Archive for the ‘Cato Publications’ Category
U.S. Credit Rating Downgraded by S&P
… which makes this video out of date by about 20 minutes, but it’s instructive nonetheless.
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NYT Magazine: ‘Surprising…How Willingly’ Medicaid Officials Enable Fraud
The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy (and not entirely unflattering) feature on James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. Here’s what the profile says about Project Veritas’s ongoing string of Medicaid-fraud sting videos:
It isn’t exactly a secret that some Medicaid money winds up in unqualified hands, but it was surprising to see how willingly minor officials turned a blind eye and, in some cases, even offered advice on how to game the system.
Actually, it’s not just minor officials. And when one understands Medicaid, it’s not surprising either.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Bill Daley on When It’s Okay to Impeach Obama
On NPR this morning, I heard White House chief of staff Bill Daley say, “The president cannot usurp the power that’s in the Congress.” What a relief! Also, this:
I don’t think the American people would find it appropriate for the president of the United States to defy the laws of the nation and its Constitution, without their belief that that president should be impeached. And this president isn’t going to do anything against the Constitution, against the laws of the United States of America.
So if the president were to defy, say, the War Powers Resolution by ridiculously redefining “hostilities,” or if he were to defy the Constitution by signing a law that claims for Congress a power the Constitution does not grant (say, ObamaCare), we should impeach him. Got it.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
The New York Times on Anders Breivik
My Washington Examiner column this week looks at the rush to score partisan points over the horrific slaughter in Norway last Friday.
In it, I argue that blaming Al Gore for the Unabomber, Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Bruce Bawer for Anders Breivik makes about as much sense as blaming Martin Scorcese and Jodie Foster for the actions of John Hinckley. In general, “invoking the ideological meanderings of psychopaths is a stalking horse for narrowing permissible dissent.”
And right on cue, here’s today’s New York Times editorial on Breivik, decrying “inflammatory political rhetoric” about Muslim immigration in Europe:
Individuals are responsible for their actions. But they are influenced by public debate and the extent to which that debate makes ideas acceptable — or not. Even mainstream politicians in Europe, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France have sown doubts about the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel said last October.
Oh, Grey Lady: you had me at “individuals are responsible for their actions,” but you lost me after “but.”
Because, maybe there are, in fact, limits to the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. And perhaps multiculturalism has failed. I don’t know—I don’t live in Europe, and I don’t follow its immigration debates closely. But contra the Times‘ editorialists, it seems to me that these ideas are “acceptable,” in the sense that they might actually be true, and that you ought to be able to debate them without thereby becoming morally responsible for the actions of lone psychotics.
Virtually every European immigration skeptic manages to participate in that debate without resort to violence, just as vanishingly few hard-core environmentalists try to promote their ideas by means of armed assault. The actions of the deranged few don’t tell us much about what’s wrong with those political stances.
As others have pointed out, the notion that you should “watch what you say” in political debates amounts to giving a sort of “heckler’s veto” to the biggest nutjobs within earshot.
As a means of avoiding horrifying—but thankfully rare—events like mass shooting sprees, it doesn’t seem terribly promising. But it might help you temporarily intimidate your ideological opponents—which is why it’s a perennially popular tactic.
Health Care Entitlements Are the Real Debt Bomb
I’m a few days behind on this, but over at The Corner Yuval Levin has written an important post about how health care entitlements are the real cause of the debt crisis facing the federal government. Using Congressional Budget Office projections, Levin creates this magnificent chart, which I plan to steal over and over again:
If Republicans want to conquer the federal debt, they need to embrace health policy like they embrace tax cuts.
How Your Government Deceives You, ‘Social Insurance’ Edition
From my former Cato colleague, Will Wilkinson:
The trick to weaving an effective and politically-robust safety net for those who most need one is designing it to appear to benefit everyone, especially those who don’t need it. The whole thing turns on maintaining the illusion that payroll taxes are “premiums” or “insurance contributions” and that subsequent transfers from the government are “benefits” one has paid for through a lifetime of payroll deductions. The insurance schema protects the main redistributive work of the programme by obscuring it. As a matter of legal fact, payroll taxes are just taxes; they create no legal entitlement to benefits. The government can and does spend your Social Security and Medicare taxes on killer drones. But the architects of America’s big social-insurance schemes, such as Frances Perkins and Wilbur Cohen, thought it very important that it doesn’t look that way. That’s why you you see specific deductions for Social Security and Medicare on your paycheck. And that’s why the government maintains these shell “trust funds” where you are meant to believe your “insurance contributions” are kept.
