ObamaCare’s ‘Sweetheart Deal’ for PhRMA
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn reports that back in March, IMS Health projected slightly negative revenue growth for the pharmaceutical industry but recently changed that projection to 3.5-percent annual growth from 2008 through 2013.
“What changed?” Cohn asks. “A major factor, according to IMS, was the emerging details of health care reform . . . Put it all together, and you have more demand for name-brand drugs . . . enough to boost revenue significantly.” And:
“If this bill is implemented,” the report concludes on page 138, “an increase in prices on new drugs can be expected.”
How could this be happening? Oh yeah:
That brings us back to the deal that the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, which represents those companies, made with the White House and Senate Finance Committee . . .
The industry agreed to embrace health care reform and, later on, launched a massive advertising campaign to promote the cause. In exchange, the White House and Senate Finance–which had been asking various industries to pledge concessions that would help pay for the cost of coverage expansions–promised not to seek more than $80 in reduced payments to drug makers.
To an industry as big and profitable as the drug makers, giving up $80 billion over ten years wouldn’t seem like much of a sacrifice–a point critics started making right away. But if IMS is right, the drug industry wouldn’t even be giving up $80 billion, in any meaningful sense of the term. If anything, it’d be making more money. Maybe quite a lot of it.
Which is what I predicted, both here and here.
Cohn concludes, “the drug industry has enormous leverage in Congress.” But Cohn still supports the president’s health care takeover. Or is it PhRMA’s health care takeover?
Filed under: General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Health Care: Not Close to Over
The fat lady hasn’t even started to warm up yet.
The narrow 220-215 victory in the House on Saturday night was a step forward on the road to a government takeover of the health care system. But as close and dramatic as that vote was, that was the easy part. The Senate must still pass its version of reform—which will not be the bill that just passed the House. Nancy Pelosi was, after all, able to lose the votes of 39 moderate Democrats. Harry Reid cannot afford to lose even one. A conference committee must reconcile the two vastly different versions. And then, Pelosi must hold together her 3 vote margin of victory (if it gets that far). Yet several House Democrats who voted for the bill on Saturday said they did so only to “advance the process.” Their vote is far from guaranteed on final passage. And, House liberals are almost certain to be disappointed by the more moderate bill that may emerge from the conference.
Among the more contentious issues:
Individual Mandate: This should’ve been low-hanging fruit. Democrats agreed on a mandate early in the process. But it became increasingly plain that a mandate would hit those with insurance as well as the uninsured — forcing people who are happy with their plan to switch to a different, possibly more expensive plan. With this mandate now being seen as a middle-class tax hike, qualms have developed. The House bill contains a strict mandate, with penalties of 2.5 percent of income backed up by up to five years in jail. The Senate Finance Committee, on the other hand, watered down the mandate’s penalties and delayed the mandates implementation.
Employer Mandate: The House bill also contains an employer mandate, a requirement that all but the smallest employers provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty tax of up to 8 percent of payroll. The Senate, looking at unemployment rates over 10 percent, seems unlikely to include an employer mandate.
The Public Option: The House included, if not a “robust” public option, at least a semi-robust one. But moderate Democrats in the Senate are clearly not on board. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) says that he will join a Republican filibuster if the public option is included. Harry Reid is trying various permutations: a trigger, an opt-in, an opt-out. But as of now there is not 60 votes for any variation.
The Sheer Cost: Fiscal hawks like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) say they will not support a bill that adds to the deficit or spends too much. But the house bill cost a minimum of $1.2 trillion.
Taxes: The House plan to add a surtax on incomes of $500,000 or more a year has no support in the Senate. At the same time, the Senate plan to slap a 40 percent excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans is unacceptable to key Democratic constituencies like labor unions.
Abortion: Conservative Democrats insisted on a strict prohibition on the use of government funds for abortion. The bill could not have passed without the inclusion of that provision. House liberal swallowed hard and voted for the bill, despite what they called “a poison pill” anyway with the expectation that it will be removed later. If the final bill includes the prohibition at least a couple liberals could defect. If it doesn’t, conservative Democrats won’t be on board.
Immigration: The Senate Finance Committee included a provision barring illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance through the government-run Exchange. The House Hispanic Caucus says that if that provision is in the final bill, they will vote against it.
As if these disagreements among Democrats wasn’t bad enough, public opinion is now turning against the bill.
