Fort Hood and Political Correctness
This morning, Politico Arena asks:
The Fort Hood tragedy: Why does it matter, or not, what we call it? Is it being politicized?
My response:
If we want to be technical, what we call the Fort Hood massacre matters, and James Taranto got it right in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: It was not a terrorist attack, targeting noncombatants, but an act of guerrilla warfare, carried out by one of our own in apparent contact with the enemy, and hence an act of treason.
But the deeper and far larger problem is why the Army didn’t act sooner against this man and, even more, why it is, as Dorothy Rabinowitz put it in yesterday’s Journal, that “the tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace.” After all, it is not as if “the Hasan problem,” richly detailed elsewhere, were unknown to the Army. So why was nothing done? We all know why. It was stated simply in an NPR report yesterday: “A key official on a [Walter Reed] review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim.” If this isn’t ”political correctness,” nothing is.
And it goes beyond the naive analyses that say we can do nothing about these kinds of problems. It infects our very culture, from the newsroom to the college campus and far beyond, crippling sound analysis and judgment. We learn just this morning, for example, again in the Journal, that the FBI may not have briefed the Army, or done so sufficiently (it’s unclear), about Hasan’s intercepted emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni imam. There may have been intelligence reasons for compartmenting that information. But in other cases it is an obsession with privacy that cripples investigation, itself a species of political correctness. Yet the conflicting “rights” at issue in risk contexts are never more than right claims until they’re delineated by statute or adjudication. Too often, however, that obsession blinds us, including in our legislation and adjudication, to the rights on the other side. After all, the 3,000 who died on 9/11 and the soldiers who died at Fort Hood had rights too.
The Fort Hood massacre cries out for further investigation. But it must be clear-eyed and free from the prejudice that today is rightly called “political correctness.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
‘Net Neutrality’ Regs: Corporate Interests Do Battle
Some people have labored under the impression that “net neutrality” regulation was about the government stepping in to ensure that large corporations would not control the Internet. Now that the issue is truly joined, it is clear (as exhibited in this Wall Street Journal story) that the debate is about one set of corporate interests battling another set of corporate interests about the Internet, each seeking to protect or strengthen its business model. The FCC is surfing the debate pursuing a greater role for itself, meaning more budget and power.
Tim Lee’s paper, The Durable Internet, dispels the idea that owners of Internet infrastructure can actually control the Internet. The preferred approach to “net neutrality” is to let Internet users decide what they want from their ISPs and let ISPs and content companies do unmediated battle with one another to create and capture the greatest value from the Internet ecosystem.
If the FCC were to reduce its power by freeing up more wireless spectrum—either selling it as property or dedicating it to commons treatment—competition to provide Internet service would strengthen consumers’ hands.
Reflections on China’s 1949 “Liberation”
During a speaking trip to China three years ago, the young tour guide in Beijing kept referring to “the liberation.” I soon realized that she meant the October Revolution of 1949, in which Mao Tse Tung and the communists seized power and began their rule 60 years ago today.
Far from liberating China, the reign of Mao represents one of the worst tyrannies in the history of mankind. Opposition parties, free speech and freedom of religion were quickly eliminated. The Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 forced the collectivization of agriculture, resulting in a famine that killed tens of millions. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, while not as deadly, unleashed chaos that crippled the economy and scarred a generation. As Gordon Chang writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning, the celebration by the Chinese people will be understandably muted.
China’s real liberation began not 60 years ago, but 30 years ago, with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. While China remains an oppressive, one-party state politically, its economy has taken a true great leap forward in the past three decades because of market reforms in agriculture, industry, and trade. China’s liberation has far to go, but the Chinese people today are much more free of government interference in their personal, daily lives than they were in the time of Mao.
When I point to China’s economic progress as an example of what trade liberalization can deliver, my debate opponents will sometimes counter that China is a communist country. But China’s dramatic growth has not occurred because of its residual communism. For 30 years now, its government has been in the process of abandoning the communist economic policies of Mao and his fellow “liberators,” much to the benefit of the Chinese people and the world.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
The Zazi Case: Spread the Good News!
