Monthly Archives: June 2019

In Which I Agree with the ACLU

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The National Security Agency illegally spied on American citizens, again.  This time occurred, last October, when the NSA

collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn’t authorized to obtain last year….

This

occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode.

This flouting of law and of its instructions was no accident, not the second time.  It was deliberate.

An ACLU staff attorney, Patrick Toomey, said in part,

this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good.  The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many….

It appears that the NSA didn’t explicitly call for the data when it asked a (sadly name-redacted) telecommunications firm for legitimately collectable data; that firm “overprovided.”  The data, though, were “overprovided” for nine days before the NSA asked the company to…investigate…its delivery.  Nor is there evidence the NSA purged those overcollections.

Especially that last bit about compliance: the NSA, with this latest collection, has demonstrated that it considers laws, rules, constraints to be solely for the small people; they don’t apply to august entities like themselves.

Toomey is right, and I’ll go a ways further: the NSA should be shut down, the agency disbanded and withdrawn from the government’s books, and the personnel all returned to the private sector.

Only Part of the Story

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New Hampshire publishes on a State Web site the prices charged by hospitals in the State, and President Donald Trump is working up an Executive Order that would, with some differences in breadth (including information on the prices negotiated with insurers), make the practice a nationwide one.

Price transparency is a Critical Item in controlling—bringing down—the cost of health care, but it’s only part of the story.  A measure of cost transparency would be useful, too, not only for the consumer, but for governments as they look for (non-subsidy, non-tax) ways to further price competition.

Most costs are legitimately proprietary, especially in the competitive market environment that’s optimal for constraining prices.  One cost, though, would be useful: how much of the price charged through insurance to a consumer goes to covering the cost to the hospital of treating an uninsured consumer—both the voluntarily cash-paying consumer and the consumer who can’t otherwise afford the prices charged.  Within that cost, too, are useful data on how it is split between the hospital and the insurer(s) with which it has contracted.

Tax and Spent Progressive-Democrats

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In spades.  They’re in a race to bankrupt us.  Or, as The Wall Street Journal put it,

The Democratic presidential primary is turning into a bidding war.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) has broken out of the starting gate with an offer of forgiveness of $640 billion in student debt for our votes.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT), though, has caught her at the first turn: he’s offering $1.6 trillion (yes, that’s with a ‘t’) in canceled student debt plus tuition-free “public” colleges.

And both, and their fellow horse racers, are offering tens of trillions more dollars on their Green New Deal variants, health care for all variants, government jobs guarantee variants, social security for all variants, and on and on.

Free stuff for all, and all they want is our votes.  And the destruction of our economy and our wallets.

Federal Government and Home Lending

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Investors worry about the impact on home mortgage costs from the Trump administration’s efforts to reform Federal involvement in the business—for instance, cutting Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loose from Federal controls and support.

The WSJ‘s subheadline of the article at the link sums up those investors’ worry:

[A]ny overhaul to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reduce or eliminate the federal backstop

To which this investor—and home-owner and mortgage payer—says, “Yeah, and?”

There should be no Federal backstop at all, there should be no Federal involvement in this, or any other, industry at all.  Federal involvement only distorts the market, and Federal money, being the increased demand of additional and protected money, only drives up costs.

I’m Not Talking to You

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Like an angry wife of a bygone era, the Iranian government is having a hissy fit over the latest round of sanctions, these applied directly to the likes of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s MFWIC; Foreign Minister Javad Zarif; and three military leaders:

Ali Reza Tangsiri, who was responsible for the Iranian regime’s forces threatening to close the straits of Hormuz; Amirali Hajizadeh, who was commander of the air force and responsible for downing the US unmanned aircraft in international airspace; and Mohammad Pakpour, who is responsible for IRGC’s ground forces.

Iran’s government isn’t happy.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a tweet Tuesday that the new US sanctions that target Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials permanently end any chance of diplomacy between countries.

This, though, is just another example of the Iranian government’s dissembling. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited Khamenei, Khamenei refused to receive a message from President Donald Trump that Abe was bearing, and Khamenei said that he’d never talk to Trump.

All channels of diplomacy and any chance of future diplomacy have been closed off by Iran for some weeks.

Khamenei, Abbas Mousavi (Spokesman and Head of the Center for Public and Media Diplomacy), Hassan Rouhani (Iranian President), et al., are just acting out the temper tantrums of those angry wives.