Daily Archives: 12 May 2017

Going Soft

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Senate pseudo-Republicans are balking at one good item that was contained the House-passed American Health Care Act: repeal of Obamacare’s trillion dollars’ worth of taxes.  These guys actually don’t see the value of that repeal.  Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is typical:

I don’t see how you can repeal all of the pay-fors…and still meet the goal of providing health-insurance coverage for people who truly need assistance[.]

Aside from the false premise of needing Federal government “pay-fors” as a default position, rather than a last result, the Lady from Maine and her fellows plainly either don’t understand free market principles, or they have no confidence in free markets.

One path for the Senate could be a repeal of the taxes but a delay in the effective dates.

This is the only legitimate point of discussion on the repeal of these taxes.  The AHCA makes the repeal retroactive to 1 Jan 2017.  It’s the repeal that’s important, not its date of effectivity.  Effective 1 Jan 2018 is fine, so is a date (certain) in 2019, to the extent health coverage providers, businesses, and individual citizens need time to plan and prepare.  The repeal itself, however, must be inarguable.

I’ve decried the House’s Freedom Caucus of No, but the Caucus of Squish in the Senate is going too far in the other direction.  These folks need to do the job they were sent to the Senate to do vis-à-vis Obamacare and our nation’s health provision and health coverage industries.  Failing to repeal the Obamacare taxes in addition to the reductions in other business and personal taxes that have been proposed is unacceptable.  If the Caucus of Squish fails to do this, its members need to be replaced at the next available elections for each of them.

If that costs the Republican Party control of the Senate, well—how will we tell the difference?  The Caucus of Squish is, with its timidity, worse even than the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Getting Rid of Federal Government Rules

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A couple of random thoughts triggered by a Wall Street Journal article.  The Republican Congress has been using the Congressional Review Act to rescind rules enacted by various Executive Branch agencies.  The Act allows Congress, by simple majority vote (no Senate filibuster) and Presidential signature to rescind rules so long as the rescission is done within 60 days of the rule’s promulgation in the Federal Register or formal reporting to Congress.  There are potsful of rules that haven’t yet passed that threshold, and so Congress can reach back years for rescissions under the Act.

Senate Democrats have insisted the rules have lengthy debate time….

This isn’t necessary.  The rules have already been debated extensively, both in the public and via the rule’s public comment period during which experts in the subject matter as well as the general public have conducted extensive debate.  Except for rules rushed through at the end of a President’s term or whose comment period was held sub rosa, like many of the EPA and CFPB rules have been.  Those rules had their chance at lengthy debate, and the relevant rule-making authority has already said that lengthy debate wasn’t necessary.

Senator Chris Coons (D, DE) said the “Republican majority has misused” the act and has repealed regulations “adopted genuinely to protect the environment, protect consumers, protect the public.”

Of course.  It’s the thought that counts for Democrats, not the actual <ahem> disparate impact they have in their failure to protect much of anything and the actual damage they do, especially to consumers, citizens, and individual choices.

Congress should push the pace; the extraneous rules are costing us money.  Just the 13 rescinded already have saved the public some $85 billion.  There’s also nothing in the Act that prevents Congress from batching up related rules (or unrelated rules, come to that) and rescinding them en masse.