Category Archives: culture

Ethics and the Left

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s talk about this in the context of Presidential elections and the Electoral College.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, award Electoral College votes on the basis of which candidate won the state’s Congressional districts in the popular vote.  The winner of a district gets one Electoral vote, and (in general) the winner of the state’s overall popular vote gets two Electoral College votes.  Four other states, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, are actively moving in that direction, with a number of other states in the talking stage.  Virginia is the farthest along, having passed out of committee a by-district proposal in the state Senate (awarding the two votes to the candidate winning the most districts rather than the overall popular vote) and sent it to the full Senate.

What’s interesting here is not so much the rationale for making the move, but the arguments against and who is making those arguments.

Virginia State Senator Donald McEachin (D) calls the bill a “sore-loser bill” and added

The bill is absolutely a partisan bill aimed at defying the will of the voters, giving Republican presidential candidates most of Virginia’s electoral votes, regardless of who carries the state[.]

Virginia State Delegate Vivian Watts (D) sponsored or co-sponsored several bills over the years that would have apportioned Virginia’s electoral votes by Congressional district; she had this to say about that:

I’m age 72 so I spent a lot of years in the wilderness and the last time the state had gone Democratic [before 2008] was following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  I thought back in those days about how we were just totally ignored.

But she opposes the present bill coming before the House of Delegates.  The argument that Democrats weren’t getting their voices heard yesterday is valid, but the argument that Republicans aren’t getting their voices heard today is invalid.  Hmm….

Nationally, Democrats also oppose today what they wanted yesterday.  Mike Tate, Democratic Party Chairman, had this to say:

They can’t appeal to a majority of voters, whether it’s here in Wisconsin or Michigan or in the rest of the Midwest, so they are undermining a majority of voters.  The Republicans realize that where they are today, they can’t win a presidential election. It’s an audacious attempt to rig the system.

And, as The Washington Post summarizes,

Democrats nationwide attacked the proposed plans, which could tip the balance away from population-heavy urban centers to more rural districts that tend to favor Republicans.

Because bitter, gun-clinging, bible-toting rural Americans aren’t as important as more progressive, citified Americans.

Democratic political analyst Larry Sabato had this to say:

[I]t is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb—the whole hand, in fact—on the scale for future Republican candidates.  We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it.  A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans.  A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor.

No, we insist the handicap favor the Democrats.  We insist that Democratic Chicago alone carry Illinois in its entirety, against the will of the rest of the state.  We don’t accept that letting the grass roots—individual Americans themselves—determine the apportioning of Electoral College votes is in any way democratic.

It is the Democrats themselves, presently in the ascendant, who fear the future and want to seal their superiority by blocking—today—a more democratic apportionment.

Thus, as the Post points out at the end of the article at the first link above, this isn’t the first move (in Virginia, to take that state as our example):

[S]everal [Electoral College apportionment bills] have been introduced over the past decade, all with the same rationale of giving more say to voters on the losing side.  The only difference is that those bills were submitted by Democrats, back when they weren’t having as much luck in the state in presidential elections.

And Democrats nationally were in favor of changing the Electoral College system to better favor them in the aftermath of their narrow losses in 2000 and 2004.  And before that in response to the Nixon victories in the 1970s.

Ethics are what we say they are, say Democrats, when we need them to say that.

Takers vs Doers

Posted on by
Reply

Nicholas Eberstadt has the call.

A growing body of empirical evidence points to increasing dependency on state largess.

Then he enumerates [emphasis his]:

  • Over the 50-plus years since 1960, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, entitlement transfers—government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens—have been growing twice as fast as overall personal income.  Government transfers now account for nearly 18% of all personal income in America—up from 6% in 1960.
  • According to the BEA, America’s myriad social-welfare programs (the federal bureaucracy apparently cannot determine exactly how many of these there are) currently dispense entitlement benefits of more than $2.3 trillion annually.  Since those entitlements must be paid for—either through taxes or borrowing—the burden of entitlement spending now amounts to over $7,400 per American man, woman and child.

To pay for this, every child is born with a $7,400 debt.  Including those who will be recipients of this welfare.  Which means, as a practical matter, the other children are born with an even greater debt.

  • In 1960, according to the Office of Management and Budget, social-welfare programs accounted for less than a third of all federal spending. Today, entitlement programs account for nearly two-thirds of federal spending.  In other words, welfare spending is nearly twice as much as defense, justice and everything else Washington does—combined.  In effect, the federal government has become an entitlements machine.

Yet President Barack Obama insists that entitlements don’t sap us, they strengthen us.  He’s partially right: they strengthen those who control the handouts from these entitlements.  Politically.

  • According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half (49%) of Americans today live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits.  That percentage is up almost 20 points from the early 1980s.  And contrary to what the Obama White House team suggested during the election campaign, this leap is not due to the aging of the population.  In fact, only about one-tenth of the increase is due to upticks in old-age pensions and health-care programs for seniors.
  • As entitlement outlays have risen, there has been flight of men from the work force.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of adult men 20 and older working or seeking work dropped by 13 percentage points between 1948 and 2008.
  • In recent years, the biggest increases in disability claims have been for “musculoskeletal” problems and mental disorders (including mood disorders).  But as a practical matter, it is impossible for a health professional to ascertain conclusively whether or not a patient is suffering from back pains or sad feelings.  The government’s disability-insurance programs were intended to address genuine need.  On the current trajectory, the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out of money during Mr Obama’s second term.
  • The president and others describe Social Security and Medicare as “social insurance” programs rather than transfer schemes.  True, the eventual beneficiaries of these programs contribute payroll taxes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds during their working lives.  But “insurance” programs are meant to pay for themselves; Social Security and Medicare cannot do so.

