden ordinary citizens expending $200 with monthly reporting requirements, concerning which legal advice might be necessary because any violation of the campaign regulations “is punishable by imprisonment in the county jail” for up to a year. As the Supreme Court said in its excellent Citizens United ruling, “Prolix laws chill speech for the same reason that vague laws chill speech: People ‘of common intelligence must necessarily guess at [the law’s] meaning and differ as to its application.’ ”
So, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi held: “Where, as here, potential speakers might well require legal counsel to determine which regulations even apply, above and beyond how to comport with those requirements, the burdens imposed by the state’s regulations are simply too great to be borne by the state’s interest in groups raising or expending as little as $200.” And the same is true regarding “the state’s informational interest in individual speakers” expending $200.
When, in 2011, Dina Galassini of Fountain Hills, Ariz., wanted to oppose her city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, she sent e-mails encouraging 23 friends and acquaintances to write letters of opposition to newspapers and to join her in a demonstration. Six days later, the town clerk sternly admonished her: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”
Arizona’s law says that whenever two or more people collaborate, using at least $250, to influence voters about anything, they instantly become a “political committee,” a magical transformation that triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filling out forms, and establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has no intention of raising money. All this must be done before members of the “committee” are permitted to speak. Galassini got no response when she wrote to the clerk to find out if she could have permission to e-mail the 23 persons to tell them the demonstrations were canceled.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona supported Galassini. It had to, given that Citizens United said laws requiring official permission to speak “function as the equivalent of prior restraint by giving the [government] power analogous to licensing laws implemented in 16th- and 17th-century England, laws and governmental practices of the sort that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit.”
Liberals who love the regulatory state loathe Citizens United. You can understand why.
By George F. Will
“The First Amendment does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance attorney, conduct demographic marketing research, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing the most salient political issues of our day.”
— U.S. Supreme Court,
Citizens United (2010)
Brick by brick, judges are dismantling the wall of separation that legislators have built between political activity and the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and association. The latest examples, from Mississippi and Arizona, reflect the judiciary’s proper engagement in defending citizens from the regulation of political speech, a.k.a. “campaign finance reform.”
In 2011, a few like-minded friends and neighbors in Oxford, Miss., who had been meeting for a few years to discuss politics, decided to work together to support passage of an initiative amending Mississippi’s Constitution. The amendment, restricting the power of the state and local governments to take private property by eminent domain, was provoked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo ruling that governments could, without violating the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”), take property for the “public use” of transferring it to persons who would pay more taxes to the government.
The Mississippi friends and neighbors wanted to pool their funds to purchase posters, fliers and local newspaper advertising. They discovered that if, as a group, they spent more than $200 to do these simple things, they would be required by the state’s campaign finance law to register as a “political committee.” And if, as individuals, any of them spent more than $200 supporting the initiative, they must report this political activity to the state.
Mississippi defines a political committee as any group of persons spending more than $200 to influence voters for or against candidates “or balloted measures.” Supposedly, regulation of political activity is to prevent corruption of a candidate or the appearance thereof. How does one corrupt a “balloted measure”?
Granted, there is some slight informational value in knowing where money supporting a voter initiative comes from. But surely not enough to burden ordinary citizens expending $200 with monthly reporting requirements, concerning which legal advice might be necessary because any violation of the campaign regulations “is punishable by imprisonment in the county jail” for up to a year. As the Supreme Court said in its excellent Citizens United ruling, “Prolix laws chill speech for the same reason that vague laws chill speech: People ‘of common intelligence must necessarily guess at [the law’s] meaning and differ as to its application.’ ”
So, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi held: “Where, as here, potential speakers might well require legal counsel to determine which regulations even apply, above and beyond how to comport with those requirements, the burdens imposed by the state’s regulations are simply too great to be borne by the state’s interest in groups raising or expending as little as $200.” And the same is true regarding “the state’s informational interest in individual speakers” expending $200.
When, in 2011, Dina Galassini of Fountain Hills, Ariz., wanted to oppose her city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, she sent e-mails encouraging 23 friends and acquaintances to write letters of opposition to newspapers and to join her in a demonstration. Six days later, the town clerk sternly admonished her: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”
Arizona’s law says that whenever two or more people collaborate, using at least $250, to influence voters about anything, they instantly become a “political committee,” a magical transformation that triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filling out forms, and establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has no intention of raising money. All this must be done before members of the “committee” are permitted to speak. Galassini got no response when she wrote to the clerk to find out if she could have permission to e-mail the 23 persons to tell them the demonstrations were canceled.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona supported Galassini. It had to, given that Citizens United said laws requiring official permission to speak “function as the equivalent of prior restraint by giving the [government] power analogous to licensing laws implemented in 16th- and 17th-century England, laws and governmental practices of the sort that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit.”
Liberals who love the regulatory state loathe Citizens United. You can understand why.
25 October, 2013
More legal trouble for Affordable Care Act
Critics of Obama's healthcare plan are suing over a part of the law that offers tax credits through state exchanges. If they win, the program falls apart in 36 states.
By David G. Savage
5:00 AM PDT, October 25, 2013
WASHINGTON— If computer glitches are not enough of a problem, President Obama's healthcare law also has a legal glitch that critics say could cause it to unravel in more than half the nation.
The Affordable Care Act proposes to make health insurance affordable to millions of low-income Americans by offering them tax credits to help cover the cost. To receive the credit, the law twice says they must buy insurance "through an exchange established by the state."
But 36 states have decided against opening exchanges for now. Although the law permits the federal government to open exchanges instead, it does not say tax credits may be given to those who buy insurance through a federally run exchange.
Apparently no one noticed this when the long and complicated bill worked its way through the House and Senate. Last year, however, the Internal Revenue Service tried to remedy it by putting out a regulation that redefined "exchange" to include a "federally facilitated exchange." This is "consistent with the language, purpose and structure … of the act as a whole," the Treasury Department said.
But critics of the law have seized on the glitch. They have filed four lawsuits that urge judges to rule the Obama administration must abide by the strict wording of the law, even if doing so dismantles it in nearly two-thirds of the states. And the Obama administration has no hope of repairing the glitch by legislation as long as the Republicans control the House.
This week, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, a President Clinton appointee, refused the administration's request to dismiss the suit. Instead, he said the challengers had put forward a substantial claim, and he promised to issue a written ruling.
"This is a problem," said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. "This case could have legs," although "it was never the intent of Congress to establish federal exchanges that can't do anything. They were supposed to have exactly the same powers."
Michael Carvin, the Washington lawyer leading the challenge, says the wording of the law is what counts. "This is a question of whether you believe in the rule of law. And the language here is as clear as it could possibly be," he said.
Last year, Carvin went before the Supreme Court to argue that the law's mandate to buy insurance was unconstitutional. The high court handed down a split decision. By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled the government may impose a tax penalty on those who can afford to buy insurance but decline to do so. But in a 7-2 decision, they said states had the option to expand their Medicaid coverage under the law, or to turn down extra federal money.
The states have now split evenly, as 25 of them have opted to take the extra money from Washington and expand their Medicaid coverage, and 25 have refused. As a result, the law's aim to provide free healthcare for those who are poor will go forward in only half of the nation.
The new suits take aim at the parts of the law that offer subsidies to those who are above the poverty level but still may struggle to pay for insurance. A single person with an income up to $45,960 can qualify for subsidies now, as can a family of four with an income up to $94,200. If the federal government cannot offer these subsidies in the 36 states without exchanges, it cannot enforce the mandate to have insurance, lawyers say.
"My jaw dropped when I first saw this," said Michael F. Cannon, a health policy expert at the Cato Institute and a fierce critic of the law. He and others credit former Justice Department attorney Tom Christina and Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, with first highlighting the glitch.
"This has the potential to sink Obamacare. It could make the current website problems seem minor by comparison," Cannon said.
Defenders of the law say the courts are being used as part of the political campaign against the law.
"This is definitely heating up. It is now the major focus of the Republican strategy for undoing the Affordable Care Act," said Simon Lazarus, a lawyer for the Constitutional Accountability Center. "The lawsuits should be seen as preposterous," he said, because they ask judges to give the law a "nonsensical" interpretation.
No judge has ruled directly on the claim that the IRS rule put forth by the administration is illegal and contradicted by the words of the law. Indiana Atty. Gen. Greg Zoeller filed one of four lawsuits this month. A federal judge in Oklahoma is considering a similar suit filed by that state's attorney general. A fourth suit is scheduled to be heard by a judge in Richmond, Va.
If any of the four judges agree with the challengers, they are likely to be asked to put the law on hold until the legal dispute is resolved. And that in turn could quickly send the issue to a U.S. appeals court and then to the Supreme Court.
"They are betting on getting five votes at the Supreme Court," Lazarus said. "I don't think it will happen."
By David G. Savage
5:00 AM PDT, October 25, 2013
WASHINGTON— If computer glitches are not enough of a problem, President Obama's healthcare law also has a legal glitch that critics say could cause it to unravel in more than half the nation.
The Affordable Care Act proposes to make health insurance affordable to millions of low-income Americans by offering them tax credits to help cover the cost. To receive the credit, the law twice says they must buy insurance "through an exchange established by the state."
But 36 states have decided against opening exchanges for now. Although the law permits the federal government to open exchanges instead, it does not say tax credits may be given to those who buy insurance through a federally run exchange.
Apparently no one noticed this when the long and complicated bill worked its way through the House and Senate. Last year, however, the Internal Revenue Service tried to remedy it by putting out a regulation that redefined "exchange" to include a "federally facilitated exchange." This is "consistent with the language, purpose and structure … of the act as a whole," the Treasury Department said.
But critics of the law have seized on the glitch. They have filed four lawsuits that urge judges to rule the Obama administration must abide by the strict wording of the law, even if doing so dismantles it in nearly two-thirds of the states. And the Obama administration has no hope of repairing the glitch by legislation as long as the Republicans control the House.
This week, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, a President Clinton appointee, refused the administration's request to dismiss the suit. Instead, he said the challengers had put forward a substantial claim, and he promised to issue a written ruling.
"This is a problem," said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. "This case could have legs," although "it was never the intent of Congress to establish federal exchanges that can't do anything. They were supposed to have exactly the same powers."
Michael Carvin, the Washington lawyer leading the challenge, says the wording of the law is what counts. "This is a question of whether you believe in the rule of law. And the language here is as clear as it could possibly be," he said.
Last year, Carvin went before the Supreme Court to argue that the law's mandate to buy insurance was unconstitutional. The high court handed down a split decision. By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled the government may impose a tax penalty on those who can afford to buy insurance but decline to do so. But in a 7-2 decision, they said states had the option to expand their Medicaid coverage under the law, or to turn down extra federal money.
The states have now split evenly, as 25 of them have opted to take the extra money from Washington and expand their Medicaid coverage, and 25 have refused. As a result, the law's aim to provide free healthcare for those who are poor will go forward in only half of the nation.
