Archive for July, 2010
Nor Does Tech Get D.C. . . .
Politico has a pretty thorough article on D.C.’s thorough ignorance of things tech.
Take a 2008 hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee about privacy and online behavior-based advertising. The discussion seemed to fall apart when Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and others seemed not to understand the term “cookies.”
Cookies. That’s the (utterly rudimentary) technology that was an issue a decade ago. Washington, D.C. naturally overreacted, but luckily only harmed itself. The White House recently revamped the cookie policy for federal government web sites.
It’s worth noting Tech’s thorough misapprehension of Washington, D.C. as well. Judging by how they act, most tech executives have all the insight they could pick up from Schoolhouse Rock. It seems cool and helpful to come to Washington and give money, so they do, encouraging the bears to rip open their cars looking for peanut butter.
Medicare Part D May Set a Record for Crowd-Out
According to a new study by economists Gary V. Engelhardt and Jonathan Gruber, 80 percent of enrollment in Medicare Part D, and 80 percent of the dollars spent by Part D, merely crowd out private prescription drug coverage and spending.
Put differently, Medicare Part D extends prescription drug coverage to one senior for the price of five.
Eradicating Social Evils
The goal of a new Chinese government campaign is to “eradicate all social evils” and “advocate a healthy, civilized and high-minded lifestyle,” according to the Washington Post. Some elements of the state just don’t like the way the Chinese people are using their newfound freedom.
On a different level, we face the same arguments here in the United States. Both the Hillarys and the Huckabees in our world seek to fight “social evils” and lead us to “a healthy, civilized and high-minded lifestyle.” The Huckabees focus on our souls, urging the government to stamp out sin and push us to do God’s will (as they see it). The Hillarys often focus on our bodies, with campaigns against smoking, popcorn, sodas, salt, and all manner of “unhealthy lifestyles.” Then again, the Hillarys do want to save our souls, as well, with campaigns to eradicate racism and sexism and spread the environmentalist gospel.
In China, economic freedom is giving people an opportunity to throw off old social rules and restrictions and to experiment with living their lives as they choose. Economic freedom has the same impact here, and in both countries there are powerful people who don’t like the choices free people make.
Gun Control Advocates Should Applaud the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court ruled last week that state and city governments must respect the individual right to bear arms that is guaranteed by Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ruling does not necessarily invalidate all gun control laws, but it will likely mean the demise of outright bans and restrict significantly the ability of states and cities to impose other kinds of controls.
Advocates of gun control have decried the ruling because they believe guns cause crime and that gun control laws, by gun reducing gun availability, reduce crime. Regardless of the constitutional questions, however, both arguments for controls are flawed.
Many crimes do not require an armed perpetrator, and numerous weapons can substitute for guns (knives, baseball bats, fists, bombs, chains, shivs-the list is endless). Even if guns encourage or facilitate crime, guns potentially prevent crime by giving criminals reason to worry that victims might shoot back. In addition, gun controls cannot make guns disappear; they can only attempt to reduce availability via regulation, taxation, or prohibition. Those with illegitimate purposes, however, can circumvent such policies by borrowing or stealing a gun, or purchasing one on the black market.
Existing evidence indicates that the availability of guns plays a small role in causing crime and that gun control does little to reduce crime. Numerous countries have widespread gun ownership but low crime or violence rates; other countries have strict gun control laws but abundant guns and substantial violence. Police stations, army barracks, and rural households have high gun prevalence but little crime. Simply stating that guns automatically lead to high levels of crime is facile.
In addition, gun controls have costs, both for individuals and for society.
Many people derive a benefit from owning guns. Some enjoy collecting, others like hunting or target-shooting, and others want guns for self-defense. Controls raise the costs of gun ownership, thereby harming legitimate users. The costs of many of these controls are mild-a three-day waiting-period to buy a gun, for example, imposes small costs on those with legitimate reasons to own a gun. Yet such controls do little to deter illegitimate uses, so they also have minimal benefits.
