Internet Scofflaw

The Democrats’ new financial regulation bill exempts the SEC from the Freedom of Information Act. The SEC is already using the provision to insulate itself from scrutiny.

The SEC’s web site (archived here) still talks about their commitment to the Freedom of Information act, but I imagine that will be airbrushed soon.

In regard to the president’s deficit commission, Glenn Reynolds remarks:

When they say “everything’s on the table,” they don’t really mean “everything, including elimination of the Department of Education, and privatization of Social Security, and a 15% across-the-board cut in federal payrolls.”

Or to put it more bluntly, when they say everything’s on the table, they are lying.

President Obama is taking four vacations in a little over a month. Hey, anything that keeps him out of the White House is fine by me.

Our various stimulus boondoggles are more expensive than the war:

(From National Review.)

Der Spiegel reports:

With expensive accounting rules, an increased threat of litigation and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for some firms, the once prestigious New York Stock Exchange and other American markets have become unattractive to Germany’s biggest companies. Daimler and Deutsche Telekom have fled this year and the few remaining are likely to follow.

How sad is it that (at least in this regard) America’s free market is now weaker than Germany’s? Friedrich Hayek must be rolling in his grave.

(Via Instapundit.)

Timothy Geithner says we are early in the recession (!):

“Right now, the best thing the government can do…is help create the conditions for the private sector to start to invest in hiring again,” [Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner] said. “Now, we’ve seen six months of positive job growth by the private sector. That’s pretty good,” Geithner said. “Pretty good this early in a recession.“

(Emphasis mine.)

Early in the recession? Which would be scarier: if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or if he does?

(Via Hot Air.)

As predicted:

Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday. Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty said in his state UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have stopped issuing new policies that cover children individually. Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland said a couple of local insurers in her state have done likewise.

Starting later this year, the health care overhaul law requires insurers to accept children regardless of medical problems. Insurers are worried that parents will wait until kids get sick to sign them up, saddling the companies with unpredictable costs.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Of course insurers are going to stop writing policies for children! The new rules make them unprofitable. Family plans will survive (for now), because even those abusing the system will have to pay for the whole family, and probably the whole family isn’t sick. Existing policies will survive as well; those people aren’t abusing the system.

An unintended consequence? Perhaps. A predictable consequence? Definitely.

(Via Hot Air.)

I don’t know which is more shocking, that public-sector employers aren’t required to participate in Social Security, or that public-sector pensions are so insolvent that they’re thinking of giving up such a plum privilege.

Rasmussen reports that we truly are governed by an elite class at odds with the people:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure. . .

America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin. However, among Mainstream voters, 90% prefer the free market.

Outside of the Political Class, free markets are preferred across all demographic and partisan lines. This gap may be one reason that 68% of voters believe the Political Class doesn’t care what most Americans think. Fifty-nine percent (59%) are embarrassed by the behavior of the Political Class.

ASIDE: Rasmussen defines the political class (4% of the population), as those whose answers to a set of questions show an affinity for government. The mainstream class (65%) answer the opposite way.

Rasmussen also notes an interesting gap between affinity for “capitalism” and “free markets”:

A Rasmussen Reports survey last year caused quite a stir by showing that just 53% of Americans prefer capitalism over socialism. That stat even made its way into a Michael Moore film. By April 2010, the preference for capitalism was up to 60%. However, there is still a significant gap between support for capitalism and support for free markets. While some politicians and economists use the terms interchangeably, just 35% believe a free market economy is the same as a capitalist economy.

One reason for the gap in support for capitalism and free markets is clearly the behavior of some large American corporations. Seventy-three percent (73%) of Americans believe that Goldman Sachs is likely to have committed fraud as charged by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Seven-out-of-10 Americans believe that government and big business work together against the interests of consumers and investors.

John Kerry, 2004:

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently calls companies and chief executives “Benedict Arnolds” if they move jobs and operations overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

John Kerry, 2010:

Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I.

