Monthly Archives: January 2018

It’s a Start

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has been instructed by President Donald Trump to adjust its rules to allow the States to adjust their own rules to require work for Medicaid payments.

This is a very good start.  There are two remaining steps, though.  The funds transferred to the States in support of Medicaid need to be converted to block grants with no strings attached.  Each State knows its own medical support needs far better than does the Federal government.

The last step is to begin reducing, over a short number of years, the size of those block grants until no funds at all are being sent to the States.  This will get the Feds out of the States’ business, remove an extortion tool from the Feds’ kit which the Feds use to push the States into doing (or not doing) things the Feds demand be done or not done, and it will greatly reduce Federal spending.  In 2016, the Federal government sent almost $350 billion to the States in Medicaid transfers.

Privacy Innovation

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The FBI’s management says it supports strong encryption, but out of the other side of their mouth they claim that the FBI’s

inability to access data [is] “an urgent public safety issue” that requires “significant innovation.”

Here we go again.  Heads up for FBI Director making plain what he’s now only hinting at: he wants a backdoor into our encryption so Government can enter whenever it takes a notion to.

FBI Director Chris Wray is seeking to reboot the privacy-versus-security debate surrounding law enforcement’s inability to access data on electronic devices protected by powerful encryption.

Over the past year, the FBI failed to access data from nearly 7,800 devices, Wray said Tuesday at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York City, adding that the number continues to grow[.]

This is disingenuous.  The FBI, in the San Bernardino terrorist shooting, pretended it was unable to open decrypt the cell phone of one of the terrorists because they couldn’t hack the password.  They also pretended difficulty decrypting the contents when they did get the phone opened.  In both cases, when a private enterprise was allowed into the problem, that private company cracked both problems lickety-split.

But we can trust Government.  Nobody in Government would abuse that backdoor.

Here’s an innovation: do your own work at keeping up in the encryption/decryption arms race; don’t demand private enterprise hand you the keys to our kingdom.

Here’s another innovation: get a warrant.

The Price of Labor

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…is also a cost to labor.  Minimum wage mandates took effect at the start of the year in 18 States and in 20 cities.  These mandates have drastically raised the cost to labor.

Late Monday, casual dining chain Red Robin Gourmet Burgers (RRGB) announced that it would eliminate bus boys at 570 restaurant locations, a move that is expected to save the company an estimated $8 million over the course of the coming year. The company’s chief financial officer said the decision was made in order to “address the labor increases we’ve seen.”

Those busboys can thank their respective Progressive-Democratic politicians for the wage increase they can enjoy not having.  They also should remember this largesse in the coming primary season and again this fall.

There’s another cost to labor, one that is far longer lasting, and so far more devastating to us citizens and the economy in which we must operate.  Michael Saltsman, Employment Policies Institute Director, addressed the problems faced by our teenagers and other first-time workers:

I think the loss, as the minimum wage goes up…[is the] hollowing out of entry-level opportunities[.]

Without that entry-level experience—not only in a particular job, but in the nature of having a job, the ethic of work—how will our first-timers get the next-level job?  How, indeed, will they even get any entry-level job when they’re being priced out of the starter market?

Congressional Districts and Gerrymandering

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North Carolina’s Congressional districts are illegally drawn, says a special three-judge court.

A special three-judge court invalidated the North Carolina map after finding Republicans adopted it for the driving purpose of magnifying the party’s political power beyond its share of the electorate.

I’ll leave aside the disparate impact sewage that local districts must reflect the larger State’s electorate “demographics.”  The larger problem is with the underlying premise of gerrymandering: that some groups of Americans need their political power enhanced relative to other groups of Americans because some groups are, in some sense, fewer in numbers than other groups.

That’s not relevant when it comes to citizenship and the citizens’ right and obligation to vote.  All Americans are the same in the voting booth.  The differentiation occurs legitimately only in the campaigns for office and on the ballot and nowhere else.  Indeed,

[T]he court’s opinion found that the Republican-drawn map violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and other provisions that deal with the election of members of Congress.

Any form of gerrymandering commits that violation, since any form of gerrymandering by design enhances one group at the expense of another.

It’s long past time for courts to recognize this—and for politicians to preempt the question by acting on their recognition of this simple fact.  Don’t gerrymander.  Draw Congressional districts solely as squares containing substantially equal populations of citizens, with the first four squares’ shared corner at the State’s geographic center and working out from there to the State’s boundaries with abutting States.  The squares’ straight sides (and the squareness of the district) should be deviated from only at those boundaries.

It’s time to treat Americans in the voting booth—in the political arena—as that which we are: Americans.  The demographic membership of an American is deeply secondary to that.

Northern Korea and Talks

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Jonathan Cheng had a piece in the Wall Street Journal that talked about differences in policy held by RoK President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump, especially concerning northern Korea.  He seemed surprised that friends or allies could disagree with each other rather than one simply being a satrap of the other.

Withal, though, I want to comment on one remark he had at the end of his piece.

[Moon suggested that] the end goal of international pressure and sanctions is to “find a way for North Korea to live together in peace with the international community”—a comment that appears at odds with the US goal of denuclearization.

Cheng is wrong; there is no contradiction. If northern Korea truly is interested in “living together in peace and harmony with the international community,” it has no need of nuclear weapons. No one is interested in attacking northern Korea, except in self defense, perhaps preemptively.

Northern Korea doesn’t have very much that anyone else wants, and what it does have is more easily and more cheaply obtainable through free trade than through conquest. Baby Kim knows this.