The potentially significant cost of mild controls is that they evolve into strict controls. A century ago no country had substantial controls on gun ownership, yet most now have strict controls or virtual prohibition. If gun control becomes prohibition, the potential for adverse effects is large. Prohibition creates black markets, which means violent dispute resolution, corruption of judges and police, and disrespect for the law. Such outcomes are easily worse than any negatives of guns themselves.
The most significant negative of gun control is distracting attention from policies like drug prohibition that play a far larger role in generating crime. So long as policy generates a demand for crime, policy can do little to reduce crime.
Critics of the Supreme Court’s decision, therefore, have no cause for worry. If the ruling prevents many or most gun control laws, that will be good for everyone.
C/P at psychologytoday.com
The Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of Fiscal Policy
The fault line in American politics is often not between Republicans and Democrats, but rather between taxpayers and the Washington political elite. Here are two examples that symbolize why economic policy is such a mess:
First, we have President George W. Bush’s former top aide, Karl Rove, making the case in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration has been fiscally irresponsible. That’s certainly true, but as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions (here and here), Rove has zero credibility on these issues. In the excerpt below, Rove attacks Obama for earmarks, but this corrupt form of pork-barrel spending skyrocketed during the Bush years. Rove rips Obama for government-run healthcare, but Rove helped push through Congress a reckless new entitlement for prescription drugs. He attacks Obama for misusing TARP, but the Bush administration created that no-strings-attached bailout program.
Those are examples of hypocrisy, but Rove also is willing to prevaricate. He blames Obama for boosting the burden of government spending to 24 percent of GDP, but it was the Bush administration that boosted the federal government from 18.2 percent of GDP in 2001 to 24.7 percent of GDP in 2009. Obama is guilty of following similar policies and maintaining a bloated budget, but it was Bush (with Rove’s guidance) that drove the economy into a fiscal ditch.
Here’s some of Rove:
The president’s problem is largely a mess of his own making. Deficit spending did not begin when Mr. Obama took office. But he and his Democratic allies have supported, proposed, passed or signed and then spent every dime that’s gone out the door since Jan. 20, 2009. Voters know it is Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders who approved a $410 billion supplemental (complete with 8,500 earmarks) in the middle of the last fiscal year, and then passed a record-spending budget for this one. Mr. Obama and Democrats approved an $862 billion stimulus and a $1 trillion health-care overhaul, and they now are trying to add $266 billion in “temporary” stimulus spending to permanently raise the budget baseline. It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year. This is indeed the road to fiscal hell, and it’s been paved by the president and his party.
Second, we have Nancy Pelosi claiming that paying people to remain unemployed is a good way of creating jobs. She’s been appropriately mocked for this assertion, but keep in mind that she is accurately regurgitating standard Keynesian theory. It doesn’t matter that Keynesianism didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s, didn’t work for Japan in the 1990s, and didn’t work for Bush in 2008. Proponents of this approach have a childlike faith in the Keynesian model and its ability to generate very specific (albeit completely inaccurate) numbers.
Active Government, Passive Economy
Today, Politico Arena asks a second question:
What does Obama need to do on jobs?
My response:
What does Obama need to do on jobs? Asked about that in his Arena interview today, Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) answers, “The best thing we could do is encourage banks to lend money.” Encourage them? Banks don’t need to be encouraged: if they can make money by lending it, they will. But that’s just the problem. The regulatory climate under Obama is so uncertain that capital isn’t moving. Andrews adds that “we need to stimulate,” as if we hadn’t already massively stimulated with little to show but massive debt. And he says that “the Wall Street reform bill will help.” Apparently he hasn’t read Stanford economist John B. Taylor’s analysis in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which concludes: “People may be waking up to the fact that the bill does not do what its supporters claim. It does not prevent future financial crises. Rather, it makes them more likely and in the meantime impedes economic growth.”
The Not-So-White Tea Party
USA Today is out with a new poll on Tea Party supporters. Near the top of both the article and the accompanying graphic is this point, also singled out by Howard Kurtz in his Washington Post report on the study:
They are overwhelmingly white and Anglo,
Not too surprising, perhaps. Economic conservatives, we hear, are more white than the national average. But wait — here’s the rest of Kurtz’s sentence:
although a scattering of Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans combine to make up almost one-fourth of their ranks.