President Obama has called for a bill to be on his desk before Christmas—the latest in a series of deadline that are so far unmet. It is hard to see how Congress can meet this one either. The Senate has not yet received CBO scoring of its bill and is not prepared to even begin debate until next week at the earliest. That debate will last 3-4 weeks minimum, assuming there are 60 votes for cloture. That means, the bill cant’ go to conference committee until mid-December, even if everything breaks the way Harry Reid wants. Privately, Democrats are now suggesting late January, before the State of the Union address, is the best they can do.
The fat lady can go back to sleep—this isn’t over yet.
Crist and Cato
Florida’s airwaves are alive with the sound of Governor Charlie Crist’s radio advertisement trumpeting his grade of “A” on Cato’s “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.”
I am pleased that Gov. Crist values Cato’s ratings because we work hard to make them accurate and nonpartisan. But the radio ad is making many fiscally conservative Floridians scratch their heads because of the governor’s recent policy actions.
The governor earned his Cato grade in last year’s report mainly because of his large property tax cuts and moderate spending approach. The grade was based purely on quantitative data on revenues, general fund spending, and tax rate changes.
However, since I wrote the report in mid-2008, the governor seems to have fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse.
In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal “stimulus” money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases.
About $1 billion of the tax increases are on cigarette consumers, which will particularly harm moderate-income families. The rest of the increases are in the form of higher costs for often mandatory services, such as automobile registration, which is really just a sneaky form of tax increases.
These tax increases will be particularly painful to Floridians in the short-term because of the recession. But Crist has also jeopardized the state’s long-term finances with his expanded subsidies for hurricane insurance. Hurricanes are a major challenge in Florida, but giving big subsidies to coastal property owners, driving private insurers out of the state, and guaranteeing a massive state bailout when the next hurricane hits strikes me as the height of fiscally irresponsibility.
More on the Crist campaign here.
One Nation Under Double Jeopardy
The Senate is about to vote on Defense Department funding with an expanded federal “hate crimes” bill. This well-intentioned piece of legislation threatens to make violations of the fundamental right against Double Jeopardy a routine practice, as federal courts will now have the power to re-prosecute defendants for what are traditionally state crimes.
The House removed language that the Senate put in place to ensure that the “hate crimes” provisions did not stretch to encompass free speech, threatening to attach criminal liability to core rights of free expression.
This expansion of federal jurisdiction guarantees that high profile cases will be retried until a guilty verdict is obtained to satisfy political factions. This politicization of justice will only harm our courts and our freedoms. The Senate should vote down this threat to the fundamental rights of all Americans.
Now for some quick background reading:
- “Welcome to the new age of Double Jeopardy.”
- Why hate-crime legislation won’t work.
- Podcast: How hate-crime legislation undermines federalism.
Parsing Pelosi: House Health Takeover Would Cost around $2.25 Trillion
Just like the Senate Finance Committee’s government takeover, the House of Representatives’ government takeover hides more than half of its cost by pushing those costs off the government’s budget and onto the private sector.
So when Speaker Pelosi says the House bill would cost under $900 billion, what she actually means is that it would cost around $2.25 trillion.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
House Democrats Choose Dishonesty
I’m not a fan of the House Democrats’ proposed takeover of the health care sector. (If there’s one thing that legislation is not, it’s “reform.”) But at least House Democrats were honest enough to include the cost of the $245 billion bump in Medicare physician payments in their legislation, unlike some committee chairmen I could mention.
Unfortunately, House Democrats have since decided that dishonesty is the better strategy. They, like Senate Democrats, now plan to strip that additional Medicare spending out of health “reform” and enact it separately. (Democrats are already trying to exempt that spending from pay-as-you-go rules, making it easier for them to expand our record federal deficits.) Why enact it separately? Because excising that spending from the “reform” legislation reduces the cost of health “reform”!
But why stop there? Heck, enact all the new spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would plummet! Enact the new Medicaid spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would fall by $438 billion! Do it with the subsidies to private health insurance companies, and the cost of “reform” would plunge by $773 billion! All that would be left of “reform” would be tax increases and Medicare payment cuts. Health “reform” would dramatically reduce federal deficits! Huzzah!
Except it wouldn’t, because at the end of the day Congress would be spending the same amount of money.
The only good news may be this. If this dishonest budget gimmick succeeds, then Congress will have “fixed” Medicare’s physician payments. Absent that “must pass” legislation, the Democrats health care takeover would lose momentum, and would have to stand on its own merit. That would be good for the Republic, though not for the legislation.