Alas, like Social Security and Medicare themselves, the deceptions that protect these entitlement programs cannot go on forever.
Generally, liberals are profoundly conservative about the classic Perkins-Cohen architecture of America’s big entitlement programmes, which they credit for their remarkable popularity and stability. Yet that architecture offers very few degrees of freedom for significant reform. Crunch time is coming, though, and sooner or later something’s got to give.
If Wilkinson’s overlords at The Economist demand that he misspell program, they should be consistent and allow him to abandon the American convention of mislabeling leftists as liberals.
Protecting Consumers from Consumer Protection
It’s an article of faith that government regulation always delivers better outcomes. The new consumer protection agency now ramping up its involvement in financial markets may prove to be an agency that harms consumer interests in the long term. Mark Calabria discussed the new agency in today’s podcast.
Subscribe to the podcast here (RSS) and here (iTunes).
‘Cut, Cap and Balance,’ the Debt Ceiling and Federal Spending
Cato Institute scholars Daniel J. Mitchell and Chris Edwards evaluate the plans offered by Republicans for lowering federal spending using a so-called “Cut, Cap and Balance” proposal that would make small cuts to federal spending in the short run, cap federal spending, and balance the federal budget using a tax-limited balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
‘The Government Would Really Like for You to Have a Wheelchair’
USA Today’s Kelly Kennedy is going to town on Medicare & Medicaid fraud. Today, she writes:
In California, as English-as-a-second-language Medicare recipients line up for other services, a person will approach them in line and “They’ll say, ‘The government would really like for you to have a wheelchair,’” said Julie Schoen, director of special projects for California’s Senior Medicare Patrol. Then, she said, the scammer will take the Medicare recipient to a “clinic” for an exam.
The patient will often receive a wheelchair, but not a motorized wheelchair worth about $3,600 for which Medicare will be billed, Schoen said…
“It’s a big problem,” Schoen said. “The scammers really know how to do it well, but the guy with Parkinson’s who needs a chair has to fight for it.”…
In South Dakota, people fall victim to television ads, said Melissa Wood, program director for Senior Medicare Patrol in South Dakota. The ads show seniors using electric wheelchairs to fish or visit a shopping mall, and tell them that, as Medicare recipients, they qualify for free.
“The people have no idea it’s fraudulent,” Wood said. “I think in the past year or so, it’s picked up because of all the advertisements.”
The scammers also collect people’s Medicare numbers, which they then use fraudulently or sell to another company to use, Wood said.
But never fear. Your trusty public servants are on the job:
The federal government is cracking down on medical-equipment providers who either overcharge Medicare for motorized wheelchairs or obtain them for people who don’t need them, Medicare and Justice Department records show.
Medicare plans to almost triple the number of anti-fraud strike forces it operates nationwide, from seven to 20, U.S. Health and Human Services Department budget documents show.
Almost triple! Too bad fraud experts say Medicare would have to increase its anti-fraud efforts 10- or 20-fold to address fraud in a serious way.
Congress will never do that, of course, because the game is rigged — not just to allow fraud, but to protect fraud.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Interplanetary Greatness Conservatism
My Washington Examiner column this week is on the final flight of the Space Shuttle, and what looks to be the withering away of the manned space program. In 2004, President Bush announced plans for a moonbase and an eventual Mars mission. But last year President Obama effectively cancelled the moonbase, and has exhibited little desire to liberate Mars. That’s good news, I argue:
“We are retiring the shuttle in favor of nothing,” Michael Griffin, Bush’s NASA administrator, wailed to the Washington Post recently.
Here, as usual, “nothing” gets a bad rap. I’ll be “in favor of nothing” until the advocates of federally funded spaceflight can come up with an argument for it that doesn’t make me spray coffee out my nose.
NASA’s Griffin failed that test in 2005, when he gave an interview to the Washington Post insisting it was essential that “Western values” accompany those who eventually “colonize the solar system,” because “we know the kind of society we would get if you, for example, carry Soviet values. That means you want a gulag on Mars. Is that what you’re looking for?”
Well … is it, punk?
