Category Archives: Issues

After ObamaCare, What Then – Part 1

As everyone knows who has ever eaten at an “all you can eat” buffet, once someone has paid the bill (or premium), they feel that they are “entitled” to get their money’s worth, and maybe more.  By the same token, people will also come to feel that they are “entitled” to health insurance, and rightly so, if, 1) they have paid a premium for their health insurance, either in cash or via taxation, or 2) they qualify for taxpayer-funded health care as a social welfare benefit.

And, once someone begins to feel “entitled” to health care at no cost (beyond a small co-pay), they are likely to ask for any and all services and/or treatments that they believe will confer a health benefit, with no regard to any cost/benefit analysis.  This systemic incentive to over-consume creates what economists call a “moral hazard”, and I believe it is one of the largest factors in the long-term escalation of health care costs in the United States.

So, if we may permit ourselves to contemplate the repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (in 2017, with Republicans in control of the Congress and the White House), what should the conservative substitute look like?

For decades, my view has been that there are a few reform elements that are crucial, and the most crucial of all is the elimination of the third party payer, at least in terms of the role they now play.  Only when our health care system is changed to force each of us to evaluate health care services with respect to cost/benefit ratios (in much the same way that we evaluate other things that we purchase) will competition come into play, eventually forcing down costs.  Health Savings Accounts were a good start, but the concept would need to be expanded greatly, and employer-provided health insurance plans would need to be eliminated by rescinded their corporate tax deductibility.  The point of these steps would be enable everyone to have ownership over the funds used to pay for his health care, thereby incentivizing the conservation of those funds.  Health Insurance should be relegated to the role it played a half-century or so ago, that of protecting against catastrophic health care expenses.

Recently I came across another scheme that has some appeal.  Russell Korobkin is a Law Professor at UCLA, where he writes and teaches in the fields of Negotiation, Behavioral Law and Economics, Contracts, and Health Care Law.  He advocates for what he calls Relative Value Health Insurance (RVHI), and he recently had THIS article published in the Michigan Law Review explaining his plan in detail.  A shorter treatment was also posted earlier this week at the Volokh Conspiracy.  An excerpt:

The basic idea of RVHI is that insurance policies should be available that would cover medical care that satisfies a higher or lower cost-effectiveness standard, thus enabling customers to determine, through their purchasing decisions, just how much of their resources they wish to devote to health insurance as opposed to other goods and services.

One example I use to illustrate how RVHI would work is the new drug Procysbi, which treats juvenile kidney disease more conveniently and with fewer serious side effects than the current treatment but, according an article in the New York Times, retails for $250,000 per year — far more than the $8,000 per year cost of the current treatment.

It is impossible to say in any objective way whether the benefits of Procysbi are “worth” the addition cost.  It depends on the value each individual places on the marginal benefits of the drug.  RVHI would enable customers to determine (before becoming ill) whether they wish to purchase what I call a “deep” insurance policy, which would cover treatments that offer even relatively little marginal health benefit compared to its cost, or a “shallow” insurance policy, which would only cover treatment options that offer substantial expected benefits relative to their cost.   A deep policy would cover Procysbi, and other medical treatments with a similar cost-effectiveness profile.  A shallow policy would cover the established treatment, but not Procysbi.  Deeper policies would cost more, of course, than shallower policies.  The market would determine the precise difference in price.

How would customers decide what depth of policy they would prefer?  After all, before the customer or a dependent contracted kidney diseases, they would have little reason to even know what treatments are available for different conditions.

My proposal is for the government to provide ratings of different available treatments for different medical conditions on a 1-10 scale based on their relative cost-effectiveness.   The most cost-effective treatments would earn a score of “1,” and treatments that provide very marginal benefits at a high cost would earn a score of “10.”  The benefit scores would be based on QALY (quality adjusted life year) ratings; the cost scores would be based on retail charged for the drugs, devices, or services in question.  Notice that these ratings would in no way prescribe what level of coverage could be bought or sold; it would only provide a relative measure of what medical treatments are more or less cost effective.  Insurance companies then could sell policies that cover treatments rated “3 or better,” “5 or better,” “9 or better,” etc.

For the full article at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, click HERE.

Gangster Guvmint Post Of The Day: ObamaCare Edition

From a new article up on National Journal today by reporter Sam Baker:

The health care law provides subsidies to help low-income people cover GangstaGuvsome of their out-of-pocket costs. Last year, the administration said those subsidies were taking a 7 percent cut because of the sequester, which imposed across-the-board reductions in federal spending.