The new suits take aim at the parts of the law that offer subsidies to those who are above the poverty level but still may struggle to pay for insurance. A single person with an income up to $45,960 can qualify for subsidies now, as can a family of four with an income up to $94,200. If the federal government cannot offer these subsidies in the 36 states without exchanges, it cannot enforce the mandate to have insurance, lawyers say.
"My jaw dropped when I first saw this," said Michael F. Cannon, a health policy expert at the Cato Institute and a fierce critic of the law. He and others credit former Justice Department attorney Tom Christina and Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, with first highlighting the glitch.
"This has the potential to sink Obamacare. It could make the current website problems seem minor by comparison," Cannon said.
Defenders of the law say the courts are being used as part of the political campaign against the law.
"This is definitely heating up. It is now the major focus of the Republican strategy for undoing the Affordable Care Act," said Simon Lazarus, a lawyer for the Constitutional Accountability Center. "The lawsuits should be seen as preposterous," he said, because they ask judges to give the law a "nonsensical" interpretation.
No judge has ruled directly on the claim that the IRS rule put forth by the administration is illegal and contradicted by the words of the law. Indiana Atty. Gen. Greg Zoeller filed one of four lawsuits this month. A federal judge in Oklahoma is considering a similar suit filed by that state's attorney general. A fourth suit is scheduled to be heard by a judge in Richmond, Va.
If any of the four judges agree with the challengers, they are likely to be asked to put the law on hold until the legal dispute is resolved. And that in turn could quickly send the issue to a U.S. appeals court and then to the Supreme Court.
"They are betting on getting five votes at the Supreme Court," Lazarus said. "I don't think it will happen."
23 October, 2013
How to NOT take Responsibility
Amazing. It is always someone else's fault. Why hasn't she been fired yet?
I love that those in charge continue to say that the healthcare website's problems are driven by larger than expected demand. This is surprising, since Democrats have been saying for years that millions of people are clamoring for this system. How can they then be surprised by the turnout (especially since this is the President's #1 agenda item, promoted constantly for 3+ years)? All that is a ruse anyway - the Secretary admits the site crashed during testing with only hundreds of people on it - can we please stop this charade that unexpected demand is to blame?
Also, the suggestion that now they have brought in the A team to fix the problems is amusing. Here's a quote from the article below:
"We (had) hoped that they had their 'A-Team' on the table" from the start, Sebelius said of the contractors and agencies responsible for the project.
She does realize she's in CHARGE of this project, right? The buck stops with her. Feel free to take responsibility at any point. And she says the President was not made aware of any shortcomings before the launch? That alone would get you fired in the private sector - bosses do not like their major projects blowing up on launch day when the project manager had advance warning and said nothing. And she says the President knew nothing about it as if that absolves him of responsibility. Being ignorant of the problems is not reassuring - so he's oblivious rather than incompetent? The evidence seems to suggest he (and Sebelius) are both.
Finally, a note to the media - STOP QUOTING APPLICATION TOTALS. I know we're desperate to find a silver lining here, but the number of people to opened an account or started the process is pretty meaningless at this point. Give me the number of people who have actually completed the process. Oh wait, the government won't release that information. I wonder why.
Sebelius: Obamacare website problems blindsided the President
By Greg Botelho and Holly Yan , CNN
updated 8:56 AM EDT, Wed October 23, 2013 CNN.com
(CNN) -- Before it even launched, red flags went up about the Obamacare website. Health insurance companies complained about it, and the site crashed during a test run. But nobody told the President of any of it, the nation's health chief told CNN.
Kathleen Sebelius said President Barack Obama didn't hear that there may be problems with the sign-up portal for his signature health care law until it went live on October 1. That's when the site nosedived into a technical abyss.
In an exclusive interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the Health and Human Services secretary admitted that her department and the White House are displeased with the technically botched website's rollout.
"No one could be more frustrated than I am and the President," she said.
The site was supposed to make it simple for people to search and sign up for new health care policies, but instead it's been clunky and, at times, inoperable. And for Sebelius, that's disappointing.
"We're not at all satisfied with the workings of the website," she said. "We want it to be smooth and easy and let consumers compare plans."
A team of high-tech experts from within the government and from Silicon Valley is going to tackle the issues, Sebelius said. Jeff Zients, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, will lead the team.
So why weren't they brought in before the website launched October 1?
"We (had) hoped that they had their 'A-Team' on the table" from the start, Sebelius said of the contractors and agencies responsible for the project.
But now, she said, "we want new eyes and ears. We want to make sure that we get all the questions on the table, that we get all the answers and accelerate the fix as quickly as possible."
The secretary attributed some problems to "extremely high" volume, saying nearly 20 million people came to the Obamacare website in the first three weeks after its launch. Yet only 500,000 people have created accounts on the website. And not all of them have necessarily enrolled in health care plans.
It's not like no one saw this coming. When the website crashed during a test run, just a few hundred users were on it.
But the Obama administration went ahead with the launch. Waiting was not an option, Sebelius said.
"There are people in this country who have waited for decades for affordable health coverage for themselves and their families," she said.
Sebelius' comments struck some Republicans as surprising and even odd.
"At this point, she has a lot of questions to answer, and we look forward to her testimony in the House next week," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.
A Senate GOP leadership aide called the situation "odd."
"Everyone was surprised by her statement that the President was unaware of the website's failures until a few days into it," the aide told CNN.
"They had been claiming that the Obamacare rollout was his top priority and that he was receiving regular updates, which was inaccurate. And he gave remarks on October 1 about how great it was and that people should go sign up," the aide said. "Assuming that he didn't know that the website didn't work, why did they let him make that speech when they knew it had crashed in testing? Did really no one recommend a delay to the President? It just seems odd."
Before the website's launch, Republicans made targeting the program a centerpiece of their agenda. Many insisted they wouldn't vote to fund the entire government unless Obamacare was defunded or delayed.
They said that the website's woes show that the Obama administration and the federal government generally aren't capable of executing what the GOP says was an ill-advised program from the get-go.
"God only knows how much money they've spent, and it's a failure," Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said Sunday on CBS. "The government isn't going to be able to get this job done correctly."
On the other side, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire sent a letter to Obama asking that the open enrollment period be extended past March 31, 2014. She also asked that he consider delaying assessment of a penalty to those who don't sign up for any health insurance before the so-called individual mandate kicks in.
Even Obama has been critical, insisting Monday that there's "no excuse for the problems." But he also said the problems should not amount to a blanket condemnation of the Affordable Care Act.
"Nobody's madder than me about the website not working as well as it should," Obama said, "which means it's going to get fixed."
Several top Republicans -- including 2012 vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan -- have called on Sebelius to step down due to the program's problems. The secretary skirted questions Tuesday about whether she'd step down, saying only that she works "at the pleasure of the President" and is committed to her job.
"I think my job is to get this fully implemented and to get the website working right," she told Gupta.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett stood up for Sebelius in an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan on Tuesday night.
"I am a friend of Kathleen's, and I'm a friend of her when she's in trouble," he said. "I like Kathleen. I feel sorry for her in the position she's in. Obviously, it's a huge screw-up, but it will get worked out."
Sebelius refused to give a timetable Tuesday as to when the website will be fully operational, but she insisted it's improving every day.
"More people are having an easier time," she said, "and we intend to stay at this until we open the doors wide open."
Rubio calls for delay of Obamacare sign-up deadline
And it's too early to call the rollout a failure, the health secretary said. There's still a long time for people to take advantage in person, by calling or by using the website during the open enrollment period.
When that six-month stretch is over, Sebelius said, people can better decide whether this part of Obamacare is a success or a failure.
I love that those in charge continue to say that the healthcare website's problems are driven by larger than expected demand. This is surprising, since Democrats have been saying for years that millions of people are clamoring for this system. How can they then be surprised by the turnout (especially since this is the President's #1 agenda item, promoted constantly for 3+ years)? All that is a ruse anyway - the Secretary admits the site crashed during testing with only hundreds of people on it - can we please stop this charade that unexpected demand is to blame?
Also, the suggestion that now they have brought in the A team to fix the problems is amusing. Here's a quote from the article below:
"We (had) hoped that they had their 'A-Team' on the table" from the start, Sebelius said of the contractors and agencies responsible for the project.
She does realize she's in CHARGE of this project, right? The buck stops with her. Feel free to take responsibility at any point. And she says the President was not made aware of any shortcomings before the launch? That alone would get you fired in the private sector - bosses do not like their major projects blowing up on launch day when the project manager had advance warning and said nothing. And she says the President knew nothing about it as if that absolves him of responsibility. Being ignorant of the problems is not reassuring - so he's oblivious rather than incompetent? The evidence seems to suggest he (and Sebelius) are both.
Finally, a note to the media - STOP QUOTING APPLICATION TOTALS. I know we're desperate to find a silver lining here, but the number of people to opened an account or started the process is pretty meaningless at this point. Give me the number of people who have actually completed the process. Oh wait, the government won't release that information. I wonder why.
Sebelius: Obamacare website problems blindsided the President
By Greg Botelho and Holly Yan , CNN
updated 8:56 AM EDT, Wed October 23, 2013 CNN.com
(CNN) -- Before it even launched, red flags went up about the Obamacare website. Health insurance companies complained about it, and the site crashed during a test run. But nobody told the President of any of it, the nation's health chief told CNN.
Kathleen Sebelius said President Barack Obama didn't hear that there may be problems with the sign-up portal for his signature health care law until it went live on October 1. That's when the site nosedived into a technical abyss.
In an exclusive interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the Health and Human Services secretary admitted that her department and the White House are displeased with the technically botched website's rollout.
"No one could be more frustrated than I am and the President," she said.
The site was supposed to make it simple for people to search and sign up for new health care policies, but instead it's been clunky and, at times, inoperable. And for Sebelius, that's disappointing.
"We're not at all satisfied with the workings of the website," she said. "We want it to be smooth and easy and let consumers compare plans."
A team of high-tech experts from within the government and from Silicon Valley is going to tackle the issues, Sebelius said. Jeff Zients, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, will lead the team.
So why weren't they brought in before the website launched October 1?
"We (had) hoped that they had their 'A-Team' on the table" from the start, Sebelius said of the contractors and agencies responsible for the project.
But now, she said, "we want new eyes and ears. We want to make sure that we get all the questions on the table, that we get all the answers and accelerate the fix as quickly as possible."
The secretary attributed some problems to "extremely high" volume, saying nearly 20 million people came to the Obamacare website in the first three weeks after its launch. Yet only 500,000 people have created accounts on the website. And not all of them have necessarily enrolled in health care plans.
It's not like no one saw this coming. When the website crashed during a test run, just a few hundred users were on it.
But the Obama administration went ahead with the launch. Waiting was not an option, Sebelius said.
"There are people in this country who have waited for decades for affordable health coverage for themselves and their families," she said.
Sebelius' comments struck some Republicans as surprising and even odd.
"At this point, she has a lot of questions to answer, and we look forward to her testimony in the House next week," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.
