Borkians Preserve Federal Obamacare Subsidies

29 Monday Jun 2015

Tags

ACA, Administrative State, Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice Roberts, Damon Root, Ilya Shapiro, Judicial Activism, Judicial Restraint, King vs. Burwell, Obamacare, Randy Barnett, Robert Bork, Robert Laszlewski, SCOTUS, SCOTUSblog, Tyler Cowen

I have mixed feelings about the Supreme Court’s King vs. Burwell decision upholding federal subsidies for health insurance purchased in states that did not establish their own exchanges. My biggest concerns are that the decision gives a pass to the unchecked exercise of executive fiat as well as congressional carelessness (“lassitude”, to use Justice Scalia’s term), and the smearing of the separation of legislative and judicial powers. I admit that I was eager to see the exchanges unravel under the weight of their own lousy economics. However, the economics remain lousy even with the ruling, which will become more evident as major subsidies to health insurers expire over the next 18 months. It will be interesting to watch as the process of escalating premia plays out. I’m relieved that the Obamacare opposition in Congress (primarily Republicans) is now off the hook. These legislators never coalesced around an alternative and would have received a good portion of the blame for any further disruptions in the insurance “market” had the decision gone the other way. Probably their best approach would have been to extend the subsidies to all exchanges, at least for the remainder of Obama’s term. As Tyler Cowen notes, an extension would have occurred:

“… only after a lot of political stupidity and also painful media coverage. So on net I take this to be good news, although arguably it is bad news that it is good news.“

On the merits of health care policy, given the failure to put forward a better plan, what would have been gained over the next 18 months from a ruling for the plaintiffs? Not much.

Cowen links to a Robert Laszlewski post emphasizing the fragile economic and political condition of Obamacare:

“Obamacare has only enrolled about 40% of the subsidy eligible market in two years worth of open enrollments. That level of consumer support does not make Obamacare either financially sustainable or politically sustainable. The surveys say the 40% who have enrolled like their plans. Of course they do, they are the poorest with the biggest subsidies and the lowest deductibles. The working and middle-class have most often not signed up for Obamacare because it costs too much and delivers too little.

That Obamacare is not financially sustainable is evidenced by the first wave of big 2016 rate increases by so many large market share insurers. The next wave of rate increases a year from now will also be large and will be in the middle of the 2016 election.“

The SCOTUS decision flies in the face of the roles and responsibilities assigned to the branches of government by the Constitution. The implication of the ruling is that a law means whatever the executive branch says it means, even when it says the opposite unambiguously. This goes too far in granting executive power to “reimagine” legislation, and the Left may well come to regret it as a precedent. Executive rulings in implementing laws is nothing new, but one hopes for the courts to keep a tight rein on this discretion in an era when the regulatory environment is growing increasingly complex.

A Randy Barnett post at SCOTUSblog quotes Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion:

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.“

Improve health care markets? Not destroy them? Wait… I’m confused! But seriously, at this point in the process, Justice Roberts must be confused about actual outcomes. An objective assessment of Obamacare would include an accounting for the many individuals whose policies were cancelled against their wishes, premium escalation, and the fact that the ACA has fallen well short of expectations for reducing the number of uninsured; the law has certainly not improved markets. Barnett describes Roberts’ apparent philosophy on this point thusly:

“... the Chief Justice seems to be telling us that he is once again putting a thumb on the scale for the government here as he did in his solo opinion in NFIB. Rather than assessing the constitutionality of the law as written – or enforcing it according to its terms – the court will rewrite the law to suit the government.”

This is not merely “legislative deference”, it is legislative rescue and a rewriting of the law. And Barnett points out that the Courts should provide a check on bad legislation, not serve as enablers.

Damon Root offers an excellent clarification of Roberts’ thinking: the strand of conservative judicial philosophy calling for deference to legislative intent is often attributed to Robert Bork. This obviously conflicts with the notion that conservatives are judicial activists. I discussed judicial activism here a few months ago, including Randy Barnett’s assertion that the term seems to be invoked as a pejorative almost any time someone doesn’t like a court decision. If it means preserving the Constitution, then count me as an activist.

Ilya Shapiro sums up the “intent” of the legislation and the “deferential” position taken by the court in King vs. Burwell:

“Roberts explains his transmogrification by finding it ‘implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,’ to deny subsidies to millions of people as part of legislation intended to expanded coverage. But it’s hardly implausible to think that legislation that still says that states ‘shall’ set up exchanges—the drafters forgot to fix this bit after lawyers pointed out that Congress can’t command states to do anything—would effectively give states an offer nobody thought they’d refuse. It was supposed to be a win-win: states rather than the federal government would run health care exchanges (yay federalism!) and all those who need subsidies to afford Obamacare policies would get them (yay universal healthcare!).

