Minor Thoughts from me to you

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

Interesting.

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Reading this blog post, I learned about GreatSchools, a rating site for both public and private schools. It's a very cool resource and illustrates just what would be possible in a truly free educational market. Just imagine if you could search all of the schools in your area and then send each of your children to the one that's the best match for him/her, with complete freedom to choose.

Here's Bill Jackson talking about one of the features that he'd like to be able to add to the site.

3. School program and curriculum

I want to know all about the school's curriculum and programs. We've got this down pretty well in our next-generation school profile launching this month in select cities. For example, check out St. Joan Antida High School, a private girls-only high school in Milwaukee that accepts vouchers. You can see tons of details here.

Another way to get insight: photos and videos that shed light on unique features of schools. For an example, see this video linked from the GreatSchools profile of Amy Beverland Elementary School in Indianapolis.

In the future, I'd like to get parent and student reviews that provide insight into the quality of programs at middle and high schools. In addition to learning whether the school has a band, we could learn about how meaningful that band is to students and families.

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Competition is coming to the healthcare system. It's coming very slowly, but it is coming.

In Priceless, I hazarded a guess that employers could cut the cost of hospital care in half by engaging in medical tourism. It’s a variation on what is sometimes called “value-based purchasing” or “reference pricing.” In its pure form, the employer picks a low-cost, high quality facility and covers all costs there. If the employee chooses another hospital, the employee must pay the full extra cost of the more expensive choice. In Priceless, I argued that to take full advantage of the opportunities available, the patients must be willing to travel.

Several large companies are already trying the idea out. As Jim Landers explains:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest employer, will jump into medical tourism next year by offering insured employees no-cost heart and spine surgeries at Scott & White Memorial [in Temple, Texas] and seven other hospitals across the country…By using a hospital in the new narrow network, patients could save as much as $5,000 or more…

The hospitals in Wal-Mart’s network — including the Cleveland Clinic and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. — have gained national reputations for both quality and value. Physicians and surgeons work under financial incentives rewarding improved patient outcomes.

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Many politicians were motivated to push for Obamacare because of how much money we're spending on emergency room care, for patients who don't have insurance.

Health care delivered in the emergency room is often derided as expensive and inefficient, the source of our health spending woes. Physician Robert O’Connor has a different way to describe emergency medicine: An incredibly good deal.

O’Connor chairs the department of emergency medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. As an emergency room doctor, he is not unbiased in defending the work he and his colleagues do. He’s also pretty tired of all the rhetoric about emergency rooms as the health spending culprit.

He says that ERs only account for 2 percent of all health care spending—and argues that patients actually get tons of bang for their buck.

... Another surprising data point: Emergency room spending is pretty uniform across different types of insurance coverage. That challenges some of the assumptions that the uninsured tend to visit the emergency room the most frequently. As it turns out, 89 percent of emergency room patients have some form of public or private insurance.

How much government regulation should we do, if we're concerned about 2-4% of overall healthcare spending?

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The Congressional Budget Office has estimated ObamaCare will "reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by roughly half a percent" — about 800,000 full-time jobs. It seems likely that four especially steep cliffs — including two where marginal tax rates can approach 100% or more — will factor into work and hiring decisions.

The 50th employee: For companies with 49 workers that do not offer its employees health coverage, the hiring of just one more worker would carry a penalty of $40,000.

The low-income cliff: At 200% of the poverty level is a dividing line. Deductibles for married couples on one side may be $300 vs. $3,500 on the other, according to one estimate provided to the Kaiser Family Foundation by Towers Watson.

The moderate-income cliff: The cliff is even steeper for families at 400% of poverty. Just past that point, families would lose eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies, which can get quite valuable for older workers.

Older workers' cliff: Lastly, consider a 62-year-old worker with $38,500 in income, $4,000 from investments. Such a worker could qualify for a $6,500 ObamaCare subsidy, paying $3,700 toward premiums with perhaps a $2,000 deductible.

But if she retires and claims Social Security, with roughly $14,000 a year in benefits, her ObamaCare premium subsidy would rise to $9,400 with almost no deductible.