Isabel – Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage – was designed by Rhode Island boat designer Ted Fontaine.

But instead of berthing the vessel in Nantucket, where the senator summers with the missus, Teresa Heinz, Isabel’s hailing port is listed as “Newport” on her stern. . .

Cash-strapped Massachusetts still collects a 6.25 percent sales tax and an annual excise tax on yachts. Sources say Isabel sold for something in the neighborhood of $7 million, meaning Kerry saved approximately $437,500 in sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000.

Just to be clear, Kerry’s not doing anything wrong by mooring his yacht in Rhode Island. He’s merely doing what anyone would do to avoid high taxes. The point is that Kerry is an idiot and a hypocrite.

The secondary point is the Massachusetts “sails tax” is stupid. It’s easy for people to move their boats, so what the tax does is push business out of state.

(Via Cato@Liberty.)

President Obama came Donald Berwick a recess appointment to head Medicare and Medicaid, even though the appointment was not stalled, in order to avoid public scrutiny for his radical views. The Wall Street Journal has compiled a handy list of some of those views. (I can’t speak to the context of these statements, but given Berwick’s other statements, we have every reason to believe they are not out of context.)

For central planning, and against individual autonomy and markets:

• “I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.”
• “The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.”
• “Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.”
• “Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.”

For rationing:

• “It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded.”
• “A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply.”
• “One over-demanded service is prevention: annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures that supposedly help catch diseases early.”
• “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” [This one is from here, not from the list.]

Health care should be run by bureaucrats, not doctors:

• “I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care.”
• “Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.”

Those last two are possibly the most chilling. Berwick is saying that we must provide one-size-fits-all care, and not give doctors (let alone patients) the power to do what they think is best.

This is the man who is now running Medicare and Medicaid.

But Berwick himself has no stake in the program; he has made arrangements never to need Medicare. His foundation, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has pledged to give him and his wife health care from retirement until death.

Berwick wants to ration care and to standardize care, but for everyone else, not himself.

POSTSCRIPT: Berwick’s foundation is a funny thing. In 2008 (the most recent year available), it received $12.2 million in revenue. (Republicans would like to know where that money came from, but since Democrats avoided holding a hearing for Berwick, they never had the chance to ask.) In that same year, it compensated him $2.3 million in pay and benefits. That’s nearly a fifth of the foundation’s entire revenue.

A new Quinnipiac poll:

A year after President Barack Obama’s political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 – 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 – 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Unfortunately for Republicans, they can’t nominate an unnamed Republican. Anyway, I agree with Patterico that the remarkable thing here isn’t the result, but the fact that Quinnipiac would be willing to embarrass President Obama by asking the question. His stock certainly has dropped.

Set aside the moral issue of abortion for a moment, and just think of it as a medical-ish service. Dan Mitchell notes that the stability of the price of abortion illustrates the power of market forces, in contrast to the third-party payer problem for most health care:

Many people think that market forces don’t work in the health care system and that costs will always rise faster than prices for other goods and services. There are a few examples showing that this is not true, and proponents of liberalization usually cite cosmetic surgery [chart here] and laser-eye surgery as examples of treatments that generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. Not surprisingly, prices for these treatments have been quite stable — particularly when increases in quality are added to the equation.

I just ran across another example, and this one could be important since it may resonate with those who normally are very suspicious of free markets. As the chart from the Alan Guttmacher Institute shows, the price of an abortion has been remarkably stable over the past 20-plus years. [Chart here.] Let’s connect the dots to make everything clear. Abortions generally are financed by out-of-pocket payments. People therefore have an incentive to shop carefully and get good value since they are spending their own money. And because market forces are allowed, the cost of abortions is stable. The logical conclusion to draw from this, of course, is that allowing market forces for other medical services will generate the same positive results in terms of cost and efficiency.