As has been widely reported, federal authorities believe an Aurora, Colorado man named Najibullah Zazi was preparing to commit acts of terrorism in the United States. Ben Friedman has provided some insight into the charge against him.
I don’t know how the case will come out, of course. I take it for what it is: an alleged terror plot. Terrorism is an acute security challenge because people who look like nincompoops to us might be activated by a capable leader and used as “muscle” in a real attack. If authorities act too early, it looks like there was never a threat. If they act too late, they might fail to prevent an attack.
Putting aside the merits, the press reaction to this case seems different from many past cases. Take this story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Along with reporting the possibility of this being the first Al Qaeda cell in the United States since 9/11, it says:
Hundreds of terrorism-related prosecutions, many for far more serious charges than lying to investigators, have been filed by U.S. authorities since the 9/11 attacks. On numerous occasions, U.S. officials have made startling allegations about terrorism suspects, only to later significantly dial back their rhetoric.
I was interested also by the tone of this USA Today story which focused as much on the U.S. government’s issuance of terror alerts as on their number and validity. “Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI and DHS have issued hundreds of similar bulletins,” the story said. It’s easy to see a reporter’s skepticism in that sentence, and his signal to readers that they shouldn’t get too agitated.
My sense — and it is only impressionistic — is that the media are starting to get their feet under them. After eight years of parroting official fear-mongering, serious reporters (I say mostly to exclude cable “news”) are prepared to question what officials tell them. That can only be good. The press plays an important role in digesting information and equipping society to address terrorism along many dimensions, including girding against unnecessary fear and overreaction.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
New Report: Honduras Acted Constitutionally
A new report by the non-partisan Law Library of Congress now publicly available reviews the legal and constitutional issues surrounding Honduran President Zelaya’s removal from office. The report concludes that both the Supreme Court of Honduras and the Congress acted in full accordance with the constitution in removing the president from power. The study, first reported by Mary O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal this Monday, is consistent with the point she, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, and others have made with regard to Washington’s unbelievable policy of undermining Honduras’ rule of law by insisting on Zelaya’s return to power, calling his removal a coup, and otherwise sanctioning the small nation’s Supreme Court by suspending the visas of its justices.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
That Costly Mandate
The Wall Street Journal notes that Sen. Max Baucus’s allegedly moderate health care plan “would increase the cost of insurance and then force people to buy it, requiring subsidies. Those subsidies would be paid for by taxes that make health care and thus insurance even more expensive, requiring even more subsidies and still higher taxes.” Other than that, it’s not so bad. The Journal also digs up a great graphic produced by the 2008 presidential campaign of a little-known Illinois senator named Barack Obama:
And speaking of health care mandates and how much they’re going to cost young people, as the Washington Post was yesterday, I just had lunch with Clark Ruper, program manager for Students for Liberty, who told me he’d be on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS tonight. In the interview he told them that as a young healthy person he has voluntarily chosen not to purchase health insurance and instead invests in his own savings. And he thinks a lot of young people make such choices and don’t want a government mandate requiring them to buy government-approved insurance. Check it out tonight on PBS.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
When Stimulus Is No Stimulus
The Obama administration has been touting its wasteful “stimulus” package as the answer to the recession. Now that Uncle Sam has started his spending binge, John Cogan, John Taylor, and Volker Wieland assess the result. Their conclusion: for all of the money spent, the effort wasn’t much of a stimulus.
They write in the Wall Street Journal:
Direct evidence of an impact by government spending can be found in 1.8 of the 5.4 percentage-point improvement from the first to second quarter of this year. However, more than half of this contribution was due to defense spending that was not part of the stimulus package. Of the entire $787 billion stimulus package, only $4.5 billion went to federal purchases and $17.7 billion to state and local purchases in the second quarter. The growth improvement in the second quarter must have been largely due to factors other than the stimulus package.
Incoming data will reveal more in coming months, but the data available so far tell us that the government transfers and rebates have not stimulated consumption at all, and that the resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic not the fiscal stimulus program deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement from the first to the second quarter. As the economic recovery takes hold, it is important to continue assessing the role played by the stimulus package and other factors. These assessments can be a valuable guide to future policy makers in designing effective policy responses to economic downturns.