“Almost one-fourth of their ranks” is “a scattering”? Sounds like a pretty good chunk to me, especially in a country that is after all still mostly white. Let’s go to the tape. The data-filled graphic says that 77 percent of Tea Party supporters are “non-Hispanic whites.” And this 2008 Census report says that the United States as a whole is 65 percent non-Hispanic white. So the Tea Party is indeed somewhat more “white” than the country at large, but not by that much. Twelve points above the national average is not “overwhelmingly white,” and 23 percent Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans is not “a scattering.” At a rough estimate, it represents about 14 million non-Anglo Americans who support the Tea Party movement.
How does this compare to the demographics of other movements? Strangely enough, I can’t find any real data on the demographics of the enviromental movement. Maybe pollsters and mainstream journalists don’t want to know. But here’s a report that 84 percent of the visitors to the Sierra Club website are Caucasian. Similar implication here. And here’s a story on the environmentalist movement’s desperate attempt to seem not so “overwhelmingly white.” Yet somehow journalists don’t focus on that obvious fact about the environmentalist movement.
Instead, they keep describing the Tea Party movement as “overwhelmingly white,” even when the data suggest a different conclusion.
Ranking the Academics
At Politico Arena today, the question is:
Who was the best president, and who was the worst? (For more on this question, see the post by David Boaz, just below.)
My response:
The new Siena College poll ranking U.S. presidents speaks to nothing so much as the corruption of the modern American academy. I defer to the comments of my colleague, David Boaz, and would add only that these rankings are about as insightful as many of the scribblings of these academics.
Who Were the Best Presidents?
At Politico Arena, the question of the day is:
A new Siena College poll ranks Barack Obama as the 15th best U.S. president (landing him below Bill Clinton, ahead of Ronald Reagan). Franklin Delano Roosevelt earned top honors, while Andrew Johnson was last. Pollsters say Obama is high on imagination, communication and intelligence, but weak on background. On your list of best presidents, where would President Obama land? Who was the best president, and who was the worst?
I responded:
Of course Obama ought to be given an incomplete. But he got a Nobel Peace Prize purely on spec. He does now have 18 months of presidential action, and he has already done many things that establishment political scientists like. Presidential scholars love presidents who expand the size, scope and power of government. Thus they put the Roosevelts at the top of the list. And they rate Woodrow Wilson — the anti-Madisonian president who gave us the entirely unnecessary World War I, which led to communism, National Socialism, World War II, and the Cold War – 8th. Now there’s a record for President Obama to aspire to! Create a century of war and terrorism, and you can move up from 15th to 8th.
George Washington, who made real the Founders’ dreams of a free republic, should surely be rated first. That he is not speaks volumes about the interests and values underlying this survey.
In his book Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, Ivan Eland gives high grades to presidents who left the American people alone to enjoy peace and prosperity, such as Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford B. Hayes. The fact that you can’t remember what any of those presidents did is a plus. At the bottom he places Wilson, Truman, McKinley, Polk, and George W. Bush. Bush is also rated near the bottom by the Siena poll. But when current passions have faded, and the next generation’s establishment presidential scholars reflect on Bush’s expansion of federal power and executive power, Bush will start rising in the rankings.
I’m also amused by the presidential scholars’ ranking of Lyndon Johnson 1st in the category of relations with Congress. LBJ was known for his vulgar, arm-twisting, threatening, corrupt manipulation of a huge congressional majority. One would hope that congressional scholars might rate higher a president who recognized the constitutional limitations of the executive branch.
Obama Administration Moves to Implement Sunlight Before Signing
I have written here once or twice before—well, 26 times, but who‘s counting?—about “Sunlight Before Signing“—President Obama’s campaign promise to post bills he receives from Congress online for five days before signing them.
It was his first broken campaign promise, but a presidential term lasts four years, and a pledge like this is redeemable. So I have been delighted to see moves over the past few weeks to implement President Obama’s simple, but important transparency promise.