But now, the White House has changed its mind. It removed the cost-sharing subsidies from its list of programs that are subject to the sequester, eliminating the 7 percent cut for 2015.
 
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which noticed the change, said the reversal would likely restore about $560 million to the subsidies—and require $560 million in cuts to other programs to make up for it.

The cost-sharing subsidies are expected to total $8 billion this year and $156 billion over the next decade.

Who benefits from the change? The low-income families who qualify for these subsidies, as well as the White House and insurance companies.

View the full article, HERE.

The CPAC Poll and Doctor Ben Carson on Gun Rights

Yesterday I posted the results of the informal poll taken of his readers by Professor Glenn Reynolds at his Instapundit blog.  Comparison with the CPAC poll, below, is interesting.  Rand Paul won at CPAC, of course, as CPAC attracts a very libertarian crowd.  Senator Ted Cruz faired very well in both polls, as did Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  The standout differences seem to be with the results for Governor Chris Christie, Senator Marco Rubio, and Doctor Ben Carson.

CPAC_2014_PrezPollDr. Ben Carson may have done well simply because he was a featured speaker at CPAC, and conversely, he may have done poorly in the Instapundit poll because Professor Reynolds’ readers may be inclined toward conservatism rather than libertarianism, and conservatives do not like Dr. Carson’s squishy-ness on Second Amendment rights.

For those not aware of Dr. Carson’s views on gun rights, most of what is known stems from an interview he did with Glenn Beck about a year ago during which Beck asked him if citizens should be allowed to own semi-automatic weapons.  Dr. Carson’s reply is quoted as “It depends on where you live.  I think if you live in the midst of a lot of people, and I’m afraid that that semi-automatic weapon is going to fall into the hands of a crazy person, I would rather you not have it.”  Oddly, this view corresponds fairly closely to the dissent filed by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in the DC v. Heller case, which suggested that an individual had a more legitimate right to own a firearm for hunting purposes than for self-protection.  Lastly, the phrasing of his response suggests to me that Dr. Carson may not realize that virtually all firearms now in the hands of civilians are semi-automatics, from your run-of-the-mill revolver up to the legal AK-47 versions.

Recently, however, Tony Lee has reported at Breitbart that Dr. Carson now says:

… he does not believe in gun registration because America’s massive debt could transform the nation into a third-world country in which martial law may be imposed.

Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who has been getting buzz in conservative circles, said that he changed his mind and was against gun registration because of the “sinister internal forces” that could surface in that scenario.  He said he “used to think they needed to be registered, but if you register them they just come and find you and take your guns.”

That seems to me to be a weak rationale for getting to where he needs to be on the issue, but still, maybe Dr. Carson has been boning up on the history and justification for the Second Amendment.  I hope so, for the sake of any future political ambitions he may have.

I Liked Ike

I liked Ike, but being a pre-teen at the time, I never got to vote for him.  My parents did, however, despite being registered Democrats.  It was hard not to like the man who had commanded all the allied forces in the European theater in World War II, directing the largest assemblage of armed forces that the world had ever seen toward their eventual victory.

Nowadays, the image of Eisenhower is being burnished by, somewhat incongruently, the Democrats and the liberal mainstream media.  Their purpose in doing so is to favorably liken President Obama to President Eisenhower, in that both seemed reluctant to engage in foreign wars, and especially reluctant to expend American blood and treasure in the Middle East.  To a substantial degree, however, these are views seen through rose-colored glasses.  As young as I was, I still remember the many heated discussions between my Dad, his brother, and other family members over Ike’s authorization of the CIA engineered overthrow of Iranian leader Mossadegh in favor of the Shah (1953), his failure to support the British against the Egyptians in the 1956 Suez Canal crisis (which strengthened the hand of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, a Soviet acolyte), and his blatant lie to the American people (in a national television address, no less, presaging Bill Clinton by decades) denying the overflights of the Soviet Union by American U2 spy planes after the Russki’s shot down Francis Gary Powers in 1960.

