Monthly Archives: February 2014

Progressive Gun Rights

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…are what government says they are.  Last week, though, the 9th Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, struck down a San Diego County, California law that asserted exactly that.  This law

requir[ed] residents to show a “pressing need” in order to get a permit to carry weapons in public.

However,

The judges found that in order to receive a permit, a person need only show a desire to defend himself outside the home.

Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, writing for the court, clearly does understand the situation.  Addressing three other Appellate Court rulings upholding public carry restrictions (a fourth Appellate Court struck such restrictions), he wrote

they misapprehend both the nature of the Second Amendment right and the implications of state laws that prevent the majority of responsible, law-abiding citizens from carrying in public for lawful self-defense reasons.

Jon Lowy, Director, Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, demurred, however:

Neither history nor precedent supports this aberrant, split decision that concocts a dangerous right to carry hidden handguns in public places to people whom law enforcement has determined…have no good cause or qualifications to do so.

Rights are what a Progressive government says they are, according to this Progressive.

No, Mr Lowry.  You clearly do not understand inalienable rights, nor our Constitution.  The right to life is inalienable, and it carries with it the inalienable right to self-defense.  Neither are “concocted rights.”  These rights, moreover, carry within them the right to possess the means with which to carry out that defense.  Everywhere.  These inalienable rights are not at all limited to places convenient to government.  Full Stop.

Moreover, the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The binding document, within which our governments—at all levels—must operate, has said all there is to say on our right to keep and bear arms.  Especially in public.  Governments have very little at all to add regarding “good cause or qualifications.”  Full Stop.

Here Come the Insurance Company Bailouts

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Humana is taking point on this one.  This from Dr Scott Gottlieb at AEIdeas:

Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in Obamacare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014.  This amounts to about 25% of the insurer’s expected exchange revenue.  This money is needed to offset losses that the insurer will take as a result of slower enrollment in its Obamacare plans, and a skewed risk pool that weighs more heavily toward older and less healthy members than it originally budgeted.

And

More than half of the money will come from the $25 billion reinsurance pool that Obamacare provides (collected through a tax on employer-sponsored health plans). The other half will come mostly from the risk corridors.

Of course, President Barack Obama was counting on the “migration” of folks in the private health insurance market to the plans pushed through ObamaMart.  However, as Humana is experiencing, and as other health plan providers (I hesitate to call them insurers, anymore) are discovering, that “migration” isn’t happening, and those that are buying have the wrong demographics for the law’s operation.

We know, though, that the “migration” was intended to be a forced migration, because during the 2010 Obamacare summit which our President hosted in the run-up to its party-line passage, he told [especially the first 30 seconds] then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, VA) that “8 to 9 million people…might have to change their coverage….”

And those that are “changing” still aren’t responding in the Obamacare-required demographic breakdown.

Hence bailouts.  Unless we get serious in the upcoming primaries and the fall elections.

Look! Shiny!

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President Barack Obama was in California at the end of last week, touting “executive actions” (no need of an impudent Congress, he) for spending money to “help” the state fight its drought problem.  Among his promised expenditures were $100 million in assistance for livestock producers, $60 million in food-bank funding for families affected by the drought, and $15 million for areas nationwide most severely harmed by dry conditions.  Don’t worry about how all of this will be paid for: Obama just got a new checkbook from Congress, of course he still has money in the bank.

Then he segued to our climate “problem.”  Shiny!

He repeated his call for $1 billion (that new checkbook, again) for “climate resilience,” supported by his Assistant for Science and Technology, John Holdren, who averred

Weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.

(We need an Assistant to the President to say something any first grader understands?)

You bet climate and changing climate influences weather—that’s what climate change does—it alters the conditions within which weather occurs.  And the sun is, indeed, warming over its lifetime, and within that, it’s presently undergoing a quiescent period, as measured by its current sunspot cycle, of historic proportions—rather like its quiescent period prior to and during the Little Ice Age.

But, shiny!

Obama has made climate change a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, tapping the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions from power plants….

Obama recently launched the creation of “climate hubs” to study how volatile weather conditions are affecting the agriculture industry.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Obama would pledge the “federal government will do all that it can” to help farmers and livestock producers and that he would act “rather than wait for congressional action.”

Never mind climate “models” that can’t simultaneously predict the past and the present, we should believe them anyway.  Never mind cherry-picked tree ring data, falsified NASA historical data, substitution of data from an Australian coastal station for a failed station 700 miles away in the Australian interior.  Never mind atmospheric CO2 data that demonstrate that increased levels follow global warming rather than precede it, thus confirming the increasing health of the planet from burgeoning life.

Look at all of that, anyway, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain talking about Obamacare, failed jobs and economic policies, a stagnant “recovery,” or failed foreign policies that have us feared by our friends and held in contempt by our enemies.

It’s shiny….

Keystone XL’s Fate

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Here are two Congressmen who oppose building this pipeline.

  • Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA):
    • $15k-$50k stake in Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, intent on building a Keystone competitor pipeline
  • Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D, CA):
    • $15k-$50k stake in Enbridge Energy Management
    • $1-$15k in Kinder Morgan Energy Partners
    • $15k-$50k stake in Kinder Morgan Management; these three also are intent on building Keystone competitor pipelines

Crony capitalism, indeed.

Junk Bonds and Preexisting Conditions

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What do these have in common?  First, a caveat.  Junk bonds are so rated because of the very high likelihood that the bond issuer will default on that debt for any of a number of reasons, including bankruptcy.  Preexisting conditions have no such uncertainty; they exist.  Let’s assume the likelihood of bankruptcy on a junk bond is certain.  That certainly would make the junk bonds more expensive in the bond market than they are presently, but they’d still be marketable.

Now, in the case of a preexisting condition, the risk getting coming down with that condition has been realized, there’s nothing left there to transfer to an insurer in return for a fee or premium.

Notice, though, that the timing of a default on any particular junk bond remains uncertain, even though default itself is certain, and so there are buyers—insurers, if you will—who are willing to buy a pool of junk bonds.  These buyers are willing to assume the risk of default for some subset of the bonds in the pool in return for the likelihood of netting a profit on the aggregation of interest payments from the remaining junk bonds.

In the same way, while having a preexisting condition is certain for the afflicted person, the risk of any particular person’s condition flaring and so requiring medical treatment, remains uncertain.  This risk can be pooled and transferred to an insurer: the expectation here is that the insurer, after paying out on the flareups of some subset of the preexisting conditions in the pool, still can net a profit on the aggregation of premium payments from the preexisting conditions.

Without government’s interference in a (restored) health insurance industry marketplace, insurance products could be developed that would pool those with particular preexisting conditions (or a collection of similar preexisting conditions, or…).  Aggregating the risk of preexisting condition flareups (as opposed to attempting to deal with the preexisting condition itself) into large enough pools would bring premiums into the reach of most folks having the condition.  This is the same risk spreading technique used by junk bond mutual funds: these funds spread default risk across a large enough pool that the cost of buying into the fund comes within reach of ordinary investors.

Of course, in this simple analogy, there are a couple of contaminants.  One is the fact that, in reality, default even on a junk bond isn’t certain; it’s just very likely.  Thus, the price of junk bond pools is lower than tacitly assumed in analogy.  This is balanced to some extent, though, by the fact that while a bond, once defaulted, ceases to exist for all practical purposes, this is not the case with a preexisting condition.  In general, a flareup of a preexisting condition subsides, the condition continues to exist, and the premiums on it would continue to be paid against the next flareup (of uncertain timing).