Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Buckley Rule

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…applies to Federal funding and getting bills passed, also.

Bill Buckley’s originally espoused recommendation was to find the most electable conservative candidate and support that candidate.  Notice that “electable” part.  It does conservatives no good at all to find the most ideologically pure candidate and support that one, when he cannot get elected in the venue in which he’s running.

Now there are Obamacare and Health and Human Services’ health care insurance exchanges.

Health and Human Services Department has already burned through all the dollars appropriated by the Affordable Care Act for implementation.  HHS is now demanding an extra $5.9 billion to set up the law’s insurance exchanges—$2 billion more than it estimated it would take last year—but both Senate Democrats and the House denied the request last month.

HHS responded by announcing that it would simply steal however many dollars it needs from a separate ObamaCare slush fund.  Supposedly devoted to “prevention,” this cash has been funneled to everything from bike-path signs to patronage for liberal pressure groups lobbying for fast-food taxes.  Now HHS is reaching into this till for at least $454 million this year, with no accountability.

House Republicans are planning to remove the remaining $5 billion from that slush fund and transfer the monies to an existing fund that supports insurance for Americans with preexisting medical conditions, a fund that’s currently broke and closed to new insuree wannabes.  Yeah, that fund is idiotic and ought to be done away with, too.  However.

The zeroing out and the transfer have a number of pluses.  For one thing, it would defang a far larger travesty of Obamacare—those government-run exchanges that are a precursor to an American version of Great Britain’s disastrous NHS.  For another thing, it would block another of President Barack Obama’s end-arounds of the expressed will of Congress, this time though his HHS, by leaving those Federally created…insurance exchanges…unfunded and un-set up.  For a third thing, it would force the Democrats in both the House and the Senate, as well as Obama himself, onto the record with their choice between covering sick people now (albeit it badly) or that long-duration HHS waste.

Finally, it comports with the Buckley Rule—it’s the most conservative move that’s actually doable.

Unfortunately, groups like Club for Growth and Heritage Action (the latter is the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, who really should know better) are doing their best to block even this much.  These chuckleheads want the conservatively pure full repeal of Obamacare or nothing.

Of course, in today’s environment they’ll get the nothing option.  They know this, but purity is more important to them than the most doable conservative option.

I wrote about chuckleheads before in another context.  It seems we still have too little shortage of them.

“I Do Think at a Certain Point You’ve Taxed Enough Money”

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John Cochrane, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor of Finance (among other positions), writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, proposed an Alternative Maximum Tax.  He was on the right track, but he didn’t go far enough.

Here is a partial list of Federal taxes and tax-related limits on our weal which we currently pay:

  • Income tax, to tune of $1.2 trillion as recently as 2007
  • Cap on tax deferred savings: no more than $6,000 (in 2013) on Roth and Traditional IRAs, including catchup contributions if you’re a geezer; no more than $23,000 (in 2013) for 401(k)s, including catchup contributions
  • Tax on dividend income—this money is taxed twice: once at the corporate level where this profit sharing is not allowed to be deducted from corporate income and once at the individual level where the money is taxed as high as 20% in 2013
  • estate tax, as much as 40% on amounts over $5.25 million
  • payroll tax, 7.65% of every paycheck, and both employer and employee pay this—a total of 15.3%
  • Federal communications taxes
    • Federal excise tax of 3%
    • Federal Universal Service Cost Recovery tax of 15.5% of net interstate and international long distance tolls
  • Federal personal transportation taxes
    • gasoline tax, 18.4¢/gallon
    • diesel tax, 24.4¢/gallon
  • Obamacare taxes
    • 0.9% additional payroll tax for Medicare, paid by employees of a certain wage
    • 2.3% tax on top line revenue on medical equipment manufacturers
    • medical expense personal income tax deduction only after expenses reach 10% of income
    • surtax on investment income raises the top dividend income tax to 43.4% and the top capital gains tax rate to 23.8%
  • Obamacare Individual Mandate—by order of the Court, this is a tax: both the premium paid for buying the government-approved policy and the…tax…for not buying health insurance

I do think at a certain point, we’ve been taxed enough.

