Tag Archives: regulation

Laziness

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Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC, banks allegedly involved in rigging the erstwhile international debt interest rate benchmark LIBOR, are going to pay $132 million in aggregate to “settle” a court case over that alleged involvement.

The proposed settlements…include no admission of wrongdoing.

The banks are paying the money for—as the plaintiffs plainly agree by their own acceptance of the settlement—not doing anything.

This is a bad deal. If the banks didn’t do anything wrong, for what are they paying? If they deserve fines, why aren’t they being kept in court for an on-the-record public recitation of their wrongdoing and punishment?

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Must Be Dead Broke Again

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The money’s already spent, and the Clinton Foundation has no other money to send back to Harvey Weinstein.

That’s the excuse that the Clinton Foundation is using (I’m deliberately eliding Hillary Clinton’s fatuous excuse for not returning Weinstein’s donations to her campaign—”there’s no one to return the money to”) for refusing to return Weinstein’s donation of somewhere between $100,000 to $250,000 to the Foundation.

The money’s gone.  And since money is eminently fungible, as all of the management of the Clinton Foundation—Chairman Bill Clinton, Vice Chairman Chelsea Clinton, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer Craig Minassian, et al.—all know full well, by implication the Foundation has no other money with which to make the returns.

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Health Plan Coverage and Contraception

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The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that.  However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.

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Two Health Insurance Markets?

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The Wall Street Journal has misunderstood the situation and the proposal [emphasis added].

President Donald Trump’s executive order on health insurance, the most significant step so far to put his stamp on health policy, is designed to give more options to healthy consumers. It also could divide the insurance market in two.

What Trump is purportedly going to do with his Executive Order is

  • instruct[] federal agencies to loosen rules on health plans that the administration says have driven up premiums and reduced insurance offerings
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YGTBSM

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This is from a Food and Drug Administration warning letter to the owners of Nashoba Brook Bakery, via The Wall Street Journal:

Your…products are misbranded…because…the labels fail to bear a complete list of all the ingredients by common or usual name….

Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient “Love.” Ingredients required to be declared on the label or labeling of food must be listed by their common or usual name…. “Love” is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient.

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Another Example

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…of government regulatory failure.  The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates, among other financial institutions, brokerage houses, has its own investment portfolio.  FINRA charges fees from those it regulates for their privilege of being regulated.  And

In years when FINRA’s fee revenue exceeds forecasts and investment gains are strong, the regulator can rebate fees paid by firms it regulates.

Investment gains are strong.  However, FINRA turns out to be a crappy investor, getting just two-thirds of the return since 2004, when the regulatory body’s investment portfolio was created, that a simple-minded standard portfolio mix of 50% each of bonds and stocks would have gotten in the same period.  Its return shortfall, 3.4% vs that standard portfolio’s 6%, is a real money shortfall: $440 million for a portfolio of $1.6 billion.

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What’s Their Limiting Principle?

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Progressives, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,

believe that every human problem can be solved with a policy tweak. A ban here, a background check there, and, voila, no more mass shootings.

But what’s their limiting principle?  What level of gun control would satisfy them?  What fundamental concept would make them believe they’ve gone far enough with their tweaks, checks, bans on an American citizen’s access to the means of defending himself and his family?  Besides their empty rhetoric of “I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t take all your guns away…,” I mean.

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The Not Good Enough Legacy

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Here are some stats regarding Obamacare’s impact on our poor, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

More than one in three of taxed [via the individual mandate penalty] households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.

And

More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000.

And

Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.

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Some Thoughts on Graham-Cassidy

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These are…triggered…by Thursday’s Wall Street Journal piece on how the Graham-Cassidy Plan Would Change Health Coverage.

The Congressional Budget Office has said that, without a rule requiring insurers to charge all customers comparable premiums, health plans could become prohibitively expensive for some people with pre-existing conditions.

The plans wouldn’t be insurance plans, either, since the premiums wouldn’t have anything to do with the risk being transferred.  The plans would be welfare plans.

Separately, states could also waive a requirement that insurers provide a set of medical benefits like mental-health services and prescription-drug coverage. If those benefits aren’t required, people with costly medical conditions could have difficulty buying insurance with the relevant services or medications.

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Due Process and Colleges/Universities

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Recall the Department of Education’s 2011 egregious and cynically biased Dear Colleague Letter and its attack on due process and equal protection under law.  Things are being restored to legitimacy under the  Betsy DeVos DoEd via interim guidance just issued.

Colleges can now apply a higher standard of proof when determining guilt in sexual misconduct cases and must offer equal opportunity for the accused and accuser to have legal advisers participate in their hearings, according to interim recommendations issued by the US Department of Education on Friday.

Because

The Education Department on Friday formally rescinded guidelines issued by the Obama administration in 2011 and 2014….

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