At the online National Review this week, military historian Victor Davis Hanson has up a piece that presents far more detail about the “Eisenhower era” and how it is being reframed.  He writes:

The Eisenhower administration formulated the domino theory, and Ike was quite logically the first U.S. president to insert American advisers into Southeast Asia, a move followed by a formal SEATO defense treaty to protect most of Southeast Asia from Communist aggression — one of the most interventionist commitments of the entire Cold War, which ended with over 58,000 Americans dead in Vietnam and helicopters fleeing from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

Eisenhower’s “New Look” foreign policy of placing greater reliance on threats to use nuclear weapons, unleashing the CIA, and crafting new entangling alliances may have fulfilled its short-term aims of curbing the politically unpopular and costly use of conventional American troops overseas.  Its long-term ramifications, however, became all too clear in the 1960s and 1970s.  Mostly, Ike turned to reliance on nuke-rattling because of campaign promises to curb spending and balance the budget by cutting conventional defense forces — which earned him the furor of Generals Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and Matthew Ridgway.

The whole article is instructional and well worth reading, HERE.

The “October Surprise” Comes In March

In an exchange with a friend earlier this week, I speculated that the GangstaGuvObama administration would, with the stroke of the magic pen, rescind the ObamaCare individual mandate prior to the fall elections.  Today, the editors of the Wall Street Journal inform me that I am way behind the curve on this.  Herewith, the first two paragraphs of the piece:

ObamaCare’s implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate.  To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn’t think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet.  Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates.  Our sources only noticed the change this week.

The full article is HERE.

And for another perspective, this one from the pundits at Hot Air, click HERE.

Government Now Has Record Number Suckling

The Tailless Tenrec (T/T) is a small, cat-sized, hedgehog-like critter that lives in Madagascar, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and several other islands in the southwestern Indian Ocean.  It gives birth to a litter of as many as 32 young, with an average litter between 15-20 after a gestation of 50–60 days.

The Tailless Tenrec is relevant to this post only because it has something in common, sorta, with the United States Government. The T/T, in order to provide nutrients to 30+ infantiles, has been observed to have as many as 29 teats, thus enabling the sort of mass suckling that has now become the hallmark of the Obama Administration.

Need some numbers?  Okay, how about this from a new John Merline post at Investor’s Business Daily:

Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others.  These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high.  In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP.

What’s more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding.  Even after adjusting for inflation, they’ve shot up 29% under Obama.

For the full article, worth reading, go HERE.

ObamaCare will be Goring the Union Ox as well

From Megan McArdle, earlier this week:

The second problem is that the 40 percent excise tax on especially expensive plans — the so-called Cadillac tax — is going to hit union plans especially hard.  Unlike most people negotiating compensation, union negotiators make an explicit trade-off between wages and other benefits, and the benefit that they seem most attached to is generous health plans.  Union plans are made more expensive still because union membership is heavily skewed toward older workers.  They are thus very likely to get hit by the Cadillac tax, which takes effect in 2018.

And the third problem is that Obamacare undercuts one of the key benefits of being in a union.  Take a low-wage service worker who is currently insured through her union’s multi-employer plan.  If she went to work for a nonunion shop, she could get a substantial wage hike, use part of it to buy a heavily subsidized exchange policy, and still be better off.  As I heard one expert say, Obamacare turns health insurance from an organizing tool to a disorganizing tool.

No wonder the unions are mad.  What’s amazing is that they supported Obamacare with just vague assurances from the Barack Obama administration that it would fix everything later.

Yeah.  My heart bleeds for the Unions.  Do you see what looks like a period at the end of the last sentence?  It really is the world’s tinyest violinist playing the world’s saddest song on the the world’s tinyest violin.

But look for our lawless President, maybe just after the November-2016 elections, to just wave his wand and lift the Unions’ burden.  And if you want to read the whole thing, click HERE.

Harry Reid Is Winning the Senate Shell Game

If you take a vanilla ice cream cone, throw the ice cream part into the GangstaGuvtrash, then refill the cone with liver pudding, do you still have a vanilla ice cream cone?  Most folks, especially kids, would give you an emphatic “NO”, but the Obama Administration, in two cases making their way up the litigation ladder (perhaps to the SCOTUS) says yes.  In 2010, in order to craft ObamaCare in spite of opposition in the House of Representatives, Harry Reid took a bill that had been passed in the House and then sent on to the Senate (H.R. 3590), gutted the content, and used it as a vehicle for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

There are many lawsuits pending over various issues related to ObamaCare.  One issue on which many pinned their hopes was related to the “orgination clause”, which is that portion of the first sentence in Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution which reads “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives;”.  However, according to an article by Jonathan Adler, posted at the law blog Volokh Conspriracy, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is not cooperating with this effort.