(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Broder: Health Overhaul Likely, Because Hardest Part Lies Ahead
Yes, you read that right. And I had to do the same sort of double-take when I read David Broder’s op-ed in The Washington Post this morning.
Broder writes, “Obama has steered the enterprise to the point that odds now favor a bill-signing ceremony. But the hardest choices still lie ahead….” Whaa?? How can the odds be better than 50-50 if the biggest fights haven’t even happened yet?
Broder’s optimism continues, “Two things will be needed to reach [a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate]: first, a plausible plan for making affordable and comprehensive health insurance available to millions…. And second, a way of financing the coverage….” But that’s been the whole challenge all along. Is Broder actually acknowledging that Democrats aren’t any closer to a signing ceremony than they were six months ago?
Broder says Democrats can meet the second challenge by taxing high-cost health plans — “a step that would require Obama to face down his labor union allies.” You mean Obama should lean on Democrats to tax a crucial part of their own base? One that’s already activating to block that tax?
Broder also thinks Obama should lean on his fellow Democrats to roll the doctors and hospitals in their states/districts by including more (some? any?) “delivery system reforms” in the legislation.
Sure. No problem. What could go wrong? This is practically a done deal.
(Cross-posted, sarcasm and all, at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
Three Irrefutable Facts About the Baucus Bill
The Senate Finance Committee votes today on Senator Max Baucus’ version of the health care bill. Cato health care experts have analyzed the bill thoroughly, and point out three vital components to the cost and reach of the legislation:
1) The real cost of the bill is in excess of $2 trillion.
Chairman Max Baucus hoodwinked the CBO with a number of clever budgetary gimmicks, most notably by keeping about half of the cost off the federal books. The bill also assumes Congress will make cuts to Medicare payments, which has never once happened before.
2) The bill contains an enormous middle-class tax hike.
The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for a family plan. Insurers would almost certainly pass this tax on to consumers via higher premiums. As inflation pushes insurance premiums higher in coming years, more and more middle-class families will find themselves caught up in the tax — providing the government with more revenue.
3) The bill creates a national ID program.
The bill contains a paragraph explicitly addressing “eligibility verification.” You must prove who you are to federal entitlement agencies in order to qualify for the bill’s “state exchanges” and tax credits. No ID, no benefits.
Wednesday Links – Health Care Costs
The Congressional Budget Office released a report this week that revealed that the proposed health care bill would not increase the deficit. But is it that simple? Cato health care policy experts have examined the bill and added up the costs. Here are a few things they have found:
- Congress has been cooking the books: “When it comes to the health care reform debate…honest budgeting is nowhere to be seen.”
- Costs will only decrease if we give market forces room to breathe.
- How some in Congress are hiding the true costs of the health care overhaul.
- Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It
If You Can’t Trust a Spy, Who Can You Trust?
As I noted last week, it looks like top Democrats in the Senate are folding on even fairly mild PATRIOT Act reform for fear of disrupting ongoing investigations—and in particular a “sensitive collection program” involving Section 215 “tangible things” orders. The impulse to defer to executive branch claims of necessity is powerful, and even understandable, but it ought to be resisted. We normally impose neutral magistrates between law officers and search warrants precisely because we understand that the investigators, precisely because of the admirable vigor and single-mindedness we want and expect from them, are not necessarily the best judges of how much power they require. The classic “not enough power” story used to justify the so-called “lone wolf” provision turned out not to hold up under scrutiny, but as I was mulling the current debate, I suddenly remembered a curious story from my days as a tech journalist.
In July of 2005, the Bureau was investigating Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a one-time associate of the men who had recently bombed London’s public transit system. (It was soon determined that el-Nashar had not been involved in the plot.) According to a 2007 summary of the investigation, an agent was sent with a grand jury subpoena to recover records from North Carolina State University at Raleigh on July 13.
But then, it appears, something odd happened.”After receiving the subpoena,” the documents recount, the agent “served the subpoena and had some records in hand when he received a call” from his supervisor, who “had been notified by FBIHQ… that we were not to utilize a Grand Jury subpoena and that we must obtain a National Security Letter (NSL).” The agent apparently returned the records (though there appears to be some confusion about whether the agent had actually finished serving the subpoena), and the Bureau’s Charlotte office got to work drafting an NSL.
