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
Obama’s (In)Decision on Afghanistan
According to CBS News, President Barack Obama will send most, if not all, of the 40,000 additional troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested and reportedly plans to keep those troops in Afghanistan for the long-term.
If the CBS report turns out to be true—the White House has backed away, and other news outlets are leaving the story alone for the moment—the president’s decision is disappointing, but expected. Last month, the administration ruled out the notion of a near-term U.S. exit from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States. But if avoiding a perception of weakness is the rationale that the administration is operating under then we have already lost by allowing our enemies to dictate the terms of the war.
Gen. McChrystal’s ambitious strategy hopes to integrate U.S. troops into the Afghan population. These additional troops might reduce violence in the short- to medium-term. But this strategy rests on the presumption that Afghans in heavily contested areas want the protection of foreign troops. The reality might be very different; western forces might instead be perceived as a magnet for violence.
McChrystal’s strategy also presumes that an additional 40,000 troops will be enough. But proponents of an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy need to come clean on the total bill that would be required. For a country the size of Afghanistan, with roughly 31 million people, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine advises between 620,000 to 775,000 counterinsurgents—whether native or foreign. Furthermore, typical counterinsurgency missions require such concentrations of forces for a decade or more. Given these realities, we could soon hear cries of “surge,” “if only,” and “not enough.”
Even if the United States and its allies committed themselves to decades of armed nation building, success against al Qaeda would hardly be guaranteed. After all, in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda would simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.
It is well past time for the United States to adapt means to ends. The choice for President Obama is not between counterterrorism or counterinsurgency; but between counterterrorism and counterterrorism combined with counterinsurgency. Protecting the United States from terrorism does not require U.S. troops to police Afghan villages. Where terrorists do appear, we hardly need to tinker with their communal identities. We can target our enemies with allies on the ground or, if that fails, by relying on timely intelligence for use in targeted airstrikes or small-unit raids.
President Obama’s decision on Afghanistan could define his presidency. If an escalating military strategy leads only to thousands of more deaths, and at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, then that is a bitter legacy indeed.
One Year Later
This morning, Politico’s Arena asks:
“Election 09: What’s the message?”
My response:
A note on NY 23, then to the larger message in yesterday’s returns. Already this morning we’re seeing an effort to spin the NY 23 outcome as a warning to Republicans and a hopeful sign for Democrats. Yet the striking thing about that outcome is how close a third-party candidate came in the face of opposition from the Republican establishment. And the ultimate outcome can doubtless be explained simply by absentee ballots, plus voters unaware of the last-minute developments in the race.
Thus, given those factors, the NY 23 outcome is perfectly consistent with returns in the rest of the country. (In fact, Conservative and Republican votes in that race total more than 50 percent.) And the message will not be lost on blue-dog Democrats. If the internal inconsistencies of ObamaCare did not trouble those Democrats before yesterday, they surely must now. The silence coming from the White House last night spoke volumes.
Wednesday Links
- How Washington’s plans may result in even higher executive pay.
“In 1993, Congress intervened in corporate compensation and messed things up. Now it’s the White House’s turn.”
- The case for allowing insider trading: “Want to keep companies honest, make the markets work more efficiently and encourage investors to diversify? Let insiders buy and sell.”
- Cato v. Heritage on the Patriot Act, Round III: “In hindsight, did Congress and the president react too hastily in 2001 by passing the Patriot Act just weeks after the 9/11 attacks?”
- Instead of fixing the Patriot Act, President Obama is protecting it.
- Twenty years later: Why the Berlin Wall fell.
- Podcast: “Financial Privacy and Freedom” featuring Prince Michael of Liechtenstein.
The Real Story Behind the Chrysler Bankruptcy
If you worry about the abuse of executive power and declining respect among elected officials for the rule of law, you should watch this eloquent illumination of what really went down in the Chrysler bankruptcy earlier this year. The speaker is Richard Mourdock, Treasurer of the state of Indiana. The setting is a Cato Institute policy forum on October 15 about the “sordid details of the Bush/Obama auto industry intervention.”