A key bit:

As for the merits of the claim, what makes the Origination Clause argument difficult is that Congress observed the Origination Clause in form if not in substance.  The Senate took a bill that had passed the House, stripped out its contents, and inserted the PPACA so that it could claim fealty to the Constitutional requirement.  This approach clearly circumvents the purpose of the rule.  So, would a Court throw out portions of the PPACA on such grounds?  I doubt it.  Although the Supreme Court has suggested its willingness to consider such arguments before, I am skeptical that federal courts are likely to scrutinize how legislation gets produced.  Thus, for example, the D.C. Circuit has turned away challenges to federal legislation that allegedly violated the enrolled bill rule, refusing to second-guess the legislature’s certification that a given bill satisfied the relevant constitutional requirements.  When a federal court reaches the merits of an Origination Clause challenge, I would expect a similar outcome, even if this means the Senate may continue to play fast and loose with the origination requirement.  Utilizing shell bills may make a mockery of the rule, but it’s not the sort of thing that is likely to be overturned in federal court.

For the entire article, click HERE.

First the Good News, then the Bad News

This weekend, at least two things happened of note.  The first was that we went on Daylight Savings Time, which means another hour of daylight in the evening.  The second, as observant visitors may have already noticed, is that the Federal debt surpassed seventeen and one-half TRILLION dollars for the first time ever.

McCrory Backpedaling on the Abolition of Teacher Tenure?

Yesterday afternoon, in an article apparently drawn from a WUNC Public Radio piece, the online WRAL posted an article, HERE, quoting the Governor as saying that “his staff will consider making changes to a new law that offers raises to top teachers who give up tenure rights.”  Wait, what?  Has some of the Obama magic rubbed off on our Governor, so that he now can also change the law at will?  Or does he just mean that his staff will recommend revisions to the next session of the General Assembly?

The latter, apparently, as the article goes on to say this:

McCrory says his staff will review the impact of the law between now and the short session in May.

“I share some of the concerns expressed based on the implementation of the rule.  The intent of the rule is very good — the implementation process needs to be more clarified,” he said.

Well, okay then.  Although it seems a bit early to be declaring the law to be in need of revision when it is yet to be implemented.

The IRS Scandal: George Will Weighs In

Washington Post opinion writer George Will offers his perspective, Obama_Hammerilluminating as always, on the suppression tactics employed by the IRS in the interest of nullifying conservative political activism in the run-up to this year’s fall elections.  One incisive excerpt:

The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10,000 to anyone who can identify a liberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had — an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.

And by the way, thanks to all who used our boilerplate, or who otherwise took the initiative of writing to the IRS to express opposition to the proposed rule changes for IRS Section 501(c)(4) organizations.  Will reports that they have received over 140,000 comments to date, an impressive number considering that almost all are critical of the proposal.  For his entire article, click HERE.

And in a related story, the British newspaper Daily Mail reported yesterday, HERE, that after eight months the IRS has now agreed to provide the House investigating committee with all of Lois Lerner’s e-mails from President Obama’s inauguration up through the date she went on leave from her IRS duties.

Teacher Tenure as a Property-Right?

Many teachers (and a number of county school boards) across North Carolina are upset about the education legislation passed by the 2013 NC General Assembly, particularly the elimination of teacher tenure in favor of merit contracts coupled with bonuses.  In fact, according to an article in the February issue of Carolina Journal, the NC Association of Educators and a small group of teachers have filed a lawsuit in Wake County contending that tenure (or “career status”) is a vested contractual personal property right, and it therefore cannot be terminated without providing just compensation, much as the State would be obligated to provide just compensation when taking real property for a highway overpass.

The court has not yet spoken, of course, but the John Locke Foundation’s (JLF) legal advice is to the effect that the claim … MORE.

Mexican Tax Preparers Defrauding the US Taxpayers?

My friend Warren is no longer with us, but in his years as an independent tax prepayer with Enrolled Agent status, he often regaled and horrified me with tales of the many Hispanic clients who would claim the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on the basis of having many children listed as dependents.  Now, Carolina Journal is reporting on a similar scheme brought to light by the confessions of a Hispanic tax prepayer who apparently has a conscience.

Read the full article, HERE.