That was an exceedingly odd thing to do, because the law is totally unambiguous about the kinds of records and institutions that are subject to National Security Letters. And while they’re extraordinarily broad tools, anyone even passingly familiar with them should know they don’t apply to educational records. The school’s lawyers, doubtless perplexed about why they were getting an invalid request for records they’d already happily turned over, nevertheless properly refused to honor the illicit NSL. Agents are supposed to voluntarily report any improper NSL requests, even accidental ones, to an oversight board within 14 days. This one, for some reason, took over a year to make its way up the chain. And yet within a week of the event, FBI Director Robert Mueller was conspicuously well informed about the little mishap with el-Nashar’s school records:
A July 21 e-mail to the North Carolina office explained: “The director would like to use this as an example tomorrow as to why we need administrative subpoenas’s [sic] to fight the war on terror. In particular, he would like to know how much extra time was spent having to get the Grand Jury subpoena.”
So to review, a legally proper request is issued, the records sought are in hand, when suddenly the call comes down to give them back and use an obviously inappropriate NSL request, costing several days. The head of the bureau is instantly aware of this—though apparently not of the flagrant impropriety—and eager to cite it as evidence that, of course, investigators need more power or their vital efforts to protect us from terrorists will be stymied.
Now, I’m happy to suppose that the initial mix-up was just an honest mistake. But it also very clearly wasn’t evidence to cite in favor of the proposition that the Bureau needed broader powers. Yet nobody, at the time—neither Mueller nor the legislators before whom he testified—seemed to have the time or inclination to get particular about the facts. It was, for the purposes of all concerned, one of those stories that’s “too good to check.” Now that it has been checked, it’s a story to bear in mind when the boys at Justice cry “necessity.”
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Incredibly Mild PATRIOT Reform too Much for Dems
At hearings last week on reform and renewal of parts of the PATRIOT Act, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) made a big show of reading the full text of the Fourth Amendment to Assistant Attorney General David Kris (who, just going out on a limb, had probably seen it). On Thursday, a notably less vocal Franken joined his a bipartisan majority of his Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues in a lopsided vote that torpedoed even the most modest of proposals to introduce elementary civil liberties safeguards into the USA PATRIOT Act.
As I noted in a post earlier this week, there were two main reform proposals on the table: An impressively comprehensive and careful one floated by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and a much more limited one from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that nevertheless would have tightened the rules to require that so-called “pen/trap” surveillance and broad “section 215″ orders for private records only target individuals with at least some plausible connection to terrorists or terrorism. Some of us had nourished a foolish hope that the Committee might see fit to incorporate some of the most important elements of Feingold’s reform into the Leahy bill. Instead, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) swooped in at the last minute with substitute legislation that stripped away even the mild but important limitations that were already there. There’s a single bizarre exception for records obtained from libraries, presumably because librarians have long been at the forefront of opposition to PATRIOT and section 215 authority, where the higher standard obtains. So if you surf the Web or check out books from your public library, your activities enjoy greater privacy protection than when you surf the web or order books off Amazon from your home or workplace.
The rationale for this was the fear, articulated by Feinstein, that a higher standard might interfere with an important “ongoing investigation.” First, it should be a little distressing if the current investigative methods in use would be utterly disrupted without the ability to broadly acquire records that don’t pertain to terrorists, nor to suspected activities of terrorists, nor even to people directly in contact with suspected terrorists. Second, even granting that it might be better not to change the rules for investigations currently underway, this explanation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The authority under 215 to compel the production of records or other “tangible things” (a blood or DNA sample from your doctor’s office, say) has always had a built-in expiration or “sunset” date, which all the proposals under consideration would have extended for another four years. But the sunset provisions have always included a grandfather clause, allowing the new PATRIOT powers and standards to remain in place for ongoing investigations, even as they expired for new investigations. There’s no reason a similar clause couldn’t have been added to Leahy’s reforms in order to avoid disrupting searches already underway. Finally, Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake has a guess as to what that “ongoing investigation” entailed, and without going into great detail, it sounds like a sufficiently narrowly tailored order probably should have been available for the kind of investigation Wheeler envisions even under the more stringent standard Leahy had proposed. Back in 2005, incidentally, those slightly stricter standards had won the unanimous acceptance of the Judiciary Committee—so apparent we’ve achieved Change in the level of concern for civil liberties, albeit maybe not the sort for which some of us had Hoped.
But wait, it gets worse.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
The Seat-Warming Senate
With Gov. Deval Patrick’s appointment of longtime Kennedy courtier Paul Kirk to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate, there are now at least three close aides holding on to Senate seats while their states go through the formality of an election. The governor of Delaware appointed Joe Biden’s longtime friend and former chief of staff to fill the rest of his term in the Senate. Can you name him? It is generally thought that he is obligingly holding on to the seat until Biden’s son Beau gets back from National Guard service and is able to run to succeed his father. And in Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist named his former chief of staff to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez until the 2010 election in which Crist is running for the seat. There are more seat-fillers in the Senate than at the Oscars.