You don’t say:

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that a majority of retirees say they expect their current [Social Security] benefits to be cut, a dramatic increase in the number who hold that view. And a record six of 10 non-retirees predict Social Security won’t be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.

Skepticism is highest among the youngest workers: Three-fourths of those 18 to 34 don’t expect to get a Social Security check when they retire.

Actually, this seems low. A quarter of young people think they might get Social Security? Other than wishful thinking and/or ignorance, I can’t account for it. Social Security is already losing money, nine years early.

What would a completely failed economic policy look like? Pretty much like this, I’d say:

After you’re done gasping, also notice how the graph remains within the usual range until right around the beginning of 2009.

A few days ago it was revealed that at least two states (Pennsylvania and New Mexico) were covering abortion in federally funded high-risk health insurance pools. Now the AP is reporting that the Obama administration has issued rules barring such pools from covering abortion in most cases. If true, that’s welcome news. It would also be very surprising, coming from this administration, so I’m waiting to hear of a loophole.

Meanwhile, the Reproductive Health Reality Check, while bleating about how awful this is, underscores the fact that abortion funding is permitted under the health care nationalization law:

But here’s the catch, nothing in federal law actually restricts the use of federal or state money for abortion in PCIPs.

Recall how we were repeatedly told that the Hyde amendment would magically prevent any federal money from being spent on abortion. As I noted previously, that was a bald-faced lie. (The Hyde amendment only applies to Medicaid.) Now that the bill has been passed, the left has no reason to deny it any more.

(Via the Corner.)

In a preview of what we can expect nationwide as Obamacare takes effect, Massachusetts firms are dumping their health insurance:

The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.

Since April 1, the date many insurance contracts are renewed for small businesses, the owners of about 90 small companies terminated their insurance plans with Braintree-based broker Jeff Rich and indicated in a follow-up survey that they were relying on publicly-funded insurance for their employees. . .

The Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy annually surveys employers and found no significant drop in coverage as of the end of 2009, when more than three-quarters of companies offered health insurance.

But insurance brokers say the pace of terminations has picked up considerably since then among small companies, of which there are thousands in Massachusetts. Many of these companies — restaurants, day-care centers, hair salons, and retail shops — typically pay such low wages that their workers qualify for state-subsidized health insurance when their employers drop their plans.

(Via Power Line.)

The Economist has a column against the idea of fairness as an organizing principle for government.

A sense of fairness, as any parent knows, develops irritatingly early. A wail of “It’s not fair!” is usually the first normative statement to come out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. People seem to be hard-wired to demand fairness. Studies in which people are offered deals that they regard as fair and unfair show that the former stimulate the reward centres in the brain; the latter stimulate areas associated with disgust.

For the British fair play is especially important: without it, life isn’t cricket . . . The French have taken to using le fair-play in sport, presumably because (as their coach’s refusal to shake hands with his opposite number after losing to South Africa suggested) their own culture finds the concept rather difficult. When talking politics, however, the French, like the Americans, tend to go for the more formal notion of justice. But fairness appeals to the British political class, for it has a common sense down-to-earthiness which avoids the grandiosity of American and continental European political discourse while aspiring to do its best for all men.

I didn’t realize that this was a societal difference between America and Britain, but if it is, good for us. (And for France, I suppose.)

Fairness is a pernicious concept because it is totally subjective. It can mean anything to anyone, so it really means nothing at all. Consider two children: Alice (age 15) and Bob (age 10). Alice’s bed time is 10:30, and Bob’s bed time is 10:00. Both children are unhappy: Bob because Alice’s bed time is later, and Alice because when she was 10 years old her bed time was only 9:30. It’s not fair.

In politics, progressives tend to put things in terms of fairness: The rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. What exactly would be their fair share is never stated, but it’s always higher than they are paying now. (In 2007, the top 10% paid 70% of the income tax.) Free trade isn’t fair trade. (Whatever that means.) We need a Fairness Doctrine to shut down conservative talk radio.

