Minor Thoughts from me to you

Veronique de Rugy is worried that Romney / Ryan's talk about "protecting Medicare" means that they won't really push to reform it.

The only way to ensure that Medicare is there “for my generation, and for my kids and yours,” reform it. If when Representative Ryan says “protect” and “strengthen” he means “reform Medicare,” great. Reform can take many forms, obviously. But, then we can believe Ryan when he says “ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.”

She lays out all of the reasons why Medicare desperately needs to be reformed, if it's to survive at all. It's worth a read, especially if you're not convinced about the necessity of reforming Medicare.

∞

Yuval Levin fact checks a Paul Krugman column about Paul Ryan's speech and about Medicare reform. Yuval demonstrates (with copious links to evidence) all of the ways in which Paul Krugman is wrong about Medicare, wrong about Ryan's plan. It's the best single summary of everything wrong with Medicare that I've seen yet—and it explodes quite a few myths about Medicare's affordability, sustainability, and efficiency.

Here's a small taste.

To begin with, many of Medicare’s most significant administrative costs are just covered by other federal agencies, and so don’t appear on Medicare’s particular budget, but are still huge costs of the program. The IRS collects the taxes that fund the program; Social Security collects many of the premiums paid by beneficiaries; HHS pays for a great deal of what you would think of as basic overhead, but doesn’t put it on the Medicare program’s budget. Obviously private insurers have to pay for such things themselves. Medicare’s administration is also exempt from taxes, while insurers pay an excise tax on premiums (which is counted as overhead). And private insurers also spend a great deal of money fighting fraud, while Medicare doesn’t. That might reduce the program’s administrative costs, but it greatly increases its overall costs. Some administrative costs save money, after all: The GAO has estimated that a $1 investment in pre-payment review of claims, for instance, would save $21 in improper Medicare payments.

It's worth reading the entire thing. Especially if you think Medicare doesn't need to be changed.

∞

Austin Frakt, at The Incidental Economist, leads his readers through an exercise demonstrating that total employee compensation is a mix of salary and healthcare benefits. He demonstrates that if healthcare costs went away, employers would have to offer a higher salary.

Of course, the reverse is also true: if health insurance gets more expensive, employers will offer a lower salary (or just postpone raises indefinitely). Salary stagnation, then, is an artifact of increasing health insurance costs, not a sign of a poor economy.

∞

So when does a human being have a right to life?

Shall we say size matters? Is the unborn child too small to deserve our protection? Are big people more valuable than little people? Are men more human than woman? Do offensive linemen have more rights than jockeys? Is the life in the womb of no account because you can't hold him in our arms, or put him in your hands, or only see her on a screen?

Shall we make intellectual development and mental capacity the measure of our worth? Are three year-old children less valuable than thirteen year-olds? Is the unborn child less than fully human because he cannot speak or count or be self-aware? Does the cooing infant in the crib have to smile or shake your hand or recite the alphabet before she deserves another day? If an expression of basic mental acuity is necessary to be a full-fledged member of the human community, what shall we do with the comatose, the very old, or the fifty year-old mom with Alzheimer's? And what about all of us who sleep?

Kevin DeYoung asks a lot of good questions.

∞

The invaluable Eric Lipton over at the New York Times has another excellent article pointing out to the many ways that well-connected companies benefit from government favors. This time, he looks at the case of an Illinois-based energy producer, Exelon Corporation.

The company’s ties with senior officials in the Obama administration are important and extensive: Board member John W. Rogers is a friend of the president, Obama adviser David Axelrod worked at Exelon as a consultant, and Rahm Emanuel helped create the company. Exelon executives and administration officials held a large number of meetings at the White House, and ultimately, the executive branch enacted a number of policies and regulations that favored the company at the expense of its competitors.

Veronique de Rugy points provides extra background and details how the Obama administration is using the power of government to reward big businesses.

∞

Mark Hemingway examines the accuracy and objectivity of the nation's "fact checkers". The checkers don't fare so well.

If these examples are laughably transparent attempts by the AP to weigh in with its own opinions against the opinions of the GOP candidates​—​thinly disguised as “fact checking”​—​they’re not unusual. And the rare occasions where fact checkers deign to deal with actual facts and figures inspire little more confidence.

∞

For decades the environmental movement has used NEPA, and its CEQA-like state equivalents, to block key energy development and infrastructure projects. Seeing Obama’s signature transportation initiative killed by this same tactic is some sweet poetic justice.

Ha ha.

Maybe the reason that America doesn't do anything great anymore is that we have too many regulations and too many ways to stop projects from getting started?

∞

Before Rep. Paul Ryan had a chance to sell his budget ideas to the American people, the Wisconsin Republican first had to persuade his own party.

