Minor Thoughts from me to you

Today’s New York Times features an opinion piece by J.D. Kleinke of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Kleinke’s thesis is that ObamaCare’s conservative opponents should stop complaining. “ObamaCare is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas.”

If one defines conservative ideas as those that emphasize free markets and personal responsibility, there is zero truth to this claim.

Michael Cannon goes on to elaborate and then concludes with:

Even if one adopts the more forgiving definition that conservative ideas are whatever ideas conservatives advocate, there still isn’t enough truth to sustain Kleinke’s point. Yes, the conservative Heritage Foundation trumpeted ObamaCare’s regulatory scheme from 1989 until around the time a Democratic president endorsed it. But as National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru writes, accurately, “The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world.”

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John Goodman talks about how HSA's help customers save money and help lower costs for the overall healthcare system. Too bad the Obama administration, through Obamacare, wants to get rid of HSAs.

Megan Johnson, a self-employed single mother in Dallas, had severe pains in her side and back, just below the ribs. Her doctor said it was possibly kidney stones, but a CT scan would be necessary to confirm the diagnosis. Megan's doctor gave her the name of an outpatient radiology department near her home. A call to the hospital revealed her share of the cost would be more than $2,800. Because Megan's health insurance had a $5,000 deductible, she decided to ask some questions: Do I really need this? Is it less expensive anywhere else?

A quick search of HealthcareBlueBook.com confirmed a reasonable price for an abdominal CT scan was about $800 - not $2,800. More online research identified dozens of medical imaging centers - including one next to the doctor's office. The insurance company negotiated price was $407 - a fraction of the initial price the hospital quoted. Megan was able to save nearly $2,400 by simply doing a little research online.

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Former "car czar" Steven Rattner, fresh off of "rescuing" GM, is in favor of healthcare rationing by government bureaucrat.

We need death panels.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

This is the inevitable result of third-party payment: some paper pusher will arbitrarily cut off care once you've "had enough". Or we can move back to buying healthcare like we buy everything else in life: paying for healthcare out of a mix of savings and insurance, shopping for the lowest price, and taking responsibility for deciding what is and isn't necessary. There is no middle ground here.

I know which way I want to go and it's not through rationing by a board of government "specialists".

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The most recent CBS/NYTimes and Washington Post polls have Republicans at levels not seen in Florida since the 1960's. How can Romney win the coming media polls with fewer Republicans represented than when Barry Goldwater ran for President?

... Again the most recent CBS/NYTimes, Washington Post and NBC/WSJ polls have Republicans again under 30% at levels not seen in Ohio since before the Civil War

... Once again the most recent CBS/NYTimes and Washington Post polls have Republicans well under 30% as did the NBC/WSJ poll - at levels not seen in decades.

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Romney's tax plan is revenue neutral because he lowers rates while simultaneously eliminating exemptions, deductions, and other "giveaways to special interests". It's what I really want out of tax reform and it's one of the things that makes me look forward to a Romney administration.

Alex Brill, of the American Enterprise Institute, breaks down how the Romney plan would work and why the math, contra the Brookings Institute, doesn't point to a tax hike.

In summary:

Romney has proposed a bold tax reform that would broaden the tax base and lower statutory tax rates across the board. While maintaining preferential rates for savings and investment, his proposal repeals the tax expenditures that distort economic decisions and add complexity to tax returns.

Although Obama has no such plan for tax reform, his vision for the tax system appears clear. He has refused to endorse the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which would also have lowered statutory tax rates and broadened the tax base. Instead, his near-singular focus has been to raise statutory tax rates for high-income households and to leave untouched hundreds of special tax breaks for various political constituencies.

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Matt Yglesias, not known as a Republican booster, defends Mitt Romney's tax rate.

The main reason Romney's effective rate is so low is that the American tax code contains a lot of preferences for investment income over labor income. That's something that strikes many people as unfair on its face, and particularly unfair since it often means very low rates for extremely rich people like Romney. And Romney himself as a rich guy who's also a member of the political party seen as favoring the rich, and who's been recorded as whining that the working poor are undertaxed is perhaps not an ideal messenger for a defense of this policy.

