Tag Archives: Politico

Trump Flaunts Shape-Shifting Powers

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Government, Liberty, Tyranny

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trump characature

Donald Trump could take just about any position on any issue and defend it with conviction and blustery passion… until he changes his mind. At this point in his presidential bid, there is nothing on his campaign web site in the way of specific policy statements. Here is an “On The Issues” post showing the evolution of Trump’s positions in a number of policy areas. Just about anyone on the left or the right should be able to get a few chuckles out of this list. It’s truly astonishing.

A few of Trump’s current policy positions are discussed below, but before getting into that, it’s interesting to consider the overall tenor of his rhetoric. Most observers will happily admit that they find his bombast entertaining, and I do too. He’s outspoken and unapologetic, confronting his critics head-on, often to powerful effect. Many are drawn to this sort of candidate, and his popular image as a skilled businessman doesn’t hurt. But while all politicians are capable of disappointing supporters, Trump fans do not know, and cannot know, what they’re getting.

Trump is almost always critical but rarely suggests actual solutions, making it difficult to discern whether he really has policy positions. So much so that it’s incredible to hear praise for his “clarity”. For a more sober take, read Andy Kroll’s account of frustrated attempts to get direct responses on a few policy issues from the Trump campaign, and of Trump’s bizarre tour of Laredo, Texas. A related piece by Peter Suderman appears at Reason.com. Politico has emphasized the same point in “Will the real Donald Trump please stand up?“. Kroll says this:

“I have zero to report about Trump’s plans for actually being president—except that, from all available evidence, he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought.“

An interesting piece on Trump comes from Jeffrey Tucker in “What is Trumpism?“. A longer version appeared as “Trumpism: The Ideology“. Here is one bit from Tucker, written after hearing “The Donald” speak at FreedomFest:

“The speech lasted an hour, and my jaw was on the floor most of the time. I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety. …

His speech was like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground, and died grim deaths.“

Here are a few examples of Trump’s “nativism”, as described by Tucker:

“I did laugh as he denounced the existence of tech support in India that serves American companies (‘how can it be cheaper to call people there than here?’ — as if he still thinks that long-distance charges apply). 

When a Hispanic man asked a question, Trump interrupted him and asked if he had been sent by the Mexican government. He took it a step further, dividing blacks from Hispanics by inviting a black man to the microphone to tell how his own son was killed by an illegal immigrant.“

Two issues on which Trump has been outspoken are international trade and immigration. As an aside, I note that he is always quick to qualify any aggressive statements he makes on these topics with a quick “I love the Chinese”, or “I love the Mexicans”. Tucker, at the link above, highlights Trump’s backward views on trade, which focus almost exclusively on U.S. producers without considering the benefits of trade to U.S. consumers. He sees big ships coming into port, and thinks only of cash flowing abroad: “What do we get?” Well, we get nice foreign goods, thank you very much. But Trump blames foreign trading partners for many ills, despite the fact that his Trump-label ties are made in China! Are we somehow being cheated on those ties? Trump says we need smarter people negotiating “these deals”. Okay… is that a policy?

We don’t need trade wars if we want to avoid a much weaker economy. Yet Trump’s trade rhetoric suggests that he would be tempted to employ trade restrictions like tariffs as a bludgeon. For example, consider one of his other big talking points: illegal immigration (despite the fact that the inflow of illegals has slowed to a trickle over the past few years). Trump wants to build a wall across the length of the U.S.-Mexican border, and he says he’ll make Mexico pay for it. To get a wall built, Trump might well decide that he can raise tariffs on Mexican goods to prohibitive levels as a way of twisting Mexican arms. That sort of action is likely to be very costly for U.S. consumers, and ultimately producers as well.

Trump’s latest pronouncements on immigration policy have been described as confusing. In a nutshell, he wants to deport “the criminals” (and not just those already doing time) and deport all other undocumented aliens; create an expedited process whereby we can let “the good ones” back into the country with legal status; “maybe” create some sort of path to citizenship (because “who knows what’s going to happen”), but not right away; and “we’re going to do something” for the “DREAMers”. Trump says he’ll know how to identify the “good ones”. If he’s so confident of that, then why would he, a smart “business guy”, allow the country to incur the expense of deporting millions of them?

Who knows what Trump will propose in terms of tax reform, health care and gun control? Ditto on welfare policy, defense, the drug war, foreign policy and energy. He wisely spoke against the drug war in 1990, but I’m not aware of any recent statements on the issue. Also in his favor, he does not accept the “consensus” on climate change and opposes Common Core. He has criticized crony capitalism but has undoubtedly benefited from cronyism, enlisting governments in the pursuit of eminent domain action. He is said to favor cuts in federal spending, but he has opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. He opposes an increase in the minimum wage, but he has proposed a wealth tax in the past.

