Minor Thoughts from me to you

During his first run for president, Barack Obama made one very specific promise to voters: He would cut health insurance premiums for families by $2,500, and do so in his first term.

But it turns out that family premiums have increased by more than $3,000 since Obama's vow, according to the latest annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey.

I must say, that's a totally unexpected result after increasing government regulations.

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Arizona's immigration laws have hurt its economy. The 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) attempts to force unauthorized immigrants out of the workplace with employee regulations and employer sanctions. The 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070) complements LAWA by granting local police new legal tools to enforce Arizona's immigration laws outside of the workplace.

LAWA's mandate of E-Verify, a federal electronic employee verification system, and the "business death penalty," which revokes business licenses for businesses that repeatedly hire unauthorized workers, raise the costs of hiring all employees and create regulatory uncertainty for employers. As a result, employers scale back legal hiring, move out of Arizona, or turn to the informal economy to eliminate a paper trail. SB 1070's enforcement policies outside of the workplace drove many unauthorized immigrants from the state, lowered the state's population, hobbled the labor market, accelerated residential property price declines, and exacerbated the Great Recession in Arizona.

LAWA, E-Verify, and the business death penalty are constitutional and are unlikely to be overturned; however the Supreme Court recently found that some sections of SB 1070 were preempted by federal power. States now considering Arizona-style immigration laws should realize that the laws also cause significant economic harm. States bear much of the cost of unauthorized immigration, but in Arizona's rush to find a state solution, it damaged its own economy.

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Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales.

The laws in the city will be separate from those in the rest of Honduras. Strong said that the default law that will be enforced in the city will actually be based on Texas state law, which has relatively few regulations.

“It will be Texas law with more freedom of contract. Texas scores well on state economic freedom rankings,” he explained.

This will be an interesting experiment to watch. Hong Kong 2.0?

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Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only" responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page analyzes a recent Obama statement about the deficit ("90% of that is as a consequence of [things I'm not responsible for]."). The results are not pretty.

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In the end, Rector thinks he knows why he hasn’t been contacted by fact checkers. “They didn’t want the answer. .  .  . If they really wanted the answer, all they had to do was pick up the phone and I would talk to them until they would fall asleep,” he says. “I have the lowest possible expectations for these people.”

Mark Hemingway writes at The Weekly Standard about the media fact checkers and the debate over the Obama Administration's changes to welfare work rules.

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Two months ago, I wrote about a police officer who tazed a man with Alzheimer’s. This weekend, I followed-up on the story, to see what’s happened since then. I’m happy to report that the Peru, IN police chief recommended firing Officer Gregory Martin. The Peru Board of Works held a hearing from from July 30-August 10, to review the recommendation. They ultimately upheld the decision and voted to fire Officer Gregory Martin.

I’m happy about this decision but it’s not over yet. Officer Martin is planning to appeal the decision, in a Miami County court.

Excerpt: Here’s another story where the public’s supposed protector practices assault and battery instead. Clifford claims in the police report that Vander Lee was using offensive language, but according to the criminal complaint, no one else in the restaurant heard it. No one claims Vander Lee struck Clifford first, though Clifford apparently claimed [...]

Here's another story where the public's supposed protector practices assault and battery instead.

Clifford claims in the police report that Vander Lee was using offensive language, but according to the criminal complaint, no one else in the restaurant heard it. No one claims Vander Lee struck Clifford first, though Clifford apparently claimed he feared Vander Lee was about to. After striking Vander Lee, Clifford then fled on foot to a nearby parking lot as Vander Lee’s brother and friend chased him. His wife then swung by in her car to pick him up, and the two of them fled. He turned himself in the next day.