A Senate GOP leadership aide called the situation "odd."
"Everyone was surprised by her statement that the President was unaware of the website's failures until a few days into it," the aide told CNN.
"They had been claiming that the Obamacare rollout was his top priority and that he was receiving regular updates, which was inaccurate. And he gave remarks on October 1 about how great it was and that people should go sign up," the aide said. "Assuming that he didn't know that the website didn't work, why did they let him make that speech when they knew it had crashed in testing? Did really no one recommend a delay to the President? It just seems odd."
Before the website's launch, Republicans made targeting the program a centerpiece of their agenda. Many insisted they wouldn't vote to fund the entire government unless Obamacare was defunded or delayed.
They said that the website's woes show that the Obama administration and the federal government generally aren't capable of executing what the GOP says was an ill-advised program from the get-go.
"God only knows how much money they've spent, and it's a failure," Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said Sunday on CBS. "The government isn't going to be able to get this job done correctly."
On the other side, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire sent a letter to Obama asking that the open enrollment period be extended past March 31, 2014. She also asked that he consider delaying assessment of a penalty to those who don't sign up for any health insurance before the so-called individual mandate kicks in.
Even Obama has been critical, insisting Monday that there's "no excuse for the problems." But he also said the problems should not amount to a blanket condemnation of the Affordable Care Act.
"Nobody's madder than me about the website not working as well as it should," Obama said, "which means it's going to get fixed."
Several top Republicans -- including 2012 vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan -- have called on Sebelius to step down due to the program's problems. The secretary skirted questions Tuesday about whether she'd step down, saying only that she works "at the pleasure of the President" and is committed to her job.
"I think my job is to get this fully implemented and to get the website working right," she told Gupta.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett stood up for Sebelius in an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan on Tuesday night.
"I am a friend of Kathleen's, and I'm a friend of her when she's in trouble," he said. "I like Kathleen. I feel sorry for her in the position she's in. Obviously, it's a huge screw-up, but it will get worked out."
Sebelius refused to give a timetable Tuesday as to when the website will be fully operational, but she insisted it's improving every day.
"More people are having an easier time," she said, "and we intend to stay at this until we open the doors wide open."
Rubio calls for delay of Obamacare sign-up deadline
And it's too early to call the rollout a failure, the health secretary said. There's still a long time for people to take advantage in person, by calling or by using the website during the open enrollment period.
When that six-month stretch is over, Sebelius said, people can better decide whether this part of Obamacare is a success or a failure.
11 October, 2013
Our government wants you to play a role in the slimdown -- it's your job to panic
Our government wants you to play a role in the slimdown -- it's your job to panic
By John Stossel
Published October 09, 2013 /
A fence surrounds the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington October 5, 2013. (Reuters)
Government wants you to play a role in the slimdown or “shutdown” of the federal government. Your role is to panic.
Republicans and Democrats both assume that shutting some government is a terrible thing. The press concurs. “Shutdown threatens fragile economy,” warns Politico. “Federal workers turn to prayer,” laments The Washington Post.
If the public starts noticing that life goes on as usual without all 3.4 million federal workers, we might get dangerous ideas, like doing without so much government. Politicians don’t want that.
They’d rather have us worry about how America will cope.
President Obama gave a speech where he actually said we need to keep government open for the sake of people like the person working for the Department of Agriculture “out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit,” and the Department of Housing and Urban Development “helping somebody buy a house for the first time.”
Give me a break. Farmers don’t need bureaucrats to teach them how to make a profit, and Americans can buy first homes without HUD helping a chosen few. Americans would make more profit and afford better homes if they didn’t have to spend a third of national income on federal taxes.
Bureaucrats, acting like bullies, protest the partial closures by doing things like cutting off access to public parks -- even privately funded ones.
Federal cops block access to outdoor war memorials and much of Mt. Rushmore.
They block access to motels and order people out of private homes that happen to sit on federal land.
The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The closure of a Virginia park that sits on federal land, even though the government provides no resources for its maintenance or operation.”
This is shutdown theater.
It’s similar to the fake “austerity measures” in other countries. We’re told that Europe’s slow economic growth is a result of “austerity” embraced by European governments.
But there hasn’t really been any austerity. England, where a “conservative” government is in charge, increased government spending by 4 percent.
“Austerity” in Greece -- supposedly so drastic that the public has little choice but to riot in protest -- meant changes like reducing mandatory severance pay to one entire year (instead of two!).
In the U.S., Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif..) told CNN the federal government has cut so much spending that there’s just nothing left to cut: “The cupboard is bare! There’s no more cuts to make!”
What? The federal government spends almost 4 trillion dollars! The government cupboard overflows! We fund entire cabinet departments that are worse than useless.
The Labor Department interferes with actual labor. Commerce would flow more smoothly without Commerce Department bureaucrats channeling money to their cronies.
The government hasn’t cut spending -- it never does. After the last shutdowns, politicians even voted to award retroactive pay to government workers who didn’t work. Bet they do it again this time. The federal government remains the biggest employer in the country. President Obama says so with pride.
Compare this to what happens in the private sector in tough times: AT&T cut 40,000 workers. Sears cut 50,000. IBM: 60,000. They weren’t easy decisions, but they enabled the companies to stay profitable. With fewer workers, leaner companies found more efficient ways to get things done.
And the rest of us barely noticed. We expect change and adaptation in free-market institutions. But it doesn’t happen in government. Government just grows.
Maybe the ugliest part of this story is that the city that whines most about suffering through the shutdown, Washington, D.C., is now the richest geographic area in America. Washington got richer while the rest of America didn’t. Over the past 12 years, median income in the U.S. dropped about 6.5 percent -- but not in D.C.! There, it rose 23 percent. Four of the five richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.
No wonder politicians and bureaucrats are convinced big government is essential to keep the economy going -- it is essential to keep them going.
By John Stossel
Published October 09, 2013 /
A fence surrounds the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington October 5, 2013. (Reuters)
Government wants you to play a role in the slimdown or “shutdown” of the federal government. Your role is to panic.
Republicans and Democrats both assume that shutting some government is a terrible thing. The press concurs. “Shutdown threatens fragile economy,” warns Politico. “Federal workers turn to prayer,” laments The Washington Post.
If the public starts noticing that life goes on as usual without all 3.4 million federal workers, we might get dangerous ideas, like doing without so much government. Politicians don’t want that.
They’d rather have us worry about how America will cope.
President Obama gave a speech where he actually said we need to keep government open for the sake of people like the person working for the Department of Agriculture “out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit,” and the Department of Housing and Urban Development “helping somebody buy a house for the first time.”
Give me a break. Farmers don’t need bureaucrats to teach them how to make a profit, and Americans can buy first homes without HUD helping a chosen few. Americans would make more profit and afford better homes if they didn’t have to spend a third of national income on federal taxes.
Bureaucrats, acting like bullies, protest the partial closures by doing things like cutting off access to public parks -- even privately funded ones.
Federal cops block access to outdoor war memorials and much of Mt. Rushmore.
They block access to motels and order people out of private homes that happen to sit on federal land.
The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The closure of a Virginia park that sits on federal land, even though the government provides no resources for its maintenance or operation.”
This is shutdown theater.
It’s similar to the fake “austerity measures” in other countries. We’re told that Europe’s slow economic growth is a result of “austerity” embraced by European governments.
But there hasn’t really been any austerity. England, where a “conservative” government is in charge, increased government spending by 4 percent.
“Austerity” in Greece -- supposedly so drastic that the public has little choice but to riot in protest -- meant changes like reducing mandatory severance pay to one entire year (instead of two!).
In the U.S., Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif..) told CNN the federal government has cut so much spending that there’s just nothing left to cut: “The cupboard is bare! There’s no more cuts to make!”
What? The federal government spends almost 4 trillion dollars! The government cupboard overflows! We fund entire cabinet departments that are worse than useless.
The Labor Department interferes with actual labor. Commerce would flow more smoothly without Commerce Department bureaucrats channeling money to their cronies.
The government hasn’t cut spending -- it never does. After the last shutdowns, politicians even voted to award retroactive pay to government workers who didn’t work. Bet they do it again this time. The federal government remains the biggest employer in the country. President Obama says so with pride.
Compare this to what happens in the private sector in tough times: AT&T cut 40,000 workers. Sears cut 50,000. IBM: 60,000. They weren’t easy decisions, but they enabled the companies to stay profitable. With fewer workers, leaner companies found more efficient ways to get things done.
And the rest of us barely noticed. We expect change and adaptation in free-market institutions. But it doesn’t happen in government. Government just grows.
Maybe the ugliest part of this story is that the city that whines most about suffering through the shutdown, Washington, D.C., is now the richest geographic area in America. Washington got richer while the rest of America didn’t. Over the past 12 years, median income in the U.S. dropped about 6.5 percent -- but not in D.C.! There, it rose 23 percent. Four of the five richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.
No wonder politicians and bureaucrats are convinced big government is essential to keep the economy going -- it is essential to keep them going.
04 October, 2013
Who shut down Yellowstone?
Who shut down Yellowstone?
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 3
The Obamacare/shutdown battle has spawned myriad myths. The most egregious concern the substance of the fight, the identity of the perpetrators and the origins of the current eruption.
(1) Substance
President Obama indignantly insists that GOP attempts to abolish or amend Obamacare are unseemly because it is “settled” law, having passed both houses of Congress, obtained his signature and passed muster with the Supreme Court.
Yes, settledness makes for a strong argument — except from a president whose administration has unilaterally changed Obamacare five times after its passage, including, most brazenly, a year-long suspension of the employer mandate.
Article I of the Constitution grants the legislative power entirely to Congress. Under what constitutional principle has Obama unilaterally amended the law? Yet when the House of Representatives undertakes a constitutionally correct, i.e., legislative, procedure for suspending the other mandate — the individual mandate — this is portrayed as some extra-constitutional sabotage of the rule of law. Why is tying that amendment to a generalized spending bill an outrage, while unilateral amendment by the executive (with a Valerie Jarrett blog item for spin) is perfectly fine?
(2) Perpetrators
The mainstream media have been fairly unanimous in blaming the government shutdown on the GOP. Accordingly, House Republicans presented three bills to restore funding to national parks, veterans and the District of Columbia government. Democrats voted down all three. (For procedural reasons, the measures required a two-thirds majority.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t even consider these refunding measures. And the White House has promised a presidential veto.
The reason is obvious: to prolong the pain and thus add to the political advantage gained from a shutdown blamed on the GOP. They are confident the media will do a “GOP makes little Johnny weep at the closed gates of Yellowstone, film at 11” despite Republicans having just offered legislation to open them.
And besides, whence comes the sanctity of the “clean CR,” the single bill (continuing resolution) that funds all of government? The Democrats have declared it inviolable — and piecemeal funding, as proposed by the Republicans, unacceptable on principle. On what grounds? After all, the regular appropriations process consists of 12 separate appropriation bills. The insistence on the “clean CR” is just a fancy way to suggest some principle behind the president’s refusal to compromise or even negotiate.
