If They Depend on Subsidies…

…then they shouldn’t be in business. The subheadline laid it out:

Republicans want to shift subsidies away from some of the frailest companies in the industry

In this context, “the industry” is the health care coverage industry, and the subsidies are those paid health coverage providers in the Affordable Care Act. I claim, though, that “private” companies that require government handouts are neither all that private nor deserving of staying in business. If they cannot survive without taxpayer money as anything more than a shortish-term loan to survive a catastrophe, they should be left to go out of business.

The news writer at the link made a big deal out of the need for the subsidies to those coverage providers in order to hold down the prices—the premiums—the customers pay for the policies, jerking tears especially for the lower income customers. What he does not address, though, is the deductibles and the out-of-pocket caps those Obamacare policies have. The deductibles and caps each separately represent significant fractions of those lower income customers’ income. They, especially, had better not get sick. If they do, their strait is not much different from that of those folks who are uninsured at all.

The subsidies paid into their hands directly would at least give them a little relief, but that’s only a stop gap. The real solution is to eliminate the ACA altogether and free up the health care coverage industry, restoring it to a health insurance industry in a free market with policies marketable nationwide, rather than limiting them to intrastate sales with the permissions and regulations of fifty different States.

Companies providing health care coverage or insurance should see their prosperity in how well they treat their customers and how well they serve them. Their prosperity should not come from government handouts—transfers from us taxpayers who don’t use their services.

Affordability

What is this thing, “affordability?” Greg Ip, in his Sunday Wall Street Journal piece, correctly noted that it’s more than just the inflation spike of the Biden administration or an outcome of that spike.

What started as a serious but short-lived spike in inflation from 2021 to 2023 has evolved into something broader and more amorphous. Like the climate crisis or the crisis of democratic legitimacy, the affordability crisis has become an umbrella term for countless loosely connected phenomena.

As a campaign issue, such amorphosity is useful. For us average Americans, though, and for those charged specifically to solve the problem, that’s a useless characterization. A problem needs a specific definition, or its constituent pieces each need a specific definition. That’s where Ip made his own error. He was suitably specific, but in the wrong way.

Strictly speaking, affordability means having the resources to pay for goods and services at current prices. By that standard, the simplest metric is real (i.e., after-inflation) incomes. Real incomes fell behind when inflation shot up, then recovered as inflation receded and wages caught up. Real personal income was up 2.3% in the year through August, and real hourly wages climbed 0.8% in the year through September, both in line with the 19-year average.

None of us spend these mythical “real” dollars, though; they only exist in overall measures of economic questions. “Real” dollars also exist, especially in Ip’s (and my) context, only as a nationwide calculation. All of us, wherever we are in the real (not “real”) world, spend the dollars in our pockets—nominal dollars, the dollars we receive in our paychecks or welfare payments. That’s a fairly steady level for employees of national companies, but it varies widely from region to region for the smaller employers that fit into the “mid-sized” company category; the mom-and-pop wages vary from locale to locale.

Neither do any of us face the nationwide price level that is the outcome of inflation (or deflation); we pay the nominal prices that occur in the specific area where each of us lives. That’s true even for the goods and services that are sold nationwide rather than regionally. California’s prices for energy, for instance, isn’t the same as New York’s, or Texas’, or Nebraska’s, or….

What each of us does do is pay those local or regional nominal prices with the nominal dollars we have. Thus: affordability—usefully specific and accurately defined affordability—is regional and nominal: the relationship between the dollars each of us has and the prices each of us faces in the locale or region in which we live. The military gets at this with the Cost of Living Allowances it adds to members’ paychecks: that’s an addendum intended to cover some of the gap between the nominal dollars servicemen and women receive and the nominal prices they actually face where they’re stationed. Social Security payments get annual adjustments related to the “cost of living,” but those adjustments are nationwide, based on the national inflation rate; they are not adjusted according to where any of us live. Some make out like bandits in their local market places and prices, others are still left well short, most see only most of the gap filled.

Until that is understood, what to do about affordability—if anything—cannot be determined. When real affordability gets addressed, any solutions will have to be at least as finely done as regional. “Affordability” is another area where one-size-fits-all doesn’t fit any.

It’s No Choice

President Donald Trump (R) has put on the table a piece agreement between Ukraine and Russia that, if it’s being accurately described, amounts to abject surrender by Ukraine to the barbarian. The arrangement calls for Ukraine to cede to the barbarian occupied Crimea and all of the Donbas, including both the currently occupied and the unconquered parts. Ukraine also would be forced to at least partially disarm and cap its standing army at two-thirds of its current complement, and Ukraine would be forever barred from entering into any sort of defensive alliance.

Even the US would lose in this. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed a deal wherein the US would develop Ukraine’s mineral deposits, including significant rare earths, in return for which the US would get a significant fraction of the outputs. Under the arrangement on offer now, we would lose access to those minerals and rare earths since the vast bulk of them are in the Donbas.

Zelenskyy addressed his people when presented with the peace “deal,” whatever it is in fact, and said that his nation, his people must choose between “dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”

If this “peace” thing is being described accurately in the press, Ukraine already has lost a key partner.

