Archive for the ‘Regulatory Studies’ Category
Cannon’s Second Rule of Economic Literacy
…appears at the end of this a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:
After quoting a scholar who expresses the economic consensus that the rising cost of employer-purchased health benefits “means lower wages and salaries,” “New study shows health insurance premium spikes in every state” [Nov. 17] immediately contradicts that consensus by stating, “employers are attempting to shift health costs onto their workers” by “asking employees to shoulder a larger share of the premium.”
If workers bear the cost of employer-paid health benefits in the form of lower wages and salaries, then increasing the employee-paid portion of the premium is not a cost-shift. Workers would have borne those costs either way.
Employers cannot shift to workers a cost that workers already bear.
‘The Dangerous Gym Membership’?
Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:
“The dangerous gym membership” [Jan. 12] claims that in Medicare Advantage, “advertising a plan as the go-to health insurance source for marathoners could lure in a healthier subscriber base, disrupting the rest of the market place in the process.” Oh?
Does it disrupt the market for sneakers when running shops advertise themselves to marathoners? Since when does giving consumers something they want disrupt the market? That’s why markets exist.
What’s disrupting the market for seniors’ health insurance is government—in this case, Congress’ counter-productive attempt to cross-subsidize the sick via price controls that forbid carriers to consider each applicant’s risk when offering and pricing health insurance.
‘Professor Cornpone: Ethanol Lobbyist Newt Gingrich—and the Future of the GOP’
The title is from a Wall Street Journal editorial in January of 2011. I commented on Gingrich’s response to that editorial in the following excerpt from a chapter I wrote for a recently published book by Robert E. Looney, ed., Handbook of Oil Politics, Routledge (2012):
Even if draconian belt-tightening by U.S. motorists could significantly reduce the world price of oil (which is highly doubtful), the benefits of cheaper oil would by definition accrue to other countries. If the U.S. allowed its own industries and consumers to benefit from the supposed drop in world oil prices (as a result of breaking the oil cartel), that would undo the effort to cut imports. Most petroleum consumed in the U.S. is not used by passenger cars and demand for petroleum among commercial, industrial and non-auto transportation sectors would rise if any induced reduction in the world oil price was allowed to be matched by a lower domestic oil price (rather than being offset by taxes or rationing).
Consider the protectionists’ old idea that money spent on buying something useful from another country is just lost to the U.S. economy, so we would be much better off buying everything close to home (regardless what it costs, though they never say that).
Attempting to defend ethanol subsidies and mandates, for example, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wrote, ‘It is in this country’s long-term best interest to stop the flow of $1 billion a day overseas. . . . Think of what $1 billion a day kept in the U.S. economy creating jobs, especially energy jobs which cannot be outsourced, could do.’ That is, of course, a totally false choice. Apologists for subsidies and mandates are not proposing to pay the same price for domestic fuel as we could otherwise pay for an energy-equivalent amount of imported oil – replacing $1 billion of imported fuel with $1 billion of domestic fuel. They are talking about paying much more for domestic fuel than we pay for imported oil. Why else would they be asking for subsidies, tariffs and mandates?
Paying much more for something as important as energy, whether directly or through taxes, makes an economy poorer, and being poorer is no way to create ‘green jobs.’ Money wasted on something like ethanol which politicians favor is money that could otherwise have been spent on something else that consumers favor.
Headline of the Week: “Consumer Chief Richard Cordray Promises Not to Abuse His Power”
From the Los Angeles Times.
It works on so many levels.
The President’s Spilled-Milk Joke
One of President Obama’s better applause lines the other night came when he stepped into the unaccustomed public role of a deregulator:
We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.
I will note for the record that we had made a bit of a hobbyhorse of EPA’s dairy-oil-spill controls, taking note of them in no fewer than four posts as the sort of regulatory overkill the Obama administration should disavow. House Republicans complain that the president is now putting himself at the head of someone else’s parade, since their members had long urged repeal of the rules and the Obama EPA under administrator Lisa Jackson had dragged its heels about going along. But I’m not going to complain. The ability to get out in front of the other side’s parades served President Bill Clinton well, and I just wish President Obama would use it more often.
