In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation.

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To hear some folks tell it, budget cuts in Virginia over the past three to four years have been so savage it’s a miracle there’s any state government left. We long ago cut out all the fat and hacked through the muscle; now we’re sawing deep into bone. Localities are scared stiff that the state will stiff them come January. And it’s only going to get worse. Gov. Bob McDonnell has had state agencies prepare plans cutting 2 percent, 4 percent, and 6 percent from their budgets. The stories have grown numbingly familiar.

Still: The general fund has grown roughly $1 billion from last fiscal year to this one. That represents about a 6 percent hike. So why is the governor asking agencies to plan for cuts?

… For example: From fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2012, general-fund outlays for the Department of Medical Assistance Services (that’s the one responsible for administering Medicaid and the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program) have grown 35 percent. General-fund revenue hasn’t grown anything like that, so the difference has to come from the pockets of other programs.

Huh. Maybe we really should talk about reforming Medicaid.

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Education used to make up a bigger share of state spending. When the association first began compiling the report in 1987, elementary and secondary education made up the biggest share of state spending, and higher education the second-biggest share. Medicaid surpassed higher education as the second-biggest state program in 1990, and in 2003 it became largest state program for the first time. Since then it has vied with schools for the biggest share of state spending, but for the past three years it has been in the lead, with an increasing margin.

Maybe it’s time to consider reforming Medicaid? Before it eats up state budgets completely? And maybe we could do it without demonizing the one party that’s willing to talk about it? (Hello, Congressman Paul Ryan.)

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The bill barred insurers or employers from forcing patients to use mail-order plans for prescription drugs, except for plans negotiated by unions. Instead, consumers would be guaranteed the choice of having their prescriptions filled either through mail-order or at the local drugstore, without any added copayments or fees.

So, at a time when health plans are under tremendous pressure to cut premiums (or at least to raise them as little as possible), the Governor is going to raise health plans’ costs? Not exactly.

But the governor signed both bills late Monday on the condition that the Legislature would retroactively amend them to require retail pharmacies to accept the same reimbursement rates for drugs as mail-order pharmacies.

Oh, okay. The Governor is going to force small mom-and-pop stores to lose money on every prescription that they fill. Yeah, that’s going to work out well. <sarcasm />

There’s absolutely no good way to fulfill this requirement without raising somebody’s costs. The patient’s preference for locally filled prescriptions is more expensive. By rights, patients should pay for that preference. Instead, the Governor is looking to make someone else pay instead. That’s always a bad idea and this is going to end up back-firing.

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• Complex Systems Cannot Be Managed from the Top, Down
• The Core Components of Complex Systems Cannot Be Copied
• Choosing Public Policies for Complex Systems
• Public Policy Lessons

Most people in health policy do not understand complex systems. They really don’t understand social science models either. As a result, when they advocate or enact public policies, they are almost always oblivious to the inevitability of unintended consequences. The idea that a policy based on good intentions could actually make things worse is beyond their comprehension.

Speaking as someone who works in healthcare: yup. Every time healthcare people get together in large numbers, I see the belief that they can figure out a master plan, using the power of good intentions to make everything better. (Usually, of course, without using any evil profits either.)

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All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in.

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Many business owners who sell low-priced goods like coffee and candy bars now are paying higher rates—not lower—when their customers use debit cards for transactions that are less than roughly $10.

That is because credit-card companies used to give merchants discounts on debit-card fees they pay on small transactions. But the Dodd-Frank Act placed an overall cap on the fees, and the banking industry has responded by eliminating the discounts.

“There will be some unhappy parties, as there always is when the government gets in the way of the free-market system,” says Chris McWilton, president of U.S. markets for MasterCard Inc. He said the company decided that it couldn’t sustain the discounts under the new rate model because the old rates had essentially subsidized the small-ticket discounts.

And, the kicker.

Mr. Scherr, the coffee shop owner, says that debit-card fees at one of his five stores rose to about 4.5% of sales from 3.5% of sales in the month after the new law took effect. “It’s a killer for me,” says Mr. Scherr, who estimates that 95% of his sales are under $15.

In the meantime, Mr. Scherr is weighing whether the expense of an ATM would justify its installation. If he gets one, he says he plans to “stick a sign on top of it, calling it a ‘Durbin ATM.’”

I didn’t expect that level of pushback from a Manhattan coffee shop owner. Good for him—I hope he does it.

