Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:
4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Tim Connors, Senior Manager in the Law Enforcement and Security Division of CAAS, LLC – National Security and Embassy Closings;
4:30 CDT/5:30 EDT: Scott McEwen, Coauthor of the #! New York Times bestseller “American Sniper” – nonstop-action thriller, “Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip”;
5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Lance Izumi, Koret Senior Fellow and Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute – Unions and Schools; and
5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Angela Logomasini, Senior Fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute – Liberal Media Needlessly Scaring Women.
Listen live on the Internethere. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.
So here’s some interesting socio-political news. A new study from one of the top business schools in the nation, Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, contradicts the popular stereotype that conservatives are comparatively stodgy and unadventurous while liberals are open-minded and inclined to try new things.
According to the study to be released today, conservatives are actually more adventurous than liberals when it comes to product selection and real-world exercise of choice. According to Naomi Mandel, one of the study’s authors, “Usually, when you think of conservatives, you think of people who like to have control over things or who are familiar and predictable.” Those of us who actually are conservatives, of course, tend to know better. After all, we’re the ones devoted to “free markets, free people,” as the saying goes. By getting government off of people’s backs and allowing them to make their own individualized choices rather than comply with more of a government-dictated, one-size-fits-all model, societies can become more prosperous and happier, as the real-world evidence repeatedly confirms.
So liberals can continue expressing fealty toward choice-limiting institutions like ObamaCare or the Post Office. Contrary to popular myth, we conservatives reply, “Vive le difference!”
There are a lot of reasons to lament the rise of the administrative state. There’s the lack of accountability that comes from policy decisions being made by unelected bureaucrats. There are the cozy relationships that often form between regulators and those they regulate. There’s the avalanche of rules and regulations that make the law so vast as to be virtually unknowable. But one factor that’s become especially salient during the Obama years is the fact that administrative caprice undermines equality before the law. Case in point: the outbreak of waivers for favored clients of the Obama Administration.
While we’ve heard about this trend most often in regards to Obamacare, it’s also become a serious issue in education. As noted in Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook:
No Child Left Behind technically expired in 2007. But Congress didn’t manage to do anything about it. They just kept appropriating money for the zombie bill. And so the outdated provisions of this out-of-touch bill began strangling the education system.
NCLB says that fully 100 percent of school districts need to meet tough proficiency goals in reading and math in 2014 or they lose tons of money. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to hit those targets and that’s been clear for years now. Everyone knows NCLB needs an overhaul. But, you know, Congress.
So the Obama administration has started waiving NCLB for states that propose sufficiently rigorous alternative plans. So far, 39 states and the District of Columbia have been let out of No Child Left Behind. On Wednesday, they were joined by eight individual school districts in California — Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.
“This is a pretty troubling development,” Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, told The Post. “The states have always traditionally been in control of accountability for most school districts. . . . The idea that the secretary of education is controlling the accountability system in eight districts in California is kind of mind-boggling.”
Of course, the Obama administration says, with some justification, that it would’ve been even more troubling to leave the million kids in these districts in the grips of a law that no longer makes any sense.
Luckily, we have a mechanism for amending or repealing laws that don’t make sense: it’s called Congress. If you can’t get a fix through, too bad. You don’t get to change the rules when you don’t like the outcome.
The Obama Administration shouldn’t be in a position to determine “sufficiently rigorous alternative plans” and favor some states over others. That’s a legislative judgment that needs to be worked out on Capitol Hill. And even that, frankly, is too much. Ideally, education should be managed exclusively at the state and local level. The bowels of the federal administrative state, however, are the last place from which control should be emanating.