Trump has not offered many specifics in this campaign, and the GOP debate this Thursday night will not provide a decent forum for articulating policy. In general, his positioning is a very mixed bag. One gets the sense that he is doing his best to appeal to a sort of populist conservatism. Unfortunately, his signature “positioning” on trade and immigration qualify him as something of a statist. He has certainly held a number of other statist views in the past, though he has disavowed at least some of those.

In closing, here are two more quotes from Jeffrey Tucker about Trump that I found both ominous and plausible:

“What’s distinct about Trumpism, and the tradition of thought it represents, is that it is not leftist in its cultural and political outlook (see how he is praised for rejecting “political correctness”), and yet still totalitarian in the sense that it seeks total control of society and economy and demands no limits on state power.“

“These people are all the same. They purport to be populists, while loathing the decisions people actually make in the marketplace (such as buying Chinese goods or hiring Mexican employees).“

Obamanomics and Opportunity Knocked Off

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Regulation

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find-govt-worker

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.

Fifty Ways To Wreck Your Health Care

29 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Obamacare

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health care wait times

It’s getting to be a challenge to keep track of the myriad ways in which Obamacare is screwing up the medical insurance and health care markets. This is a government initiative, after all, but was there ever a law so rife with unintended consequences, or a law implemented with such stunning incompetence? I’ve posted on the fallout from the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) a number of times in the past, but there’s always some new revelation at which to marvel. Here’s one you might not have heard, but it actually contains a bit of good news: some people are refusing Obamacare exchange subsidies, despite the sometimes strange fact that they qualify at all, which of course is the bad news.

“… some people who qualify for subsidies based on their income could afford to pay their own way. ‘There is no question that we are enrolling  people through these programs who would otherwise be considered middle-class or even affluent,’ says Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow for health policy studies at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation think tank. ‘We are seeing people with enrollment in these programs that have significant assets, but for whatever reason – usually a temporary reason – fall below the income line.’ Those reasons could range from early retirement to a midcareer job change. But whatever the case, some of those who are turning down subsidies are aware others are gaming the system, and they think it’s wrong.”

Well, apparently there is still some honor in the world, even in the face of seduction by the welfare state.

Obamacare contained provisions on electronic health records (EHRs) and was expected to leverage a separate federal initiative on EHRs in the 2009 economic stimulus bill. This too is proving disastrous. Beyond the privacy implications of making medical records accessible to the prying eyes of government bureaucrats and potential hackers, the mandate faced by providers to convert to the EHR system necessitates an extremely time-consuming and costly effort. And the penalty for failing to meet deadlines is a cut in Medicare payments to the provider. No one seems to have considered the supply-side incentive this might create:

“It would thus appear that one method for avoiding the fine would be to stop serving Medicare patients altogether. Well, that’s one way to ration care for the elderly.”

So, in the fashion typical of central planners, the bureaucrats have failed to consider the effects of their policies on real market conditions. The author quotes a recent piece in Politico on the EHR mandate:

“Rather than saving physicians and health care money, the program in effect has created a new industry — the medical scribe. About 100,000 of these glorified typists are expected to be working for doctors by 2020. ‘After five years I can’t really do anything I couldn’t do before the program started,’ says Martin O’Hara, a cardiologist who practices in northern Virginia. Computers make everything more legible, O’Hara says, but otherwise the payoff has been slim. At one hospital in the D.C. area, administrators were pulling their hair out over the huge fees charged to transmit data including routine lab and radiology tests. ‘I talk to EHR vendors all day long and many of them have these criminal-like practices of setting whatever price tag they want because they can,’ said a medical informatics officer who spoke on condition he not be named. … The slow progress of health IT has also put a drag on research.”

Finally, in a post on some basics of good (and bad) health care reform appearing in Mises Daily, Matt Battaglioli discusses the unavoidable reliance on arbitrary methods of rationing in centrally-planned health care systems. (I like that cartoon above, but it’s no joke.) That need is created by a mis-pricing of services. Subsidies prevent consumers from seeing the real cost of routine and non-catastrophic medical services as well as the ex ante, actuarial cost of catastrophic services. Then, unfortunately, the resultant excess demand tends to push costs upward without the natural restraint of a well-functioning market price mechanism. Battaglioli also bemoans the obstacles to competition in the medical field due to licensing requirements and their impact on the supply of care.

Obamacare is under threat on several fronts, including Congress, the courts, consumers, providers, and it’s own clumsy architecture. Apparently congressional Republicans will soon reveal their “one plan” (as described by John Boehner) for health care reform to replace Obamacare. We’ll see if they can do much better.