Of course, Kennedy himself took his seat when he attained the age of 30, after it was kept warm for him by family retainer Benjamin A. Smith III.
Meanwhile, as of 2005 there were 18 senators who gained office at least partly through their family ties – sons, daughters, wives, nephews of former senators, governors, presidents, and so on.
The Founders envisioned the Senate as an assembly of wise and accomplished men, chosen for their experience and judiciousness. Political campaigns that favor the handsome, the glib, the panderers, and the best fundraisers are bad enough. But a Senate full of legacies and seat-warmers is especially unfortunate.
Transparent Health Care Legislating?
Will Americans get “quality time” with proposed health care legislation before it passes?
Some say no: The Senate Finance Committee recently turned back an effort to put Chairman Max Baucus’ bill online for 72 hours before the committee’s vote. The Committee is on the wrong side of history.
Transparency shifts power away from the center, so it’s favored by those out of power. It’s no wonder that Republican representative John Culberson, a member of the minority party, is putting H.R. 3400 (a significant health care bill) online for comment, using a tool called SharedBook.
Transparency won’t be a gift from government. It is something we have to take. That’s why I think the action lies in private efforts like OpenCongress, GovTrack, and (my own) WashingtonWatch.com. (Links are to sites’ H.R. 3400 pages.)
The public has a way of conforming their expectations to what’s possible, and transparent law-making is entirely possible today. Closed processes like the Senate Finance Committee’s consideration of health care legislation will not satisfy the public, and it will emerge from the committee with one strike against it irrespective of the merits.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
“Law” in Massachusetts
Wouldn’t it save time if the Massachusetts legislature would just pass a law saying that if the governor is a Democrat, he fills any Senate vacancy, while if the governor is a Republican, a special election must be held?
A Chance to Fix the PATRIOT Act?
As Tim Lynch noted earlier this week, Barack Obama’s justice department has come out in favor of renewing three controversial PATRIOT Act provisions—on face another in a train of disappointments for anyone who’d hoped some of those broad executive branch surveillance powers might depart with the Bush administration.
But there is a potential silver lining: In the letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) making the case for renewal, the Justice Department also declares its openness to “modifications” of those provisions designed to provide checks and balances, provided they don’t undermine investigations. While the popular press has always framed the fight as being “supporters” and “opponents” of the PATRIOT Act, the problem with many of the law’s provisions is not that the powers they grant are inherently awful, but that they lack necessary constraints and oversight mechanisms.
Consider the much-contested “roving wiretap” provision allowing warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to cover all the communications devices a target might use without specifying the facilities to be monitored in advance—at least in cases where there are specific facts supporting the belief that a target is likely to take measures to thwart traditional surveillance. The objection to this provision is not that intelligence officers should never be allowed to obtain roving warrants, which also exist in the law governing ordinary law enforcement wiretaps. The issue is that FISA is fairly loosey-goosey about the specification of “targets”—they can be described rather than identified. That flexibility may make some sense in the foreign intel context, but when you combine it with similar flexibility in the specification of the facility to be monitored, you get something that looks a heck of a lot like a general warrant. It’s one thing to say “we have evidence this particular phone line and e-mail account are being used by terrorists, though we don’t know who they are” or “we have evidence this person is a terrorist, but he keeps changing phones.” It’s another—and should not be possible—to mock traditional particularity requirements by obtaining a warrant to tap someone on some line, to be determined. FISA warrants should “rove” over persons or facilities, but never both.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Czar of All the Americans
Anger about Obama’s many “czars” is rising, reports the Washington Post:
On paper, they are special advisers, chairmen of White House boards, special envoys and Cabinet agency deputies, asked by the president to guide high-priority initiatives. But critics call them “czars” whose powers are not subject to congressional oversight, and their increasing numbers have become a flash point for conservative anger at President Obama.
Critics of the proliferation of czars say the White House uses the appointments to circumvent the normal vetting process required for Senate confirmation and to avoid congressional oversight.
I have tended not to take concern over “czars” very seriously. After all, advisers to the president can’t exercise any power that the president doesn’t have (or assume without response from Congress or the courts). And I figured the White House doesn’t call people “czars,” that’s just a media term, so it’s not really fair to blame the White House for what reporters say.