(3) Origins
The most ubiquitous conventional wisdom is that the ultimate cause of these troubles is out-of-control tea party anarchists.
But is this really where the causal chain ends? The tea party was created by Obama’s first-term overreach, most specifically Obamacare. Today’s frantic fight against it is the echoing result of the way it was originally enacted.
From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote. Never. In every case, there was significant reaching across the aisle, enhancing the law’s legitimacy and endurance. Yet Obamacare — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote.
The Democrats insist they welcomed contributing ideas from Republicans. Rubbish. Republicans proposed that insurance be purchasable across state lines. They got nothing. They sought serious tort reform. They got nothing. Why? Because, admitted Howard Dean, Democrats didn’t want to offend the trial lawyers.
Moreover, the administration was clearly warned. Republican Scott Brown ran in the most inhospitable of states, Massachusetts, on the explicit promise to cast the deciding vote blocking Obamacare. It was January 2010, the height of the debate. He won. Reid ignored this unmistakable message of popular opposition and conjured a parliamentary maneuver — reconciliation — to get around Brown.
Nothing illegal about that. Nothing illegal about ramming it through without a single opposition vote. Just totally contrary to the modern American tradition — and the constitutional decency — of undertaking major social revolutions with only bipartisan majorities. Having stuffed Obamacare down the throats of the GOP and the country, Democrats are now paying the price.
I don’t agree with current Republican tactics. I thought the defunding demand impossible and, therefore, foolish. I thought that if, nonetheless, the GOP insisted on making a stand, it should not be on shutting down the government, which voters oppose 5-to-1, but on the debt ceiling, which Americans favor 2-to-1 as a vehicle for restraining government.
Tactics are one thing, but substance is another. It’s the Democrats who have mocked the very notion of settled law. It’s the Democrats who voted down the reopening of substantial parts of the government. It’s the Democrats who gave life to a spontaneous, authentic, small-government opposition — a.k.a. the tea party — with their unilateral imposition of a transformational agenda during the brief interval when they held a monopoly of power.
That interval is over. The current unrest is the residue of that hubris.
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 3
The Obamacare/shutdown battle has spawned myriad myths. The most egregious concern the substance of the fight, the identity of the perpetrators and the origins of the current eruption.
(1) Substance
President Obama indignantly insists that GOP attempts to abolish or amend Obamacare are unseemly because it is “settled” law, having passed both houses of Congress, obtained his signature and passed muster with the Supreme Court.
Yes, settledness makes for a strong argument — except from a president whose administration has unilaterally changed Obamacare five times after its passage, including, most brazenly, a year-long suspension of the employer mandate.
Article I of the Constitution grants the legislative power entirely to Congress. Under what constitutional principle has Obama unilaterally amended the law? Yet when the House of Representatives undertakes a constitutionally correct, i.e., legislative, procedure for suspending the other mandate — the individual mandate — this is portrayed as some extra-constitutional sabotage of the rule of law. Why is tying that amendment to a generalized spending bill an outrage, while unilateral amendment by the executive (with a Valerie Jarrett blog item for spin) is perfectly fine?
(2) Perpetrators
The mainstream media have been fairly unanimous in blaming the government shutdown on the GOP. Accordingly, House Republicans presented three bills to restore funding to national parks, veterans and the District of Columbia government. Democrats voted down all three. (For procedural reasons, the measures required a two-thirds majority.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t even consider these refunding measures. And the White House has promised a presidential veto.
The reason is obvious: to prolong the pain and thus add to the political advantage gained from a shutdown blamed on the GOP. They are confident the media will do a “GOP makes little Johnny weep at the closed gates of Yellowstone, film at 11” despite Republicans having just offered legislation to open them.
And besides, whence comes the sanctity of the “clean CR,” the single bill (continuing resolution) that funds all of government? The Democrats have declared it inviolable — and piecemeal funding, as proposed by the Republicans, unacceptable on principle. On what grounds? After all, the regular appropriations process consists of 12 separate appropriation bills. The insistence on the “clean CR” is just a fancy way to suggest some principle behind the president’s refusal to compromise or even negotiate.
(3) Origins
The most ubiquitous conventional wisdom is that the ultimate cause of these troubles is out-of-control tea party anarchists.
But is this really where the causal chain ends? The tea party was created by Obama’s first-term overreach, most specifically Obamacare. Today’s frantic fight against it is the echoing result of the way it was originally enacted.
From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote. Never. In every case, there was significant reaching across the aisle, enhancing the law’s legitimacy and endurance. Yet Obamacare — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote.
The Democrats insist they welcomed contributing ideas from Republicans. Rubbish. Republicans proposed that insurance be purchasable across state lines. They got nothing. They sought serious tort reform. They got nothing. Why? Because, admitted Howard Dean, Democrats didn’t want to offend the trial lawyers.
Moreover, the administration was clearly warned. Republican Scott Brown ran in the most inhospitable of states, Massachusetts, on the explicit promise to cast the deciding vote blocking Obamacare. It was January 2010, the height of the debate. He won. Reid ignored this unmistakable message of popular opposition and conjured a parliamentary maneuver — reconciliation — to get around Brown.
Nothing illegal about that. Nothing illegal about ramming it through without a single opposition vote. Just totally contrary to the modern American tradition — and the constitutional decency — of undertaking major social revolutions with only bipartisan majorities. Having stuffed Obamacare down the throats of the GOP and the country, Democrats are now paying the price.
I don’t agree with current Republican tactics. I thought the defunding demand impossible and, therefore, foolish. I thought that if, nonetheless, the GOP insisted on making a stand, it should not be on shutting down the government, which voters oppose 5-to-1, but on the debt ceiling, which Americans favor 2-to-1 as a vehicle for restraining government.
Tactics are one thing, but substance is another. It’s the Democrats who have mocked the very notion of settled law. It’s the Democrats who voted down the reopening of substantial parts of the government. It’s the Democrats who gave life to a spontaneous, authentic, small-government opposition — a.k.a. the tea party — with their unilateral imposition of a transformational agenda during the brief interval when they held a monopoly of power.
That interval is over. The current unrest is the residue of that hubris.
17 September, 2013
Minimum Wage Madness
Minimum Wage Madness
By Thomas Sowell - September 17, 2013
Political crusades for raising the minimum wage are back again. Advocates of minimum wage laws often give themselves credit for being more "compassionate" towards "the poor." But they seldom bother to check what are the actual consequences of such laws.
One of the simplest and most fundamental economic principles is that people tend to buy more when the price is lower and less when the price is higher. Yet advocates of minimum wage laws seem to think that the government can raise the price of labor without reducing the amount of labor that will be hired.
When you turn from economic principles to hard facts, the case against minimum wage laws is even stronger.
Countries with minimum wage laws almost invariably have higher rates of unemployment than countries without minimum wage laws.
Most nations today have minimum wage laws, but they have not always had them. Unemployment rates have been very much lower in places and times when there were no minimum wage laws.
Switzerland is one of the few modern nations without a minimum wage law. In 2003, "The Economist" magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February." In February of this year, Switzerland's unemployment rate was 3.1 percent. A recent issue of "The Economist" showed Switzerland's unemployment rate as 2.1 percent.
Most Americans today have never seen unemployment rates that low. However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States. The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent. When Hong Kong was a British colony, it had no minimum wage law. In 1991 its unemployment rate was under 2 percent.
As for being "compassionate" toward "the poor," this assumes that there is some enduring class of Americans who are poor in some meaningful sense, and that there is something compassionate about reducing their chances of getting a job.
Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European -- not Europeans in poverty, the average European.
Why then are they called "poor"? Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state -- and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats' own jobs.
Most people in the lower income brackets are not an enduring class. Most working people in the bottom 20 percent in income at a given time do not stay there over time. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain behind in the bottom 20 percent.
There is nothing mysterious about the fact that most people start off in entry level jobs that pay much less than they will earn after they get some work experience. But, when minimum wage levels are set without regard to their initial productivity, young people are disproportionately unemployed -- priced out of jobs.
In European welfare states where minimum wages, and mandated job benefits to be paid for by employers, are more generous than in the United States, unemployment rates for younger workers are often 20 percent or higher, even when there is no recession.
Unemployed young people lose not only the pay they could have earned but, at least equally important, the work experience that would enable them to earn higher rates of pay later on.
Minorities, like young people, can also be priced out of jobs. In the United States, the last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate -- 1930 -- was also the last year when there was no federal minimum wage law. Inflation in the 1940s raised the pay of even unskilled workers above the minimum wage set in 1938. Economically, it was the same as if there were no minimum wage law by the late 1940s.
In 1948 the unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. This was a fraction of what it would become in even the most prosperous years from 1958 on, as the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation.
Some "compassion" for "the poor"!
By Thomas Sowell - September 17, 2013
Political crusades for raising the minimum wage are back again. Advocates of minimum wage laws often give themselves credit for being more "compassionate" towards "the poor." But they seldom bother to check what are the actual consequences of such laws.
One of the simplest and most fundamental economic principles is that people tend to buy more when the price is lower and less when the price is higher. Yet advocates of minimum wage laws seem to think that the government can raise the price of labor without reducing the amount of labor that will be hired.
When you turn from economic principles to hard facts, the case against minimum wage laws is even stronger.
Countries with minimum wage laws almost invariably have higher rates of unemployment than countries without minimum wage laws.
Most nations today have minimum wage laws, but they have not always had them. Unemployment rates have been very much lower in places and times when there were no minimum wage laws.
Switzerland is one of the few modern nations without a minimum wage law. In 2003, "The Economist" magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February." In February of this year, Switzerland's unemployment rate was 3.1 percent. A recent issue of "The Economist" showed Switzerland's unemployment rate as 2.1 percent.
Most Americans today have never seen unemployment rates that low. However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States. The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent. When Hong Kong was a British colony, it had no minimum wage law. In 1991 its unemployment rate was under 2 percent.
As for being "compassionate" toward "the poor," this assumes that there is some enduring class of Americans who are poor in some meaningful sense, and that there is something compassionate about reducing their chances of getting a job.
Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European -- not Europeans in poverty, the average European.
Why then are they called "poor"? Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state -- and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats' own jobs.
Most people in the lower income brackets are not an enduring class. Most working people in the bottom 20 percent in income at a given time do not stay there over time. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain behind in the bottom 20 percent.
There is nothing mysterious about the fact that most people start off in entry level jobs that pay much less than they will earn after they get some work experience. But, when minimum wage levels are set without regard to their initial productivity, young people are disproportionately unemployed -- priced out of jobs.
In European welfare states where minimum wages, and mandated job benefits to be paid for by employers, are more generous than in the United States, unemployment rates for younger workers are often 20 percent or higher, even when there is no recession.
Unemployed young people lose not only the pay they could have earned but, at least equally important, the work experience that would enable them to earn higher rates of pay later on.