But this is definitely an issue where the conservative position is in line with what most experts think is the right course, and Democrats are outside the mainstream.

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House investigators warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to expect a hearing into their finding that that American staff at the U.S. Embassy in Libya had their request for additional security denied by Washington officials.

“In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi,” Issa and Chaffetz added (my emphasis). “The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington.”

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Israel may have an ally, for a strike against Iran, in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan, the oil-rich ex-Soviet republic on Iran's far northern border, has, say local sources with knowledge of its military policy, explored with Israel how Azeri air bases and spy drones might help Israeli jets pull off a long-range attack.

That is a far cry from the massive firepower and diplomatic cover that Netanyahu wants from Washington. But, by addressing key weaknesses in any Israeli war plan - notably on refueling, reconnaissance and rescuing crews - such an alliance might tilt Israeli thinking on the feasibility of acting without U.S. help.

Why would they help?

The country, home to nine million people whose language is close to Turkish and who mostly share the Shi'ite Muslim faith of Iran, has four ex-Soviet air bases that could be suitable for Israeli jets, the Azeri sources said.

Relations have long been strained between the former Soviet state and Iran, which is home to twice as many ethnic Azeris as Azerbaijan itself. Tehran beams an Azeri-language television channel over the border which portrays Aliyev as a puppet of Israel and the West, as well as highlighting corruption in Baku.

Azerbaijan sees Iranian hands behind its Islamist opposition and both countries have arrested alleged spies and agitators.

Faced with an uneven balance of force, Aliyev's government makes no bones about Israel being an ally. As one presidential aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained: "We live in a dangerous neighborhood; that is what is the most powerful driving force for our relationship with Israel."

But, of course. Iran is being their normal belligerent, export aggression selves and Azerbaijan wants some backup. If not for Hezbollah, I think Lebanon would be in the exact same boat. Azerbaijan wants to avoid Lebanon's fate, by making sure Iran never gets a foothold inside their borders.

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I am totally keeping this in my back pocket. I'll pull it out the next time some hyperprotective parent tells me that I should force my daughters to wear bicycle helmets. (A local school administrator wouldn't even let them ride tricycles without a helmet. Ridiculous.)

In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. Un-helmeted cyclists are regarded as irresponsible, like people who smoke. Cities are aggressive in helmet promotion.

But many European health experts have taken a very different view: Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

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So, sure. I've been blogging a lot of political stuff lately. But I get really excited about the potential for technological innovation to change our lives for the better. For instance, take driverless cars. (I'd love to!)

Would they just be a more convenient way to get around or would they revolutionize the entire idea of personal transportation? I was talking about this with my wife just last week, so I was excited to see someone else echoing my thoughts. If I'm not alone in my thinking, maybe I'm not crazy to think it.

When I've thought about driverless cars, which if you believe Sergey Brin, will be available within "several years," I've tended to think of them as a drop-in replacement for our current automobiles. So, you'd buy a VW Automaton and it would sit in your driveway until you wanted to go somewhere. Then, you'd hop in, say, "Take me to Lake Merritt," and then just sit back and pop in the latest Animal Collective while the computer drove.

But maybe that's not what would happen at all. Changes in transportation technology have tended to be accompanied by changes to transportation systems, too. Long-time technologist Brad Templeton argues that this will, in fact, be the case. And he's even got an idea of what the big shift might be. We could enter the age of the "whistlecar." If one can hire a cheap specialized 'robotaxi' (or whistlecar) on demand when one has a special automotive need," Templeton writes, "car users can elect to purchase a vehicle only for their most common needs, rather than trying to meet almost all of them -- or to not purchase at all."

This vision is kind of stunning: imagine the Kiva Systems logistics robots that now speed around major warehouses, but for people. Transportation-as-a-service models could really take off in a world of hyperoptimized robotaxis. Not only would the robotaxis be built differently from normal cars, but people's private vehicles (if they had one) would change as they realized how they could use the new system more effectively.