We all recall former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous instruction that Congress should pass ObamaCare so that we can all find out what’s in it. Well, it turns out that Congress itself didn’t like what it found, and desperately worked to secure a free pass from the ObamaCare mandates to which other Americans are bound. Like in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” some are apparently more equal than others despite the law’s statutory language that Congress and its staffers would be subject to the law that they passed. As our old compatriot Quin Hillyer notes, that not only violates the law and all concepts of fairness, it also contravenes an important portion of the Contract with America:
For decades, Congress had exempted itself in myriad ways from laws or rules applying to the rest of the country. The Contract vowed to change that – and on the very first day of the new Congress in 1995, it did. Here was the language: “First, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress.” How simple. How straightforward. And how important! And for the next 18½ years, until this past week – and despite frequent rumors to the contrary – that’s exactly what Congress did. For all its faults, Congress actually abided by the Contract’s rule. But now that’s gone. Now, via a ruling worked out between certain congressional leaders and the White House, federal subsidies for health insurance – of a sort available to no private-sector workers – will continue to be provided for congressmen and their staffs. This sort of special exemption for government workers is not a merely symbolic annoyance; instead, it feeds a perception that soon becomes an attitude that soon makes itself manifest in various actions. The perception is that government workers are above the law; the attitude that can grow among the federal workforce is that those workers are our masters rather than our servants; and the actions that flow from that attitude can include many abuses, small and large, of privacy or liberty.”
An important point, and one that Americans should raise as Congressional leaders head home for August recess and citizen townhall meetings.
From issues like ObamaCare to immigration to the ongoing administration scandals, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses several questions that should be put to Members of Congress at town hall meetings during the August recess.
Avik Roy, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discusses the Obama Administration’s unilateral decision to delay parts of ObamaCare, why delaying the employer mandate while continuing to implement the individual mandate is unfair to hard-working Americans and evidence that the law is failing to work as intended, and how ObamaCare will make health insurance less affordable as premiums rise.
Protectionism for volunteers? It’s an idea only the left could love. From John K. Ross, writing at Reason:
In the aftermath of the tornado that devastated Joplin in 2011, Remote Area Medical, a Tennessee-based charity that provides free health care, sent its mobile eyeglass laboratory to Missouri to help.
But it wasn’t allowed to assist because Missouri law makes it extremely difficult for doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals to offer free services.
“We did send the vehicle up there,” said RAM founder Stan Brock. “Unfortunately, it was not allowed to do anything because we did not have a Missouri-licensed optometrist and opticians available to do the work.”
Now, the kindhearted amongst you may have assumed (hoped?) as I did upon reading that passage that this was the product of some archaic law that no one knew existed until the situation arose (though even then one would have to question why they bothered enforcing it). Nope. Not only is this active policy, it’s one that the Show-Me State’s governor is intent on protecting:
In May, state legislators passed the Volunteer Health Services Act, which would have allowed health professionals licensed in other states to offer free care in Missouri and also would have relaxed medical malpractice liability for volunteer health workers.
Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed the bill last month, writing that the VHSA “is unnecessary given that Missouri already has a system in place that encourages volunteerism.”
There is political calculation and then there’s intellectual and moral perversion. Saying “Thanks, but we’d prefer you not help the most afflicted amongst us” falls decidedly into the latter category. It’s stories like this that remind us that “compassionate conservatism” is a tautology.
How often do the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Elections Commission share information about non-profit political groups?
If the question seems highly unusual that’s because it is. Ordinarily, there is no reason for the two federal agencies to communicate about a private entity, yet evidence is mounting that IRS and FEC officials had several conversations about politically conservative non-profit groups.
To recall, the IRS has the power to grant or strip a group’s non-profit status, and the FEC is the main arbiter of political speech. If there is evidence of coordination between these two agencies to discriminate against associations because of their viewpoint, a whole new level of government corruption will emerge.
To find out the truth, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is requesting “All documents and communications between or among any FEC official or employee and any IRS official or employee for the period January 1, 2008, to the present.”
If past experience with the Obama administration is any guide, House committee staff could be in for a lot of reading.
Note to Members of Congress and HR consultants – it’s not what you think.
Most of the attention on this particular mandate has focused on the idea that employers can avoid the twin threats of costly insurance or hefty fines if they pare back full-time employees to part-time status.
By not employing 50 full-time employees a small business can avoid triggering the mandate, or so the thinking goes.
But the reality is that ObamaCare adds up the total amount of part-time hours worked to create “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees that count toward the 50 employee total. Meet or exceed the threshold, and say hello to huge compliance costs.
