Monthly Archives: January 2014

Another Battle

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…in the Progressive war on women.

Here’s it’s the Obama administration’s response to Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s injunction staying Obama’s  contraceptive mandate as it applies to the Little Sisters of the Poor and their nursing home/hospice in Colorado.  Sotomayor, in issuing her injunction, had ordered the Obama administration to respond by last Friday morning with their argument for why the injunction should be lifted.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s response boiled down to the Little Sisters have no legal claim: they aren’t harmed by authorizing contraceptives to be covered by an insurer in their name because they aren’t offering the coverage directly.  Verrilli went on:

…are not required to offer group health plans in the first place.  [They can make a] “choice” between two legal options: provide a group health plan or risk payment of the tax.

As The Wall Street Journal put it,

This case is simply a raw assertion of state power directing the religious to follow orders.  Thus ObamaCare forces women who have taken a vow of chastity and minister for the dying to implicate themselves in what they consider to be grave moral wrongs.

Tax Breaks, Taxes, and Congress

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Fox News niggles at the story.  Here’s a short list of tax breaks that are at risk of not being renewed (due to Democrats’ intransigence concerning cutting Federal spending, these tax “breaks” do increase the deficit), even though usually they are renewed early in the subsequent year:

  • tax credit for research and development: saving an estimated $6.2 billion in 2013
  • exemption that allows banks, insurance companies and other financial firms to shield foreign profits from being taxed by the US: saving an estimated $9.4 billion in 2013
  • break allowing profitable companies to write off large capital expenditures immediately, rather than over time: saving an estimated $34 billion in 2013
  • tax credit for producing renewable energy, including wind and solar, in plants built before the end of 2013: saving an estimated $116 million in 2013
  • provision that allows motorsport race tracks to more quickly write off improvement costs: saving an estimated $46 million in 2013.
  • tax break that allows TV and movie productions to more quickly write off expenses: saving an estimated $266 million in 2013.

And so on, for more than 50 such things.

Of course none of this would matter—and the associated lobbyists would be put out of work and have to find something useful to do, instead—in a régime of a low flat tax on all income of whatever source, with no deductions, exemptions, credits, what-have-you, that everyone pays.  And we’d have fewer market distortions from the social engineering folderol of the current tax policy.

A Risk for Future Food Prices?

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Or of land…acquisitions…or both?

About one tenth of China’s farmland is polluted by lead, zinc, and other heavy metals to “striking” levels exceeding official limits[.]

And

About…8 million acres…of China’s farmland is too polluted to grow crops, a government official said on Monday, highlighting the risk facing agriculture after three decades of rapid industrial growth.

The area of China’s contaminated land is about the same size as Belgium.

The Wall Street Journal reports that

Figures released by the Ministry of Land and Resources on Monday in Beijing indicated as much as 2.5% of China’s soil could be too contaminated by heavy metals and other pollutants to farm.  Meanwhile, the share of China’s land that is arable fell by a fifth of a percent during the three years ended in 2009 due to pollution, urbanization, and other reasons….

And

The pollution figure equals about 2.5% of China’s 2.027 billion mu [roughly 340 million acres] in total arable land in 2012, according to a calculation by The Wall Street Journal.  The total arable land figure, down about 0.2% from 2.031 billion mu [338 million acres] in 2009, was also…newly released by the [Land Bureau] on Monday.

Further, much of the PRC’s farmland starts out as not good farmland:

Almost a quarter of China’s arable land is located in areas considered poor for farming, such as hillsides, the bureau said.

One result is this:

In recent years, China’s land shortage has helped drive facets of its foreign policy, from state-supported purchases of farmland and agro-business groups around the world to its appetite for foreign agricultural commodities like US corn.

The PRC also is concluding a deal to lease 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of Ukrainian farmland for the next 50 years, for instance.

This comes on the heels of another pessimistic report on the viability of Chinese farmland.

Chinese demand—need—for food won’t explode overnight, or even necessarily over the next few years.  If Chinese demographics don’t improve, the demand might not get much larger than it is today.

Still, for a world that has trouble feeding itself, at least in part through the affordability of food, this is a matter on which it’s useful to keep an eye.  Among other things, as the competition for farm-grown food heats up, so will prices and the competition for fisheries, including those in the South and East China Seas.

Health Insurance Risk…Corridors

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These are insurance company premium income/payout cost bands written into Obamacare that are intended to smooth out the transition from a quasi-free market in health insurance to the government run health welfare program that is Obamacare.  Under this program, insurance companies that are too successful are punished for that success by being forced to disgorge some of their income in the form of a tax on the premiums they collect, which the Feds then transfer to insurance companies that couldn’t hack the new program, so they get government support.

Only some companies that are having trouble need not apply for the bailout support—they just get to pay the vig without the payoff.

The IRS collects an annual flat amount specified by the Affordable Care Act to be allocated among the insurers according to market share.

But….  IRS regulations published in November excluded “any entity that is a self-insured employer to the extent that such employer self-insures its employees’ health risks.”  Since about four of five employers with more than 500 workers and most union-negotiated health plans are self-insured, they are spared from the tax.  So is insurance on behalf of “government entities,” such as original Medicare (but not privately run Medicare Advantage).

[Thus]…the tax burden falls on the saps who work for small businesses, the self-employed and individuals—i.e., the people who can least afford it.

Worse,

this [tax] is not deductible for corporate income tax purposes.  In other words, health plans pay the tax and then federal and state taxes on the taxed amount.  [Ex-CBO director Doug] Holtz-Eakin estimates this unusual taxes-on-taxes rule means that the effect on premiums is 54% larger than the dollar amount of the tax itself.

Hmm….

China Doesn’t Like It

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So it can’t be all bad.

China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday accused Japan’s prime minister of hypocrisy and said he would not be welcome in China after he visited a shrine honoring Japan’s war dead.

The People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Qin Gang said,

[Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s hypocrisy in his claims of prioritizing relations with China and hopes for dialogue with the Chinese leaders has been fully revealed.

The Chinese people do not welcome him.  Now, Abe needs to admit his mistakes to the government and people of China, cut loose from the past and make a new start.

Because a nation’s leaders honoring their war dead is wrong.  And because the People’s Republic of China gets to dictate to other nations how those nations must behave internally.  Sure.

Withal, that’s of a piece with dictating to other nations how they must behave in international waters and airspace—like the South and East China Seas and the airspace above the East China Sea.

In the end, I have to ask: when will the PRC cut loose from the past and make a new start?