But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia, and only 14 states (plus D.C.) took that too-tempting offer, perhaps having been burned too many times before by the regulations that accompany any pots of “free” federal money. And that’s why we ended up with King v. Burwell: Obamacare the reality doesn’t accomplish Obamacare the dream.“

We’ll watch to see how badly Obamacare fares over the next two years. And we’ll hope that eventually Congress can fashion a new health care plan that creates more choice, reduces taxes, increases competition and reduces coercive rules and regulatory burdens.

Federally-Mandated Regionalism

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government, Regulation

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, Disparate impact, Housing and Urban Development, HUD, Katherine Kersten, Marc A. Thiessen, New Geography, Plan Bay Area, Regionalism, Stanley Kurtz, Sustainable Communities Grants, Thrive MSP 2040, Transit-oriented development, Wendell Cox

Quietly creeping into our lives is a regulatory framework from the Obama Administration dubbed “regionalism”. That might sound innocuous enough. On one level, we can think of regionalism as a pooling of resources in order to accomplish things that would be difficult at more fragmented levels, such as small municipalities. That could take various forms, such as annexation of an adjacent municipality or the formation of regional districts tasked with providing services such as special schools, transportation, utilities, or certain law enforcement functions. Obviously, any of these steps involves a loss of local control — for someone.

Regionalism as redefined by the Obama regime is more radical and involves not just other regional jurisdictions, but the federal government. The key elements of one proposed rule are federal data collection, federal diversity objectives and federal purse strings. The new rule, to be issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is described in a WaPo opinion piece by Marc A. Thiessen, “Obama wants to reengineer your neighborhood“:

“Under Obama’s proposed rule, the federal government will collect massive amounts of data on the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of thousands of local communities, looking for signs of ‘disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets.’ Then the government will target communities with results it doesn’t like and use billions of dollars in federal grant money to bribe or blackmail them into changing their zoning and housing policies.“

The clause “...in access to community assets” is subject to broad interpretation. As Thiessen notes later, housing and lending discrimination are already prohibited on all of the bases listed above. However, this rule has socioeconomic implications apart from the protected classes. The rule may well hold a community responsible for the aggregate disparate impact of what HUD calls “… the operation of housing markets, [and] investment choices by holders of capital.” The upshot is that a community could be penalized if HUD determines that private builders, developers and investors offer insufficient units of affordable housing within its borders.

By what standard will any such disparate impact be judged? A group’s non-representation within the borders of a subject community would frequently obviate the rule. Clearly, the reference area for any single community would have to encompass a larger regional geography, but that is likely to be decided by federal regulators. The scheme will become very arbitrary if regulators have much flexibility on a case-by-case basis.

I have been a critic of zoning laws and other local building restrictions that artificially restrict the supply of housing and inflate housing costs. It is possible that the HUD rule would weaken such restrictions, but it is more likely that local communities would leave those rules largely intact and instead carve out affordable housing “districts”. They might even find it convenient to do so via eminent domain. In any case, I do not support the kind of federal oversight and control of local communities envisioned by the Obama Administration.

Obama regionalism is much broader than the new HUD rule. Stanley Kurtz warned of this encroachment two years ago in “Regionalism: Obama’s Quiet Anti-Suburban Revolution“, and in an earlier book on the threat of Obama regionalism to American suburbs. The new HUD rule:

“… is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced ‘economic integration.’ The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in ‘stack and pack’ high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse.“

Much of Kurtz’s focus is on the San Francisco region’s “Plan Bay Area”. Under the guise of “sustainable development”, this initiative limits new development in the Bay Area, restricts new single-family home construction, and shoe-horns new housing and business expansion into districts near transportation hubs. Kurtz also discusses a 2012 award to Plan Bay Area of a “Sustainable Communities Grant” by the Obama Administration. The rules surrounding the use of such grants contribute to the further politicization of local development.

Wendell Cox elaborates on Kurtz’s book and the threat of regionalism to suburban life in a New Geography article entitled “Spreading the Fiscal Irresponsibility“. Obama’s regionalism entails greater local dependence on federal funds and an extreme loss of local control. Cox emphasizes the negative implications of that loss for fiscal restraint at local levels.