This is why a proposed legislative fix won’t actually solve the underlying problem, which is capping the amount of hours a small business can pay out to 50 FTEs – whether they are full-time, part-time or some combination of both.
It’s time for Congress to take a closer look at how ObamaCare’s employer mandate works and repeal it.
With just eight weeks to go until ObamaCare’s October 1 enrollment, the Health and Human Services department is scrambling to meet the deadline.
Its first order of business: A log-in portal where users can create a personal account.
In a few clicks you can get a sense of the kind of information you’ll be sharing via your account: family size, personal income, health history, age, gender and employment status.
Yes, some level of government likely has access to most if not all of this information, but it is ObamaCare’s user account that will, for the first time, house all of it in one place.
It will then be the Federal Data Hub’s job to share this information with the applicable state-based insurance exchange, and check your entries against another federal database to ensure accuracy.
In a last ditch effort to shield Members of Congress and their staff members from having to pay the same outrageous premiums set to hit everyday Americans under ObamaCare, President Obama personally intervened to ensure that the government would instead pay the bill.
The deal preserves a 75 percent contribution by the federal government for Congress and its staff toward the price of the new, costlier health insurance premiums available under ObamaCare, according to Politico.
The decision flies in the face of an amendment attached to ObamaCare that requires Congress and staff to use the same health insurance exchanges as everyone else with the same rules. Until today, that meant that a person’s salary – from a Senator’s to an entry-level staff member’s – would determine whether a person qualifies for a federal subsidy and if so for how much.
But now we see that, once again, Congress and this President are choosing to operate by a different set of rules than the ones they enforce on everyone else.
If you followed the recent debate in Congress over the farm bill, you know that the associated programs were often sold as vital to preserving a way of life in rural America. To cut one red cent anywhere would be to betray the nation’s farmers. So we were told, anyway.
Well, it turns out that there are at least a few beneficiaries who will probably be able to get by without the federal handout. From James Grieff at Bloomberg View:
It’s bad enough that the U.S. government showers billions of dollars a year in subsidies and handouts on the nation’s farmers, a group that as a whole is much better off than most Americans. Now the Government Accountability Office says in a new report that many of the recipients of that federal largess aren’t even alive.
The agency determined that thousands of dead farmers have received as much as $36 million in payments for crop insurance, disaster aid and conservation programs. The report doesn’t say how dead farmers received the checks or who went to the banks to cash them — but never mind, since that wasn’t the GAO’s assignment.
These are the same people, keep in mind, who think that government can make health care less expensive than the private sector. Count me skeptical. In fact, I’m guessing that experiment will play out like an exaggerated version of the scenario above: with more money wasted and a higher body count.
In my column this week, I detail how U.S. economic growth has hit stalling speed. Today’s jobs report from the Labor Department demonstrates that the same is true of the nation’s employment situation in the fifth year of Obama’s economic program.
Only 162,000 jobs were added in July, which was significantly below analysts’ expectation of 190,000. Even worse, and putting that number in context, 240,000 people dropped out of the workforce last month, while the labor participation rate fell again to 63.4%. That dropoff explains why the headline unemployment rate declined a bit to 7.4%, which is the number the Obama Administration and sympathetic media will highlight. But that number only counts people who are actually looking for a job, so those hundreds of thousands who continue to drop out make the surface unemployment rate look better than it actually is. Moreover, keep in mind that Obama promised at the outset of his administration in February 2009 that his economic policies and trillion-dollar spending “stimulus” would have the unemployment rate down to 5% by now.
The number of part-time workers also amounted to 174,000, showing once again that the approaching ObamaCare mandates are forcing employers to make those they do decide to hire part-time. All in all, yet another lackluster Obama era jobs report.
Health reform is now causing job turmoil across the country in three key groups that the White House has depended on for support—local government, school workers and unions.
School districts in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Indiana are dropping to part-time status school workers such as teacher aides, administrators, secretaries, bus drivers, gym teachers, coaches and cafeteria workers. Cities or counties in states like California, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Michigan and Iowa are dropping to part-time status government workers such as librarians, secretaries, administrators, parks and recreation officials and public works officials.