Factoring in a state and federal tax bill of $6,500, that worker would have an after-tax, after health cost (premium and deductible) income of $26,000, vs. $17,100 in the old early-retirement scenario. In other words, the pre-tax gap between working and retiring early would shrink from $20,500 to just $8,900.

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The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) published a breakdown of the coming changes to healthcare, due to Obamacare.

Employees will pay a long list of new taxes, some of them hidden. ... Drug companies will pay a new tax on brand-name prescription drugs, but the tax will be passed along to you through higher premiums.

Medical device manufacturers will pay a new 2.3% tax on their products but will pass the tax on to you through higher premiums. One industry analysis suggests this may cause a loss of more than 43,000 jobs. Medical devices range from bedpans to MRI machines.

Employees will lose choices. If your income and family size qualify you for Medicaid, PPACA won’t allow you to stay on your employer’s plan. Example: A couple with 3 children and income of $41,000 can get private insurance through an employer. If the couple has a fourth child, however, PPACA will force them to leave the employer’s insurance and go on Medicaid because the federal poverty level (FPL), which determines who is and is not on Medicaid, increases with family size.

If your household income tends to fluctuate, you may have to move back and forth between a private insurance policy and Medicaid – possibly multiple times per year. Each time this happens, you may have to change doctors, hospital, etc.

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Here's a new entry in Tyler Cowen's always interesting "markets in everything" series. This is a fantastic idea.

Here is a new service:

Over 250,000 weddings are called off every year. We purchase cancelled weddings and resell them to new couples.

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Register with us and help us build a new market for weddings.

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If Romney wins, will lobbyists defile the White House that Obama has kept so clean and so pure? That’s what Politico suggests with this piece today headlined “Lobbyists ready for a comeback under Romney.”

President Barack Obama’s gone further than any president to keep lobbyists out of the White House — even signing executive orders to do it.

In crafting and signing those executive orders, I wonder if Obama relied on the help of White House deputy counsel Cassandra Butts (1), White House special assistant Martha Coven (2), or the chief of staff or the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Michael Strautmanis (3), all of whom were registered lobbyists. (I’m only numbering registered lobbyists.)

Timothy Carney gets up to 55 registered lobbyists, before concluding with this.

Given all this undue corporate influence already going on, imagine what would happen if lobbyists got jobs in the administration!!!

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The Cato Institute recently released the 2012 version of their annual report card on the nation's governors. As a supporter of the Tea Party movement, it's gratifying to see that the Republican governors are actually improving and are growing more fiscally responsible.

Wisconsin's own Scott Walker earns a "C", for some very good reasons. I hope he can pull that up to an "A" over the next 2 years.

Are Republicans and Democrats Any Different?

Advocates of smaller government often lament that politicians of both major par- ties tax and spend too much. While that is certainly true, Cato report cards have found that Republican governors are a bit more fiscally conservative than Democratic governors, on average. In the 2008 report card, Republican and Democratic governors had average scores of 55 and 46, respectively. In the 2010 report card, they had average scores of 55 and 47, respectively.

This pattern is even more pronounced in the 2012 report card. This time around, Republican and Democratic governors had average scores of 57 and 43, respectively. And, as in prior report cards, the difference between the two parties is slightly more pronounced on taxes than on spending.

The fiscal differences between governors of the two parties have increased a bit. In this year’s results, there are fewer governors than in prior reports who are out of step with the typical policies of their parties. In both the 2008 and 2010 reports, for example, Democrat Joe Manchin earned an “A,” while Republican Jodi Rell earned an “F.” But in this year’s report, all four “A” governors are Republicans and all five “F” governors are Democrats.

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This is hardly a conservative rag.

[W]hile the nation's economy is still sputtering nearly four years after Obama took office, the federal government is more than $5 trillion deeper in debt. It just racked up its fourth straight 13-figure shortfall.

We have little confidence that Obama would be more successful managing the economy and the budget in the next four years. For that reason, though we endorsed him in 2008, we are recommending Romney in this race.

Obama's defenders would argue that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, and would have made more progress if not for obstruction from Republicans in Congress. But Democrats held strong majorities in the House and Senate during his first two years.

Other presidents have succeeded even with the other party controlling Capitol Hill. Democrat Bill Clinton presided over an economic boom and balanced the budget working with Republicans. Leaders find a way.