A more recent example of regionalism in action is in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN, where a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040” has been promulgated by a regional planning council. Katherine Kersten weighs in on the plan in the Wall Street Journal in “Turning the Twin Cities Into Sim City” (or you may need to use this Google search to get past the pay wall):

“While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify ‘racially concentrated areas of poverty’ and ‘high opportunity clusters.’ The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area.“

HUD and HUD grant money is assisting in this effort. To quote Kersten, HUD

“… says that mapping is intended, in part, to identify suburban land-use and zoning practices that allegedly deny opportunity and create ‘barriers’ for low-income and minority people.“

The Thrive plan also calls for “Transit-oriented development” and evaluation of “all future development policies through the ‘lens’ of climate change.” From Kersten’s closing paragraph:

“… Twin Cities residents will likely realize that Thrive MSP 2040’s centralized decision-making and Orwellian appeals to ‘equity’ and ‘sustainability’ are a serious threat to their democratic traditions of individual liberty and self-government. Let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.“

Frittered Freedoms and Secular Stagnation

23 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Government, Human Welfare

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Economic Freedom, Economic Freedom of the World, Fraser Institute, Freedom capital, Freedom Index, J.D. Tuccille, Pope Francis, Richard Alm, SMU Cox School of Business, W. Michael Cox, William J. O'Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom

Economic freedom is strongly associated with higher living standards, but the United States is steadily working to reverse its historical gains. That conclusion is supported by the work of W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm from the William J. O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the SMU Cox School of Business. They make use of an index of economic freedom published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, which is available for 94 countries going back to 1970. It incorporates 43 components such as tax rates, inflation, trade barriers, various regulations and the availability of credit.

“Hong Kong and Singapore, two former British outposts in Asia, have the highest freedom capital stocks, followed by the United States. India and China have adopted market-oriented reforms in recent years, but they’re still among the countries ranking low in freedom capital — a hangover from decades of central planning. Populism left Venezuela with a meager freedom capital stock.“

Cox and Alm fit a cross-country statistical model linking the freedom index to annual per capita consumption, which is a measure of the average standard of living. The data can be explored here. (I was hoping to see interactive scatter plots, but that may require the additional inconvenience of a download).

That freedom should be strongly associated with a society’s ability to consume may not be obvious to everyone, but it follows from some basic axioms: a more productive capital stock generates more choices and more consumables, and the capital will be more highly valued as a result. More freedom means broader choice and more flexibility over the use of capital, which enhances its value. There are many ways that freedoms can enhance the value of capital, such as lower taxes, fewer regulatory burdens and compliance costs, low inflation, and well-developed markets for capital funding. So it should be easy to recognize that the stock and value of a country’s capital are dependent on the freedoms under which it was cultivated. Cox and Alm refer to this contribution as “freedom capital”.

Comparing a country’s actual consumption to the level predicted by the freedom index measures the extent to which the county is consuming over or under a budget defined by its freedom capital. An under-prediction implies that the country’s actual level of consumption is not sustainable given the freedoms and/or constraints embedded in its institutions. A negative trend in the freedom index may also portend declines in the country’s standard of living.

The U.S. does not fare well based on these criteria. According to Cox and Alm, the U.S. consumes at a level 22% above what is afforded by its freedom index, and the index has declined over the past eight years. These facts do not bode well for our future standard of living.

The Cox and Alm research is also reviewed by J.D. Tuccille in Reason. He adds some interesting details from the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World” report showing the dramatic way in which the poor around the world are affected by economic freedoms:

“Annual per capita income is $11,610 in ‘most free’ countries, abruptly falling off to $3,929 in the second quartile, and declining from there [to $1,358 in the lowest quartile].

Economic freedom is also closely connected with civil liberties. Relatively free countries tend to respect people’s autonomy across the board. Authoritarian governments don’t confine their predations to any one area of human life. Freedom is a package deal.

So, if the United States is in for economic stagnation because of decayed economic freedom, we should expect that the poor will be hit hardest.“

I wish that Cox and Alm could arrange an audience with Pope Francis, whose ideas about helping the poor run precisely counter to these lessons.

Green Hubris: The Flub of Rome

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Global Warming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brendan O'Neil, Club of Rome, Fr. Robert Sirico, Free Markets, Green Theology, IPCC, John Hinderaker, Limits to Growth, Matt Ridley, Papal encyclical, Patrick J. Michaels, Politics of Science, Prometheus, Thomas Malthus, Tim Ball

The Papal Encyclical published last week has generated controversy for venturing into areas about which Pope Francis, and for that matter the Catholic Church, has absolutely no authority or expertise. Pope Francis has noble aims. His compassion for the poor is admirable and even poignant. Nevertheless, the Pope errs in his assessment of scientific, technological and economic issues, and he fails to reference or consider mountains of evidence that contradict the views that dominate this encyclical. It should come as no surprise that he has been swept along by the Leftist orthodoxy, of which he has long been a part.