ASIDE: Even when progressives use the word “justice” (e.g., “social justice”), they usually don’t actually mean objective justice, but some sort of subjective concept — which is to say fairness. We need to defend the word “justice”. The left has perverted the word “liberal” to the exact opposite of its historical meaning, we can’t let them have “justice” as well.

The author shies away from a full-throated condemnation of fairness, but I think all this what he is getting at in his conclusion:

Yet the fact that everybody believes in fairness is a clue to what’s wrong with the notion. Like that other warm-blanket word, “community”, it signals limp thinking. What exactly is “fair” about restricting trade, for instance? Or “unfair” about letting successful people in business or other fields enjoy the fruits of their enterprise without punitive taxes?

“Fairness” suits Britain’s coalition government so well not just because its meanings are all positive, but also because—like views within the coalition—they are wide-ranging. To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares.

Those two meanings are not just different: they are opposite. They represent a choice that has to be made between freedom and equality. Yet so slippery—and thus convenient to politicians—is the English language that a single word encompasses both, and in doing so loses any claim to meaning.

Fairness is fudge. This newspaper will have none of it. We reject the wide, woolly notion of fairness in favour of sharper, narrower words that mean what they say, like just or cruel.

It turns out the health care nationalization act imposes a sales tax on real estate sales. A story in the Washington Post purports to debunk it, but actually just argues semantics:

• It’s not a sales tax or a transfer tax, it’s a Medicare tax. Why I should care about the label is beyond me.
• It doesn’t affect anyone making under $200k per year. First of all, taxes are a drain on the economy whoever pays them. Second, $200k is not $250k, the level at which Obama promised we would not face a tax increase. But, most importantly, sales taxes are invariably passed on to the buyer, so the fact that the tax is levied on the “rich” has no bearing on who actually pays it.
• The tax is levied only on the profit. Untrue. More precisely, it depends on how you define profit. The calculation of profit doesn’t figure in inflation, nor does it figure in the amount spent maintaining the home (major improvements, on the other hand, are figured in), so one could easily end up paying the tax despite taking a loss in real terms. Indeed, if inflation soars in the coming years (as it seems like it must) most of the price of a home will be “profit”.
• The tax is calculated using a very complex formula. Can’t argue with that one.

(Via Cato@Liberty.)

Wait, I thought this wasn’t supposed to happen.

We already knew it was a lie that health care nationalization would not pay for abortions, but we didn’t (or, at least, I didn’t) know how many ways it would fund abortion, and how quickly that funding would start: Obamacare will be funding abortions in Pennsylvania and New Mexico beginning pretty much immediately.

That’s two of the four plans for which the National Right to Life Committee was able to find language, so there will surely be dozens more.

Earlier this week, I wondered if, by passing a fake budget, Democrats were giving up the ability to ram legislation through the Senate using reconciliation. The Washington Independent says the answer is yes:

Recognizing that Democrats would be reluctant to record “yes” votes for a budget that would augment the deficit, the House leadership opted to deem as passed a “budget enforcement resolution” instead, just before the July 4 recess. While the distinction between an enforcement resolution and a full budget is largely technical, there is one crucial difference: Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year — a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

The fake budget may be a bad thing in terms of the honesty of the budget, but I’d say this consideration outweighs that, particularly with the specter of a mad duck session on the horizon.

(Via the Corner.)

Another reason to despise BP (there are so many):

The oil giant BP faced a new furor on Thursday as it confirmed that it had lobbied the British government to conclude a prisoner-transfer agreement that the Libyan government wanted to secure the release of the only person ever convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing over Scotland, which killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans. . .

BP’s statement on Thursday repeated earlier acknowledgments that it had promoted the transfer agreement to protect a $900 million offshore oil-and-gas exploration deal off Libya’s Mediterranean coast. The British justice minister at the time, Jack Straw, admitted after Mr. Megrahi was repatriated and freed that the BP deal was a consideration in the review of his case.

(Previous post.)