When Government Is The False Advertiser, Cont’d
Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City health department has come in for repeated criticism in this space and elsewhere for crusading against salty and fattening foods through ad campaigns that manipulate viewer reactions in ways that border on the misleading and deceptive (“What can we get away with?” famously asked one official). They’re at it again. On January 9, Gotham’s for-your-own-good crew unveiled a new ad warning “Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations,” dramatically illustrated with a photo of an obese man with a stump where his leg had been. But as the New York Times reports, city officials “did not let on that the man shown — whose photo came from a company that supplies stock images to advertising firms and others — was not an amputee and may not have had diabetes.” Instead, they just Photoshopped his leg off, which certainly got the effect they were looking for, albeit at the cost of photographic reality. At an agency developing an ad campaign for a private company, someone might have advised adding a little fine print taking note that the picture was of a model and had been altered, lest the manipulation turn into the story itself, or even attract the interest of federal truth-in-advertising regulators. But the Bloomberg crew probably isn’t worried about the latter, given that their constant stream of hectic propaganda is fueled by generous grants from the federal government itself. Such grants also helped enable a contemplated booze crackdown exposed by the New York Post this month—quickly backed off from after a public outcry—that would have sought to reduce the number of establishments selling alcohol in New York City.
While on the topic of nannyism, the Times also reported this week that Penn State researchers found that the fad for banning so-called junk food in schools had no apparent effect: “No matter how the researchers looked at the data, they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where sweets and salty snacks were available.” Number of “food policy” types quoted in the article admitting “maybe we were wrong”: zero.
Let’s Regulate Harder. That’ll Provide More Jobs For Young Law Grads!
No, legal academics don’t usually come right out and say this, but Hazel Weiser, executive director of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), did say it as part of a discussion of the woes of new law graduates in a slow hiring market:
Rather than deregulate the legal profession, which is notoriously bad at self-policing, the best way to get more jobs for these unemployed recent graduates is to up regulation, not do away with it. Another op ed piece, “It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid” dated October 25, 2011, by James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers, puts it perfectly: “…private investment — that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.” Government spending means regulation as well as bridges and tunnels. Let’s hire these young attorneys to enforce the laws of the land!
In a similar vein, note this blog post by University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos, a leading disabled-rights expert who served in the Obama administration until last year as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, the number two official in the Civil Rights Division. Commenting on a report that the city of Mobile, Alabama, was preparing to spend $146,000 to comply with new federal rules governing its public swimming pools, Prof. Bagenstos ran the item under the headline “New ADA Regs: Job Creators.” (Update: It was a joke, he says.)
Next time you read about some daffy new idea out of Washington, keep in mind that there’s a whole school of thought out there that, faced with a choice between a mild and a stringent regulatory option, imagines that by going with the more stringent Washington can create more jobs. It explains a lot.
One Way to Get Around Courtroom Camera Ban
Ohio TV station WOIO is re-enacting highlights of a local corruption trial with puppets (cross-posted from Overlawyered).
If the ‘Volcker Rule’ Is So Great, Why Exempt Treasuries and Agencies?
One of the more controversial provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act is its restrictions on proprietary trading, contained in Section 619. Setting aside the fact that even Paul Volcker has said the provision would have done little to avoid to the recent crisis, the Act’s various exemptions illustrate the confusion and hypocrisy underlying the rule.
Foremost among these exemptions is the allowance of proprietary trading when the financial instrument in question is either a U.S. Treasury bill/bond or a security issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These instruments are actually the bulk of proprietary trading. Remember the failed hedge fund Long Term Capital Management? Their signature trade was arbitraging on-the-run and off-the-run Treasuries. Ever hear of Bear Stearns? The largest single asset in Maiden Lane I, those Bear Stearn assets guaranteed by the New York Federal Reserve, were Fannie and Freddie securities.
Countries around the World, such as Japan and Canada, have already raised concerns that if their government debt is subject to the Volcker rule, the result will be less liquidity and higher funding costs. But then one has to suspect that former senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) understood this, as they allowed an exemption for Treasuries and Agencies (Fannie/Freddie). While I’m no expert on trade policy, this may very well raise World Trade Organization questions since the Volcker rule, as proposed, favors U.S. debt over foreign debt. Of greater concern should be that the Volcker rule favors non-productive investment, that of the U.S. government and Fannie/Freddie, over productive investment, such as corporate paper.