... The next president is likely to be dealing with a Congress where at least one, if not both, chambers are controlled by Republicans. It verges on magical thinking to expect Obama to get different results in the next four years.

Two years ago, a bipartisan panel the president appointed recommended a 10-year, $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. Rather than embrace it and sell it to the American people, Obama took his own, less ambitious plan to Congress, where it was largely ignored by both parties.

Now the president and his supporters are attacking Romney because his long-term budget blueprint calls for money-saving reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, three of the biggest drivers of deficit spending. Obama would be more credible in critiquing the proposal if he had a serious alternative for bringing entitlement spending under control. He doesn't.

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David Henderson rounds up links to various economists and think tanks that have studied the Romney tax plan. They all agree that it's not impossible, that it could work, and that it is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan (which President Obama summarily ignored).

After laying out the details of the Romney plan, Reynolds does a comparison:

When it comes to tax policy, the main difference between Romney's and Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force advisers is that Romney proposes 1) a slightly lower corporate tax rate, and 2) a much lower bottom rate of 8 percent rather than 12 percent. (The fact that there would be six rates rather than three is insignificant.)

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As if raising kids wasn't hard enough.

A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city's police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors.

Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside.

She said her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away.

"I was out there the entire time," Cooper said. "I never left that lawn chair the entire time."

Cooper said a little while later, a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home.

"I went out there to see what he was here for and he said, 'Ma'am, we're here for you.' I said, 'Oh really? Why?' He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised.

Cooper said she was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and forced to spend the night in jail.

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Fracking has done more to reduce US carbon emissions than anything that solar or wind could currently hope to do.

Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.

The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45% less carbon per energy unit. The US used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20% from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: in April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32%, on par with gas.

... The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy consumers were added to the US population over the past two decades. Indeed, US carbon emissions have dropped some 20% per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.

David Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year. To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.

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Garett Jones on an alternative to either bailing out the banks or letting them fail spectacularly.

But all corporate bankruptcy means (again, to an economist, not a lawyer) is that some of the bondholders get turned into shareholders: Instead of getting the $10,000 you were owed, you get shares that will probably be worth much less.  In the simplest case, the shareholders get nothing (they had their chance to run the firm and blew it), the bondholders become the new shareholders, and the firm keeps right on running.  Seems like something you could do over a weekend.  

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In the 1990's the Federal government experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity, that gave vouchers to poor families, allowing them to move from poor neighborhoods to mixed-income neighborhoods.

The program aimed to boost education and income, by giving mothers and their children access to better housing and schools, as well as better job opportunities and social networks. By those measures, it largely failed. Participants moved to better housing and safer neighborhoods, but they showed minimal economic or educational gains.

But the program nonetheless had a pronounced effect on families' lives, researchers found. Participants had significantly lower rates of diabetes, extreme obesity, anxiety and stress than those who stayed behind. They were also much happier with their lives overall—something researchers said was particularly important.

Interesting.

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While urgent care centers typically offer hundreds of medical services, they do not perform surgery and are not equipped to deal with life-threatening emergencies. In most cases, a doctor is on site, although care may be provided by a nurse or physician assistant who is also on staff. Many centers are busiest in the evenings and on weekends, when most doctors' offices are closed.

In the past, at least some of the patients who now go to urgent care centers would have ended up in hospital emergency rooms. While the typical $100 visit to a center is comparable in price to a visit to a doctor's office, an emergency room visit can cost more than twice as much. A 2010 Rand Corp. study found that almost one in five visits to hospital emergency rooms could be treated at urgent care centers, potentially saving $4.4 billion annually in health-care costs.

Better customer service (because of late hours and quick appointments) and lower price. What's not to like? I think the increase in urgent care centers is a very good thing for American healthcare.

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Avik Roy, on a very promising development from the AMA.

At the Vice-Presidential debate last week, Joe Biden claimed that the American Medical Association sided with him, and against Paul Ryan, on the merits of the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare reform. “Who do you believe?” exclaimed Biden. “The AMA [and] me? A guy who has fought his whole life for this? Or somebody [like Paul Ryan]?” Well, it turns out that the AMA’s key policy committee has come out in favor of premium support for Medicare, in a fashion that tracks closely with what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are proposing.