As state treasurer, Mourdock is the person responsible for investment decisions concerning Indiana’s state employee pension funds, some of which owned a small share of Chrysler’s $6.9 billion in secured debt and some of which opposed the administration’s offer of $.29 on the dollar for that debt. Though these small secured holders were publicly castigated by President Obama as “unpatriotic” and unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good, Mourdock led the effort to stop the “sale” of Chrysler all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mourdock’s presentation gives a flavor for the tactics employed by the Obama administration to “encourage” senior, priority creditors to back off their claims so that chosen parties could take priority—tactics that included backroom reminders that some of those creditors had received and might seek more TARP funding, threats of bringing the full weight and measure of the White House press office to bear down on dissenters, public condemnation, and other forms of arm-twisting most Americans would find unseemly for a U.S. presidential administration.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy; Trade and Immigration
Whitehouse.gov Switches to Drupal
There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it.
The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost and high security.
Arnold Kling wrote recently on the Library of Economics and Liberty blog relating the work Elinor Ostrom did to win the Nobel prize in economics to how the Internet enables private provision of public goods—no regulation, little to no centralized authority at all.
Open source is nothing if not an example of that, and it’s good to see this use of open source joining many others across the big, beautiful Internet.
Obama’s Fall Offensive
In today’s Politico Arena, the editors ask:
White House Strategy: Will Obama’s effort to undermine critics undermine Obama instead? Is it overdue or overdone?
My response:
Obama is losing it. His increasing moves to marginalize his critics, richly detailed this morning at Politico, mark him as an amateur. America is not Chicago. Nor are those who oppose his agenda synonymous with the Republican Party. They’re far more numerous than that, and their numbers are growing.
Politics is one thing: “It ain’t beanbag,” Mr. Dooley noted. But scorched-earth politics is something else. It’s over the edge, like Nixon’s enemies list. It has no place in America, except in political backwaters like Chicago. (Personal note: In 1972 my wife and I served as Republican election judges in the first Mayor Daley’s Chicago. On election day, when we walked into the Hyde Park polling station at 5:30 a.m., the three Democratic judges looked at us in astonishment: “Are you real Republicans?” How else are you going to control the election?! Hamid Karzai has nothing on Chicago.)
As a practical matter, in our two-party system the Republican Party is the organizational antidote to this kind of abuse. But as the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, the party’s going to have to get its act together before that happens. It’s claim to be a party of principle has been seriously undermined in recent years by Republican officials at all levels of government. That leaves it to private individuals and organizations to call Congress and the administration on what they’re up to. And that’s why we too are in Obama’s cross-hairs. It won’t work — unless we let it happen. Thank you, Politico, for drawing these sad facts together in one place.
Should the White House Be Taking on Fox?
Today’s Arena question over at Politico asks:
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” Is the White House smart, or not so smart, to take on Fox?
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.
The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”
Let’s not pretend that the MSM doesn’t “manage” the news. It does it mainly by deciding daily what is and is not “news” and then by deciding how to report that news. Do we need any better example than the current ACORN story? As Fox was bringing the facts to light, nowhere were those facts to be found in the MSM — until they could be ignored no longer. Or take the huge 9/12 anti-big-government rally here in Washington. Fox covered it for the event that it was. Where was it covered in The New York Times? On page A37. And more revealing still, in the NYT electronic edition, the second of three stories posted under “Politics” was headlined “Thousands Rally in Minnesota Behind Obama’s Call for Health Care Overhaul,” the third was headlined “Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government” — the implication being that the two rallies were equivalent in size when in fact the protest rally dwarfed the Obama rally by many multiples.
But why pretend it’s otherwise? The president himself admits the MSM bias. Speaking at the May 9 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table.” A good laugh line in that setting, to be sure, but only because he’s said at last what we all know to be true.