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John Goodman writes about something that will be a big problem, as medical knowledge increases. We're increasingly finding out that different people respond differently to the same treatment, depending on their genetics and the DNA of whatever is attacking them. As our knowledge about these differences increases, we will increasingly have individualized treatments.

Everything about ObamaCare — from its emphasis on pilot programs and demonstration projects to its faith in “evidence-based care” — is all about standardization. It’s about treating all patients with the same condition the same way. It’s about herd medicine. It’s about cookbook medicine. It’s about assembly line medicine. It’s as different from personalized care as different can be.

Unless we make large scale reforms to our existing regulations, we will increasingly end up knowing how to treat someone's condition yet it will illegal for the doctor to deviate from the standardized treatment in order to apply the personalized care that the patient needs.

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This is why I keep saying that I have no idea what will happen on election day. Everything depends on turnout and, right now, we have absolutely no idea whether more Democrats or Republicans will turn out. The 2008 election was a massive year for Democrats, while the 2010 election was a massive year for Republicans. What will the 2012 election be?

Here is what people should know is bothering pollsters, and if you’re a Republican you can feel comfortable that what you are reading is based on guess work assumptions:

In 2010, we saw the country move back to 2004 levels, but we also saw a bubbling of the Tea Party, who are among the most enthusiastic of voters. Also 2010 was a midterm, where the overall turnout of registered voters is considerably lower, and the GOP base turns out better in non-presidential years than the Democrats’ base. So we process this data.

We saw in 1994 the GOP do very well, but in 1996 Clinton won easily. But sometimes a party’s momentum from the midterms carries on to the following year; we saw the Democrats add to their 2006 gains in 2008. So will 2012 be a receding of the tide of the midterms (like 1996) or an acceleration (like 2008)?

Of course in 1996, the economy was soaring and right now, we’re crawling… so you make the judgment on where this should be.

Even using logical deductions, it is difficult to get a read on what the 2012 partisan divide will be because we’ve seen it change so quickly. From 1994 through 2004, the partisan divide was fairly stable, moving no more than 2 points from cycle to cycle.

Personally I think its safe to say that 2008 is not going to happen in 2012, any pollster hanging their hat on 2008 sampling cannot be reasonably relied on…

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At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.

You read that correctly: In any attempted poll or survey, only 9% of attempted contacts come back with an actual response.

That means 91% of sampled households are NOT having their opinions recorded by pollsters.

... 53% of Americans actively refuse to answer poll questions.

Interesting. I wonder what this means in terms of polling accuracy? I don't know enough about statistics to know if you can still get an accurate statistical sample, if enough people are actively refusing to participate.

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Lori Montgomery wrote an article in the Washington Post heavily criticizing Paul Ryan for not doing enough to solve America's debt crisis. Keith Hennessey rips into her article and exposes it for the politically motivated hackery that it is.

She writes that Mr. Ryan did draft a blueprint for wiping out deficits by 2040, but she fails to mention that he passed that plan through the House. She does not report that Mr. Ryan's staff were providing behind-the-scenes technical assistance to Speaker Boehner during the Grand Bargain negotiation. She doesn't report that Mr. Ryan loaned his budget committee staff director to Mr. Hensarling on the super committee. She doesn't mention that Mr. Ryan's prediction that the super committee would fail came true, or that the Obama White House was AWOL during the super committee negotiations. She doesn't mention that he voted for the Budget Control At of 2011, for the tax rate extensions at the end of 2010, and for the FY 2012 Omnibus Appropriations Act, three major bipartisan fiscal laws that deeply split House Republicans.

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Yuval Levin has a fantastic essay on the difference in vision between President Obama and everyone who's not a progressive.

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom.

