Archive for February, 2011
Good Riddance 1099 Mandate
Senate Democrats deserve credit for this much: in voting to repeal the so-called “1099 reporting mandate,” they have acknowledged that this small part of Obamacare will be a disaster. With time and education, perhaps they will see what most Americans already see: The rest of Obamacare is a disaster too — a monumental one — for patients, doctors, employers, the Constitution, and individual freedom.
At this point, even the most ardent Obamacare supporters must have noticed that the law has not been well received. As public opposition further manifests itself, perhaps some supporters will begin to reconsider their fealty to this law.
Not a Good Week for Obamacare
It has not been a good week for Obamacare. Another court ruled that the bill was unconstitutional, while it took a party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to avoid a legislative repeal. Meanwhile, chipping away at the legislation began, with the Senate voting to repeal one of the bill’s most unpopular provisions, a requirement that businesses file 1099 tax forms on even small purchases. Supporters of the bill are bailing as fast as they can, but the ship is sinking rapidly.
Al Gore on Snowpocalypse 2011
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Ex-VP Al Gore says the snowstorms that paralyzed much of the U.S. this week are more evidence of manmade global warming. “The scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.” Do you agree?
My response:
A scientific hypothesis that’s essentially unfalsifiable — cold corroborates “global warming,” heat corroborates it, nothing really falsifies it — is worse than useless. It’s a scientific poseur, properly classified as a belief system, like religion. And the implication that there’s an optimal earth temperature, or range of temperatures, or that global warming is destructive, not possibly beneficial, is just further evidence that there’s more going on here than pure science.
Throw in beliefs about the human contributions to “global warming” and the policy recommendations that follow – massive shifts toward wildly expensive command-and-control energy systems, the effect on the world’s poor notwithstanding – and the politics of the matter come into view. Let’s remember that Al Gore, who never missed an opportunity to expand government, was once an ethanol evangelist, a posture he’s recently admitted was connected mainly with presidential politics in Iowa — now that ethanol has been shown to have negative environmental consequences. Frankly, I’ll stick with Punxsutawney Phil.
The Survival of Dumb Ideas
On the National Interest‘s Skeptics blog, I discuss Steve Walt’s article in the latest Foreign Policy magazine: “Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?” Walt explains why discredited ideas about foreign policy survive despite all the study and debate we give to them in this country. He is really talking about failure in what John Stuart Mill calls the “marketplace of ideas“—the tendency of free speech to bring debate that promotes good ideas and demotes bad ones, driving public policy toward improvement.
My take is that Walt’s impressive analysis has two flaws. First, he thinks it wise and possible to free policy debate from the clutches of interest groups. Second, he fails to appreciate how politics differs from academic semimars. Ideas about policy are generally the product, rather than the cause, of differing preferences about policy. They are tools to rally political support, not hypotheses that their authors are eager to test. Political debate tends to reify divisions rather than unify people around mutally-acknowledged truths.
From my post:
Walt writes that “this problem with self-interested individuals and groups interfering in the policy process appears to be getting worse.” That sentence carries the quixotic and undemocratic assumption that there once existed another kind of policy-making process, one free of self-interested actors, where all participants honestly argued in service of the national interest, and that those halcyon days can be restored. But a marketplace of ideas without self-interested groups and actors would be one robbed of the lion’s share of intellectual capital. Self-interest is the engine of policy-making in democracy, not its enemy.
Walt thinks that either the public or the politicians that serve them are like judges, weighing contending views to arrive at wise policy; or like academics, studying ideas to arrive at preferences, which they simply enact. A more accurate description of policy-making comes from pluralism (pluralist scholars include David Truman, Edward Banfield, Charles Lindblom, James Q. Wilson, and Robert Dahl), which imagines a more intense, but less efficient, marketplace of ideas. The American government, pluralists tell us, is an arena for the competition of interest groups (ideological or economic), manifested in pressure groups and governmental agencies. Collective action theory explains that only these concentrated interests will be reliably motivated to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Those interests’ contention is our politics; its current outcome is policy. Presidents preside over this fray, but their control is far less than we generally imagine. They accept the status quo far more than they change it, and having accepted it, they sell that compromise as their own policy, using ideas to match it to the national interest.
Bad ideas then persist because they are useful weapons in policy-fights. Policy-makers are more like lawyers than judges, using arguments about how their preferred policies serve the national interest to win adherents. Walt cites the resurrection of domino theory to illustrate his argument, arguing as if its intellectual defeat would prevent the policies it justifies. Instead, if no one believed in the domino theory, hawks would simply employ another argument about why we should fight in Afghanistan, or wherever we are next.
For-profits Fighting Back, Harkin to Flog-on
Last week, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Comittee, announced that on February 17 he will continue his obssessive attack on for-profit colleges, holding yet another hearing to determine just how evil profit-seekers are. At least, that is what will presumably be discussed — the specific subject of the hearing is yet to be identified. But the committee actually tackling, say, rampant waste throughout higher education driven by federal student aid, or just giving for-profit schools an even-handed treatment, would be too huge a turnaround to contemplate.