But then, thanks to crack Cato intern Miles Pope, I discovered that the White House does call its czars czars, at least informally. A few examples:
In an interview on April 15, 2009 Obama said, “The goal of the border czar is to help coordinate all the various agencies that fall under the Department of Homeland Security…”
In a March 11, 2009, briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs turned to “address the czar question for a minute, because I think I’ve been asked in this room any number of times if the czars in our White House to deal with energy and health care had too much power.”
On March 11, 2009 Vice President Biden said, “Today I’m pleased to announce that President Obama has nominated as Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy — our nation’s drug czar — Gil Kerlikowske…”
More examples here.
So they do like czar imagery. So have at them, critics.
And while I said that the advisers have no real power, there’s at least one who does — a real czar — the “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. He “has sole discretion to set compensation for the top 25 employees” of large companies receiving bailouts, and his “decisions won’t be subject to appeal.” Now that’s a czar.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
New Senate Agriculture Committee Head Received Farm Subsidies
In his blog post yesterday — appropriately entitled “Congressional Conflict of Interest“ — my colleague Chris Edwards questioned the selection of Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) to head the Senate Agriculture Committee:
Lincoln has been “a tireless advocate for the Arkansas rice industry’ and a ‘champion for agriculture.” You can see what 20 or so other agriculture lobby groups say about Lincoln here. These are very laudatory remarks, but what about the taxpayers? What do taxpayers think about her support for the $20 billion or so in annual giveaways to farmers?
I wonder what taxpayers think about the fact that Senator Lincoln and her family have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidies?
From a 2007 USA Today article:
Members of Congress must report sources of income totaling more than $200, but most get payments through partnerships or other entities, so it can be difficult to learn which ones receive the subsidies. Recipients are searchable by name on www.ewg.org, but, for example, payments to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., are listed under her maiden name, Lambert, at a Virginia address near Washington. Records show Lincoln and her family members collected $715,000 from 1995-2005, the most recent year complete data are available. She said she personally received less than $10,000 a year, and the subsidies ended in 2005 when her land was sold.
Let’s say I force a stranger under threat of imprisonment or violence to part with part of his or her paycheck, and proceed to give that money to a friend. I would rightly be labeled a thief or worse. Suppose I not only gave the money to my friend, but kept a cut for me and my family. That would be even worse.
But when politicians do it we call them “public servants”?
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
A Harsh Climate for Trade
Although it has very much taken a back-seat to health care, and a press report [$] today say it could be bumped down yet another notch on the administration’s hierarchy of goals, climate change is shaping up to be a major battle if the others don’t prove to be prohibitively exhausting. So today I am weighing in on the debate by releasing my new paper on the dangers of using trade measures as a tool of climate policy.
The Democrats were keen to pass a climate change bill in advance of the December meeting in Copenhagen designed to agree on a successor regime to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. However, opposition from a number of quarters and the fear of health-care-town-halls-mark-II has cooled their heels. Senate leaders have pushed back the deadline for passing bills out of committees a number of times.
The reason why climate change legislation has become so controversial is that businesses and consumers are, quite understandably, fearful about any policies that threaten to increase their costs. I’ll leave it to others to blog about the effect of emissions-reductions policies on jobs and profits, but even the fear of losses has led to calls for special deals for “vulnerable industries”, in the form of free emission permits and/or protection from imports that are sourced from countries that purportedly take insufficient steps to limit emissions.
H.R. 2454, the so called Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House in June, contains both free permits and provisions for carbon tariffs. I’ve blogged before about the efforts of trade-skeptic senators to introduce the same kinds of protections in the senate bill. To that end, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D, OH) is reportedly meeting with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee next week about trade protections for manufacturing industries. As my paper makes clear, I think these efforts are misguidedly ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.
I’m looking forward to discussing these issues in more detail tomorrow at a Hill briefing in Washington DC. Registration for the event was closed very early because of overwhelming demand, but you can watch the event when the video becomes available on the Cato website.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Trade and Immigration
Then Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
According to CNS News:
In a sign that intra-party negotiations continue to drag on, [House Democratic Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer [MD] declared that no single provision was sacred, not even President Obama’s coveted government-run “public option” plan.
“I want to see the Senate give its proposal so that in September we can contribute to having a conference that’s productive and results in health care reform,” said Hoyer. “I don’t think there’s any specific item that is absolutely essential to reform.”
You can say that again.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Obama the Uniter
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), commenting on President Obama’s health plan: “The only thing bipartisan about the measure so far is the opposition to it.”
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on YouTube
Cato Tweets