On one hand, Pope Francis expresses a viewpoint that is almost universally shared: that we are stewards of the natural world and have a moral obligation to treat it well for the benefit of others now and in the future. However, he also believes in the unproven proposition of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW), that human activities are causing global temperatures to rise inexorably. He takes the questionable view that ongoing technological advances will benefit only the rich, leaving the poor behind in increasingly desperate circumstances. And he recklessly questions the morality of free markets and capitalism, asserting that they benefit only the rich and work against the interests of the broader masses.

One of the most interesting pieces of commentary on the Encyclical appeared in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “The Pope’s Green Theology“, written by Fr. Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest. (If the link doesn’t work, Google “wsj Sirico Green Theology”.)

“… capitalism has spurred the greatest reduction in global poverty in world history: The number of people living on $1.25 a day fell to 375 million in 2013 from 811 million in 1991, according to the International Labor Office. This is only one statistic among reams of evidence that vindicate capitalism. An honest debate among experts will lay this canard to rest.

The encyclical unwisely concedes too much to the secular environmental agenda, for example, by denigrating fossil fuels. But it also voices moral statements dismissing popular, ill-conceived positions. The repeated lie that overpopulation is harming the planet—expressed by even some of the advisers for the Vatican—is soundly rejected.“

Much of the evidence on global temperatures contradicts the Pope’s position, yet he sides with the groupthink of the environmental Left based on model predictions that have been consistently wrong over several decades. The models have drastically over-predicted global temperature trends, even before the “pause” in warming that began in the late 1990s.

It is rather early in the game for the Catholic Church to take such an unequivocal position on an issue as far afield from matters of religious faith as climate science. As Dr. Tim Ball notes, the Catholic Church has not always bet well on science, going back to its denunciation of Galileo almost 400 years ago. Apparently, any lessons learned from that episode about the process of scientific inquiry have been forgotten. Matt Ridley has a great (if lengthy) essay on the politics of science and the damage that politicized climate science has done to the cause of real understanding:

“Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.’ Richard Feynman was even pithier: ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’”

Climate science is really in its infancy. Recorded history of the climate is in its infancy as well. The scant evidence of global warming during the 20th century is well within the range of natural variation estimated for the past 8,000 years, according to a study by a former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). For the Pope, or anyone else, to make strong claims about “the science”, or to prescribe draconian limits on individual liberty in an effort to plan “the climate”, is hubris of the first order. That’s ironic given the Pope’s condemnation of what he characterizes as mankind’s Promethean hubris, as if making the world more livable was sinful. The Encyclical condemns technological progress, going so far as to denigrate the use of air conditioning. That attitude is driven by objections to energy use; nevertheless, the Pope reveals a deep mistrust of technology and betrays the soul of a Luddite.

Patrick J. Michaels of CATO’s Center for the Study of Science wrote about the Pope’s climate views and the morality of “dense energy” in April:

“Abundant and dependable energy frees mankind from a menial existence, allowing us to use our given talents for the greater good. The mental capital of the poor in the underdeveloped world is untapped without dense energy. The burning of dung for cooking is a major cause of early death from pulmonary disease. The massive deforestation that must occur without dense energy amplifies floods from ubiquitous tropical downpours.“

Here is a link to some very sarcastic commentary from Brendan O’Neil at Reason on the Pope’s “Dotty Green Theology“. O’Neil mentions the tyrannical fantasies dancing in the minds of some on the environmental Left:

“Christianity’s end-of-worldism is getting a new airing in the apocalypse obsession of greens, who warn of an eco-unfriendly End of Days. Its promise of Godly judgement for our wicked ways has been replaced by greens’ promise that we’ll one day be judged for our planetary destructiveness. A leading British green has fantasised about ‘international criminal tribunals’ for climate-change deniers, who will be ‘partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths.'”

Let’s hope the Pope isn’t on board with that, though he did propose that a worldwide governing body take charge of environmental issues. Please, no favors! John Hinderaker, in the context of the Encyclical, discusses the regressive impact of policies that raise energy prices. That’s consistent with the Pope’s green objectives. Hinderaker cites figures showing that those earning less than $30,000 per year in the U.S. spend 23% of their after-tax income on energy, compared to just 7% for those earning $50,000 or more.

It is extremely late in the game for the Pope to inveigh against capitalism, with all evidence pointing to the long-term success of free markets in lifting the poor from the depths of privation. In fact, the Encyclical is strongly reminiscent of the Malthusian “Limits to Growth” published by the Club of Rome. That “study” contained what has proven to be among the worst collections of prognostications of all time, and the Club persists in purveying doom and gloom to this day.