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The Open Fuel Standard bill (H.R. 1687) would remedy this situation by requiring automakers to activate the flex-fuel capabilities of their vehicles. This would open the market to fuels producible from plentiful domestic resources not under cartel control, free us from looting by OPEC, create millions of jobs, slash our deficit, reduce the flow of income to the Islamists, and cushion us from counter-effects should forceful action be required to deal with threats such as the Iranian nuclear-bomb program. Introduced by Reps. John Shimkus (R., Ill.) and Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.), its current bipartisan list of sponsors includes liberals such as Jim McDermott (D., Wash.), Allyson Schwartz (D., Pa.), Steve Israel (D., N.Y.), and Howard Berman (D., Calif.) to conservatives Dan Burton (R., Ind.), Roscoe Bartlett (R., Md.), Tom Cole (R., Okla.), and Allen West (R., Fla.), as well as many in between. It is a bill clearly in the national interest, and should be supported by everyone from left to right.

By eliminating the artificial incompatibility between the vehicles we drive and the fuels we can make ourselves, the Open Fuel Standard bill will unchain the Invisible Hand, creating a true free market in vehicle fuels. Those reluctant to embrace it need to answer the following questions: In whose interest is it that Americans should continue to be denied fuel choice? In whose interest is it that America’s vast natural-gas, coal, and biomass resources remain unusable as a source of liquid vehicle fuel? In whose interest is it that America continue to give hundreds of billions of dollars each year to foreign potentates bent upon our destruction, instead of paying our own people to make fuel out of our own resources? In whose interest is it that a foreign cartel retains unlimited power to raise the cost of our fuel? In whose interest is it that we remain in the power of our enemies? Finally, should their interests be allowed to prevail, or should ours?

Bah. I dislike any proposal that starts with “someone is missing an opportunity to do some good” and ends with “let’s force them to do it!”. I don’t care how good the idea is and I don’t care whether it’s proposed by a conservative or a liberal. I just care that your primary interest is in forcing it down everyone’s throats and not in convincing everyone that it’s in their own self interest.

If consumers were really shopping for methanol cars, manufacturers would be producing them. If methanol producers wanted consumers to drive methanol cars, they’d start an advocacy campaign and advertise about the benefits of methanol. That’s how things should work. Bottom up change. Not top down coercion. And I don’t care if Congressman Allen West does think this is a good idea. On this, he’s wrong.

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All highways wear out over time, despite ongoing maintenance. Over the next 30 years, most of Wisconsin’s Interstate system will exceed its nominal 50-to 60-year design life and will need complete reconstruction. When that point is reached, it makes sense to update designs to current safety and operational standards, as was done recently in the reconstruction of the Marquette interchange. And in corridors where demand is projected to exceed capacity, resulting in heavy congestion, it makes sense to add lanes.

Wisconsin already has a $1 billion per year highway funding gap. The total $26.2 billion cost of this Interstate program is far beyond the ability of current transportation funding sources to handle. Federal and state fuel tax revenues, the largest source of transportation funding, are in long-term decline in real, or inflation-adjusted, terms, and a portion of Wisconsin’s vehicle registration fee revenue is now committed for several decades to paying debt service on transportation revenue bonds issued since2003 to cover funding shortfalls. General obligation bonds, with general fund debt service, were also issued to make up for recent diversion of transportation fund revenue to the state’s general fund. To rebuild the rural Interstate and southeastern freeway system in a timely manner will require an additional source of transportation revenue.

This study explores the feasibility of using toll revenue financing to pay for this $26.2 billion reconstruction and modernization program. Under the principle of value-added tolling, tolls would not be charged on a corridor until it was reconstructed and modernized. All toll revenues would be dedicated to the rural Interstate and southeastern freeway system corridors, as pure user fees. Based on a 30-year program of reconstruction and assuming moderate toll rates comparable to those on other toll road systems, the study estimates that the entire rural Interstate program could be financed by toll revenue bonds. For the southeastern freeway system, one option is to toll only the new lanes, operating them as express toll lanes. Doing so would produce enough revenue to cover about 17% of the cost of the entire freeway system reconstruction. Tolling would be all electronic, with no toll booths or toll plazas to impede traffic. If political support could be garnered to price all lanes on the southeastern freeway system instead, our analysis estimates that the revenues would cover 71% of the cost of reconstruction.

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Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco.  Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined.  I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information pictured and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied.  Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place.  I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared.  She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear.  And they did.  And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

There are reasons that I don’t fly, unless I absolutely have to.

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