The Minneapolis Police Department initially went into defensive mode, noting that Clifford had received two medals of valor and “no sustained allegations on his disciplinary record.” A couple things, there. First, let’s keep in mind that this is the same Minneapolis Police Department that gave its SWAT team “medals of valor” for raiding the wrong house, resulting in a shootout with an innocent Hmong man. His wife and six children were in the house, which the police filled with at least 22 rounds. As for Clifford’s alleged clean record, the key word in that sentence is sustained. In this case, it merely means he hasn’t yet done anything so severe that even other cops and prosecutors were willing to hold him accountable.

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This is despicable.

Police announced Monday they have launched an internal investigation, but would not comment about the incident or the investigation.

Police Chief Steve Hoover said no time frame has been set on the investigation, noting several people need to be interviewed regarding the incident.

“I would just ask from the citizens of Peru to be patient and allow us to do a thorough investigation into the matter,” he said Monday. “We assure you that we are taking this seriously, but it will take some time to do the investigation correctly.”

Given the alleged facts, the investigation should take about a day to do. And then the people involved should be fired with extreme prejudice. Given the "thin blue line" and the power of police unions, the people involved will probably end up with a medal for their valorous actions.

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I've been observing the Tea Party movement ever since it started and this is exactly what I've seen.

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Economist Veronique de Rugy.

I have written a few times in the past about the growing evidence that, contrary to common belief, a political party that implements ambitious reforms or spending cuts won’t be punished by voters in the next election. In fact, it may even be rewarded.

Among other studies, there is a Goldman Sachs Global Economics study by Ben Broadbent called “Fiscal tightening need not be electorally costly, but it will test government unity.” It shows that spending cuts can actually be a good thing politically. “It is commonly assumed that cuts in government spending will be both economically painful and electorally costly,” he writes. And:

Neither is borne out in the data. We’ve written before about the limited (and sometimes positive) effects of spending cuts on economic growth, at least in open economies. Here we add some simple analysis on the electoral consequences and, like others, find no evidence that spending cuts reduce support for the incumbent government. If anything the opposite tends to be true.

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My favorite Wisconsin political blogger comments on Tuesday's election results.

1. The Democrats have no bench.  Hey Democrats, who are your frontrunners for the 2014 gubernatorial election?  You just killed off Tom Barrett and Kathy Falk.  You have nobody in the Congressional delegation.  If Ron Kind wouldn't do it now, at a time when you really needed him, why's he going to do it later when he has to give up his House seat to do it?  And what else?  Your Young Screamers contingent?  Supertwitterer Chris Larson?  Gordon Hintz, lover of the happy ending?  The ever-sanctimonious Kelda Helen Roys?  That'd be like the GOP hanging its hat on Andre Jacque and Tyler August.

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I read this in Jonah Goldberg's emailed newsletter, the "Goldberg File", last week. I thought it was really good.

The other day Mary Katharine Hamm tweeted a link to one of those utterly predictable stories about how corporations with more lobbyists pay lower taxes or some such. She also remarked "complexity is a subsidy" -- and that really stuck with me. In many respects those four words distill vast swaths of scholarship from everyone from Friedrich Hayek to Charles Murray.

Again, it's not a new idea, but I think it's an extremely useful and pithy description of a very complex argument. The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with-strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses -- then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for "fixers" of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place.

The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules.

George Will offers a strong defense of campaign funding and points out that spending doesn't buy elections.

The Post, dismayed about super PACs, reports “a rarefied group of millionaires and billionaires acting as kingmakers in the GOP contest, often helping to decide, with a simple transfer of money, which candidate might survive another day.” Kingmakers? Where’s the king?

If kingmaking refers to, say, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino owner, keeping Newt Gingrich’s candidacy afloat with large infusions to the super PAC supporting Gingrich, then kingmaking isn’t what it used to be.

He also defends the constitutionality of campaign funding.

... The court’s unremarkable logic was that individuals do not forfeit their First Amendment speech rights when they come together in corporate entities or unions to speak collectively. What is the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?

... Actually, Citizens United has nothing to do with Adelson and others who are spending their own money, not any corporation’s. People have done this throughout the nation’s life, and doing so was affirmed as a constitutional right in the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.