I have written before on Sacred Cow Chips about Pope Francis’ statist, anti-market inclinations. From that post:

“… it is not just the secular Left that fails to recognize the inherent conflict between big government and religious liberty. Pope Francis himself seems oblivious to the dangerous implications of big government for religious freedom. His apostolic exhortation for greater reliance on the state to care for the poor simultaneously embraces socialism and condemns capitalism. I take no issue in principle with the provision of a social safety net, but the Pope should be more results-oriented in assessing different forms of social organization and their impacts on poverty. Big government typically fails to achieve the kinds of humane objectives usually espoused by the Left. The sad ‘road to serfdom’ has played out too many times in the past.“

Should Foreign Goods Be Pricey?

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Free Trade

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Caroline Baum, Don Boudreaux, Fast Track Authority, Free trade, Intellectual Property Rights, Mercantilism, Protectionism, Trade Promotion Authority, Trans-Pacific Partnership

Even ardent supporters of the Pacific trade deal get one thing wrong consistently: promoting free trade is not so much about domestic producers, jobs and export promotion as it is about consumers, prices and improved access to imports. The latter are the real rewards of trade, while the former are more appropriately viewed as payments. This was the subject of “Free Trade Lets You Make a Deal” on Sacred Cow Chips in April., in which I quoted Greg Mankiw:

“A nation benefits from imports, [Adam Smith] argued, because they expand its opportunities for consumption. Exports are necessary only because other nations have the temerity to want to be paid for the goods they provide.“

Free trade is a process of exploiting exchanges that are mutually beneficial, but based on the commentary in the press and social media, one would think it was something harmful. You could hardly blame anyone from drawing that impression based on the way governments negotiate trade deals. Last month, Don Boudreaux had a humorous take on this in “If Buying A Car Were Like Negotiating A Trade Deal“. The parties just can’t tolerate a better deal!

To draw another analogy, when IKEA opens a store in a new town, consumers are excited about the goods available there, and about the new shopping experience. When the circus comes to town, people are thrilled by the “imported” entertainment. They are not especially antagonized about the extra spending this might entail, or the extra hours they might have to work in order to afford it. Of course, the cheaper, the better. Yet when it comes to foreign trade, the general commentary turns this logic on its head: you’d think our concerns centered around a desire for more expense and that our access to new goods is a nuisance!

Opposition to trade deals among progressives is based on classic protectionist sentiment. This usually ends in protecting rents earned by interests that would rather not face competition. Nothing could be more corporatist in its effect. But it is obviously counter-productive to argue in support of industries that cannot compete internationally, so opponents retreat to accusations that trading partners cheat by selling below cost or manipulating their currencies. If so, those policies represent gifts to the U.S. It would be wonderful for the country if the flow of gifts from abroad continued indefinitely, but that is not sustainable. As matters are rationalized over time, and they will be, opportunities will present themselves to U.S. producers, who may well be in better stead by virtue of the earlier gifts from abroad. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth by favoring domestic rent seekers.

Like Boudreaux, I support trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “with my nose held tightly“. Deals like this generally do reduce trade barriers, though they invariably involve politically-motivated nonsense like the imposition of cross-country rules and regulations that negate some of the economic gains.

Caroline Baum has a good summary of legislation related to the TPP, which involves the president’s “fast-track” negotiating authority as well as assistance to “workers who are adversely affected by a trade agreement“. The trade deal, fast track and trade assistance have created strange political bedfellows and estrangements. Baum notes the confusion surrounding the real benefits of trade from fast track’s biggest proponent:

“Obama’s entire trade pitch – ‘the more we sell abroad, the more jobs we create at home’ – is a thinly disguised mercantilist argument: the idea that a country can export its way to prosperity. It’s a mistake to think that the advantages of free trade are limited to the export side.“

Some otherwise strong supporters of free trade are opposed to granting Obama fast-track authority, despite the fact that the last six presidents have had that authority. I am as skeptical about Obama’s leadership and negotiating skills as anyone, and I have little faith that he would keep sight of the main objective, were he actually sitting at the negotiating table. That would be lower trade barriers, not the environment or any other intrusion into the domestic policies of other parties to the deal. If our domestic regulatory standards are tougher or involve greater expense than those abroad, that should be afforded by greater U.S. productivity, not by making our producers uncompetitive on international markets. And if that is the case, our standards should be reassessed, we should recognize the prohibitive impact that our standards could have on the costs of our trading partners, and we should hope for those partners to eliminate any additional barriers to our goods.

I am also opposed to making the trade deal hinge on the extension of tougher intellectual property (IP) rights to poor Asian nations, though that is certain to be part of the negotiations. There is disagreement among economists about whether such an extension of IP rights would be good or bad.

I would like to see Congress grant Obama fast-track authority, but only because Congress will still have the authority to approve or reject a final deal. The promise of reductions in trade barriers is unequivocally positive. We’ll have to evaluate the downside when the deal goes before Congress.