If policymakers really want to stimulate the economy, they will stop prodigiously wasting money, unfairly redistributing people’s earnings, making the tax system ever more complex, and imposing job-killing regulations. In other words, politicians will stop being politicians.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Jervis on Afghanistan
Columbia University IR guru Robert Jervis has a smart post at Foreign Policy’s “Af-Pak” blog. For those who couldn’t get enough at yesterday’s Cato forum on Afghanistan, Jervis’ post is well worth a look:
Prof. Robert Jervis
Most discussion about Afghanistan has concentrated on whether and how we can defeat the Taliban. Less attention has been paid to the probable consequences of a withdrawal without winning, an option toward which I incline. What is most striking is not that what I take to be the majority view is wrong, but that it has not been adequately defended. This is especially important because the U.S. has embarked on a war that will require great effort with prospects that are uncertain at best. Furthermore, it appears that Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan was less the product of careful analysis than of the political need to find a “tough” pair to his attacks on the war in Iraq during the presidential campaign. It similarly appears that in the months since his election he has devoted much more attention to how to wage the war than to whether we need to wage it.
The DNC’s Pure Uninformed Demagoguery
The other day, Sarah Palin cited my work in an oped for the Wall Street Journal. So when the Democratic National Committee savaged her for it, ABCNews.com asked me for comment. Here’s an excerpt from George Stephanopoulos’ blog:
“Instead of poll-driven ’solutions,’ let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven,” wrote Palin. “As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each years in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines.”
Cannon, the Cato expert referenced by Palin, has not had any direct contact with the former Alaska governor or any of her advisers.
He did, however, come to her defense on the Medicare issue.
‘Vouchers would not make seniors less secure, it would make them more secure,’ Cannon told ABC News. ‘Everyone agrees that Medicare cannot go on spending as much money as it does now. The voucher idea allows individual consumers to make their own decisions about what they need and what they don’t need.’
‘Giving Medicare seniors a voucher is the most rational, the most humane way to contain Medicare spending,’ he added.
Asked about the DNC’s charge that Palin’s proposal would leave seniors with pre-existing conditions vulnerable, Cannon, the director of health policy studies at Cato, called it ‘pure uninformed demagoguery.’
Cannon says that under proposals he has developed, bigger vouchers would be given to people with pre-existing conditions as well as to people with low incomes.
Actually, I think what I said was that DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse was engaging in pure ignorant demagoguery. But whatever.
The DNC is even running an ad claiming that Republicans are trying to “cut” and “kill” Medicare, presumably with vouchers. Never mind that President Obama proposes to “cut” (i.e., slow the growth of) Medicare spending too.
If Republicans were smart — hey, where are you going? — they would be running ads that say:
President Obama wants government bureaucrats to decide whether seniors get health care. Republicans are fighting to control health care costs and preserve seniors’ ability to make their own health care decisions and choose the benefits that they value most. Support Medicare vouchers!
For more on reforming Medicare the right way, click here.
The War on Terror Is Over—Spread the News!
Daniel Henninger shares the good news in the Wall Street Journal today: The war on terror is over!
Unfortunately, he appears to bemoan that development. The excesses of the “war on terror” will—regrettably, to him—be reined in by lawyers.
His basic thesis is, very roughly: Lawyers interfere with good things. Lawyers are going to interfere with torture. So torture is a good thing.
This litigation nightmare, together with the chilling effect of the special prosecutor’s potential indictments, has as its goal making the price of aggressive interrogation too high under any circumstance, including a one-hour-bomb scenario.
Bring back the Dalkon Shield, asbestos, and torture!
Except that the ticking time-bomb/”one-hour bomb” scenario is never going to happen. It’s an interesting ethical thought experiment—and riveting fodder for TV—but not a serious dilemma for our security policy.
I take delight when commentators misuse history or culture to jazz up their writing, and Henninger throws a slow, fat pitch right over the plate: He quotes the famous anti-laywer line from Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
The line was spoken by a criminal to other criminals as they dreamed up a criminals’ “chicken in every pot” scenario. This undercuts the idea that we’d be better off without lawyers and the rule of law.