As in so many other areas, Dodd-Frank does leave the actual decision-making to the bank regulators. (Is it too much to ask Congress to actually legislate?) Section 619 is very clear that regulators may exempt Treasuries and Agencies, which implies they also may not. The first best solution would be to just scrap the Volcker rule, but if we are going to have it, then apply it to everyone and all asset classes. Otherwise, one is just introducing additional distortions into our financial markets, some of the same distortions that actually lead to the financial crisis.
Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy
Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.
That said, I remain a bit amazed that it’s become an indisputable premise in Washington that there’s an enormous piracy problem, that it’s having a devastating impact on U.S. content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole,” our legislative class has somehow determined that—among all the dire challenges now facing the United States—this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it. But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm—that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs—that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO’s warning in mind, the data we do have doesn’t remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.
The International Intellectual Property Alliance—a kind of meta-trade association for all the content industries, and a zealous prophet of the piracy apocalypse, released a report back in November meant to establish that copyright industries are so economically valuable that they merit more vigorous government protection. But it actually paints a picture of industries that, far from being “killed” by piracy, are already weathering a harsh economic climate better than most, and have far outperformed the overall U.S. economy through the current recession. The “core copyright industries” have, unsurprisingly, shed some jobs over the past few years, but again, compared with the rest of the economy, employment seems to have held relatively stable at a time when you might expect cash-strapped consumers to be turning to piracy to save money.
Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to find an effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the U.S. market.
So, for instance, Nielsen SoundScan data shows new album releases stood at 35,516 in 2000, peaked at 106,000 in 2008, and (amidst a general recession) fell back to mid-decade levels of about 75,000 for 2010. That’s against a general background of falling sales since 2004—mostly explained by factors unrelated to piracy—which finally seems to have reversed in 2011. The actual picture is probably somewhat better than that, because SoundScan data are markedly incomplete when it comes to the releases by indie artists who’ve benefited most from the rise of digital distribution.
Bryan Caplan Rates Jonathan Gruber’s ObamaCare Graphic Novel ‘Awful’
Over at EconLog:
Given my interest in health economics and graphic novels, I was initially hopeful about Jonathan Gruber‘s graphic novel, entitled Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works. But in all honesty, the book is awful. Gruber crafts his argument like a salesman, not an economic educator. He’s careful to avoid outright mistakes, and makes a couple of awkward disclosures. Yet he omits a long list of crucial, damaging points.
Caplan discusses 13 of them.
EEOC: Hiring Only High School Grads May Violate ADA
You may have taken time off from work last month, but the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was quite busy. As the Bureau of National Affairs and the Washington Times report, it posted to its website an informal advisory letter that has been getting a lot of businesspeople’s attention. To quote the BNA:
“[I]f an employer adopts a high school diploma requirement for a job, and that requirement ‘screens out’ an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA’s definition of ‘disability,’ the employer may not apply the standard unless it can demonstrate that the diploma requirement is job related and consistent with business necessity. The employer will not be able to make this showing, for example, if the functions in question can easily be performed by someone who does not have a diploma,” EEOC said.
Further, to satisfy the ADA, the employer must show that a job applicant with a disability cannot perform the job’s essential functions with or without a reasonable accommodation, even if he or she does not meet a standard that is job-related and consistent with business necessity, the commission added.
Employers require high school diplomas as prerequisites for many jobs. Yet if the matter gets to court, it can be quite expensive and cumbersome for them to establish that such a screen is “job related and consistent with business necessity” — necessity being of course a legal term of art.
Some suggest the policy is not all that new or special since the EEOC has long taken the position that diploma requirements must be “job related and consistent with business necessity” if they serve to screen out members of minority groups less likely to have graduated from high school. But diploma requirements aren’t actually challenged very often on racial-impact grounds, perhaps because correlations between ethnicity and high school graduation rates are shifting and contingent. The new wrinkle this time — that the protected group are the learning-disabled themselves — makes a big difference. The diploma’s very purpose, after all, is to signal that its holder has achieved a level of proficiency that some with severe learning disability will find forever out of their reach.
“If I were hiring a janitor,” notes columnist Amy Alkon, “I’d need that janitor to be able to read the back of bottles of chemicals.” But it’s growing ever clearer that the point of the game is to attack employers precisely for wanting to hire candidates of ability.
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