WTH — A New Long-Range Stealth Bomber?

On the heels of announcements that the A-10 Thunderbolt-II Warthog may be phased out soon due to budget constraints, the USAF is also placing a high priority on getting a new long-range stealth bomber.  The project is being characterized as a key modernization priority, but at a time when the nation is footing the bill for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the KC-46A aerial refueling tanker, along with retiring what many think of as the best close air support aircraft since the prop jobs of the WW2 era, why don’t we just build more B-2 Spirit bombers instead of launching a project to produce 90 or so entirely new planes?

The Air Force now has twenty B-2 bombers in operation, and it has announced that the plane is to be a part of the US arsenal through 2058.  What possible new features can be built into a new bomber that aren’t already a part of the B-2 design, or added to it?

From the WikiPedia page for the B-2 Spirit:

The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber, is an American strategic bomber, featuring low observable stealth technology designed for penetrating dense anti-aircraft defenses; it is able to deploy both conventional and nuclear weapons.  The bomber has a crew of two and can drop up to eighty 500 lb (230 kg)-class JDAM GPS-guided bombs, or sixteen 2,400 lb (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs.  The B-2 is the only aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.

and

The B-2 is capable of all-altitude attack missions up to 50,000 feet (15,000 m), with a range of more than 6,000 nautical miles (11,000 km) unrefuelled and over 10,000 nautical miles (19,000 km) with one refueling.  Though originally designed primarily as a nuclear bomber, it was first used in combat to drop conventional bombs …

and

A number of upgrade packages have been applied to the B-2.  In July 2008, the B-2’s onboard computing architecture was extensively redesigned, it now incorporates a new integrated processing unit (IPU) that communicates with systems throughout the aircraft via a newly installed fibre optic network; a new version of the operational flight program software was also developed, with legacy code converted from the JOVIAL programming language used beforehand to standard C.  Updates were also made to the weapon control systems to enable strikes upon non-static targets, such as moving ground vehicles.

On 12/29/2008, Air Force officials awarded a $468 million contract to Northrop Grumman to modernize the B-2 fleet’s radars.  <snip>  In 2010, it was made public that the Air Force Research Laboratory had developed a new material to be used on the part of the wing trailing edge subject to engine exhaust, replacing existing material that quickly degraded.

In 2013 the USAF contracted for the Defensive Management System Modernization program to replace the antenna system and other electronics to increase the B-2’s frequency awareness.

When sequestration is putting so much pressure on the funding for all the military, this initiative does not seem prudent to me, and the Air Force should be pressed to explain why it would not be more cost effective to produce more B-2s.  For more, check out THIS article at Defense News.

It Takes A Village

This post is about just one of the situations that can arise when the full weight and resources of a over-reactive school district are unjustly Hillary_ItTakesAVillagebrought to bear to marginalize a student, particularly a young child.  This portion of the last paragraph seems to summarize it best:

My wife and I have degrees in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology.  We have the means and the leverage to go to experts and to the courts.  But even with all that leverage, we still barely saved our son from a system that couldn’t grasp the disability it was dealing with.  How many families and children get ground up by that system?  If our experience is any guide, parents should be vigilant, and if something doesn’t seem right, always stand up for your child.

The entire article, HERE, is fairly long, but well written and illuminating.

The Improved GBU-57: Can It Go 90-Meters Deep?

James Dunnigan at Strategy Page reports on the recent confirmation by the US military of rumors that America’s heaviest Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) has been improved.  Successful tests of the weapon in 2013 were apparently against an accurate replica of the main Iranian nuclear weapons development facility at Fordo, which is said to have sections that go as deep as 90-meters.  Moreover, according to Dunnigan’s article:

The GBU-57 contains 2.4 tons of explosives and costs $3.5 million each.  In the last few years several B-2 bombers have been equipped to carry these weapons (two bombs per B-2).  This was apparently meant to send a message to Iran and North Korea.  There were no known targets for such a weapon anywhere else, but there are plenty of such targets in Iran and North Korea.  Moreover, even if there were deep bunkers in Somalia or Afghanistan you don’t need a stealth bomber to deliver an MOP.  The enemy in those countries have no way of detecting a high flying B-52, much less a stealthy B-2.  But Iran and North Korea do have radars, and a B-2 could slip past those radars and take out the air defense system command bunkers, or any other targets buried deep.