And he defends the right of relative outsiders to influence the political process.

Critics of super PACs — critics who were remarkably reticent in 2004 when George Soros was lavishing his own money on liberal advocacy — often refer to them as “outside groups,” much as Southern sheriffs used to denounce civil rights workers as “outside agitators.”

Pray tell: Super PACs are outside of what? Is the political process a private club with the parties and candidates controlling membership?

It might be more wholesome for the speech-financing money that is flowing to super PACs to go instead to the parties and candidates’ campaigns. But the very liberals who are horrified by super PACs (other than Barack Obama’s) have celebrated the laws that place unreasonable restrictions on such giving.

The whole thing is worth reading and pondering.

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The Democratic Senate has not adopted a budget in three years. This is not only flagrantly irresponsible, it is a violation of federal law. Outgoing Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who is retiring at the end of the year, apparently felt pangs of conscience, because he decided it was finally time for his committee to mark up a budget. He announced that the committee would do so, starting tomorrow.

A standard markup process begins with the committee chairman laying out a proposal, with the chairman and the ranking minority member giving opening statements. This is followed by an amendment process, in which amendments to the proposed legislation (here, the budget resolution) are offered and voted on. The markup process concludes with a committee vote on the bill or resolution as amended. In this case, Conrad assured ranking Republican Jeff Sessions that amendments would be allowed, and as recently as a few hours ago, Conrad’s and Sessions’s staffs were working out details of the amendment process.

Then, earlier this afternoon, Conrad gave a press conference in which he made the stunning announcement that there will be no budget markup after all. Instead, he will present a budget to the Budget Committee tomorrow. There will be no amendments and there will be no votes; not, at least, until after the election. Apparently Conrad had been proceeding on his own initiative, and at the 11th hour Harry Reid–supported by members of his caucus who do not want to have to go on record in favor of any budget–shut down the process.

Even though Republicans are more than happy to vote "on the record about" budgets, never fear. It's Republican obstructionism and a "do nothing" Republican Congress that's keeping Washington paralyzed.

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I've listened to the weekly Presidential radio addresses, since at least 2005. (Yes, I know that makes me something of a masochist.) Which means that I've heard the last 3 or 4, from President Obama, on the subject of taxes and the Buffet Rule. I've been irritated by them and have wanted to do a take down of them. Thankfully, Reason magazine did it for me.

If there were some kind of award for the most misleading statements in a single four-minute speech, President Obama would have earned it with his weekly address this weekend, timed for tax day.

“We can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Obama said.

This is really something. First of all, who is the “we” in that sentence? The many Americans who don’t pay any income taxes at all, or who take more from the government in welfare or entitlement benefits than they pay in taxes? Second, it’s great to see Mr. Obama start to crack down on unaffordable government spending. But it’s hard to define tax cuts as spending unless you start from the concept that all money belongs to the government to begin with. It’s one thing to conceive of some special tax break as a “tax expenditure.” But it’s not “spending” for the government to allow an individual to keep money that the individual earned or owned in the first place.

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L.A. Chinatown residents want a Wal-Mart. L.A. won't let Wal-Mart in to serve them.

While Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) has decried Wal-Mart’s “ability to…drive all other competitors away” with rock-bottom prices, many Chinatown residents, suffering for years from gouging by the local markets, would probably say “good riddance.” In what must frustrate the unions most, the typical argument that products “Made in China” are inherently inferior doesn’t work in Chinatown. “I come from China, too!” one of the old Chinese ladies protesting in favor of Wal-Mart said. “We Chinese are cheap!” another pro-Wal-Mart elderly lady told me.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Wal-Mart does more to help poor people than anything of the anti-Wal-Mart crowd could ever dream of doing.