... The AMA Council’s report states that it came around to this view not at the behest of Republican operatives or candidates, but after speaking with Bill Clinton’s former budget chief, Alice Rivlin, who along with Paul Ryan proposed a version of this plan. “Dr. Rivlin emphasized that defined contribution amounts should be sufficient to ensure that all beneficiaries could afford to purchase health insurance coverage, and that private health insurance plans should be subject to regulations that protect patients and ensure the availability of coverage for even the sickest patients.”

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Just because you have a piece of paper that says you have “health insurance” doesn’t mean that you can see a doctor when you need to.

There are three major forms of health insurance in America: Medicare, our government-sponsored program for the elderly; Medicaid, our government-sponsored program for the poor; and private insurance for most everyone else. As I have described extensively on this blog, it’s much harder to get a doctor’s appointment if you’re on Medicaid than if you have private insurance, because Medicaid pays doctors so little that doctors can’t afford to see Medicaid patients. This, in turn, leads patients on Medicaid that are at best no different than being uninsured, and in many cases even worse.

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Tyler Cowen, on the slow improvements in agriculture and the difficulties that Africa faces.

Consider Africa, which is often considered to have turned a corner and to be headed toward steady growth. The expansion of the African middle class and the decline in child mortality rates are both quite real, but the advances have not been balanced — and agriculture lags behind.

In a recent address, Michael Lipton, an economist and research professor at Sussex University in Britain, offered a sobering look at Africa’s agricultural productivity. He suggests that Rwanda and Ghana are gaining, but that most of the continent is not. Production and calorie intake per capita don’t seem to be higher today than they were in the early 1960s. It remains an issue how Africa’s growing population will be fed.

... On top of all that, many African nations have unhelpful policies toward agriculture. Malawi, for instance, subjects corn to periodic export and import restrictions as well as to price controls, all of which thwart development of a well-functioning market. When market speculators save corn in anticipation of greater scarcity, they may be punished by law. These restrictions of market incentives exacerbate the basic supply problems.

What can we do about these problems?

... the United States government should stop subsidizing its own corn-based biofuels, mainly ethanol. Today, about 40 percent of America’s field corn goes into biofuels, thanks to a subsidy and regulatory policy dating from 2005. With virtual unanimity, experts condemn these subsidies as driving up food prices, damaging land use and costing the taxpayers money. Once the energy costs of producing the biofuels are taken into account, it doesn’t even appear that this policy helps slow climate change. It has become a form of crony capitalism, at great global expense.

Perhaps Christians should take up the elimination of ethanol subsidies as a "social justice" issue. Is it just to funnel money to American farmers at the expense of hungry, poor people worldwide?

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The Department of Justice is interested in racial quotas. It doesn't really care if meeting those quotas requires banks to blow up the economy.

In a complaint filed Wednesday and settled the same day, Justice claimed that California-based Luther Burbank Savings violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act by setting a policy that had a "disparate impact" on minorities. Between 2006 and mid-2011, 5.2% of Luther's single-family residential mortgage loans went to African-Americans and Hispanics, compared to an average of 41.7% for other lenders in the area. The complaint doesn't cite evidence of intentional discrimination because there wasn't any.

Luther Burbank wasn't a fly-by-night operator that marketed those loans to any and all. The bank insisted on a minimum $400,000 loan amount and made loans with an average 680 FICO score and 67% loan-to-value. Over the period that Justice examined, Luther Burbank foreclosed on a mere 11 borrowers out of 629 loans outstanding—a loss ratio of 1.75%. In a normal world, Luther Burbank would get a medal from regulators for its risk management, having chosen borrowers even at the height of the housing mania who could meet their monthly payments.

But Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has a different priority: He wants banks to meet lending quotas to minorities—regardless of whether those borrowers can afford the loans. Many minority borrowers have low incomes that make them riskier lending bets. Is that a bank's fault?

To be fair, Congress passed the laws that the DoJ is enforcing. Is there any chance, at all, that we can repeal those laws without having the entirety of the liberal and progressive world scream "racist!"?

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