The Government Inequality Machine

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government

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Beautiful Anarchy, Cronyism, Export-Import Bank, Housing Policy, Inequality, Intellectual Property Rights, Jeffrey Tucker, Kevin Erdmann, National Review, Redistribution, regulation, rent seeking, Robert P. Murphy, Scott Sumner, The Freeman, Thomas Piketty, Welfare for the Rich

Some perceive the government as an ideal agent of redistribution, but they fail to apprehend the many ways in which government policy undermines equality. Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann have written an excellent essay on this point entitled “Here’s What’s Driving Inequality” at National Review. They focus on three areas of government action with the unavoidable side-effect of upward redistribution: housing policy (at all levels of government), regulation, and excessive protections for intellectual property.

Sumner and Erdmann briefly cover Thomas Piketty’s controversial view that wealth becomes increasingly concentrated under conditions of secular stagnation. However, they note that over the past few decades:

“... almost the entire change in the share of domestic income going to capital in major developed economies was explained by rising rents on residential real estate. Non-rental capital income (including the corporate sector) still has a fairly stable share of domestic income.“

Housing policy has driven rents upward in myriad ways. For example, restrictive zoning laws, environmental regulation of new building and regulation of bank lending have all made homeownership less feasible and renting more expensive. If you’re already in your own home, you’re safe! If not, welcome to the have-nots! Here’s a story on government insurance programs that offer massive subsidies to wealthy homeowners. All these redistributional effects are compounded by a tax code that has inflated housing prices through the home mortgage interest deduction, and at the same time inflated rents via the incidence of higher taxes on rental income and real estate capital gains.

Regulation of private business activity is often viewed naively as a necessary, protective function of government, but regulation acts in perverse ways:

“Unfortunately, many government regulations tend to favor larger firms. In recent years we have seen the passage of some extremely complex regulations involving thousands of pages of rules, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and the Affordable Care Act. The Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, and the public health-care complex tend to create opportunities for uber-firms within industries, which act as clearinghouses for public contracts and regulatory demands.”

Large firms tend to pay higher wages and salaries than small firms. By favoring large firms, regulation in turn favors their relatively high-income workers. In addition, regulation such as occupational licensing, labor regulations and local wage controls damage the health and growth potential of small firms and the mobility of individuals at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Finally, Sumner and Erdmann discuss the often bizarre extension of intellectual-property (IP) rights and the way it favors large firms:

“Copyright protections once lasted for 14 years, applied only to maps and books, and could be renewed once if the author was still alive. Now they’ve been extended to many other products, extend for 50 years after the death of the author, and last for at least 95 years for corporations. These extensions are widely seen as reflecting the lobbying power of companies such as Disney. In the high-tech sector, patents are often granted for seemingly minor and obvious innovations.“

Sacred Cow Chips featured a piece on IP several months ago called “Is The Patent a Perversion?” The Libertarian view of IP is skeptical, to say the least, and favors limited protection at most. In that post, I quoted Jeffrey Tucker of the Beautiful Anarchy blog:

“Through intellectual property laws, the state literally assigned ownership to ideas that are the source of innovation, thereby restricting them and entangling entrepreneurs in endless litigation and confusion. Products are kept off the market. Firms that would come into existence do not. Profits that would be earned never appear. Intellectual property has institutionalized slow growth and landed the economy in a thicket of absurdity.“

There is little doubt that economic mobility is not well served by excessive grants of IP rights that extend monopolies indefinitely.

Government fosters inequality in many other ways. The mere existence of a confiscatory mechanism for legal revenue collection, and a complex bureaucracy in charge of distributing the spoils and making rules, will always attract high-powered rent-seeking resources and encourage cronyism. It is a graft machine. The very complexity of the tax code creates fertile ground for transfers via obscure breaks and carve-outs, while higher tax rates on others are required to fund the exceptions. Here’s another: the Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes exports for large corporations. A nice run-down of some of the many areas of “Welfare for the Rich” was provided a few years ago by Robert P. Murphy in The Freeman.

Unfortunately, direct efforts by the government to help the poor are often mere palliatives. At the same time, many of these programs are notorious for destroying work incentives, which undermines equality and economic mobility.

Government is simply not as well-suited to promoting equality as well-functioning markets, free of government meddling and government grants of monopoly. Profits in such markets attract new resources that compete away excess returns and bid prices downward, actions that tend to promote equality. The opportunity to compete without restraint not only vitiates artificial or permanent claims to profits; along with strong property rights, it encourages invention, economic mobility and growth.