... Again and again, the administration has sought to hollow out the space between the individual and the state. Its approach to the private economy has involved pursuing consolidation in key industries — privileging a few major players that are to be treated essentially as public utilities, while locking out competition from smaller or newer firms. This both ensures the cooperation of the large players and makes the economy more manageable and orderly. And it leaves no one pursuing ends that are not the government’s ends. This has been the essence of the administration’s policies toward automakers, health insurers, banks, hospitals, and many others.

Yuval Levin ties this into the "contraception mandate" issues by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services.

It is important to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs — which of course they do have in our country. It did not even say that the government facilitate people’s access to these drugs — which it does today and has done for decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other religious entities should facilitate people’s access to contraceptive and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of civil society into active agents of the government’s ends, even in violation of their fundamental religious convictions.

The rule implicitly asserted that our nation will not tolerate an institution that is unwilling to actively ratify the views of those in power — that we will not let it be and find other ways to put those views into effect (even though many other ways exist), but will compel it to participate in the enactment of the ends chosen by our elected officials. This is an extraordinarily radical assertion of government power, and a failure of even basic toleration. It is, again, an attempt to turn private mediating institutions into public utilities contracted to execute government ends.

Are we all yoked together, through government, forced to go the same way, do the same things, and approve of the same things? Or should the government be shrunk down, to allow space for people to voluntarily join together and work together, as they see fit?

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Stephen Green makes the libertarian case for Romney.

Since the father of RomneyCare isn’t exactly an easy sell to libertarians, first we have to look at the man already sitting in the Oval Office. And it’s safe to say that unlike 2008, in 2012 there is absolutely zero Libertarian case to be made for Barack Obama.

... We don’t get to choose this year between “good” and “better’” — have we ever enjoyed that choice? But we do get a sharp distinction this year between “bad” and “worse.”

I’m going with “bad” because I’m not sure we’ll survive another term of the worst.

I think that about sums up my own position. I'm moderately hopeful that a President Romney would moderately decrease regulations. I'm positive that President Obama would not only not roll them back, he'd attempt to increase them.

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Snicker.

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U.S. economic growth is dangerously slow. I’ve frequently written about research from the Fed which finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 48% of the time. And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 70% of the time.

Citigroup has also taken a shot at determining the stall speed: “Specifically, when U.S. growth has cut below 1½ percent on a rolling four-quarter basis, it has tended to fall by nearly 3 percentage points over the following four quarters, and the economy has typically entered recession.

Bottom line: Growth the past two quarters has averaged about 1.6%. Not only does this mean the economy is growing more slowly than last year’s 1.8%, it is also slow enough to signal about a 50% chance of a recession within a year. And the third quarter also looks weak.

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The Federal Reserve Bank’s recent QE3 announcement that they will be buying $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities a month for an indefinite period of time is an excellent example of regulatory capture. Under Chairman Bernanke, the Fed has successfully pushed to increase its regulatory role over the financial industry, and Stigler’s capture theory would predict that the Fed, as a financial regulator, would act to benefit the financial industry it regulates.

In recent posts on The Beacon I have argued that the Fed’s purchases of these securities is unprecedented, that it is an example of crony capitalism, and now am arguing that it is an example of the regulatory capture that Stigler described. Just like the government’s purchase of Chevy Volts, the Fed is creating demand for a product (morgtage-backed securities) that is in weak demand, for the benefit of the industry it regulates.

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This may be interesting reading, if you're tempted to place a lot of weight on what "Nobel prize winning economist" Paul Krugman has to say.

We have made a complete review of Krugman’s New York Times columns 1997 through 2006—in all, 654 columns. The pattern of policy positions and arguments do not square with his purported concern for general prosperity and the interests of the poor. Some of the evidence lies in statements made. But the more important evidence lies in patterns of statements not made. Because Krugman assumes the role of addressing the most important things, because our account is comprehensive, and because the omissions are flagrant, we may treat omissions as evidence of Krugman’s ideological character and sensibilities. Krugman is best interpreted as a committed social democrat and Democratic partisan. Our main contention is that his social-democratic bent sometimes trumps people’s interests, notably poor people’s interests.

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