Walter Dellinger may write, citing no evidence, that the Tax Day Tea Party protests were “conceived and executed by Fox News,” but he surely knows that’s not true. He hails from North Carolina, albeit now from Duke. He knows that outside that cloister there’s protest in the land. Fox News isn’t generating that opposition to the Obama juggernaut. It’s real, but it’s so much easier for the MSM to blame the bearer of that news than to face the reasons for their own falling numbers: Their “news” doesn’t fit with what so many people see with their own eyes. I’m reminded of the great Groucho Marx line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
C/P Politico’s Arena
The President’s Health Care Tax
As Michael Cannon discussed in an earlier post, the White House is trying to claim that health care “reform” does not mean higher taxes. This is a two-pronged issue. First, there is a mandate to purchase health insurance. Second, there is a tax (the White House calls it a fee) on people who fail to purchase a policy.
The White House claims this mandate is akin to state-level requirements for the purchase of health insurance, and that the newly-insured people will be getting some value (a health insurance policy) in exchange for their money. These assertions are defensible, but that does not change the fact that a tax is being imposed.
It might be plausible to argue that the mandate is not a tax if the value of the insurance policy to the individual was equal to the cost. But since these are people who are not buying policies, their behavior reveals that this obviously cannot be true. So this means that they will be worse off under Obama’s plan and that at least some of the cost should be considered a tax.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
A Bizarre Privacy Indictment
Page one of today’s Washington Times—above the fold—has a fascinating story indicting the White House for failing to disclose that it will collect and retain material posted by visitors to its pages on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. The story is fascinating because so much attention is being paid to it. (It was first reported, as an aside at least, by Major Garrett on Fox News a month ago.)
The question here is not over the niceties of the Presidential Records Act, which may or may not require collection and storage of the data. It’s over people’s expectations when they use the Internet.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.
Of course, the White House is free to disclose or announce anything it wants. It might be nice to disclose this particular data practice. But is it really a breach of privacy—and, through failure to notify, transparency—if there isn’t a distinct disclosure about this particular data collection?
Let’s talk about what people expect when they use the Internet and social networking sites. Though the Internet is a gigantic copying machine, some may not know that data is collected online. They may imagine that, in the absence of notice, the data they post will not be warehoused and redistributed, even though that’s exactly what the Internet does.
There can be special problems when it is the government collecting the information. The White House’s “flag@whitehouse.gov” tip line was concerning because it asked Americans to submit information about others. There is a history of presidents amassing “enemies” lists. But this is not the complaint with White House tracking of data posted on its social networking sites.
People typically post things online because they want publicity for those things—often they want publicity for the fact that they are the ones posting, too. When they write letters, they give publicity to the information in the letter and the fact of having sent it. When they hold up signs, they seek publicity for the information on the signs, and their own role in publicizing it.
How strange that taking note of the things people publicize is taken as a violation of their privacy. And failing to notify them of the fact they will be observed and recorded is a failure of transparency.
America, for most of what you do, you do not get “notice” of the consequences. Instead, in the real world and online, you grown-ups are “on notice” that information you put online can be copied, stored, retransmitted, and reused in countless ways. Aside from uses that harm you, you have little recourse against that after you have made the decision to release information about yourself.
The White House is not in the wrong here. If there’s a lesson, it’s that people are responsible for their own privacy and need to be aware of how information moves in the online environment.
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
Obama: I Want Those Patriot Act Powers
Yesterday, President Obama’s lawyers informed members of Congress that the president does not want any provision of the Patriot Act to expire. Turns out that Obama wants to have the sweeping powers. This is just the latest example of the cacophony that pervades Washington. When Bush was in the White House, the Dems postured against his runaway spending, his military quagmires, and his constitutional violations. With Obama in the White House, Bush’s most misguided policies either continue or worsen.
Obama is in the news today for his “off-the-record” comment about Kanye West. It would have been better had a reporter overheard Obama saying something like, “John Ashcroft was a terrific Attorney General, but I’ll never admit that publicly.”
For related Cato work, go here and here.
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.