Minorities, like young people, can also be priced out of jobs. In the United States, the last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate -- 1930 -- was also the last year when there was no federal minimum wage law. Inflation in the 1940s raised the pay of even unskilled workers above the minimum wage set in 1938. Economically, it was the same as if there were no minimum wage law by the late 1940s.
In 1948 the unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. This was a fraction of what it would become in even the most prosperous years from 1958 on, as the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation.
Some "compassion" for "the poor"!
09 September, 2013
Unserious Commander-in-Chief
Unserious Commander-in-Chief
If Obama can’t tell us what his objectives for attacking Syria are, Congress should vote no.
Charles Krauthammer
Senator Bob Corker: “What is it you’re seeking?”
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”
— Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, September 3
We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander-in-chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.
Now, a shot across the bow is a warning. Its purpose is to say: Cease and desist, or the next shot will sink you. But Obama has already told the world — and Bashar Assad in particular — that there will be no next shot. He has insisted time and again that the operation will be finite and highly limited. Take the shot, kill some fish, go home.
What then is the purpose? Dempsey hasn’t a clue, but Secretary of State John Kerry says it will uphold and proclaim a norm and thus deter future use of chemical weapons. With a few Tomahawk missiles? Hitting sites that, thanks to the administration having leaked the target list, have already been scrubbed of important military assets?
This is risible. If anything, a pinprick from which Assad emerges unscathed would simply enhance his stature and vindicate his conduct. Deterrence depends entirely on perception and the perception in the Middle East is universal: Obama wants no part of Syria.
Assad has to go, says Obama, and then lifts not a finger for two years. Obama lays down a red line, and then ignores it. Shamed finally by a massive poison-gas attack, he sends Kerry to make an impassioned case for righteous and urgent retaliation — and the very next day, Obama undermines everything by declaring an indefinite timeout to seek congressional approval.
This stunning zigzag, following months of hesitation, ambivalence, contradiction, and studied delay, left our regional allies shocked and our enemies gleeful. I had strongly advocated going to Congress. But it was inconceivable that, instead of recalling Congress to emergency session, Obama would simply place everything in suspension while Congress finished its Labor Day barbecues and he flew off to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. So much for the fierce urgency of enforcing an international taboo and speaking for the dead children of Damascus.
Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies.
In this year alone, Israel has four times launched airstrikes within Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad’s acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect. They care about just one audience — the party to be deterred, namely Assad and his allies.
Assad knows who did it. He didn’t have to see the Israeli prime minister preening about it on world television.
And yet here is Obama, having done nothing yet but hesitate, threaten, retract, and wander about the stage, claiming Wednesday in Sweden to be the conscience of the world, upholding not his own red line but the world’s. And, incidentally, Congress’s — a transparent attempt at offloading responsibility.
To his dovish base, Obama insists on how limited and militarily marginal the strike will be. To undecided hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who are prepared to support a policy that would really alter the course of the civil war, he vaguely promises the opposite — to degrade Assad’s military while upgrading that of the resistance.
Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.
This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategy for altering the trajectory of the Syrian war, Congress should vote no.
If Obama can’t tell us what his objectives for attacking Syria are, Congress should vote no.
Charles Krauthammer
Senator Bob Corker: “What is it you’re seeking?”
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”
— Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, September 3
We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander-in-chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.
Now, a shot across the bow is a warning. Its purpose is to say: Cease and desist, or the next shot will sink you. But Obama has already told the world — and Bashar Assad in particular — that there will be no next shot. He has insisted time and again that the operation will be finite and highly limited. Take the shot, kill some fish, go home.
What then is the purpose? Dempsey hasn’t a clue, but Secretary of State John Kerry says it will uphold and proclaim a norm and thus deter future use of chemical weapons. With a few Tomahawk missiles? Hitting sites that, thanks to the administration having leaked the target list, have already been scrubbed of important military assets?
This is risible. If anything, a pinprick from which Assad emerges unscathed would simply enhance his stature and vindicate his conduct. Deterrence depends entirely on perception and the perception in the Middle East is universal: Obama wants no part of Syria.
Assad has to go, says Obama, and then lifts not a finger for two years. Obama lays down a red line, and then ignores it. Shamed finally by a massive poison-gas attack, he sends Kerry to make an impassioned case for righteous and urgent retaliation — and the very next day, Obama undermines everything by declaring an indefinite timeout to seek congressional approval.
This stunning zigzag, following months of hesitation, ambivalence, contradiction, and studied delay, left our regional allies shocked and our enemies gleeful. I had strongly advocated going to Congress. But it was inconceivable that, instead of recalling Congress to emergency session, Obama would simply place everything in suspension while Congress finished its Labor Day barbecues and he flew off to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. So much for the fierce urgency of enforcing an international taboo and speaking for the dead children of Damascus.
Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies.
In this year alone, Israel has four times launched airstrikes within Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad’s acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect. They care about just one audience — the party to be deterred, namely Assad and his allies.
Assad knows who did it. He didn’t have to see the Israeli prime minister preening about it on world television.
And yet here is Obama, having done nothing yet but hesitate, threaten, retract, and wander about the stage, claiming Wednesday in Sweden to be the conscience of the world, upholding not his own red line but the world’s. And, incidentally, Congress’s — a transparent attempt at offloading responsibility.
To his dovish base, Obama insists on how limited and militarily marginal the strike will be. To undecided hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who are prepared to support a policy that would really alter the course of the civil war, he vaguely promises the opposite — to degrade Assad’s military while upgrading that of the resistance.
Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.
This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategy for altering the trajectory of the Syrian war, Congress should vote no.
04 September, 2013
Barack Obama’s Staggering Incompetence
Barack Obama’s Staggering Incompetence
Peter Wehner
09.02.2013 - 11:00 AM
It’s reported that President Obama was ready to order a military strike against Syria, with or without Congress’s blessing, but “on Friday night, he suddenly changed his mind.” According to the Huffington Post:
Senior administration officials describing Obama’s about-face Saturday offered a portrait of a president who began to wrestle with his own decision – at first internally, then confiding his views to his chief of staff, and finally summoning his aides for an evening session in the Oval Office to say he’d had a change of heart.
In light of all this, it’s worth posing a few questions:
1. Why didn’t the president seek congressional authority before the administration began to beat the war drums this past week? Did the idea not occur to him? It’s not as if this is an obscure issue. When you’re in the White House and preparing to launch military force against a sovereign nation, whether or not to seek the approval of Congress is usually somewhere near the top of the to-do list.
And why has the urgency to act that we saw from the administration during the last week–when Assad’s use of chemical weapons was referred to by the secretary of state as a “moral obscenity”–given way to an air of casualness, with Obama not even calling Congress back into session to debate his military strike against Syria?
2. The president didn’t seek congressional approval for his military strike in Libya. Why does he believe he needs it in Syria?
3. Mr. Obama, in his Rose Garden statement on Saturday, still insisted he has the authority to strike Syria without congressional approval. So what happens if Congress votes down a use-of-force resolution? Does the president strike Syria anyway? If so, will it be an evanescent bombing, intended to be limited in scope and duration, while doing nothing to change the war’s balance of power? Or does the president completely back down? Does he even know? Has he thought through in advance anything related to Syria? Or is this a case of Obama simply making it up as he goes along?
This latest volte-face by the president is evidence of a man who is completely overmatched by events, weak and confused, and deeply ambivalent about using force. Yet he’s also desperate to get out of the corner he painted himself into by declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line.” As a result he’s gone all Hamlet on us. Not surprisingly, Obama’s actions are being mocked by America’s enemies and sowing doubt among our allies. (Read this New York Times story for more.)
What explains this debacle? It’s impossible for us to know all the reasons, but one explanation appears to be a CYA operation.
According to Politico, “At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a ‘red line’ if he used chemical weapons against his own people.” And the Washington Post reports:
Obama’s proposal to invite Congress dominated the Friday discussion in the Oval Office. He had consulted almost no one about his idea. In the end, the president made clear he wanted Congress to share in the responsibility for what happens in Syria. As one aide put it, “We don’t want them to have their cake and eat it, too.”
Get it? The president of the United States is preparing in advance to shift the blame if his strike on Syria proves to be unpopular and ineffective. He’s furious about the box he’s placed himself in, he hates the ridicule he’s (rightly) incurring, but he doesn’t see any way out.
What he does see is a political (and geopolitical) disaster in the making. And so what is emerging is what comes most naturally to Mr. Obama: Blame shifting and blame sharing. Remember: the president doesn’t believe he needs congressional authorization to act. He’s ignored it before. He wants it now. For reasons of political survival. To put it another way: He wants the fingerprints of others on the failure in Syria.
Rarely has an American president joined so much cynicism with so much ineptitude.
Peter Wehner
09.02.2013 - 11:00 AM
It’s reported that President Obama was ready to order a military strike against Syria, with or without Congress’s blessing, but “on Friday night, he suddenly changed his mind.” According to the Huffington Post:
Senior administration officials describing Obama’s about-face Saturday offered a portrait of a president who began to wrestle with his own decision – at first internally, then confiding his views to his chief of staff, and finally summoning his aides for an evening session in the Oval Office to say he’d had a change of heart.
In light of all this, it’s worth posing a few questions:
1. Why didn’t the president seek congressional authority before the administration began to beat the war drums this past week? Did the idea not occur to him? It’s not as if this is an obscure issue. When you’re in the White House and preparing to launch military force against a sovereign nation, whether or not to seek the approval of Congress is usually somewhere near the top of the to-do list.
And why has the urgency to act that we saw from the administration during the last week–when Assad’s use of chemical weapons was referred to by the secretary of state as a “moral obscenity”–given way to an air of casualness, with Obama not even calling Congress back into session to debate his military strike against Syria?
2. The president didn’t seek congressional approval for his military strike in Libya. Why does he believe he needs it in Syria?
3. Mr. Obama, in his Rose Garden statement on Saturday, still insisted he has the authority to strike Syria without congressional approval. So what happens if Congress votes down a use-of-force resolution? Does the president strike Syria anyway? If so, will it be an evanescent bombing, intended to be limited in scope and duration, while doing nothing to change the war’s balance of power? Or does the president completely back down? Does he even know? Has he thought through in advance anything related to Syria? Or is this a case of Obama simply making it up as he goes along?
This latest volte-face by the president is evidence of a man who is completely overmatched by events, weak and confused, and deeply ambivalent about using force. Yet he’s also desperate to get out of the corner he painted himself into by declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line.” As a result he’s gone all Hamlet on us. Not surprisingly, Obama’s actions are being mocked by America’s enemies and sowing doubt among our allies. (Read this New York Times story for more.)
What explains this debacle? It’s impossible for us to know all the reasons, but one explanation appears to be a CYA operation.