Terrorists are too weak to advance their own unpopular ideologies, so they seek to tear down their opponents’. Henninger’s attack on the rule of law in the United States invites exactly what terrorists want us to do.
HUD Helps to Set the Ground for Next Round of Mortgage Fraud
Just when you were thinking it was safe to go back into the mortgage market, today’s Wall Street Journal is highlighting the next source of mortgage fraud, the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) reserve mortgage program. In a typical reverse mortgage, the bank sends the borrower a monthly check (or a lump sum payment at the beginning of the loan).
It seems that some creative individuals have figured they could deed a run-down house to an elderly individual, and then get a reserve mortgage on that property; leaving them with the cash and the government with the run-down worthless property. Of course, this requires getting an appraiser to go along with the value of the home, but since the Clinton HUD decided to do away with FHA control of appraisers and let the lender pick the appraiser, that sadly hasn’t been much of an obstacle.
The great thing for lenders is that if the loan goes bad, or the value of the house falls below the mortgage amount, FHA – backed by the taxpayer – picks up the tab. Of course, the borrower is required to pay an insurance premium to cover any potential shortfalls. But just like in any other federal insurance program, when these’s a shortfall beyond funds collected via premiums, we taxpayers are left on the hook. I could go on about what a great job Washington does running insurance programs; suffice to say, Washington does a pretty poor job.
If Washington were serious about cracking down on predatory lending and mortgage fraud, Congress should end the practice of allowing lenders to put 100% of their losses to the taxpayer. Maybe that would provide the correct incentives for the lender to actually make sound loans.
FTC to Protect Us from Multi-Colored Beer Cans
Recently Anheuser-Busch hit upon the marketing idea of selling Bud Light beer in cans decorated with the college-team colors. As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) doesn’t have much else to do - it’s not like there’s been say fraud going on in the mortgage market – it quickly turned its attention to the issue, expressing “grave concern” that these team-colored cans would encourage underage and binge drinking.
As quoted in the Wall Street Journal, FTC attorney Janet Evans said “this does not appear to be responsible activity.” What’s not responsible is the FTC wasting taxpayer resources wondering what color beer cans we are drinking out of. When I was an underage drinker, the last thing on my mind was the color of the can. The ultimate purpose of the marketing campaign is to shift demand away from boring, non-team color beer cans toward team color cans. If beer drinkers (or can collectors) get some pleasure out of a certain colored can, where’s the fraud or deception in that?
The real purpose of FTC’s interest is revealed in the comments of the Licensing Resource Group, which represents the colleges in protecting their logos. Almost all the colleges that have asked Anheuser-Busch to stop selling the cans have cited trademark concerns. Yet none of the cans have any team logos. While no one would dispute the right of a college to control the use of its team logo, is it really reasonable to conclude that the colleges also own the rights to the use of certain colors?
More on Sugar’s Sweet Deal
Following my and Dan’s blog posts last week on the continuing lining of Big Sugar’s pockets at consumers’ expense, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have written editorials on the scam. I commend both of them to you, although I could have done without the WaPo’s moralizing on the “social benefits” of high sugar prices.
Bringing the States Back In
It’s an annoying, hackneyed trope of foreign policy types to say “if you want to understand X, you have to understand Y.” That said, let me engage in a little bit of it.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, we’re supposed to believe, is about terrorism, failed states, economic development, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human rights, and some other stuff. And to an extent, it is about each of those things. But to my mind, if you want to get a handle on what’s driving events over there, and on its historical status as a plaything of regional and extraregional powers, you ought to read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The themes that permeate the article are familiar: States as the primary actors in international politics, their uncertainty about other states’ intentions, the fundamental zero-sumness of security competition…somebody should cook up a theory or two on this stuff.
Eventually–although in fairness, God only knows when–we’re going to leave Afghanistan. When that happens, India and Pakistan are still going to live in the neighborhood. They’d each prefer to have lots of influence in Afghanistan, and to preclude the other from having too much. Accordingly, they’re both trying to set up structures and relationships that would, in the ideal scenario, let them control Afghanistan. In a less-than-ideal scenario, they’d like enough influence to undermine the other’s control of the country. Until you grasp that nettle, you’re really just fumbling around in the dark.