The next time you hear the president drone on about income inequality, remember that his signature domestic achievement has a nasty habit of kneecapping the working class. Even if the president’s gripe is that these people had low wages and no health insurance before he took office, consider the net effect of his tenure: they now have even lower wages (thanks to fewer hours) and still have no insurance. Heck of a job, Barry.
Beware of financial bureaucrats posing as economists. That’s my main takeaway from some pre-analysis of Friday’s unemployment numbers by Gallup’s lead economist, Dennis Jacobe.
As is sometimes the case when using metrics to understand reality, it looks like the federal government isn’t counting the right economic event if it truly wants to understand the employment market.
According to Jacobe, “The current government job measures leave a lot to be desired in terms of face-validity. For example, [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke noted in his testimony to Congress that the Fed’s unemployment target may need to be adjusted, depending on the labor participation rate. A declining participation rate can artificially lower the unemployment rate as job seekers give up looking for work, while an increasing participation rate can do the reverse.”
The problem is particularly acute when one considers how the feds count part-time jobs.
“Similarly, the establishment survey can be distorted by a surge in part-time jobs – a factor that may need to be considered when one evaluates Friday’s report,” writes Jacobe. “Part-time jobs not only count as new jobs for this survey, but if an American having one part-time job adds an additional part-time job, it counts the same as the creation of a new full-time job.”
This kind of counting completely misrepresents the rise in multiple part-time jobs. By treating two-part time jobs as the equivalent of one full-time job, the metric leaves out the fact that unlike just about every full-time job, almost no part-time job provides health or retirement benefits. Thus, while the hours worked my be roughly the same, the overall compensation is not.
What makes this an especially pernicious way to describe today’s employment market is the well-documented impact ObamaCare is having on the decline of full-time employment. If the federal unemployment survey continues to equate workers with multiple part-time jobs and those with full-time employment, a huge net loss in millions of workers’ standard of living will be lost because the official formula simply doesn’t account for it.
That’s a point worth remembering if Friday’s unemployment numbers come back better than expected.
In a speech to a room full of government researchers, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker made some bold predictions: If Detroit had passed the same public union reforms as the Badger State did, it wouldn’t be bankrupt today. And if Chicago had done so, its public school system would be in much better shape.
Later this week Walker is hosting the National Governors Association in Milwaukee, and he plans to deliver a simple message: “Worry more about the next generation than the next election.”
Absent Walker’s track record, it would be an empty bromide. But with it, the phrase introduces a formula for success that Americans nationwide may be willing to try after eight years of economic futility under President Barack Obama.
IPAB – aka, the Independent Payment Advisory Board – is one of the chief cost-containing elements of ObamaCare. As designed, a presidentially appointed panel of medical experts will convene to decide how much the government will pay for certain kinds of care, and who gets which treatments.
That means that “The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” writes Howard Dean in the Wall Street Journal. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”
Dean, who is a licensed medical doctor and spent 11 years as the Democratic Governor of Vermont before running for president in 2004, knows from experience that IPAB is doomed to fail.
“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting – the essential mechanism of the IPAB – has a 40-year track record of failure,” says Dean. “What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”
Dean goes on to call for a bipartisan repeal of IPAB, which is great to read and should be acted on. But the logic of including IPAB with ObamaCare’s structure makes perfect sense. Government-controlled health care is centrally-controlled and -planned health care.
If Dr. Dean wants a more patient-centered health care system he should be calling for repeal of ObamaCare in its entirety and greater deregulation of the health care industry. Empowering a new generation of medical entrepreneurs that can leverage advances in technology into boutique health care outlets would drive down costs, increase business opportunities and improve the quality of individualized care.
Dean is right to shudder at the care-killing cost of bureaucracy. Maybe one day he’ll discover the possibilities of a freer health care market too.
Avik Roy, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discusses the Obama Administration’s unilateral decision to delay parts of ObamaCare, why delaying the employer mandate while continuing to implement the individual mandate is unfair to hard-working Americans and evidence that the law is failing to work as intended, and how ObamaCare will make health insurance less affordable as premiums rise.
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