According to Politico, “At the very least, Obama clearly wants lawmakers to co-own a decision that he can’t back away from after having declared last year that Assad would cross a ‘red line’ if he used chemical weapons against his own people.” And the Washington Post reports:
Obama’s proposal to invite Congress dominated the Friday discussion in the Oval Office. He had consulted almost no one about his idea. In the end, the president made clear he wanted Congress to share in the responsibility for what happens in Syria. As one aide put it, “We don’t want them to have their cake and eat it, too.”
Get it? The president of the United States is preparing in advance to shift the blame if his strike on Syria proves to be unpopular and ineffective. He’s furious about the box he’s placed himself in, he hates the ridicule he’s (rightly) incurring, but he doesn’t see any way out.
What he does see is a political (and geopolitical) disaster in the making. And so what is emerging is what comes most naturally to Mr. Obama: Blame shifting and blame sharing. Remember: the president doesn’t believe he needs congressional authorization to act. He’s ignored it before. He wants it now. For reasons of political survival. To put it another way: He wants the fingerprints of others on the failure in Syria.
Rarely has an American president joined so much cynicism with so much ineptitude.
22 August, 2013
Can Obama write his own laws?
Can Obama write his own laws?
By Charles Krauthammer
As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.
Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement ratified by Congress and signed by the president.
That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — for example, the amount of dope involved.
In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”
But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.
Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.
Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate.
Which followed hundreds of Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions and other well-lobbied, very special interests.
Nor is this kind of rule-by-decree restricted to health care. In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedings against young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally.
The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM Act. Or of mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing health care premiums for $175,000-a-year members of Congress. Or even whether you think governors should be allowed to weaken the work requirements for welfare recipients — an authority the administration granted last year in clear violation of section 407 of the landmark Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996.
The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will. Presidents are arguably permitted to refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional (the basis for so many of George W. Bush’s so-called signing statements). But presidents are forbidden from doing so for reasons of mere policy — the reason for every Obama violation listed above.
Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what’s left of the law?
The problem is not just uncertain enforcement but the undermining of the very creation of new law. What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give-and-take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out?
Consider immigration reform, now in gestation. The essence of any deal would be legalization in return for strict border enforcement. If some such legislative compromise is struck, what confidence can anyone have in it — if the president can unilaterally alter whatever (enforcement) provisions he never liked in the first place?
Yet this president is not only untroubled by what he’s doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign-style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress.
That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first.
At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.
By Charles Krauthammer
As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.
Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement ratified by Congress and signed by the president.
That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — for example, the amount of dope involved.
In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”
But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.
Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.
Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate.
Which followed hundreds of Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions and other well-lobbied, very special interests.
Nor is this kind of rule-by-decree restricted to health care. In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedings against young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally.
The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM Act. Or of mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing health care premiums for $175,000-a-year members of Congress. Or even whether you think governors should be allowed to weaken the work requirements for welfare recipients — an authority the administration granted last year in clear violation of section 407 of the landmark Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996.
The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will. Presidents are arguably permitted to refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional (the basis for so many of George W. Bush’s so-called signing statements). But presidents are forbidden from doing so for reasons of mere policy — the reason for every Obama violation listed above.
Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what’s left of the law?
The problem is not just uncertain enforcement but the undermining of the very creation of new law. What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give-and-take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out?
Consider immigration reform, now in gestation. The essence of any deal would be legalization in return for strict border enforcement. If some such legislative compromise is struck, what confidence can anyone have in it — if the president can unilaterally alter whatever (enforcement) provisions he never liked in the first place?
Yet this president is not only untroubled by what he’s doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign-style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress.
That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first.
At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.
09 July, 2013
The President Suspends the Law
Michael McConnell: Obama Suspends the Law
Like King James II, the president decides not to enforce laws he doesn't like. That's an abuse of power.
By MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL
President Obama's decision last week to suspend the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding of the role of the executive in our system of government.
Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.
This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II's use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal."
To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to "refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons."
Attorneys general under Presidents Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton all agreed on this point. With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress were struck down by the courts, no prior president has claimed the power to negate a law that is concededly constitutional.
In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court in Clinton v. City of New York, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: "There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes."
The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it. Section 1513(d) states in no uncertain terms that "The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." Imagine the outcry if Mitt Romney had been elected president and simply refused to enforce the whole of ObamaCare.
This is not the first time Mr. Obama has suspended the operation of statutes by executive decree, but it is the most barefaced. In June of last year, for example, the administration stopped initiating deportation proceedings against some 800,000 illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. before age 16, lived here at least five years, and met a variety of other criteria. This was after Congress refused to enact the Dream Act, which would have allowed these individuals to stay in accordance with these conditions. Earlier in 2012, the president effectively replaced congressional requirements governing state compliance under the No Child Left Behind Act with new ones crafted by his administration.
The president defended his suspension of the immigration laws as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He defended his amending of No Child Left Behind as an exercise of authority in the statute to waive certain requirements. The administration has yet to offer a legal justification for last week's suspension of the employer mandate.
Republican opponents of ObamaCare might say that the suspension of the employer mandate is such good policy that there's no need to worry about constitutionality. But if the president can dispense with laws, and parts of laws, when he disagrees with them, the implications for constitutional government are dire.
Democrats too may acquiesce in Mr. Obama's action, as they have his other aggressive assertions of executive power. Yet what will they say when a Republican president decides that the tax rate on capital gains is a drag on economic growth and instructs the IRS not to enforce it?
And what of immigration reform? Why bother debating the details of a compromise if future presidents will feel free to disregard those parts of the statute that they don't like?
The courts cannot be counted on to intervene in cases like this. As the Supreme Court recently held in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the same-sex marriage case involving California's Proposition 8, private citizens do not have standing in court to challenge the executive's refusal to enforce laws, unless they have a personal stake in the matter. If a president declines to enforce tax laws, immigration laws, or restrictions on spending—to name a few plausible examples—it is very likely that no one will have standing to sue.
Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects. As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress "would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice."
Mr. McConnell, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, is a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Like King James II, the president decides not to enforce laws he doesn't like. That's an abuse of power.
By MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL
President Obama's decision last week to suspend the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding of the role of the executive in our system of government.
Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.
This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II's use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal."
To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to "refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons."
Attorneys general under Presidents Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton all agreed on this point. With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress were struck down by the courts, no prior president has claimed the power to negate a law that is concededly constitutional.
In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court in Clinton v. City of New York, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: "There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes."
The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it. Section 1513(d) states in no uncertain terms that "The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." Imagine the outcry if Mitt Romney had been elected president and simply refused to enforce the whole of ObamaCare.
This is not the first time Mr. Obama has suspended the operation of statutes by executive decree, but it is the most barefaced. In June of last year, for example, the administration stopped initiating deportation proceedings against some 800,000 illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. before age 16, lived here at least five years, and met a variety of other criteria. This was after Congress refused to enact the Dream Act, which would have allowed these individuals to stay in accordance with these conditions. Earlier in 2012, the president effectively replaced congressional requirements governing state compliance under the No Child Left Behind Act with new ones crafted by his administration.
The president defended his suspension of the immigration laws as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He defended his amending of No Child Left Behind as an exercise of authority in the statute to waive certain requirements. The administration has yet to offer a legal justification for last week's suspension of the employer mandate.
Republican opponents of ObamaCare might say that the suspension of the employer mandate is such good policy that there's no need to worry about constitutionality. But if the president can dispense with laws, and parts of laws, when he disagrees with them, the implications for constitutional government are dire.
Democrats too may acquiesce in Mr. Obama's action, as they have his other aggressive assertions of executive power. Yet what will they say when a Republican president decides that the tax rate on capital gains is a drag on economic growth and instructs the IRS not to enforce it?
And what of immigration reform? Why bother debating the details of a compromise if future presidents will feel free to disregard those parts of the statute that they don't like?
The courts cannot be counted on to intervene in cases like this. As the Supreme Court recently held in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the same-sex marriage case involving California's Proposition 8, private citizens do not have standing in court to challenge the executive's refusal to enforce laws, unless they have a personal stake in the matter. If a president declines to enforce tax laws, immigration laws, or restrictions on spending—to name a few plausible examples—it is very likely that no one will have standing to sue.
Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects. As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress "would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice."
Mr. McConnell, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, is a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
09 May, 2013
Benghazi
Questions for the administration:
- Why was the Benghazi embassy without military protection on Sept 11 (clearly a day of interest) in a volatile country with nearby enemies?
- Is it common to leave our middle-east outposts without military protection? If so, why?
- Why were military units not immediately sent to the Benghazi upon report of the attack (note that this question still stands even if we believe it was a "spontaneous protest")?
- The administration claims it would have taken hours for military personnel to arrive on site - does this not suggest the need for additional military funding to improve response time?
- Why did UN Ambassador Susan Rice go on TV the next day and claim in multiple interviews that Benghazi was the result of a protest when it is now apparent the administration clearly knew it was a coordinated attack?
- What is the status of the President's pledge to "bring to justice" the individuals responsible for the death of three Americans?
- How can Secretary Clinton say "What difference, at this point, does it make" regarding whether or not it was a coordinated attack or a spontaneous protest? Notice that in her next sentence she says it is her job to "figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from happening again" - how can she do that if she is indifferent to the cause and actions leading to the attack?
14 February, 2013
Work Disincentives, Still Crazy After All These Years
Work Disincentives, Still Crazy After All These Years
By ARTHUR LAFFER
It is tempting to dismiss the role played by incentives in economics, but the persistence of poverty in the inner city and elsewhere is difficult to explain with any other view of human behavior. Poor people, like everyone else, respond to incentives. The dilemma is how to introduce market incentives while still maintaining a generous system of helping those in need.
The first step is to consider the role played by disincentives, whether they are disincentives to work because government benefits fall away as income rises, or disincentives that make employers reluctant to hire entry-level workers likely to come from the ranks of the young unemployed.
More than three decades ago, I began enumerating a myriad of government "needs tested" programs that diminished welfare benefits as their recipients earned more income. The loss of government benefits made earning more income less attractive to many low-income families, an effect similar to that of raising marginal tax rates.
In the intervening years, alas, very little has changed. Gary Alexander, secretary of public welfare for the State of Pennsylvania, made that quite clear in a July presentation to the American Enterprise Institute entitled "Welfare's Failure and the Solution," an analysis of the welfare benefits plus wages of a single mother of two young children living in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Alexander reports that a single mother of two in the Keystone State earning no wages will obtain welfare benefits—such as food stamps, child care and Medicaid services—worth more than $45,000 annually. If the woman begins earning wages, her total annual income, including the value of her welfare benefits, will rise as well—up to about $9,000 in wages. But the next $5,000 in wages will not increase her total income, because she will lose some Medicaid and other benefits. In short, she faces the equivalent of a 100% marginal tax.
From about $14,000 to $29,000 of gross wages, she will also lose government benefits such that her total annual income will rise only about $5,000—an effective marginal tax rate of 67%. At $29,000 of wages, the woman will realize a little less than $57,000 in net income plus benefits. Once she earns more than $29,000 in wages her housing subsidies and food subsidies drop way down. With wages above $43,000, her child-care subsidies disappear, and once her wages top $57,000 her family will no longer qualify for the Children's Health Insurance Program.