The initial version of his "Roadmap for America's Future," in summer 2008, was treated as an afterthought by party leaders, and some were openly hostile. Fearful of political backlash, just eight Republicans signed up for his conservative wish list: rewrite the tax code, scrap employer-based health care, rework Medicare and Social Security.

Today, many of Mr. Ryan's ideas have become the de facto Republican Party platform.

The Wall Street Journal paints a nice profile of Paul Ryan's work, over the past 4 years, to sell his budget plan. There are those that argue that the plan doesn't go nearly far enough. I agree. I also think that his plan is on the bleeding edge of what's politically possible. It's impossible to pass an overnight overhaul of anything in American politics. But this is a good (and very ambitious) first step.

∞

The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Israel and Iran.

Note that word—"eliminated." When Iranians talk about Israel, this intention of a final solution keeps coming up. In October 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad, quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, said Israel "must be wiped off the map." Lest anyone miss the point, the Iranian President said in June 2008 that Israel "has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain."

This pledge of erasing an entire state goes back to the earliest days of the Iranian revolution. "One of our major points is that Israel must be destroyed," Ayatollah Khomeini said in the 1980s.

Former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani—often described as a moderate in Western media accounts—had this to say in 2001: "If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

So for Iran it is "not irrational" to contemplate the deaths of millions of Muslims in exchange for the end of Israel because millions of other Muslims will survive, but the Jewish state will not.

The world's civilized nations typically denounce such statements, as the U.S. State Department denounced Mr. Ahamadinejad's on Monday. But denouncing them is not the same as taking them seriously. Sometimes the greatest challenge for a civilized society is comprehending that not everyone behaves in civilized or rational fashion, that barbarians can still appear at the gate.

The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.

As much as I like Ron Paul's foreign policy positions, this worries me. A lot. Getting Iran wrong is deadly. If it is "just rhetoric", I feel like it would be appropriate for the rest of the world to send a strong signal that there's no such thing as "just words". Rhetoric matters and deadly rhetoric may need to be responded to with deadly force.

∞

CNN reported on the personal journal of slain American ambassador Christopher Stevens over objections from his family, a State Department spokesman said Saturday.

... In its online story, CNN said it found the journal on the "floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded."

Uhm. Why was the Ambassador's diary still laying on the floor for CNN to find and pick up? Shouldn't the State Department or CIA or somebody from the government have been through that place before CNN got there? Is the State Department more upset that CNN broadcast the diary or that CNN broadcast the fact that the Ambassador was concerned about security threats—threats that the State Department did nothing to defend against?

∞

A group of Tea Party activists has spent the last several months getting public input (including an open website vote) on ways to cut the federal budget. They recently unveiled a draft version of their plan.

It's quite ambitious. The group spends the first 9 pages of the document laying out the history of the project and the principles it was organized by. Then they dive into the specifics of the budget proposal.

I like their methodology and I think it shows that the Tea Party is capable of generating serious proposals, that it's not a know-nothing, knee-jerk reactionary movement.

Now we are ready to spell out the specifics of our plan. Before we do, we want to highlight some of its big-picture benefits. Here’s how the Tea Party Budget dramatically changes Washington:

1. Balances the budget in 2015, and keeps it balanced. Almost all of the proposed reforms take place in the first year, 2012, rather than after a phase-in, because it’s legally impossible to bind future Congresses. The best way to ensure reforms never happen is to postpone them till “tomorrow.”
2. Reduces total federal outlays by about 15 percent in the first year. This may sound like a deep cut, until we recall that spending went up by 19 percent in 2009.
3. Shrinks the government by 30 percent, relative to current law. Outlays shrink from today’s 24 percent of GDP to a more affordable 16 percent of GDP.
4. Reduces gross debt from 99 percent of GDP to 75 percent of GDP.
5. Reduces the publicly held portion of the debt from 68 percent of GDP to 47 percent of GDP. Reducing the debt is extremely important, because it’s the key to ensuring lower future interest rates and more robust economic growth.

Warning: the link goes to a PDF file.

∞

This is why I worry about government spending levels. Wisconsin either needs to cut spending or raise taxes (or both) an average of $1522 more per household, per year. For the next 30 years.

Wisconsin voters know they are struggling. They sense that unchecked growth of local and state governments will grind them down even more. Government as usual was not an option.

But they need to know how bad things really are.

For example, without major reforms, the public pensions officially accounted at 100 percent funded actually need $1,563 more from the average household every year for 30 years just to pay benefits already promised, according to an updated study for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh.

Public retiree health-care funding is more than $2.3 billion short, according to the Pew “Widening Gap” study, and the state only paid 45 percent of the last payment due. Somebody is going to have to make up the difference.

∞

I like James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, on feminism, fertility, and choice.

"Family planning is good for families," she insists, ignoring the sharp rise in divorce and illegitimacy since 1960, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use. In fairness, maybe she means to make a more modest claim--that for the subset of the population who have been able to form and sustain marriages despite the social dislocations of the past half-century, birth control has on balance been beneficial.