The 6.2 meter (20.5 foot) long MOP has a thick steel cap, which was originally designed to penetrate up to 7.9-61 meters (26-200 feet) of concrete (depending on degree of hardness) or up to 61 meters of rocky earth before exploding.  This was the original spec, which is now supposed to be improved.

Now if we only had a Commander-In-Chief who was willing to use this firecracker.

If only Obama & Kerry had Sarah Palin’s magic Crystal Ball

President Obama’s disappointing reaction to Russian President Putin’s seizure of the Ukrainian Crimea calls to mind Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s warning, during the 2008 presidential campaign, of Barack Obama’s tendency toward hesitancy and moral equivocating, saying this during a campaign stop in Reno, Nevada:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

Want proof?  Here’s the video:

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And by the way, although the Bering Strait is 58 miles wide, the international boundary between the United States and Russia actually runs between two small islands situated more or less in the middle of the Strait.  The islands are named Big Diomede and Little Diomede, and belong to Russia and the US (as a part of Alaska), respectively.  The distance between the two uninhabited islands is about two miles, so on a clear day, each island can be easily seen from the other.  So, suck it, Tina Fey.

TOMORROW is the Deadline for Comments !

I have called attention several times in this space to the threat posed by the proposed IRS rule revisions to Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, which is the section under which most of the larger Tea Party and other conservative activists groups seek tax exemption.  The deadline for public comments on the proposals is tomorrow, so please, if you have not done so already, click THIS link for access to a quick and easy process for making your voice heard.

For even more motivation, click HERE to read the latest news, posted by Eliana Johnson of National Review, on the legislation that is planned for introduction in the House tomorrow.  This new bill, written primarily by Dave Camp (R-MI) would:

… directly address the circumstances that led to last year’s scandal.  The specter of Lois Lerner looms large in the minds of many Republicans, and the plan mandates the termination of any IRS employee found to have taken official action for political purposes.  The 1988 bill that restructured and reformed the IRS spells out ten actions for which the IRS commissioner must terminate an agency employee after an “administrative or judicial determination” that the employee has committed the prohibited action — among them, providing a false statement under oath on a matter involving a taxpayer and violating the rights of a taxpayer.  Today’s bill would add the commission of politically motivated acts to the list.

The plan would also require the IRS to modify its interpretation of a critical provision of the Internal Revenue Code that has been used to protect the privacy of those accused of leaking confidential taxpayer records and to deny information to the victims of IRS abuse.

Under the proposed reforms, the provision, Internal Revenue Code section 6103, would require the government to disclose to victims both the status of an investigation as well as its result, including the identity of the perpetrator.

Your turn.  Now, reach out and touch the IRS.  You can even do so anonymously.


UPDATE — WHITE HOUSE VOWS VETO !!

From PJ-Media, just past 5pm:

The White House threatened to veto a House bill that would block the Internal Revenue Service from issuing a rule that would narrow the definition of who qualifies for a 501(c)(4) exemption as a social welfare organization.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) Stop Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act, which was in the Rules Committee on Tuesday evening, would freeze the finalization of the rule for one year and restore the 501(c)(4) standards and definitions that were in place before conservative groups started to come under extra scrutiny in 2010.

Shortly after the Rules Committee meeting began, the Office of Management and Budget issued a statement warning that the administration “strongly opposes” the bill, which has 66 co-sponsors.

More HERE.

Oh! How The Money Rolls In!

First, it was the irresistible Siren call of the the lottery bounty that made the hearts of avaricious state legislators around the nation go pitty-pat, but now there is marijuana, their new inamorata.  In joyful news from earlier this week, the AP reports on the tax revenues arising from Colorado’s new legal pot law:

Colorado’s legal marijuana market is far exceeding tax expectations, according to a budget proposal released Wednesday by Gov. John Hickenlooper that gives the first official estimate of how much the state expects to make from pot taxes.

and

The initial tax projections are rosier than those given to voters in 2012, when state fiscal projections on the marijuana-legalization amendment would produce $39.5 million in sales taxes next fiscal year, which begins in July.  The rosier projections come from updated data about how many retail stores Colorado has (163 as of February 18th) and how much customers are paying for pot. There’s no standardized sales price, but recreational pot generally is going for much more than the $202 an ounce forecasters guessed last year.