Staid Speech Is Cold Comfort
After all of the rancor last week over his planned back-to-school address, it was predictable that in the end President Obama would offer a largely non-controversial speech about working hard and staying in school. If he sticks to the text released today, that is pretty much what he will do. Unfortunately, whether or not that was his original intent – and no one knows for sure but the President and his advisors – many Obama supporters will likely use the relatively staid final product as grounds to smear people concerned about the speech as right-wing kooks or out-of-control partisans. At the very least, such an outcome would be in keeping with a lot of the email I’ve gotten since the story first broke. But it will miss several critical points:
- No matter how innocuous the content of the speech, this could certainly be an address with very political goals, intended to cast the president in the warm glow of a man who just cares about kids. From kissing babies, to photo-op reading sessions featuring cute tikes on classroom floors, this could be just another instance of the old practice of using children as props for political gain. And how presumptuous of the president to make himself – rather than the children, their teachers, and their schools – the center of attention on what is the first day of school for millions of kids. Finally, add the parts of the speech that sound like the President patting himself on the back for overcoming difficulties as a youth, and the speech could easily have political aims.
- Many people feared, thanks to politically and ideologically suggestive lesson guides created by the U.S. Department of Education, that the speech would be an effort at indoctrination. Critically, it was only after very loud, initial outrage that the Department made changes to the guides and the White House announced it would release the text of the speech ahead of time. Yet administration defenders act like everyone knew from the outset that the speech would just be about working hard and staying in school. And who knows what the speech might have looked like had there not been so negative an initial reaction.
- Despite its generally innocuous tone, the speech does contain some controversial political and ideological assertions, including that “setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools” is the job of the federal government. Also, the things the President highlights as worthy aspirations are disproportionately government and non-profit work. And then there’s this self-aggrandizing assertion: “Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn.”
- Ultimately, no matter what happens now that the speech has been published, one thing cannot be ignored or spun: When government controls education, wrenching political and social conflict is inevitable. Americans are very diverse – ideologically, ethnically, morally, religiously – but they all have to support a single system of government schools. As a result, they are constantly forced to fight to have their values and desires respected, and the losers inevitably have their liberty infringed. In this case, reasonable people who want their children to hear the President must fight it out with equally reasonable people who do not want their children to watch the speech in school. It’s a situation completely at odds with a free society, but as we have seen not just with the current conflict, but seemingly endless battles over history textbooks, the teaching of human origins, sex education, and on and on, it is inevitable when government runs the schools. Which is why the most important lesson to be learned from this presidential-address donnybrook is that Americans need educational freedom. We need universal school choice or crippling conflicts like this will keep on coming, liberty will continue to be compromised, and our society will be ripped farther and farther apart.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Government and Politics
Deficits, Spending, and Taxes
The White House and the CBO announced this week that:
The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday.
The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget raised its 10-year tally of deficits expected through 2019 to $9.05 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than it projected in February. That would represent 5.1 percent of the economy’s estimated gross domestic product for the decade, a higher level than is generally considered healthy.
What is the right response to these deficits?
One view holds that most current expenditure is desirable — indeed, that expenditure should ideally be much higher — so the United States should raise taxes to balance the budget. Taxes are a drag on economic growth, however, and unpopular with many voters, so this view presents politicians with an unhappy tradeoff.
The alternative view holds that a substantial fraction of current expenditure is undesirable and should be eliminated, even if the revenue to pay for it could be manufactured out of thin air. To be concrete:
- Medicare and Medicaid encourage excessive spending on health care.
- The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan encourage hostility to the U.S. and thereby increase the risk of terrorism.
- Drug prohibition generates crime and corruption.
- Agricultural subsidies distort decisions about which crops to grow, and where.
- And much, much more.
So, under this view, the United States can have its cake and eat it too: improve the economy and reduce the deficit without the need to raise taxes.
This approach is not, of course, politically trivial, since existing expenditure programs have constituencies that will fight their elimination.
But thinking about these two views of the deficits is nevertheless useful: it shows that discussion should really be about which aspects of government are truly beneficial, not just about the deficits per se.
Cato Institute to Launch Ad Campaign Against Government-Run Health Care
The Cato Institute will launch an ad campaign Thursday highlighting under-reported poll data showing Americans’ concerns that current health care reform plans will raise costs, limit choice and reduce the quality of their health care.