What this means is that her total income—welfare benefits plus wages, minus taxes—won't reach $57,000 until her gross wage income rises to $69,000. In other words, the money earned by her between $29,000 and $69,000 faces a marginal tax rate, on average, of 100%. She receives no net benefit from her labor. Now if that doesn't motivate you to get up and go to work, I don't know what will.
This example is particular to a single mother in Pennsylvania with two children, but the principles apply generally across the country. People with low incomes who receive various forms of welfare subsidies in any number of states—with and without children, whether married or not—face enormous disincentives in trying to improve their lives by working. And these barriers to self-improvement through work have been rising over time.
According to the most recent Census Bureau data, the percentage of the American population in 2011 living below the poverty line was 15%, tied for a 50-year high and well above the 11.4% in the late 1970s when I began calling attention to "needs tested" disincentives to work.
Using employment as a share of total population for especially vulnerable demographics, the consequences of poorly thought-out policies are stark.
Consider the predicament of teenagers 16 to 19 years old, whose employment-to-population ratio has been 26%—about one in four young people employed—for the past three years. In the period 1975-2002, the ratio was in a healthier 40%-50% range. For African-Americans 16 to 19 years old, the employment-to-population ratio for the past four years has been in the anemic 14.5% to 16.5% range.
Minimum-wage laws ostensibly intended to help the young and poor may have put a bit more money in the pockets of those who found work, but study after study indicates that governmental minimum-wage interventions discourage employers from hiring.
How to counter these disincentives? My preferred solution is to enact a form of enterprise zone where marginal tax rates would be greatly lowered for both employers and employees in areas with high poverty. For starters, employer and employee payroll taxes could be eliminated for people who both live and work in the enterprise zones. There would be scant revenue loss to the U.S. Treasury because few people are working in these areas anyway.
Second, tax rates on corporate profits and personal income could also be reduced in the enterprise zones for businesses and employees whose principal residence is in the enterprise zone. Potential workers need employers after all. Once these residents see that their pay will not be whittled away by payroll and income taxes, they will not be so disinclined to sacrifice the government benefits that would recede as their income increases.
Developing business and life skills through on-the-job training is crucial for populations suffering generational poverty. To help make youth employment in the country's poorest areas more attractive, enterprise zones should eliminate job-killing state and federal minimum wage requirements for workers under 21. (The "youth minimum wage" provision allows payment of $4.25 an hour to workers under age 20 instead of the federal $7.25 minimum wage, but the rate expires after 90 days.)
After being unemployed for a number of years, poor, unskilled youths often become unemployable. And, after being unemployable for a number of years, many of them quite understandably become hostile to the world, and society has to spend fortunes protecting itself from them. It is a dispiriting Catch-22.
In the spirit of the late, great New York Rep. Jack Kemp, the time is right to take up the cause of a bipartisan pro-growth agenda for America's pockets of poverty.
By ARTHUR LAFFER
It is tempting to dismiss the role played by incentives in economics, but the persistence of poverty in the inner city and elsewhere is difficult to explain with any other view of human behavior. Poor people, like everyone else, respond to incentives. The dilemma is how to introduce market incentives while still maintaining a generous system of helping those in need.
The first step is to consider the role played by disincentives, whether they are disincentives to work because government benefits fall away as income rises, or disincentives that make employers reluctant to hire entry-level workers likely to come from the ranks of the young unemployed.
More than three decades ago, I began enumerating a myriad of government "needs tested" programs that diminished welfare benefits as their recipients earned more income. The loss of government benefits made earning more income less attractive to many low-income families, an effect similar to that of raising marginal tax rates.
In the intervening years, alas, very little has changed. Gary Alexander, secretary of public welfare for the State of Pennsylvania, made that quite clear in a July presentation to the American Enterprise Institute entitled "Welfare's Failure and the Solution," an analysis of the welfare benefits plus wages of a single mother of two young children living in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Alexander reports that a single mother of two in the Keystone State earning no wages will obtain welfare benefits—such as food stamps, child care and Medicaid services—worth more than $45,000 annually. If the woman begins earning wages, her total annual income, including the value of her welfare benefits, will rise as well—up to about $9,000 in wages. But the next $5,000 in wages will not increase her total income, because she will lose some Medicaid and other benefits. In short, she faces the equivalent of a 100% marginal tax.
From about $14,000 to $29,000 of gross wages, she will also lose government benefits such that her total annual income will rise only about $5,000—an effective marginal tax rate of 67%. At $29,000 of wages, the woman will realize a little less than $57,000 in net income plus benefits. Once she earns more than $29,000 in wages her housing subsidies and food subsidies drop way down. With wages above $43,000, her child-care subsidies disappear, and once her wages top $57,000 her family will no longer qualify for the Children's Health Insurance Program.
What this means is that her total income—welfare benefits plus wages, minus taxes—won't reach $57,000 until her gross wage income rises to $69,000. In other words, the money earned by her between $29,000 and $69,000 faces a marginal tax rate, on average, of 100%. She receives no net benefit from her labor. Now if that doesn't motivate you to get up and go to work, I don't know what will.
This example is particular to a single mother in Pennsylvania with two children, but the principles apply generally across the country. People with low incomes who receive various forms of welfare subsidies in any number of states—with and without children, whether married or not—face enormous disincentives in trying to improve their lives by working. And these barriers to self-improvement through work have been rising over time.
According to the most recent Census Bureau data, the percentage of the American population in 2011 living below the poverty line was 15%, tied for a 50-year high and well above the 11.4% in the late 1970s when I began calling attention to "needs tested" disincentives to work.
Using employment as a share of total population for especially vulnerable demographics, the consequences of poorly thought-out policies are stark.
Consider the predicament of teenagers 16 to 19 years old, whose employment-to-population ratio has been 26%—about one in four young people employed—for the past three years. In the period 1975-2002, the ratio was in a healthier 40%-50% range. For African-Americans 16 to 19 years old, the employment-to-population ratio for the past four years has been in the anemic 14.5% to 16.5% range.
Minimum-wage laws ostensibly intended to help the young and poor may have put a bit more money in the pockets of those who found work, but study after study indicates that governmental minimum-wage interventions discourage employers from hiring.
How to counter these disincentives? My preferred solution is to enact a form of enterprise zone where marginal tax rates would be greatly lowered for both employers and employees in areas with high poverty. For starters, employer and employee payroll taxes could be eliminated for people who both live and work in the enterprise zones. There would be scant revenue loss to the U.S. Treasury because few people are working in these areas anyway.
Second, tax rates on corporate profits and personal income could also be reduced in the enterprise zones for businesses and employees whose principal residence is in the enterprise zone. Potential workers need employers after all. Once these residents see that their pay will not be whittled away by payroll and income taxes, they will not be so disinclined to sacrifice the government benefits that would recede as their income increases.
Developing business and life skills through on-the-job training is crucial for populations suffering generational poverty. To help make youth employment in the country's poorest areas more attractive, enterprise zones should eliminate job-killing state and federal minimum wage requirements for workers under 21. (The "youth minimum wage" provision allows payment of $4.25 an hour to workers under age 20 instead of the federal $7.25 minimum wage, but the rate expires after 90 days.)
After being unemployed for a number of years, poor, unskilled youths often become unemployable. And, after being unemployable for a number of years, many of them quite understandably become hostile to the world, and society has to spend fortunes protecting itself from them. It is a dispiriting Catch-22.
In the spirit of the late, great New York Rep. Jack Kemp, the time is right to take up the cause of a bipartisan pro-growth agenda for America's pockets of poverty.
07 February, 2013
Barbara Boxer Op-Ed
I love it
when politicians say things like “we'll apply the savings from ending the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars to the deficit”. Um…funds
appropriated for those wars were not intended to be indefinite spending. You don't have any “savings” from ending
those conflicts. This is even worse than
her other argument, that we have “already” cut $1.2T. Again, spending avoidance is not spending
reduction. What does she really want to
cut? Nothing! No wonder every Republican proposal looks
like the “hard way”. In her mind, she
shouldn't have to make any hard choices.
Hey media,
any time you want to ask a remotely challenging question, have at it. Here’s one to get you started “What,
specifically, do you recommend we cut?
If you propose no cuts, do you believe the debt and deficit are
immaterial and we can continue spending 50% more than we take in each year?”.
30 January, 2013
24 January, 2013
I think this is an interesting double standard. Chick-Fil-a's CEO made a controversial public statement earlier this summer and criticism, boycotts and protests ensued. John Mackey's comments, however, do not receive nearly the same attention or vitriol. Could it be that liberals like Whole Foods, and they do not like Chick-Fil-a? Could it really be that simple?
Whole Foods' CEO Mackey Is Right—ObamaCare Is Like Fascism
By ROBERT ROMANO
Investors.com
Posted 01/22/2013 07:01 PM ET
In 2009, when Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in a Wall Street Journal op-ed compared the health care "public option" then under consideration by Congress to socialism — a nationalized economic system wherein the government owns the means of production — hardly anyone batted an eyelash.
Sure, at the time, the left-wing site Daily Kos called for a boycott. And a Facebook group at the time managed to find a couple hundred users angry about the characterization. Whole Foods set up a special forum for customers to express their views on the op-ed.
But it was hardly the response Whole Foods got when on Jan. 16 in an NPR interview, Mackey was asked a follow-up question on what he thought about the current law.
After all, the "public option" was never adopted. What came afterward, now known in popular vernacular as ObamaCare, was a mishmash of mandates, regulations and price controls — but fell short of an outright nationalization of the insurance industry.
That was when Mackey used the F-word. No, not that one. The other one.
"Technically speaking, it's more like fascism," Mackey said in the NPR interview, adding, "Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it, and that's what's happening with our health care programs and these reforms."
That set off a firestorm, largely again from the political left all but calling for Mackey's head.
Since then, Mackey has walked back his statement, calling it a "bad choice of language," but all the while sticking to his essential point.
He explained, "I was trying to distinguish it between socialism so I took the dictionary definition of fascism, which is when the means of production are still owned privately but the government controls it — that's a type of fascism. However, I realize that that word has so much baggage associated with it from World War II, with Germany, with Italy and Spain, that's a very provocative word, so I regret using it."
Fair enough. On one hand, fascism certainly is a controversial term. And on the other, what Mackey described certainly would fit well within the academic definition of fascism. Or more specifically, corporatism, which was the economic theory that undergirded the fascist ideology.
The fascist strain of corporatism was the brainchild of Alfredo Rocco, a key figure in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s.
It called for the organization of the economy into corporate sectors that would cooperate with the government in implementing state policy.
Its tenets, neatly defined by Roland Sarti in "Italy: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present," called for "uniting workers, entrepreneurs, and government officials in economic activities, carried out in the public interest or the interests of the state ... (and) eliminating conflicts of interest among labor, business and government."