Mason Tvert, a legalization activist who ran Colorado’s 2012 campaign, said other states are watching closely to see what legal weed can produce in tax revenue.  “Voters and state lawmakers around the country are watching how this system unfolds in Colorado, and the prospect of generating significant revenue while eliminating the underground marijuana market is increasingly appealing,” said Tvert, who now works for the Marijuana Policy Project.

Yep.  I think there is a danger that legalizing marijuana will follow the same path as lottery legalization.  As states, especially the blue and purple states, continue their profligate spending practices, they will become so desperate for funding that they will get into the drug business just as they got into the gambling business.  Anyhoo, for the full article, click HERE.

The War On Poverty — The One We Flat Out Lost

One of the few advantages to reaching the Biblical three score and ten, or more, is perspective.  Those of us who are old enough to have reached adulthood before Lyndon Johnson became President (in November, 1963) can draw a clear line between the America that existed before the pursuit of the Great Society began in earnest, as opposed to that which has evolved since.  (Spoiler alert: before was better.)

The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the entire period from 1955 through the beginning of the Reagan Revolution in 1981.  Among the many domestic wealth-transfer mechanisms set up by the whole body of Great Society legislation passed by Johnson and the Democrats was the “War on Poverty” (WoP).  Some of the discrete legislative acts resulting from the overall “War” were the expansion of Social Security (1965), Food Stamps (1964, now known as SNAP), the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (1965), and the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) which was the rubric from which the Community Action Program, Job Corps, and VISTA eventually sprang.

But the fifteen trillion dollars spent on the WoP in the decades since President Johnson declared the war in his 1964 SOTU address have seemingly gone for naught, as the US poverty rate, adjusted for inflation, is largely unchanged in the last fifty years.  Think about that.  In essence, almost one entire year’s worth of GDP, in today’s dollars, pissed away with no substantive improvement.

How can this be?  How can such an enormous amount of money be spent with nothing more to show for it than an occasional twitch of the needle?

John Goodman (the economist, not the actor) takes a stab at addressing this puzzlement in commentary published at the website for The Independent Institute, a public policy think tank.  Two snippets:

From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half.  Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone.  Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man.

and

In 1965, 18% of the population lived in poverty.  Today we are at 15%, or 50 million Americans.

It is past time that we elected a Congress that will recognize that something radically different needs to be done to bring this catastrophe to a merciful end.  Anyway, to read the entire article, complete with graph, click HERE.

The Last Limey — CNN’s Piers Morgan Bites The Dust

Coming less than three months after MS-NBC dumped fellow English commentator Martin Bashir, Piers Morgan is now out at CNN.  Morgan’s show, which had replaced Larry King’s upon King’s retirement three years ago, will end soon, probably within a month or so.  CNN’s experiment with having a Brit constantly trashing America’s gun culture, along with persistently advocating for more strict gun control laws, did not go well for some reason.  The full New York Times story is HERE.

Not Even A Smidgeon Of Corruption?

Yeah, right.  Cleta Mitchell, a top attorney at Washington, DC law firm Foley & Lardner is on the case, in only two minutes, thirty-four seconds.

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For more, Powerline’s original post on this is HERE.

And a reminder — the deadline for public comment to the IRS on the issue of their proposed rules for treatment of Section 501(c)(4) organizations (which includes most Tea Party groups) is February 27th, so if you haven’t already, please use the boilerplate text to copy and paste an e-mail to the IRS expressing your opposition.  Access the page by navigating via the menu bar [ Current Issues / IRS 501(c)(4) Rules ], above.  Please, do this soon.

Renee Ellmers Climbs Aboard The Immigration Reform Choo-Choo

Earlier this week, the News-&-Observer reported on remarks by Illegal_Immigrants_2Representative Renee Ellmers before a receptive audience in Cary:

The Dunn Republican is making immigration overhaul a top priority even as it becomes a flashpoint in her re-election campaign and the prospect of a deal appears to fade on Capitol Hill.

“If I can do anything in Washington, I’d like to solve this problem,” the second-term lawmaker told a forum of immigration advocates in Cary.

Ellmers offered a broad outline of a plan that puts the emphasis foremost on securing the nation’s borders, while also including legal status for the roughly 11 million people living in the United States illegally.

It is not the equivalent of citizenship, Ellmers cautioned, but a lesser status that she did not define. To gain legal status, she said, immigrants would have to verify their identity, pay a penalty and admit wrongdoing.

The full article is HERE.

The F-35: Six Versions for the Marine Corps?