More Unpleasant Obamacare Arithmetic

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Obamacare, Uncategorized

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adverse selection, Affordable Care Act, Death Spiral, Expanded Medicaid eligibility, Forbes, Obamacare, Political Calculations, Reinsurance program, Risk corridors, Robert Laszewski

States with expanded Medicaid eligibility may be more vulnerable to adverse selection, hastening the death spiral of their Obamacare insurance exchanges relative to states without expanded Medicaid. This is because 1) the expanded, eligible Medicaid population is young, and 2) pricing (net of subsidies) and benefits on the exchanges encourage sicker individuals to purchase plans with richer benefits. The Political Calculations blog presents this case in “How Medicaid’s Expansion Tips the Scales Against Obamacare“:

“… we observe that the states that did not expand their Medicaid programs have a much larger share of their ACA-enrollment occurring in the lower-tier metal plans that would tend to be favored by healthier individuals. Meanwhile, in the states that expanded the enrollment of their Medicaid programs under the law, we find that a significantly larger portion of their ACA enrollments were in the plans that would be favored by less healthy individuals.

In fact, we see that in Medicaid expansion states, 13.2% of their ACA enrollment occurred in the highest-tier Gold and Platinum level plans, while non-Medicaid expansion states saw 7.7% of their enrollment for these highest tiers of health insurance coverage.

The seemingly small 5.5% difference between these two figures becomes exceptionally significant when you consider how extremely concentrated health care expenditures are in the United States, where just 5% of U.S. patients are responsible for generating 50% of all health care spending in the nation.“

It will be difficult to confirm this hypothesis using data on premium increases, or actual exchange failure, until the temporary risk corridors and transitional reinsurance program expire. However, this year, several of the states in which proposed premium increases are the largest have expanded Medicaid eligibility. Robert Laszewski has a good discussion about some the reasons for the large premium increases in Forbes. It’s early and there are signs that it will get worse.

As noted last week on this blog, Medicaid itself does not stack up well in terms of how highly it is valued by recipients and the moral hazard inherent in the program. Here we see an additional bug: expanded Medicaid appears to siphoning away younger potential enrollees from the exchanges in those states, worsening the problem of adverse selection, which will negatively affect their claims experience.

Medicaid and Value Mislaid

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Obamacare

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amy Finkelstein, Earned Income Tax Credit, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Implicit insurance, Marginal Revolution, Medicaid, Megan McArdle, Moral Hazard, Nathaniel Hendren, Obamacare, Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, Redistribution, Relative Value Units, Uncompensated care, Welfare value

A new paper on the MIT Econ department web site finds that the “welfare benefit to recipients from Medicaid per dollar of government spending range from $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework ….” Those estimates are from “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment” by Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Hat Tips: Marginal Revolution, John Crawford). A major share of the increase in the number of insured individuals under Obamacare stems from Medicaid enrollments, so the efficacy of the program is of great interest as the nation considers possible changes to the health care law.

The value of Medicaid to recipients is low in part because the coverage is incremental to the uncompensated medical care they would have received without coverage. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that if “… Medicaid recipients had to pay the government’s average cost of Medicaid, they would rather be uninsured.” That’s why I think some of the commentary on this result is a little unfair, such as the way it’s presented by Megan McArdle. There are clearly other reasons why Medicaid receives a low valuation by recipients, however. For example, the authors find that the program entails substantial costs of moral hazard, which may mean that recipients are in poor health relative to reimbursement levels, take risks that they would avoid in the absence of coverage, or simply over-utilize services for which they would be unwilling to pay, even if the cash were made directly available. While it doesn’t receive much focus from the authors, low reimbursement rates discourage providers from accepting Medicaid patients. That would certainly reduce one’s willingness to pay for the coverage.

Finkelstein, Hendren and Luttmer estimate that 40% to 80% of Medicaid’s welfare value derives from “a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world.” The transfers go to providers who, in the absence of Medicaid coverage, would offer “implicit insurance” in the form of uncompensated care. As noted above, that’s a good thing. Providers should be compensated rather than relied upon as a charities, though there are strong indications that compensation is inadequate.

The authors also estimate the value of Medicaid as a “redistribution tool” relative to the earned income tax credit (EITC). At best, they find that recipients would slightly prefer Medicaid cuts to equivalent reductions in the EITC (though the comparison suffers from some conceptual shortcomings). Unsurprisingly, the outcome depends upon how highly the “transfers” to health care providers are valued by enrollees. So the program seems to do poorly in the eyes of recipients, who would likely prefer outright transfers of cash. I would speculate that many recipients would prefer a voucher with which they could purchase coverage levels of their choice, retaining any excess not spent.

The “Value of Medicaid” study suggests that the program is unsuccessful in delivering value to recipients and taxpayers. Obamacare reform should include fundamental changes to the Medicaid program, measures that restore individual choice and the private market for health coverage, and provisions to increase competition in the health care and insurance markets. Eliminating prohibitions on the sale of health insurance across state lines would be a good start. Reforms should also combat excessive regulation of health care providers, such as eliminating the electronic health records mandate and reforming the inflexible system of compensation based on relative value units. Market-oriented reforms and competition can reduce costs and make health care more affordable, aiding in the delivery of greater benefits to all segments of society.