Despite there being no end in sight to Harkin’s seige, for-profit institutions aren’t just rolling over, and today they launched their latest counterattack. This afternoon the Coalition for Educational Success — a for-profit college advocacy group — filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Office. At issue: The GAO’s ”secret shopper” report on for-profit institutions that was eventually — but very stealthily — revealed by the GAO to be riddled with errors, and which could be shown to be an even bigger smear job were the GAO to allow for-profit schools to examine the evidence behind the report.
Clearly there will be more to come on this, if for no other reason than Harkin’s show-hearings have garnered a lot of coverage in the past. Hopefully, this time potentially disturbing behavior by the GAO, as well as the huge problems federal policy has created throughout higher education — you know, the really important stories — will also get a little attention.
ObamaCare After Judge Vinson’s Ruling
Judge Roger Vinson’s decision on Monday that ObamaCare is unconstitutional in its entirety has sparked a lively debate at Cato and in the country as well about precisely what the practical effect of the decision is, pending a final ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which may be a year or more in the offing.
Obviously, the Obama administration and the states have already begun implementing parts of the law. Yet the Washington Post reports this morning that Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, one of the parties to the suit, “issued a stern statement” following the decision:
“This means that, for Wisconsin, the federal health care law is dead,” and his state “was relieved of any obligations or duties” to carry out the statute.
Other attorneys general and governors have taken a variety of positions about the decision’s effect. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is proceeding with its implementation plans, and has indicated that it will seek a stay of Judge Vinson’s decision.
The problem that my colleague Bob Levy and I see with seeking a stay, however, is that Judge Vinson’s ruling declared ObamaCare unconstitutional; but the judge did not issue a formal injunction. Our colleagues Michael Cannon and Ilya Shapiro have endorsed one plausible reading of that ruling — i.e., absent a court-issued stay, ObamaCare cannot be further implemented. That interpretation may be correct, but the administration and others disagree, and the issues are murky.
What would the remedy be if the federal Department of Health and Human Services were to continue implementing ObamaCare? If an injunction had been issued, HHS officials might be found in contempt of court. But without an injunction, there is no obvious remedy.
Moreover, a single district court in a single state might not be empowered to foreclose nationwide implementation of a federal statute. After all, two other district courts have upheld ObamaCare’s constitutionality. Suppose each of the 26 states in the Florida case had filed separate suits. Suppose further that 25 of the 26 suits had been dismissed, but one outlier court had held that ObamaCare was unconstitutional. Would that court’s order effectively require HHS to abandon the legislation? Surely, proponents of ObamaCare would have a valid argument that start-and-stop implementation might be chaotic.
Because the issues are complex and unclear, the better outcome would be for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to clarify the effect of Judge Vinson’s ruling. And given the manifold implementation uncertainties surrounding the serious constitutional questions, affecting so many people and institutions, private and public, Judge Vinson’s decision should be put on a fast track to the Supreme Court.
Addendum: Further on the practical effect of Judge Vinson’s declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional — whatever it may be – it is reasonable to argue that the 26 plaintiff states in the Florida case need not, for now, take any action mandated by the statute. Any attempt by the federal government to force compliance by one of the recalcitrant states would likely result in further litigation that might have the salutary effect, at least, of clarifying this confusing situation.
Comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics
Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab).
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a fascinating (at least for economic geeks) interactive webpage that allows readers to compare economic downturns and recoveries, both on the basis of output and employment.
The results are remarkable. Reagan focused on reducing the burden of government and the economy responded. Obama (and Bush) tried the opposite approach, but spending, bailouts, and intervention have not worked. This first chart shows economic output.
The employment chart below provides an equally stark comparison. If anything, this second chart is even more damning since employment has not bounced back from the trough. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. Why create jobs when government is subsidizing unemployment and penalizing production? And we already know the so-called stimulus has been a flop.
We’re All Terrorists Now
The Tennessee ACLU sent a letter to public schools warning them not to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. The Tennessee Fusion Center (H/T Uncle) put the communication on its map of “terrorism events and other suspicious activity”:
“ACLU cautions Tennessee schools about observing ‘one religious holiday,’” the website’s explanation reads.
Also among the map’s highlights: “McMinn County Teen Brings Gun to School,” and “Turkish National Salih Acarbulut Indicted in Chattanooga for Alleged $12 million Ponzi Scheme.”
Mike Browning, a spokesman for the Fusion Center, said “that was a mistake” to label the ACLU letter as a suspicious activity. He said the Fusion Center meant to use the icon that means merely general information. The icon was changed after the ACLU sent its news release, he said.
“It’s still on the map,” Browning told The City Paper. “It has been reclassified into the general information category.”
But a look at the website shows there is no icon for general information. Instead, the icon for the ACLU letter now signifies “general terrorism news,” according to the website’s legend.
This follows a long line of fusion center and DHS reports labeling broad swaths of the public as a threat to national security. The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat; and the Department of Homeland Security described half of the American political spectrum as “right wing extremists.”
The ACLU fusion center report and update lay out some good background on these issues, and the Spyfiles report describes how monitoring lawful dissent has become routine for police departments around the nation. Cato hosted Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and co-author of the ACLU fusion report at a forum on fusion centers, available here.