When you strip away the few half-hearted “practical” arguments space partisans offer (it turns out that the space program didn’t even give us TANG, by the way) you’re mostly left with sentimental piffle. Listening to some of them, I’m half-tempted to mount a First Amendment challenge to the space program as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
A 2008 report from MIT on “The Future of Human Spaceflight” argued that federal funding was justified as a means to promote “an expansion of human experience, bringing people into new places, situations and environments, expanding and redefining what it means to be human.” Those are *scientists* making that argument. But if your best explanation for why spaceflight is a public good gets into “sweet mystery of life” territory, then maybe you don’t have a very good argument for public funding.
Unfortunately, President Obama didn’t actually kill funding for human spaceflight. We’re now embarked on a public-private partnership, with NASA dollars flowing to companies like Space X. In fact, Obama has publicly pledged to seek slight increases in NASA’s budget.
But whether it’s done via a “government-business partnership” or not, there’s no reason we should be funding manned space exploration at all.
This is another thing President Eisenhower got right, incidentally:
he “would not be willing,” he said, “to spend tax money to send a man around the moon . . . There is such a thing as common sense,” he said, “even in research.” A moon project would be just “a stunt.”
But, since federally funded human spaceflight is a massive, “heroic,” allegedly inspiring but ultimately senseless government crusade, it’s no surprise, I guess, that neoconservatives love it. And nobody loves it more than Charles Krauthammer. Here he is in 2007, waxing rhapsodic about “the music of the spheres.”:
You should feel something when our little species succeeds in establishing new life in a void that for all eternity had been the province of the gods. If you don’t feel that, you are—don’t take this personally—deaf to the music of our time.
Look up, Krauthammer urged spacefans in 2009, after it had become clear that Barack Obama lacked “Kennedy’s enthusiasm” to boldly go, etc. “That is the moon,” Krauthammer declared, and “for the first time in history,” it had become “a nightly rebuke.” This is the burden of the Interplanetary Greatness Conservative: the moon—the very moon!—mocks you.
Personally, I’m deaf to “the music of the spheres.” But I’m all for the efforts of private entrepreneurs who can hear it. If people want to advance space exploration on their own dime and at their own risk, more power to them. And the government should neither help nor hinder them.
This Month at Cato Unbound—What’s Wrong with Expert Predictions
This month’s Cato Unbound looks at the failure of expert forecasting.
When I was very young my father received a book of expert predictions edited by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace, titled simply The Book of Predictions. How’d they do? Awfully.
Virtually no one predicted the peaceful end of the Soviet empire. The next big technology was still outer space, not information. Nuclear war and overpopulation vied with exotic environmental disasters to do us in. Want to print a document? Your computer can do that! Just walk to the end of your street, where you’ll find a device called a “printer.” I’ve kept the book, and I’ve been interested in the failure of expert prediction ever since.
This month at Cato Unbound, experts—sorry, we had to—Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock lay out the evidence against forecasting, along with suggestions for how to improve it. But they conclude that many forms of forecasting, even those that once seemed just on the horizon, will perhaps always remain a dream:
Natural science has discovered in the past half-century that the dream of ever-growing predictive mastery of a deterministic universe may well be just that, a dream. There increasingly appear to be fundamental limits to what we can ever hope to predict. Take the earthquake in Japan. Once upon a time, scientists were confident that as their understanding of geology advanced, so would their ability to predict such disasters. No longer. As with so many natural phenomena, earthquakes are the product of what scientists call “complex systems,” or systems which are more than the sum of their parts. Complex systems are often stable not because there is nothing going on within them but because they contain many dynamic forces pushing against each other in just the right combination to keep everything in place. The stability produced by these interlocking forces can often withstand shocks but even a tiny change in some internal conditional at just the right spot and just the right moment can throw off the internal forces just enough to destabilize the system—and the ground beneath our feet that has been so stable for so long suddenly buckles and heaves in the violent spasm we call an earthquake. Barring new insights that shatter existing paradigms, it will forever be impossible to make time-and-place predictions in such complex systems. The best we can hope to do is get a sense of the probabilities involved. And even that is a tall order.
Human systems like economies are complex systems, with all that entails. And bear in mind that human systems are not made of sand, rock, snowflakes, and the other stuff that behaves so unpredictably in natural systems. They’re made of people: self-aware beings who see, think, talk, and attempt to predict each other’s behavior—and who are continually adapting to each other’s efforts to predict each other’s behavior, adding layer after layer of new calculations and new complexity. All this adds new barriers to accurate prediction.
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