Obamanomics and Opportunity Knocked Off

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Regulation

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Coyote Blog, Department of Labor, Effective wage, Exempt employees, Non-exempt employees, Obama administration, Overtime rules, Politico, the administrative state, Warren Meyer

Another Obama fallacy and a new, binding constraint on voluntary private arrangements: in the latest example of administrative rule-making gone berserk, the Obama Administration (via The Department of Labor) is proposing a drastic change in the definition of an exempt employee, increasing the salary threshold for the exemption from $23,660 to as much as $52,000. This is likely to change the status of a large number of workers, but as Warren Meyer explains, not in the way the administration hopes.

Obama and his advisors imagine that this change will actually increase the incomes of a large number of workers — that employers will begin paying overtime to hard-working supervisory and administrative employees. Meyer quotes Politico‘s headline: “Barack Obama poised to hike wages for millions.” But employers are not indifferent to the cost of a given labor input.

As Meyer asserts, currently exempt employees who now earn a salary between the current and the new thresholds may well be converted to hourly, non-exempt employees. And those now working extra hours are likely to be working fewer hours under the new rules. In fact, they may well see their hours and incomes reduced. Some employers will be able to automate certain tasks to compensate for the reduction in labor input, as Meyer suggests. Or perhaps more part-time workers will be hired.

There is another issue at stake, however, in addition to the mere calculation of workers X hours X the wage rate. Meyer expresses disgust at the way the new threshold could change relationships between employers and certain employees. As he tells it, the change will convert ambitious young managers into clock-punchers. In case that sounds too much like a negative personality change, a more sympathetic view is that many workers do not mind putting in extra hours, even as it reduces their effective wage. They have their reasons, ranging from the non-pecuniary, such as simple work ethic, enjoyment and pride in their contribution to reward-driven competitiveness and ambition. Hours worked gives exempt employees an additional margin along which to prove their value to the enterprise. Obama’s proposal takes that away, which may penalize employees with less talent but strong ambition. Opportunity’s knock is getting softer.

OTC Birth Control vs. State Control

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Before It's News, Cory Gardner, Jillian Kay Melchior, Obamacare, OTC birth control, Over-the-counter birth control, Planned Parenthood, Prescription requirements, rent seeking, World Health Organization

Why would the Progressive Left oppose over-the-counter birth control? Let us count the reasons…

Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) has proposed a bill to eliminate the federal requirement that a doctor’s prescription is needed to obtain birth control. According to Gardner,

“Most other drugs with such a long history of safe and routine use are available for purchase over the counter, and contraception should join them.”

Six other Republicans have signed-on as co-sponsors. The change is sensible on many levels, from improving access to birth control to reducing health care costs, yet the Left and some so-called women’s advocates have reacted with horror. Most of what follows is discussed in two articles, “Why Liberals Oppose Over-the-Counter Birth Control“, by Jillian Kay Melchior, and “Republicans Push For Over-The-Counter Birth Control, Liberals Immediately Oppose The Plan“, from Before It’s News (BIN).

“Free” birth control was offered under Obamacare. The Left claims that the OTC proposal is a conspiracy to eliminate federal funding of birth control and shift the cost burden back to women. Yet the bill does not change the coverage requirement in any way.
The Left claims that the change to OTC will increase the cost of birth control. On one level, this is the same as #1. However, some have argued that the change will actually drive up the cost of contraception, and that’s a whole different level of delusional economics. Filling prescriptions involves much greater use resources than OTC, particularly the time of the physician and staff, the pharmacist, and the buyer. OTC would also remove a barrier to competition in the provision of birth control, which would reduce costs.
Some physicians require an examination and even tests before they’ll write a birth control prescription, which can run into hundreds of dollars. Naturally, many of them would like to retain this flow of business, yet according to Melchior, “…the World Health Organization and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have confirmed that doctors can safely prescribe the pill without a full examination.” Freeing women of the need for a doctor’s blessing would improve access unambiguously.
Melchior also reports that “Planned Parenthood alone makes around $1.2 billion each year from contraceptive services.” Naturally, Planned Parenthood would like to protect that flow of revenue, but the availability of OTC birth control would expose it to competition.

What nonsense people spout in defense of their political agenda, not to mention their rents! The proposal for OTC birth control should be a slam-dunk liberalization, one that no self-respecting Liberal or Libertarian should oppose. But apparently, for the Progressives, helping women is secondary to preserving state control and the “statist quo”.