A Nobel Peace Prize for Julian Assange?
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Does WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, as Norwegian parliamentarian Snorre Valen urges, calling him “one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency”?
My response:
A Nobel Peace Prize for Julian Assange? Please! He’s a fence for stolen goods. Transparency has its place. But nations, like individuals and private organizations, need to conduct their business with varying degrees of confidence. Look at Egypt at the moment, where American, Egyptian, and other officials are conducting delicate negotiations in the context of a potentially explosive situation. Only the most naive would expect those to be fully transparent. That’s why all nations have strict rules about classified materials.
Is classification abused? Of course it is. In my experience in government, far too much was classified, often for the wrong reasons. But that’s hardly ground for abandoning classification. And if we have a classification system, it has to be enforced. If the alleged source of the WikiLeaks trove, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is proven guilty, he should be fully punished. It’s unclear whether our law can reach Assange, but surely he should not be honored, whatever incidental good may have come here and there from his duplicity. Not only would awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize dishonor the prize and so many who’ve received it before him, but it would contribute to undermining the very system of confidential communications that is essential to peace. The very idea should be put to rest, in the name of peace.
HUD ‘Failing the Taxpayers’
That’s what the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s recently retired inspector general had to say in response to rampant malfeasance and mismanagement at public housing authorities uncovered by a joint investigation by ABC News and The Center for Public Integrity.
From the report:
The problems are widespread, from an executive in New Orleans convicted of embezzling more than $900,000 in housing money around the time he bought a lavish Florida mansion to federal funds wrongly being spent to provide housing for sex offenders or to pay vouchers to residents long since dead.
Despite red flags from its own internal watchdog, HUD has continued to plow fresh federal dollars into these troubled agencies, including $218 million in stimulus funds since 2009, the joint investigation found.
The report singles out Philadelphia’s public housing authority, which HUD reportedly considers to be a “model agency.” The Philadelphia Housing Authority’s outgoing executive director, who was paid $300,000 a year, had “spent lavishly on parties that included belly dancers, and had used more than $500,000 in housing authority funds to secretly settle claims accusing him of inappropriate sexual advances with female employees.”
Here’s the former director of the “model agency” channeling his inner Charlie Sheen on the taxpayer’s dime:
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) doesn’t understand how HUD could have missed the problems:
“We expect that the agency in Washington, D.C. ought to be making sure that every taxpayer dollar is spent in a responsible way. And it seems to me that we have not had that proper oversight,” Grassley said.
Really, Senator? As a Cato essay on HUD scandals illustrates, the agency has been plagued by mismanagement and corruption since its inception. HUD has never made sure every taxpayer dollar was “spent in a responsible way.” And it never will for the simple fact that a government agency has little incentive to ensure that money coerced from taxpayers isn’t wasted. In contrast, a private charity with a record like HUD would see its voluntary donations dry up.
See this Cato for more on public housing subsidies and why they should be abolished.
Jeff McKay: Cavalier About Violating Metro Riders’ Liberties, Spending Taxpayer Dollars
In a blog post of righteousness last week, I assailed Fairfax County (Virginia) Supervisor Jeff McKay for his failure to comprehend basic security principles as they pertain to the Metro system.
A Washington Examiner reporter retrieved McKay’s response:
[H]e laughed. But he quickly defended his stance, saying that random searches were recommended by the U.S. Transportation Security Association, the D.C. Police, and WMATA management.
“I trust the intelligence agencies when they tell me there’s a reason to do this,” he said.
McKay admitted that bag searches likely wouldn’t stop someone intent on causing mass destruction to the Metrorail, but that they will make passengers much more aware of security concerns.
Supervisor McKay was not flip about these issues at the meeting of the Metro board. He spoke about the bag search policy in terms of his moral duty to make the Metro system safe.
But it turns out he can’t defend the validity of bag searches as a security measure. He admits he’s just doing what he’s told, and he sees it as a way to keep Metro riders on edge. The taxpayer money spent on bag searches is pure waste. Interesting moral universe.
Judge Vinson’s Greatest Hits
It’s hard to get too excited about a district court decision — this is one of several, and will be superseded by circuit and eventual Supreme Court decisions — but this decision in Florida v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services is remarkable. Most notably, the 78-page ruling is well theorized and engaging (Vinson’s opus is a joy to read compared to most stuff I have to wade through to understand what the courts are doing) and sets the stage for the appellate writings to come. It puts “facts on the ground,” if you will.
No higher courts are bound but they are influenced. Judges, like anyone else, don’t want to reinvent the wheel where they don’t have to. So the circuit courts and even the Supremes will say all this in their own words but don’t for a second think they ain’t payin’ attention. I can’t cite you statistics about justices being influenced by district (or even circuit) court opinions, but it would be laughable to think that the outcome before the Court would be the same regardless of how the decisions on the merits before several thoughtful district judges went.
Read on for highlights from Judge Vinson’s magisterial opinion (to which I initially responded here and whose immediate consequences I analyzed here). Page numbers are in parentheses after each quote.
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