ACA Tax May Yet Be Its Undoing

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George Will covers the next Obamacare court challenge, on which arguments are to be held this Thursday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The plaintiff asserts harm by the penalty-cum-tax. The “tax” was enabled by legislation originating in the Senate, not the House of Representatives, which is unconstitutional.

Will: “Two years ago, the Supreme Court saved the ACA by declaring its penalty to be a tax. It thereby doomed the ACA as an unconstitutional violation of the origination clause.”

State Knew Benghazi Terror Facts Right Off

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Sharyl Attkisson reports that the State Dept. knew the truth and “immediately attributed the Benghazi attack to a terrorist group…. The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.”

With the presidential election less than two months away, the administration was seeking cover for Obama’s claim that “Al Qaeda was on the run” and a tragic security lapse that could have been avoided. They even arranged to have law enforcement make a show of arresting the man who made the video (and he is still in jail for a minor parole violation).

We now have a cover-up of a cover-up. Unlike the Ben Rhodes email, which was withheld by the administration for 20 months despite a subpoena, Congress has had this email since August under a restriction that it not be made public, but this week’s revelations prompted its release.

Ending Hardship the Old-Fashioned Way

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Jobs are the best way to fight poverty. Most of the impoverished are unemployed and many of those have stopped seeking work; very few are employed full time. More often than not, government policies erect obstacles to employment (e.g., taxes, wage floors, licensure, regulations, mandates, and negative work incentives created by many aid programs). Reversing those entanglements is imperative if we are to foster broad self-sufficiency.

Like so many other areas in which government attempts to intervene, vast spending on anti-poverty programs does little to address the underlying problems. “Throwing more government dollars at this problem won’t solve it. Despite record spending on programs to help the needy, a record 46 million Americans were in poverty in 2012.”

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Defame ‘Em

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Can public and charter schools peacefully coexist? “Demonizing the Helpers” wouldn’t be a theme of so many posts if it wasn’t such a common defensive strategy adopted by entrenched interests. In this case, Thomas Sowell notes that “charter schools provoke the ire of those who have failed students up to now.” It’s good to reflect on the actual goals of our educational system and to weigh every option that could help to achieve those goals. Real outcomes show that changes in public education are sorely needed, and charter schools have proven that they can be part of the solution. Instead, stakeholders in the failing public education monopoly have sought only to protect their turf, engaging in a systematic campaign to vilify charter schools and their supporters. 

Net Neutrality: A Tangled Web

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Net neutrality probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. It would essentially dictate that heavy network users, capacity hogs that often slow your access speeds, could not be charged a premium by providers to rationalize their usage. It would reduce incentives to increase network capacity and speeds. It would lead to less innovation on the internet. There are many other nuances that make net neutrality an awful proposition, including denial of the simple notion embraced by libertarians that private parties should be free to price their resources as they choose, and exposing the evolution of the internet to the manipulative hands of government regulators. If you want government control of the internet, then you want net neutrality.

Internet capacity is not like the air we breath. Providing network capacity is costly, and existing capacity must be allocated. Like any other scarce resource, a freely-functioning price mechanism is the most effective way to maximize the welfare surplus to be gained from this resource. Net neutrality would eliminate that solution. To those who fear corporate owners of the internet backbone, it should be noted that the market for backbone services is highly competitive, and network effects are so strong that it doesn’t make sense for them to price anyone out of the market.  

Here are two instructive links:

How Net Neutrality Hurts the Poor is a fairly short blog post explaining how non-neutrality serves the best interests of the poor in less-developed countries and in the developed world. The author explains a simple truism (“Low-quality Scotch is part of the optimal stock of Scotch”) and applies it to internet access. As I’m fond of reminding my spouse on Saturdays, “Low quality repairmen are part of the optimal stock of repairmen,” and she agrees!

Here’s a good piece with additional background on the issue: Neutralism: The Strange Philosophy Behind the Movement for Net Neutrality

Hating Poverty and Incivility

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Getting Past Name-Calling to Talk About Poverty is a Juan Williams op-ed that is right on target. I don’t often find myself in agreement with Williams on matters of public policy, but the thoughts he expresses here about the poverty debate should be welcomed by anyone who cares about the real issues. He welcomes the interest in dialogue from Republicans about reforms to anti-poverty programs. Williams calls for an end to the absurd accusations of racism that have been hurled at conservatives expressing interest in the debate, recognizing that the invective does nothing to advance the cause of ending poverty. Existing poverty programs at best provide funds to blunt the effects of low income; they do little to lift the impoverished out of the cycle. 

At the DOJ, We’ll Prohibit Anything We Want

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This seems just a bit out-of-line with the Constitution: the DOJ’s Operation “Choke Point”. “… the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuring banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it’s own politically biased moral judgements.”

Benghazi Baloney Protected the POTUS

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White House email shows the administration knew the Benghazi “talking points” were BS. The email and 40 other documents were made public by Judicial Watch, which obtained them via an FOIA lawsuit. The documents bring the events surrounding Benghazi into much sharper focus. There was clearly a set of intelligence available in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/12 indicating that the compound had been attacked (four Americans died), and that there had been no “demonstration” preceding the attack. Well after that time (but before Susan Rice spoke to Meet The Press the following Sunday), the White House communications team was still in spin mode, as the email makes clear. Obama’s election campaign was too important to allow anyone to think there had been a “policy failure.”

Physician: Why Take Insurance?

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Bravo to Daniel Craviotto for penning A Doctor’s Declaration of Independence, appearing today on wsj.com. It’s a condemnation of Obamacare from a man who understands sound medicine. Like many physicians, he’s had it with mindless regulations that take time away from patients and and interfere with the application of medical expertise. And he’s had it with the distortions that are typical of price regulation. “So when do we say damn the mandates and requirements from bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession? When do we stand up and say we are not going to take it any more?”

 

Economic Mobility Is Alive and Well

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The widespread belief that the U.S. is mired in an era of reduced economic mobility is a myth. Some prominent research cited at the link says as much. There are several kinds of mobility, of course — cultural mobility, social mobility, physical mobility, and they all bear relationships to economic mobility in one way or another. The article points out that physical mobility has increased dramatically, yet today it is less important than ever in the sense that we can accomplish so much from the comfort of a living room couch. “Today, most Americans have access to resources that were once inconceivable, and that access lets us cover more cultural and social ground than humans had ever previously been able to manage.” 

I always enjoy discussions of the inadequacies of economic yardsticks (the author mistakenly refers to such measures as “econometrics”), especially measures of output like GDP. The article uses a little humor to illustrate some of these measurement problems (e.g., “What’s the value of being able to track Alec Baldwin’s meltdowns in real-time?”), but the measurement problems contribute to the fallacy of immobility.

“… in the midst of all these developments, our reigning preoccupation is a false narrative about dwindling economic mobility. Apparently the breakthroughs and benefits accrue in such dizzying but routine fashion now that even our most fervent potentates of hope and change have trouble keeping track of our progress.”