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The evidence that Romney is lagging in the polls because voters are upset about a “war on women” -- rather than because of a bruisingly negative primary campaign or the recovering economy -- is pretty thin. But Republicans are responding not just to the polls but to the persistent mythology of the gender gap.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post recently fell prey to this conventional wisdom, writing that “the GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.” Suffered? Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five four if you exclude 2000. Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

Obama barely won men in 2008. If this race is at all competitive, he will lose them this time. And that’s not all we can predict. Romney will win among large subgroups of women: those who are married, those who are white, those who go to church regularly. Gender isn’t the principal determinant of women’s votes any more than it is of men’s.

I love reading about the inside baseball of politics.

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How could members of the Supreme Court possibly seriously consider the argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unprecedented and unconstitutional? The quality of the arguments? The presence of a genuine legal debate? No, if you ask the law’s liberal cheerleaders, there can only be one answer: pure partisan politics.

From the beginning, ObamaCare’s backers presumed that the nation’s legal institutions would be on their side—and wouldn’t require much effort to convince. Going into this week’s Supreme Court arguments over the fate of the 2010 health care overhaul, liberal analysts were supremely confident. Since the law’s passage, they’d been predicting that the law would pass constitutional muster with ease. In February 2011, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe reassured readers of The New York Times that even conservative justices would not buy the challengers’ arguments, insisting upon the “clear case for the law’s constitutionality.” Andrew Koppelman, writing in The Yale Law Journal Online, declared the mandate’s constitutionality “obvious.”

Liberal analysts maintained their enthusiasm even after multiple losses in the lower courts. The case against the mandate is “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there,” wrote former New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse a few days before the arguments began.

What can explain liberals’ widespread failure to anticipate the Court’s wariness of the mandate? Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests one possible answer: Liberals just aren’t as good as conservatives and libertarians at understanding how their opponents think. Haidt helped conduct research that asked respondents to fill out questionnaires about political narratives—first responding based on their own beliefs, but then responding as if trying to mimic the beliefs of their political opponents. “The results,” he writes in the May issue of Reason, “were clear and consistent.” Moderates and conservatives were the most able to think like their liberal political opponents. “Liberals,” he reports, “were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’”

Anecdotally, this mirrors my experiences in Madison and at the University of Pittsburgh (two very liberal environments). I've found some liberals that I can have rational, political discussions with. On the whole though, most liberals in Madison seem unable to accept that conservatives (or libertarians) act from any motive other than greed, hate, stupidity, or pure evil.

Many of them seem unable to understand conservative rationales or arguments, so they act as though conservatives have no rationales or arguments. It can make for a toxic atmosphere, where the easiest road to peace is the one where you just keep quiet.

But what fun would that be?

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David Autor of MIT talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. SSDI has grown dramatically in recent years and now costs about $200 billion a year. Autor explains how the program works, why the growth has been so dramatic, and the consequences for the stability of the program in the future. This is an illuminated look at the interaction between politics and economics and reveals an activity of government that is relatively ignored today but will not be able to be ignored in the future.

Some interesting facts.

• Disability insurance includes both a monthly cash payment as well as access to Medicare.
• The disability rolls have more than doubled in in the last 13 years, from 1.2 million people to 2.9 million people.
• Divided by the number of U.S. households, we're spending more than $1500 per U.S. household, on disability insurance.
• By law, the program is biased on favor of people making disability claims. It's comparatively easy to get disability and very, very hard to prove that someone either no longer needs disability or that they made a fraudulent claim in the first place.
• Law firms helping people get disability are entitled to 25% of the disability back benefits. Each year, the Social Security Administration pays out more than $1 billion to these law firms.
• In 1984, SSDI consumed 5% of all Social Security revenues. In 2004, SSDI consumed 10% of all Social Security revenues. It now consumes all of the dedicated SSDI revenue and is cutting into the general Social Security revenue. At the current rate of expenditure, the SSDI trust fund will be exhausted within 5 years.

It looks like SSDI is something that we need to start thinking about reforming as well, as it grows increasingly more expensive to maintain.

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I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP).  While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.

...Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

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