Shane McGlaun has a new piece up on Daily Tech about the progress of the F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter program.  In an interesting passage from the full article, HERE, Army Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the officer in charge of the F-35 program at the Pentagon, said:

“I don’t see any scenario where we are walking back away from this program.  We’re going to buy a lot of these airplanes.”  The 2015 fiscal request from the DOD asks for funds to buy two Navy versions of the F-35, six Marine versions, and 26 Air Force versions.

In a related story, Defense News is reporting HERE that F-18 Hornet purchases by the US Navy are over, with no new orders to Boeing from them or from any foreign governments.

North Korea’s Proletariat Paradise — NOT !

On Monday, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a new 400-page report on living conditions in North Korea, and AEI political economist Nicholas Eberstadt has a post up on the Wall Street Journal discussing the findings in the report.  An excerpt:

The report is a careful but shocking document, the result of a year-long investigation, based on public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, public testimony from more than 80 witnesses and an additional 240 private interviews.  Much of the material is based on firsthand testimony of escapees from this hell on Earth.

“The gravity, scale and nature of these violations . . . does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” the report says.

The full article is HERE.

A Hard Right: Ukrainian Opposition Leader Vitaly Klitschko

The press is reporting today that fires are burning in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev in the second night of violent clashes between police and dissident demonstrators.  Among the goals of the dissidents is the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych, who has ties to and is backed by Russian President Putin.  Putin sees the Ukraine, perhaps the richest of the former Soviet satellite nations, as the key to rebuilding what has been called a new mini-Soviet.  Vitaly Klitschko has announced that he will run for President of Ukraine next year against Yanukovych.  As it happens, Klitschko is a very interesting guy.  An excerpt from John Hindraker’s recent article about him on Powerline:

Vitaly Klitschko is one of the more interesting figures in world politics.  He first earned fame as a boxer: Vitaly and his younger brother Wladimir have dominated the heavyweight division for the last 15 years, and have played a major role in Europe’s boxing renaissance.  Vitaly held one or more heavyweight belts on and off between 1999 and 2013, when he retired to focus exclusively on politics.  His record in world title bouts is 15-2.  At 6-feet, 7-inches and 240 pounds, Klitschko is an imposing force.

and

Vitaly Klitschko has the second highest knockout ratio in the history of the heavyweight division — second to Rocky Marciano.  But Klitschko is much more than a Hall of Fame boxer.  The son of a major general in the Soviet Air Force, he is a very smart guy.  He has a PhD and is an excellent chess player.

And on top of that, the guy has an 80-inch reach!  Here is a video with highlights of Klitschko’s matches in the United States before he retired to engage full-time in Ukrainian politics.  He fights in the heavyweight division, of course, and the heavyweights always have the potential for spectacular damage, including knockouts,

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For more on the troubles in Ukraine and the underlying causes, check out THIS article from CNN.

US Naval Institute says China training for War with Japan

I have previously written several posts on China’s increasing aggressiveness in trying to exert dominance over the South China Sea.  In THIS short article, Sam LaGrone of the US Naval Institute explains how the recent Chinese military training exercise focus has expanded from invading Taiwan to also include the capture of the Shenkaku Islands, a disputed area that is controlled and claimed by Japan.  The article also includes a good map of the disputed area. 

ObamaCare to Illegally Bail Out Health Insurers Soon?

GangstaGuvThe “Risk Corridor” program is a measure written into the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) for the purpose of protecting health insurance providers from the very situation that we see unfolding today.  Too small a number of young, healthy people are proving to be stupid enough to enroll in the ACA, so the health insurance companies are not seeing enough revenue from these “invincibles” to fully subsidize the health care costs of the older, less healthy people.  The Risk Corridor program was a provision in the law that would provide offsetting payments to the health insurance companies if this happened.  However, the ObamaCare law specifically limits this program to the first three years, and therefore expires on December 31, 2016, shortly after the next presidential election.

Now comes word from Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner that:

The Obama Administration may extend beyond 2016 a federal reimbursement program for health insurance companies that lose money by participating in the newly created health care exchanges.

Industry insiders told the Washington Examiner a plan to extend the Affordable Care Act’s “risk corridors” are under discussion, but that administration officials have not made a final decision.

The full article at the Washington Examiner is HERE, and for another more detailed perspective, check out THIS piece from columnist Megan McArdle.