Find a solution for that in your COIN manual.
Iran’s Stalinesque Show Trials
Stalinism was dropped even by the Soviet Union when the murderous Joseph Stalin died, but it has never disappeared completely. North Korea, for instance, mimics the bizarre personality cult promoted by the Soviet dictator.
Now Iran appears to be adopting the Stalinesque tactic of staging show trials, with “confessions” from the obviously brutalized accused. Reports the Wall Street Journal:
On Sunday, reaction by Iranian newspapers and Web sites to the trials of some 100 detained opposition members, including a former vice president, was polarized as some raised questions about whether their confessions were coerced.
The trial by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court appears to be paving the way for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to secure his grip on power and cap a gradual takeover of Iran’s political landscape by hardliners. Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose government claimed victory in the disputed June 12 presidential elections, is to be inaugurated Monday for a second four-year term. Opposition leaders said the election was rigged.
Top reformist figures appeared in court Saturday looking disheveled and dazed. They sat in the front row wearing gray prison pajamas and plastic slippers without socks, in an apparent attempt to humiliate them in public. The reform leaders were unshaven and had lost weight.
Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric and former vice president to former President Mohamad Khatami, appeared without his robe and turban. Mr. Abtahi, who should legally be tried at the special tribunal for clerics, clutched a piece of paper and took the stand to give an elaborate confession. He said that reform leaders had been plotting for years to take over the government and had vowed to stick together.
By putting its outrageous repression forward front and center, the regime–fronted if not controlled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–has delivered its own affirmative answer to the question whether the recent ballot was stolen. Although the regime has sufficient coercive force to remain in power at the present, it has sacrificed any remaining legitimacy at home as well as abroad. The oligarchy led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely to have an ever more difficult time fending off challenges within the governing elite as well as among the people.
Americans should wish the forces of liberty and democracy well. There is little that the U.S. government, with an unsavory record of supporting repression in Iran, can do, other than ensure that Washington does not divert attention from the responsibility of the Tehran regime for the many problems facing the Iranian people. But people around the nation and world can help publicize the struggle in Iran and provide Iranians with the tools of freedom, including freer access to the Internet. The Iranian struggle against tyranny is one with which all lovers of liberty should identify.
Bernanke Rules?
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has outlined “The Fed’s Exit Strategy.” He tells the reader how the central bank will avoid an inflation of historic proportions resulting from all the money and credit it has injected into the economy. All of the strategies he outlines are technically feasible ways for the Fed to implement monetary restraint.
The op-ed has an air of a classroom exercise, however, rather than a practical central-bank strategy. Much of the article is devoted to explaining how the Fed can now pay interest on reserves, and how it could raise that interest rate so as to dissuade commercial banks from lending the reserves out. It could do that, but what would that rate need to be in order to meet a private bank’s threshold rate of return in normal economic times?
More importantly, the Fed has never lacked the technical tools to combat inflation. What it has so often lacked is the will to make tough decisions. And, quite frankly, it does not possess the information needed to fine-tune the economy in the way Chairman Bernanke imagines (a point made by Milton Friedman many years ago). Lack of will and lack of information combine to keep the Fed behind the curve. Its policy was too easy after 2001, and so it fueled the housing boom. It was late to recognize the turn in housing and the economy, and its policy was then too tight. If past is prologue, it will be late to implement its exit strategy.
The Fed Chairman has presented a laundry list of policy tools. What investors need is some assurance that the right tools will be used at the right moment. The mere promise of a policymaker to do the right thing has little credibility. There is no monetary rule in place, only the rule of a man.
Soaring Sales for “Road to Serfdom”
Cato’s new staff writer, Aaron Powell, told me he had recently seen two people on the Washington Metro reading The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. That prompted me to check the sales figures for Road to Serfdom at Nielsen’s Bookscan. And whattaya know? Sales have increased this year at an even faster pace than sales of Atlas Shrugged. (Atlas sells 10 times as many copies, but the percentage increase over last year is less.)