Moreover, insurance programs pay the premium payer or the payer’s designated beneficiary later, not some stranger currently.

And who’s paying for all of this?  Slightly over half, and dwindling, of those Nancy Kress called mules in her Beggars novels.  And those of our children who are picking up the debt.

The Blinders of the Liberal

Posted on by
Reply

Juan Williams has a piece in The Wall Street Journal that illustrates this quite nicely.  He writes of the “Clouds over [President Barack] Obama’s Second Term,” and surely there are such clouds.  But he couches his discussion in this way.

…there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.

…Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.

Even leaving aside the fact that the rise in the use of the filibuster includes several Congressional sessions of Democratic Party minority, this is an interesting argument.  Williams is claiming that Republican opposition to Obama’s bills couldn’t possibly be because those bills are terrible ideas.  No, being universally fine, the only purpose for opposing them must be personal—to harm Obama.

But this is entirely consistent with Williams’ next point.

…one factor for anyone judging Mr Obama is race.

Really, Mr Williams?  Have we met?  Certainly it’s no secret to my half-dozen readers that I disagree, with considerable enthusiasm, with nearly all that Obama has done or said.  But on what basis do you ascribe my opposition to race?  I reject your racist slur.

Along these lines, Williams offers this:

Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House.  By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.”

This is another manufactured beef, or it’s a concession that Liberals generally are racist.  Certainly no Conservative whom I know looked at Obama as anything other than a bad president.  Not a bad black president.  And not, even when he did show anger, an “angry black man.”

Where are you getting this stuff, Mr Williams?

More on Becoming a Dependent

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog reports that a

federal appeals court [the First Circuit] on Thursday [last] ruled that insurance companies can be required to pay long-term disability benefits to a recovering drug addict if the person would face a significant risk of relapse by returning to work.

The Law Blog expands:

The case…involved an anesthesiologist from Massachusetts…who became heavily addicted to Fentanyl, a prescription opioid used in her practice.

[The anesthesiologist] spent about three months at a treatment center, according to her attorney.  After she was discharged, her employee benefit plan that was administered by Union Security Insurance Company cut off her long-term disability benefit payments, totaling $4,000 a month.  Her therapist and other doctors feared that she had a high risk of relapse and cautioned her not to return to work where it would be easy to access the drug, the opinion said.

The anesthesiologist justified her suit by claiming that she shouldn’t have to fall off the wagon for her claim to be accepted.  She shouldn’t have actually to be disabled in order to collect disability benefits.  Never mind that there was no certainty of relapse asserted, by her or the Court, only a likelihood.  Never mind that her condition was entirely self-inflicted.  Never mind that she could have found work—even in the medical field—other than as an anesthesiologist.

Indeed, as the Appellate Court said quite clearly, she had not relapsed, and so she wasn’t back in her disability condition.  She was, though, out those $4,000 per month, payable for an actual disability.

The Court then noted in its opinion (cynically, say I)

The plaintiff’s risk of relapse was not merely theoretical.  In perhaps the most striking actualization of this risk, the plaintiff was arrested in May of 2005—some six months after her departure from [the treatment center]—for driving under the influence of alcohol[.]

Notice that.  She was driving under the influence of alcohol, not Fentanyl.  Some risk of relapse onto the drug.

The Court also noted in justification of its ruling (again cynically, say I) that the insurance company could have inured itself from this sort of…suit…by  “writing into the plan an exclusion for risk of relapse.”

The insurer, though, hadn’t included such an explicit exclusion because at the time they sold the policy they had no reason to believe a Federal Appeals court would rule so capriciously.  After all, the Fourth Circuit already had ruled differently on an identical case:

[The] Fourth Circuit…said the denial of benefits to an anesthetist addicted to the same narcotic was “reasonable.”

Now we know better.  If there’s a possibility of a disability occurring in the future, that disability exists presently.

Another brick in the wall of manufactured dependency.

Progressive Policies and the Poor

Posted on by
Reply

Thomas Sowell, writing in the National Review, had some thoughts on the impact of modern Liberalism on the welfare of blacks in the US.  I think they apply to all minorities, to whites, to our poor generally.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

And

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage.  Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment….

And

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

And

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities.  But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

Sowell summarizes the matter starkly:

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good—and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The party of Jim Crow may be attempting to correct its past.  It is, in fact, failing miserably.  Modern Liberals give so little thought to the 50 years of empirical evidence defining the consequences of their actions that I have to conclude that they’re well aware of those consequences.  One of those consequences, flowing from the poverty enforced maintained by their actions, is the continued dependency of our poor on the largesse of the Modern Liberals in government.

That’s not just petty ego stroke, that’s political power.