What He Said

Reposted from PowerLine:

Dear Anonymous Professor:
You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.
We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.
The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.
What caused this collapse, you ask?
You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.
In economics, you promote Marx and Keynesian financialization, offshoring, and money printing—policies that make homes unaffordable and force us to work two jobs just to pay bills. You omit Austrian School economists like Mises and Hayek, who defended the free markets that built the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy today. You smear capitalism as “oppressive” while pushing the actually oppressive redistribution schemes that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
In psychology, you idolize Alfred Kinsey as the father of the sexual revolution and John Money as the one who coined the word “gender” as separate from sex. Yet you never tell us that Kinsey gathered data from pedophiles who abused babies, and that Money’s theory was founded on his experiments with the Reimer twins, both of whom committed suicide from the trauma.
In literature, you replace Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dante with a racist DEI quota system, choosing books based on race and victimhood instead of merit. The more “marginalized” the author, the less their work is critiqued and the more you celebrate it.
In sociology, you force-feed us feminism, an ideology that teaches women to resent men, motherhood, and family. You glorify Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan but hide the inconvenient truth: that single, childless women are the unhappiest demographic, while married women in Christian households report the highest life and sexual satisfaction.
In history, you teach that slavery was America’s unique sin, ignoring that it was universal until White Christian nations abolished it first. You never mention the 600,000 Americans who died ending it, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron that liberated 150,000 slaves, or that slavery still thrives in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
In philosophy, you prioritize Marx, Freud, and Foucault—the philosophers of disorder—over Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke, who built the foundations of virtue, natural law, and liberty. You conveniently leave out that the philosophical purpose of freedom is to do what is good, not to do whatever we want.
In political science, you present the genocidal failures of Marxism, socialism, and communism as “viable alternatives” for academic debate, while downplaying the brilliant, liberty-ensuring architecture of our Constitution. You dismiss foundational mechanisms like the separation of powers and the Electoral College as archaic flaws, and ignore the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, because you are racist toward the White Christian males who authored them.
In the sciences, you deny the biological reality of sex, even though every single one of the 60 trillion cells in the human body is either male or female, and no amount of hormones can change that. Instead of helping people with body image and mental health issues, you promote their permanent and irreversible mutilation to virtue signal.
And we could go on. But the bitter irony is that you stand on the shoulders of the giants who built this country, this state, and this university, using your cushy job to spit on their legacy and the values that have given you everything you enjoy today. You take parents’ life savings and teach their kids to hate them, their faith, and their heritage, causing fights over Thanksgiving dinner.
You aren’t teaching us how to think; you’re teaching us what to think. You turned a marketplace of ideas, where each side is supposed to be heard equally, into an indoctrination camp where only the approved party line is parroted. You created the first generations in world history without love for their God, their family, or their country—and then wonder why they’re miserable.
Meanwhile, China, Russia, and our competitors teach their engineers calculus and physics, not gender studies and wokeness. They laugh at us as they dominate in AI, energy, and manufacturing.
So why are you scared when taxpayers demand a return to excellence? Why fear being recorded? What are you teaching that can’t stand scrutiny? Lobotomies and eugenics were once taught, too. The gender unicorn is just the current pseudoscience.
You’re not scared of politicians. You’re scared of losing your six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary because your indoctrination model is failing. What you’re seeing around you is a call on Texas A&M, the nation’s universities, and the West to become once more the leader of the educational world, as it is the leader of the free world. We need engineers, not ideologues: builders, not critics.
We need more Charlie Kirks, not more Ibram X. Kendis. We are your customers, your bosses, and your product is broken. Don’t gaslight us for demanding a better one.
Justino Russell
Texas A&M Student
P.S. I want to defend the truth, so I’ll sign my name. If you were teaching the truth, why didn’t you sign with yours?

What the student said, indeed. To which I add: is that cowardly anonymous “professor” even a professor, or is he just some random pogue BSing away?

Death for Seditionists?

Recall the six Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who called on senior military and intelligence officials to disobey “illegal” orders, all the while refusing to identify either the illegal order(s) in question or the statute(s) or constitutional clause(s) they allegedly violated.

President Donald Trump (R) has responded in his inimitable fashion:

“Their words cannot be allowed to stand,” Trump said. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.”

And later,

SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!

Now we have two more Progressive-Democratic Party politicians spouting yet more Leftist conspiracy theory foolishness.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

When Donald Trump uses the language of execution and treason, some of his supporters may very well listen[.]

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY):

…disgusting and dangerous death threats against Members of Congress….

Hmm….

Trump has, indeed, suggested, in 2016 campaign “lock her up” rhetoric style that the Six should be locked up for their seditious behavior. But death threats? No. He’s only saying sedition warrants execution, not anyone in particular. Not even in context.

Thus: the only way he could be calling for the execution of the six is if they actually are convicted of seditious behavior. From that, the only logical conclusion of Schumer’s and Jeffries’ claims is that they’re confessing the Six’ guilt of sedition.