Or as Rocco put it, "For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."
Certainly, that's what ObamaCare — with its individual and employer mandates to respectively purchase and to provide health insurance — seeks to accomplish.
It guarantees customers to large companies, in this case insurance providers that supported passage of the legislation, and in the process cartelizes the system.
In other words, private profits are being embedded into the law, and enforced by the bureaucracy, which will levy fines on individuals and employers that fail to comply with the mandates.
The purpose, ostensibly, is to reduce health care costs, a stated goal of the legislation, by increasing the pool of the insured.
When that fails, as surely it will, whoever cannot afford the insurance will then be subsidized through the state and federal-run exchanges — monies that of course will pass directly to the insurance companies and health care providers.
But the level of state control in this new system, and insurance industry participation in implementing it to its own benefit, is undeniable. It is corporatism defined.
One could compare it to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that implemented the National Recovery Administration, which may have been patterned after Mussolini's labor laws, as summarized in a 1991 Yale Law School study by James Whitman, before it was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.
Or the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which gave privately owned banks the power to appoint regional Fed chairmen and outsourced creation of the public currency to a banking cartel.
Or more recently, one might examine the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), Dodd-Frank's "orderly liquidation fund" and the Fed's continued mortgage-backed securities purchase program — all bailout programs that privatize profits and socialize losses in the financial sector. More corporatism.
In that context, ObamaCare actually fits in a long line of fascist-like ideas being implemented in the U.S. that feed the bottom lines of very large companies — all at public expense.
To be fair, corporatism does predate fascism as an idea, but it heavily influenced that ideology and its policies that were implemented in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere such that, today, they can almost be used synonymously in an academic sense.
Mackey obviously does not prefer this approach to economic policy, and so chose the highly charged fascist label. He could have just as easily called it corporatist and would have been equally accurate.
In short, Mackey was spot on. Perhaps the only thing he really regrets was telling the truth.
Whole Foods' CEO Mackey Is Right—ObamaCare Is Like Fascism
By ROBERT ROMANO
Investors.com
Posted 01/22/2013 07:01 PM ET
In 2009, when Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in a Wall Street Journal op-ed compared the health care "public option" then under consideration by Congress to socialism — a nationalized economic system wherein the government owns the means of production — hardly anyone batted an eyelash.
Sure, at the time, the left-wing site Daily Kos called for a boycott. And a Facebook group at the time managed to find a couple hundred users angry about the characterization. Whole Foods set up a special forum for customers to express their views on the op-ed.
But it was hardly the response Whole Foods got when on Jan. 16 in an NPR interview, Mackey was asked a follow-up question on what he thought about the current law.
After all, the "public option" was never adopted. What came afterward, now known in popular vernacular as ObamaCare, was a mishmash of mandates, regulations and price controls — but fell short of an outright nationalization of the insurance industry.
That was when Mackey used the F-word. No, not that one. The other one.
"Technically speaking, it's more like fascism," Mackey said in the NPR interview, adding, "Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it, and that's what's happening with our health care programs and these reforms."
That set off a firestorm, largely again from the political left all but calling for Mackey's head.
Since then, Mackey has walked back his statement, calling it a "bad choice of language," but all the while sticking to his essential point.
He explained, "I was trying to distinguish it between socialism so I took the dictionary definition of fascism, which is when the means of production are still owned privately but the government controls it — that's a type of fascism. However, I realize that that word has so much baggage associated with it from World War II, with Germany, with Italy and Spain, that's a very provocative word, so I regret using it."
Fair enough. On one hand, fascism certainly is a controversial term. And on the other, what Mackey described certainly would fit well within the academic definition of fascism. Or more specifically, corporatism, which was the economic theory that undergirded the fascist ideology.
The fascist strain of corporatism was the brainchild of Alfredo Rocco, a key figure in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s.
It called for the organization of the economy into corporate sectors that would cooperate with the government in implementing state policy.
Its tenets, neatly defined by Roland Sarti in "Italy: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present," called for "uniting workers, entrepreneurs, and government officials in economic activities, carried out in the public interest or the interests of the state ... (and) eliminating conflicts of interest among labor, business and government."
Or as Rocco put it, "For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."
Certainly, that's what ObamaCare — with its individual and employer mandates to respectively purchase and to provide health insurance — seeks to accomplish.
It guarantees customers to large companies, in this case insurance providers that supported passage of the legislation, and in the process cartelizes the system.
In other words, private profits are being embedded into the law, and enforced by the bureaucracy, which will levy fines on individuals and employers that fail to comply with the mandates.
The purpose, ostensibly, is to reduce health care costs, a stated goal of the legislation, by increasing the pool of the insured.
When that fails, as surely it will, whoever cannot afford the insurance will then be subsidized through the state and federal-run exchanges — monies that of course will pass directly to the insurance companies and health care providers.
But the level of state control in this new system, and insurance industry participation in implementing it to its own benefit, is undeniable. It is corporatism defined.
One could compare it to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that implemented the National Recovery Administration, which may have been patterned after Mussolini's labor laws, as summarized in a 1991 Yale Law School study by James Whitman, before it was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.
Or the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which gave privately owned banks the power to appoint regional Fed chairmen and outsourced creation of the public currency to a banking cartel.
Or more recently, one might examine the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), Dodd-Frank's "orderly liquidation fund" and the Fed's continued mortgage-backed securities purchase program — all bailout programs that privatize profits and socialize losses in the financial sector. More corporatism.
In that context, ObamaCare actually fits in a long line of fascist-like ideas being implemented in the U.S. that feed the bottom lines of very large companies — all at public expense.
To be fair, corporatism does predate fascism as an idea, but it heavily influenced that ideology and its policies that were implemented in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere such that, today, they can almost be used synonymously in an academic sense.
Mackey obviously does not prefer this approach to economic policy, and so chose the highly charged fascist label. He could have just as easily called it corporatist and would have been equally accurate.
In short, Mackey was spot on. Perhaps the only thing he really regrets was telling the truth.
Shopping Around for a Better Life
Shopping Around for a Better Life
By John Stossel - January 23, 2013
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can."
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
Many of them moved to Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington or Wyoming. More on what makes those states special in a moment.
When the USSR died, overthrown by its own citizens' hatred of central planning, I assumed the world would acknowledge that big government is a nightmare. But people don't. Our brains are programmed to believe that "next time, central planning will help." So, many people forget the lesson of the USSR.
Fortunately, they can still watch what's happening right now in California, Illinois and Connecticut. OK, those states are not totalitarian dictatorships, but they tax and micromanage so much that they will soon approach bankruptcy, cut services and stagnate.
And Americans have an advantage Soviet citizens never had: 50 states. If we live in a big-government state, we can move. I did.
I grew up in Illinois. It was nice enough (except in winter). But gradually its politicians gave away its future.
I moved to New York City, no political paradise, but where the big TV news jobs are. And maybe New York's promises to unions won't bankrupt us too soon.
I could always move again. I would still be smothered by federal rules, but at least I can move to a place with fewer onerous state rules.
A group called the Free State Project invites us to move to New Hampshire to help create "liberty in our lifetime." It's too early to see how that will work out, but that state now has a booming population of libertarians and anarchists. One even got elected to the state legislature after running against his own roommate, also a libertarian, whom he accused of not being anti-government enough.
Americans who want to escape state income taxes and live near better job prospects can move to one of those nine states that I mentioned above.
It's no surprise they produce more jobs. Without an income tax, those states were forced to limit the growth of their governments, so they did. Every state has schools, social service programs, prisons, etc., but those states find a way to fund those things for less. Then they reap benefits.
Last decade, those nine states gained population and increased jobs by 4.9 percent; jobs in the rest of the states declined by 2.6 percent.
It's good that we have places like Texas and New Hampshire to which fed-up citizens can escape. In Europe, you'd have to leave your country to escape its worst laws.
French actor Gerard Depardieu just moved to Belgium to escape France's proposed 75 percent tax on the rich. Years ago, high taxes in Britain drove Rod Stewart to move to Los Angeles. But by 2010, California's taxes had risen, and Stewart moved back to England. (He doesn't claim the reason was taxes; he said his child could get a better education in England.)
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute summed up California's situation for me. "The politicians want to get re-elected, and the state government workers want to get as much as they can before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. California is Greece -- the Greece of America."
I hope all Americans watch and learn from states like California. But if we don't, and if people keep electing big-government politicians, at least Americans, unlike the Greeks, can hop around between 50 states, trying to stay one step ahead of bad laws and ruin.
By John Stossel - January 23, 2013
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can."
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
Many of them moved to Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington or Wyoming. More on what makes those states special in a moment.
When the USSR died, overthrown by its own citizens' hatred of central planning, I assumed the world would acknowledge that big government is a nightmare. But people don't. Our brains are programmed to believe that "next time, central planning will help." So, many people forget the lesson of the USSR.
Fortunately, they can still watch what's happening right now in California, Illinois and Connecticut. OK, those states are not totalitarian dictatorships, but they tax and micromanage so much that they will soon approach bankruptcy, cut services and stagnate.
And Americans have an advantage Soviet citizens never had: 50 states. If we live in a big-government state, we can move. I did.
I grew up in Illinois. It was nice enough (except in winter). But gradually its politicians gave away its future.
I moved to New York City, no political paradise, but where the big TV news jobs are. And maybe New York's promises to unions won't bankrupt us too soon.
I could always move again. I would still be smothered by federal rules, but at least I can move to a place with fewer onerous state rules.
A group called the Free State Project invites us to move to New Hampshire to help create "liberty in our lifetime." It's too early to see how that will work out, but that state now has a booming population of libertarians and anarchists. One even got elected to the state legislature after running against his own roommate, also a libertarian, whom he accused of not being anti-government enough.
Americans who want to escape state income taxes and live near better job prospects can move to one of those nine states that I mentioned above.
It's no surprise they produce more jobs. Without an income tax, those states were forced to limit the growth of their governments, so they did. Every state has schools, social service programs, prisons, etc., but those states find a way to fund those things for less. Then they reap benefits.
Last decade, those nine states gained population and increased jobs by 4.9 percent; jobs in the rest of the states declined by 2.6 percent.
It's good that we have places like Texas and New Hampshire to which fed-up citizens can escape. In Europe, you'd have to leave your country to escape its worst laws.
French actor Gerard Depardieu just moved to Belgium to escape France's proposed 75 percent tax on the rich. Years ago, high taxes in Britain drove Rod Stewart to move to Los Angeles. But by 2010, California's taxes had risen, and Stewart moved back to England. (He doesn't claim the reason was taxes; he said his child could get a better education in England.)
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute summed up California's situation for me. "The politicians want to get re-elected, and the state government workers want to get as much as they can before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. California is Greece -- the Greece of America."
I hope all Americans watch and learn from states like California. But if we don't, and if people keep electing big-government politicians, at least Americans, unlike the Greeks, can hop around between 50 states, trying to stay one step ahead of bad laws and ruin.
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