So far this year the most popular edition of Road to Serfdom has sold 11,000 copies. That compares with 3,000 copies at the same point last year. That’s a 263 percent increase for those of you keeping score at home.
Why? Well, no doubt huge new government spending programs and attempts to massively expand the welfare state send people looking for classic literature that makes the case for liberty and limited government. But what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” can always use a bit of help. And indeed, just as I found in investigating the sales bump for Atlas Shrugged, it looks like an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was instrumental in boosting the sales of The Road to Serfdom.
On February 4, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now chairman of Freedomworks, published an op-ed in the Journal titled “Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek.” Sales of Road to Serfdom, which were in the low hundreds each week since the beginning of 2009, more than doubled over the next four weeks. It seems likely that Armey’s op-ed caused the new interest.
Armey didn’t actually mention The Road to Serfdom — he just talked about Hayek and his ideas generally — but when you go looking for Hayek, you’re going to find his most popular book. So maybe we could attribute the sales bump instead to David Henderson’s review of The Road to Serfdom — titled “Still Relevant–Perhaps More So” — in the Spring issue of Regulation. But the Wall Street Journal does have a larger circulation.
Update: This item has been edited to remove proprietary information.
Barnett on the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing
Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett has a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the Senate’s confirmation hearing for Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Excerpt:
Supreme Court confirmation hearings do not have to be about either results or nothing. They could be about clauses, not cases. Instead of asking nominees how they would decide particular cases, ask them to explain what they think the various clauses of the Constitution mean. Does the Second Amendment protect an individual right to arms? What was the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment? (Hint: It included an individual right to arms.) Does the 14th Amendment “incorporate” the Bill of Rights and, if so, how and why? Does the Ninth Amendment protect judicially enforceable unenumerated rights? Does the Necessary and Proper Clause delegate unlimited discretion to Congress? Where in the text of the Constitution is the so-called Spending Power (by which Congress claims the power to spend tax revenue on anything it wants) and does it have any enforceable limits?
Read the whole thing.
Excellent WSJ Column on Health Care Nonsense
By George Newman. A sampling:
“The cost of health care rises two to three times as fast as inflation.”
That’s like comparing the price of hamburger 30 years ago with the price of filet mignon today and calling the difference inflation.
How Many Uninsured Are There?
The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy tackles the question:
The Census Bureau estimates that the number of uninsured amounts to 45.7 million people. But the agency might be over-counting by millions due to faulty assumptions…
Even though legislation won’t cover many of them, illegal immigrants are especially difficult to enumerate: Few raise their hands to be counted. Prof. [Jonathan] Gruber estimates they make up about 13% of the uninsured today, or nearly six million people of that 45 million number…
Of the rest, some people are eligible for health insurance but don’t know it and many can afford it but don’t want it. About 43% of uninsured nonelderly adults have incomes greater than 2.5 times the poverty level, according to a report released Tuesday by the business-backed Employment Policies Institute.
He left out a few things, though.
The estimate of 46 million uninsured, which comes from a less-than-ideal government survey, has been the occasion of a fraud on the public. For 20 years, the Church of Universal Coverage told us that 40-some million Americans are uninsured for the entire year. Then, experts including the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said that no, 40-some million is the number who are uninsured on any given day, and a lot of those people quickly regain coverage. The number of Americans who are uninsured for the entire year is actually 20-30 million. Yet the Church of Universal Coverage kept using that 40-some million estimate as if nothing had happened – even though the meaning of that estimate had completely changed.
The Congressional Budget Office also reports that as many as 15 percent of those 20-30 million chronically “uninsured” are eligible for government programs, so they’re effectively insured.
According to economists Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford, as many as three-quarters of the uninsured could afford coverage but choose not to purchase it. Again, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 60 percent of the uninsured are under age 35, and 86 percent are in good-to-excellent health.
Government intervention has made health insurance unnecessarily expensive for them, so these folks quite sensibly don’t want to be ripped off. Mandating that they buy coverage is really about hunting them down and taxing them.
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