First, Whitehouse.gov began posting all legislation that comes to the president’s desk from Congress. An early decision to exclude “insignificant” legislation such as bills to rename post offices needlessly drove down the White House’s Sunlight Before Signing average.
Why would the public want to know about such things? Perhaps because the numerous post office renamings passed this year stand in contrast to the budget resolutions not passed this year. Foremost, all bills should be included in Sunlight Before Signing because that was the president’s promise.
More importantly, though, the White House’s web site recently added a section covering something fairly central to the president’s role: legislation! In Whitehouse.gov’s “Briefing Room,” there is now a legislation section, in which you can find lists of pending legislation (the stuff getting its five days of public review), signed legislation, and vetoed legislation.
(The signed legislation section is a bit of a jumble. It’s in no apparent order, it does not include public law numbers, it has different “signed” dates for some bills than the Thomas system has, and it even lists a few bills that have not been signed into law.)
Crucially, each of these pages has RSS feeds that make it easy for the public to stay informed about what bills have reached the president’s desk to get their five-day review. Voters and bloggers can easily get a quick sense of what Congress and the president are doing. Think of the social studies teacher who might use the bills Congress sends to the president in any given week for a class assignment.
Each time a bill reaches the president, it will pop up in RSS feeds nationwide. A habit of civic awareness can take root thanks to these RSS feeds, and the administration deserves credit for implementing them, even if it has done so tardily.
Thanks to these changes, the Obama administration’s Sunlight Before Signing average is on the rise. When we last reviewed things, just under 10% of bills had received the Sunlight Before Signing treatment, even though many were held for five days at the White House as a matter of course.
Under Romney/ObamaCare, Even the Scapegoats Scapegoat
In a recent post on how RomneyCare is increasing health insurance costs in Massachusetts (by encouraging healthy residents to purchase coverage only when they need medical care) and how ObamaCare will do the same, I linked to a Boston Globe article where an insurance-company spokeswoman made this odd claim:
We believe…the gaming in the system…is adding as much as $300 million dollars to the health care system in Massachusetts.
It’s hard to know what she meant. Taken literally, this claim is obviously untrue. The gamers aren’t adding revenue to “the system” — they’re withholding revenue. Nor are they adding costs, in the sense of additional medical spending. If anything, overall spending falls because the gamers are less often insured, and therefore consume less medical care.
She might have meant that the premiums the gamers aren’t paying (or the difference between what they pay and the medical care they receive) amounts to $300 million, and that the gamers are imposing that cost on non-gamers in the form of higher premiums. But that doesn’t hold water, either. The gamers have zero power to impose costs on non-gamers; only the government has that power. All the gamers are doing is responding rationally to the incentives RomneyCare creates and avoiding — lawfully, I might add — a $300 million tax.
So if that was her meaning, this spokeswoman should have said:
RomneyCare is imposing a $300 million tax on insured Massachusetts residents by encouraging other residents to game the system.
Instead, she blamed consumers and argued for laws that make it harder for consumers to avoid RomneyCare’s private-insurer bailout individual mandate.
So now we’ve got President Obama, who signed a law requiring health insurers to pay for more stuff, blaming insurers for rising premiums. We’ve got pro-RomneyCare politicians doing the same in Massachusetts. And we’ve got health insurers, who support laws forcing consumers to buy their products, blaming consumers for the cost of those laws.
Remember how RomneyCare and ObamaCare were supposed to promote responsibility?
Stossel on Fox News Channel: What’s Great about America
John Stossel, usually seen on Fox Business Network, will have a special on the Fox News Channel this weekend, well targeted to Independence Day: “What’s Great about America.” He’ll interview Dinesh D’Souza and immigrant businessmen, among others.
Saturday and Sunday, 9 p.m. ET both nights. Fox News is on lots more cable systems than Fox Business, so if you don’t get Fox Business, this is your chance to see Stossel.
Tonight at 9 p.m., I think it’s a rerun of his recent show on Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, featuring . . . me. Along with Johan Norberg, Tom Palmer, and Bob Chitester.
For some of my own thoughts on what’s great about America, see this article.
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