Instead of an alternative max tax, it’s time simply to eliminate a bunch of taxes and lower the rates on the others.  A straight flat tax, with no deductions, no credits, no nothing would be good.  No redistributionist, no social engineering, froo-froo of any sort.

Be Careful what you Wish For

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As the Wall Street Journal notes,

Video cameras played a critical role in helping authorities track suspects in this week’s Boston bombings.  Now calls for increased camera surveillance in the US are putting a spotlight on the technology and the debate about its use.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about that city’s surveillance system.  It can

alert police to abnormalities it detects on the street, such as an abandoned package that is left on a corner.

Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner, said on Fox News Sunday:

It gives you that historical record.

But such a ubiquitous government-run surveillance system also can alert government to abnormalities of which it disapproves—like individual citizens taking part in “right-wing extremist” peaceful rallies and meetings.  And there’s that government record on us private citizens thing, again.

In the present case, though, the matter of the Boston Marathon bombing, whose cameras were they?  The government’s cameras were involved in the data collection and subsequent hunt, certainly.  However, so were thousands of privately owned still and video cameras—all those smart phone cameras in the hands of Marathon fans and other ordinary citizens just out taking care of their own business in the area.

It was private citizens’ imagery and private citizens’ eye witness reports (one injured witness: “he looked right at me” and the boat owner’s sighting and 911 call) that generated the imagery, descriptions, and location data that so thoroughly supported the hunt, the tracking, and the capture.

Does government, today, really need such a widespread surveillance system?  No doubt the government’s surveillance cameras were highly useful, too, in this incident.  A tool for keeping track of the citizenry that’s in government hands, though, is subject to misuse, even if the tracking is for the best of reasons, as our government might assure us.  A tool for tracking one’s neighbors—or strangers—in private hands is subject to misuse, also, certainly.

Think, though, about which misuse is capable of the greater damage.

Think, also, about the extant government abuse of its surveillance capability.  Already, for instance, the present administration (and both national political parties) are scraping social media for personally identifying data for government (and party) purposes.  The IRS already is asserting its authority to read, without a court’s order, private email as part of its investigations (while denying it actually does so).  Do we need government actively tracking us private citizens?

Hmm….

Focus

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Shailini Jandial George, Suffolk University Law School Professor of Legal Writing, posits the following scenario, which she says is growing ever more common in law classrooms:

[Lara Law Student] arrives to her first-year torts class, flips open her laptop, and rests her iPhone on her desk.  Her professor starts his lecture, while she checks her email.  She visits Facebook to check out “must see” photos flagged by a friend.  When the professor turns to the subject of negligence, Lara Law Student remembers that her mom is getting sued and emails her for an update.  She’s then distracted by a text from a friend inquiring about her lunch plans…and so on.

I think George underestimates the deficiency; such behavior is growing more common in all classrooms.  Regardless, she has a solution:

“Instead of conveying all the class information via reading, lecture, and discussion, which can overtax the verbal channel in working memory,” educations should use more pictures….

[L]aw students can greatly benefit from using visuals to remember rules, apply rules to slightly modified hypothetical situations, and apply rules to completely novel situations in exam situations.

Imagine teaching our social compact documents—our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—and their underlying principles from pictures (how many drawings did Locke use in his Second Treatise?).  Imagine teaching the British constitution—which is much more document intensive than our own—from pictures.

“Conveying…information via reading, lecture, and discussion” does not at all overtax the “verbal channel in working memory;” each of those media already are rife with visual aids (Locke notwithstanding).  What overtaxes “verbal channels” is lack of practice and lack of focus (both of which STEM-ers as well as lawyers need in spades), and that lack results from all of those distractions which George illustrates in her scenario.

Maybe another education reform would be to enclose classrooms inside Faraday cages.

The Boston Lockdown

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While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.

During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.

  • Pros:
    • easier to spot the terrorist on the move (which the police never did)
    • clearer lines of fire should they need to engage
  • Cons:
    • citizens were unable to participate in the manhunt, even though part of a citizen’s duty is to aid the police
    • citizens were unable to go about their own business, except at government behest
    • economic activity in the city came to a halt for the duration
    • a “go inside and hide” mentality makes it easier for a government to dominate its people

The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local).  In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.

There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities.  On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert.  Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.

Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.

Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.