The campaign will feature full-page ads in major national newspapers, in addition to radio spots focusing on why government-run health care cannot address the problems of growing costs and lack of coverage for many individuals and families. The campaign will expand in the weeks ahead.
“Our goal is to help the American public navigate terms like ‘a public plan’ and ‘individual or employer mandates’ to understand what is really happening here,” said Ed Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute. “The bottom line is, most of the plans coming from the White House and congressional leadership will result in a government-run health care system that is really not the best option for most Americans.”
A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News conducted June 18-21 showed that 84 percent of respondents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that “current efforts to reform the health care system” would increase their health care costs. The survey also showed that 79 percent of respondents were concerned that current efforts would limit their choices of doctors or medical treatments.
As part of the campaign, Cato is running radio ads in major cities across the country. You can listen to them below, and embed them on your own blog using the code on the official campaign site.
Who Pays?
Who Decides?
Cato has also created a new website, Healthcare.cato.org, to promote more free market-oriented health care reform proposals.
Broken Promises — to Voters and the New York Times
“[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye for her June 22 story on President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign pledge. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
The story, titled “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” was about the White House effort to walk back from President Obama’s campaign pledge to post bills he receives for five days before signing them.
When the New York Times published the story, five bills had been presented to the president and were awaiting his signature. Four more were presented to him after the story’s publication. All nine are now law.
And for the life of me, I can’t find where any of them have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. Surely it was clear to the White House that the five bills it had and the four soon to come would reach the president’s desk.
I disagree with arguments for releasing President Obama from his pledge to sign bills only after he has posted them for a full five days after receiving them. It would have the same effects as the 72-hour hold the Sunlight Foundation is seeking from Congress — also a welcome legislative process reform.
And it’s becoming more clear that the five-day promise could be implemented. At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. (The DTV Delay Act was actually not held five days after formal presentment, but the White House posted it after the final version had passed Congress.) Twenty-four other bills have been held at the White House five days or more before the President has signed them. They just haven’t been posted.
To repeat, over 60% of the legislation coming out of Congress waits five days for the president’s signature as a matter of course. The only thing preventing implementation of the president’s promise as to these bills is the White House’s inexplicable reluctance to do what it says it will do.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
This “Cyberwar” Is a Cybersnooze
The AP and other sources have been reporting on a “cyberattack” affecting South Korea and U.S. government Web sites, including the White House, Secret Service and Treasury Department.
Allegedly mounted by North Korea, this attack puts various “cyber” threats in perspective. Most Americans will probably not know about it, and the ones who do will learn of it by reading about it. Only a tiny percentage of people will notice the absence of the Web sites attacked. (An update to the story linked above notes that several agencies and entities “blunted” the attacks, as well-run Web sites will do.)
This is the face of “cyberwar,” which has little strategic value and little capacity to do real damage. This episode also underscores the fact that “cyberterrorism” cannot exist – because this kind of attack isn’t terrifying.
As I said in my recent testimony before the House Science Committee, it is important to secure web sites, data, and networks against all threats, but this can be done and is being done methodically and successfully – if imperfectly – by the distributed owners and controllers of all our nation’s “cyber” assets. Hyping threats like “cyberwar” and “cyberterror” is not helpful.
Cato Experts Live-Blog ABC News Health Care Special
Cato health care experts Michael D. Tanner and Michael F. Cannon provided live commentary Wednesday night for ABC’s “Prescription for America,” a special program from within the White House on Obama’s health care reform proposal.
You can watch the program, and follow along below.
For more, visit Healthcare.Cato.org.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Cato Health Care Experts Live-Blogging Tonight’s ABC News White House Special
Tonight at 10:00 PM EST, ABC News will broadcast a “special report from the White House” on President Obama’s plan to revamp the nation’s health care system. Cato scholars Michael D. Tanner and Michael F. Cannon will offer live commentary and analysis when the program begins.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear another voice in the health care debate.
Sign up below:
For more on Cato’s research on health care, visit Healthcare.Cato.org
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