But in any case, why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

He also takes on the argument that "birth control is cheaper than unwanted babies".

Yes, in the short term, contraception is cheaper than fertility. In the long term, however, a war on fertility is an act of cultural and economic suicide. Today's low fertility is tomorrow's shortage of productive citizens--of the taxpayers who would have to pay for the ever-expanding entitlement state.

∞

I like the way Jerry Pournelle puts this.

Sandra Fluke’s solution is to demand that taxpayers pay for her contraceptive pills and devices. She can’t afford to have sex because of the risk of pregnancy, and it is up to us to provide her with the wherewithal for contraception. She hasn’t spoken about protection from STD’s but I think it safe to assume she believes we ought to pay for her insurance for treatment of those when they fail. Of course there are contraception means that are also somewhat effective against STD’s, and they are considerably cheaper than the ones Sandra Fluke demands; but apparently the choice of what we pay for is not up to us. Sandra Fluke has a right to indulge in sex when and however she wants, and to the means of contraception that she wants, and it is up to the taxpayers to pay for it.

The real question here is simple: how do you acquire the obligation to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control devices and pills? But in the great flap over her virtue that question seems to have been lost.

We need to go back to it. Even if insuring Sandra Fluke’s health is an obligation that the rest of us must assume, when did contraception pills become health insurance? What illness are we preventing? Must we then insure her against being eaten by sharks when she insists on swimming in shark infested waters? Can her life insurance include provisions that she will not be covered if she goes hiking on the Iranian border? Must we pay for any activity that might result in death, dismemberment, pregnancy, etc.?

Leave alone the freedom of religion issue of requiring a Jesuit college to provide contraception. Where did the government get the right to require that we the people pay for anyone’s contraception? How did we acquire that obligation and can we not find some way to be shut of it?

∞

Don Boudreaux writes a letter to the Washington Post, in re Sandra Fluke. I approve this message.

A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception.  A truly civilized person – especially one who can afford to be a full-time student at a prestigious law school – would refuse any invitation to publicly play the role of a victim wronged by being told to pay for her own pills or condoms.  A truly civilized person does not hold in contempt other people for their resistance to being forced to subsidize his or her ‘lifestyle choices’ (whatever those choices might be).

When someone violates standards of civility – as Ms. Fluke has done by self-righteously (and, frankly, also rather incredibly) insisting that she and her fellow students are grievously harmed by the prospect of having to pay for their own contraception – she should not be surprised when other people violate such standards in response.

∞

One issue that does not get enough attention is the prosaic act of shopping.   I spend my own money, and I care about price.  I spend someone else's money, I don't give a rip.  Josh Cothran did a visualization of who is spending health care money.  Just look at the 1960 and 2012 charts, and pay particular attention to the orange "out-of-pocket" number.  Another way to rewrite these charts is to say consumers care about prices for spending in the orange band only.

Also, healthcare providers only care about your happiness to the extent that you're paying them. If you're not paying out of pocket, they don't care whether or not you're happy with your healthcare.

∞

Veronique de Rugy talks about the immense size of our deficit and the impossibility of paying it off by raising taxes on "the rich".

This is where the middle class comes in. Politicians know the real potential for tax revenue lies with the middle class. Middle-income Americans far outnumber the rich and, at least for now, are taxed at relatively low rates. But even if we tapped the middle class, we’d have to raise tax rates by a staggering amount.

To balance the budget, we’d have to triple tax rates on every household earning over $100,000. Alternatively, we could merely double tax rates, but we’d have to do it on every household earning over $75,000. Not only are there not enough rich households to tax, there are barely enough middle-income households.

∞

John Goodman talks about what irritates him, in healthcare policy discussions.

It’s impossible to have a rational discussion about health policy when one side of the argument is irretrievably deceitful. Here are some things I find irritating, to say the least:

• A White House that claims the way to control health care costs is to follow “evidence-based” guidelines, doing only procedures that are cost effective.
• A White House that then uses taxpayer dollars to promote procedures that are not evidence-based or cost effective for blatantly political reasons.
• A sycophantic press corps and fellow-traveling health policy bloggers who either remain silent or actually apologize for this hypocrisy.

∞

On Saturday, the Obama campaign released this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of lies from top to bottom.

Yuval Levin provides his own analysis of a recent Obama campaign ad, related to Medicare reform.

∞

on Saturday, the Obama campaign came out with a new ad, approved by the President, claiming that Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could require seniors to pay $6,400 more a year for health insurance. That claim is not only false, but brazenly and incontrovertibly so. Indeed, almost everything in the ad is wrong except for the phrase “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

Democrats making things up about Republican reform plans? I'm shocked, simply shocked!

∞