Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Health Plan Providers Are Concerned

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These providers, which surprisingly The Wall Street Journal misapprehends as insurers, are bracing for a drop in enrollment in the ongoing health plan provision program “turmoil.”  There’s this key passage in the article at the link:

[M]any firms say they expect to lose consumers who will bear the full brunt of the rate increases—those who aren’t eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies, which help enrollees with annual incomes of less than around $48,000.

Yet it’s the “health law” that exploded health plan costs—premiums and deductibles, especially—by mandating coverage for things citizens don’t need or don’t want and by mandating that many of those coverages be provided at no cost to the plan purchaser.  This has led to a burial of many of those costs into the charges made rather than listing them openly as separate line items on the charge sheet and a parallel creation of the claimed need for the subsidies.

Those costs put a premium on getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with a private economy program of market oriented, actual health insurance policies sold by private companies not fettered by Federal government diktats.

That, in turn, requires three self-important Republican Senators to get with the program.  Senators John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Susan Collins (ME), especially, need to hear about our dismay with their reticence—and on a national scale.  These worthies are responsible to their State constituencies, to be sure, but the US Senate is a national body; these Senators also have a national constituency to whom they’re responsible, for all that the rest of us don’t vote for them.

The National Association of Realtors Objects

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The NAR is objecting to the current tax reform plan’s essential doubling of the standard deduction to $12,000 for single filers and to $24,000 for married couples.

The Realtors are upset because they say this middle-class tax cut would make fewer taxpayers use the mortgage-interest deduction. The National Association of Realtors trashed the framework in a statement, saying it “would all but nullify the incentive to purchase a home for most, amounting to a de facto tax increase” and ensure “that only the top 5% of Americans have the opportunity to benefit from the mortgage interest deduction.”

This is beyond disingenuous; it’s dishonest.

Doubling the standard deduction to $24,000 leaves an extra $12,000 in that family’s take-home income. That means that that family can accumulate a 20% down payment on a $240,000 home (in well-off Plano, TX, real estate market, that works out to a roughly 2,300-2,600 sq ft, 4-bedroom home) in just four years, instead of forever. That’s a strong incentive to buy a home—and these folks, shorn of the mortgage interest deduction as the NAR bleats, are not in those 5%.  They wouldn’t need the “benefit from the mortgage interest deduction.”

Oh, wait—that family might choose to replace their beater with a new, or a newer used, car that would be cheaper to run instead of buying a house. The family could pay cash for that car, rather than borrow for it, in just two years.

NAR knows all of this.

Laziness

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Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC, banks allegedly involved in rigging the erstwhile international debt interest rate benchmark LIBOR, are going to pay $132 million in aggregate to “settle” a court case over that alleged involvement.

The proposed settlements…include no admission of wrongdoing.

The banks are paying the money for—as the plaintiffs plainly agree by their own acceptance of the settlement—not doing anything.

This is a bad deal. If the banks didn’t do anything wrong, for what are they paying? If they deserve fines, why aren’t they being kept in court for an on-the-record public recitation of their wrongdoing and punishment?

Sounds like indulgences, to me.

Must Be Dead Broke Again

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The money’s already spent, and the Clinton Foundation has no other money to send back to Harvey Weinstein.

That’s the excuse that the Clinton Foundation is using (I’m deliberately eliding Hillary Clinton’s fatuous excuse for not returning Weinstein’s donations to her campaign—”there’s no one to return the money to”) for refusing to return Weinstein’s donation of somewhere between $100,000 to $250,000 to the Foundation.

The money’s gone.  And since money is eminently fungible, as all of the management of the Clinton Foundation—Chairman Bill Clinton, Vice Chairman Chelsea Clinton, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer Craig Minassian, et al.—all know full well, by implication the Foundation has no other money with which to make the returns.

Apparently, the Clintons, are dead broke again, and now their Foundation is, too.

Health Plan Coverage and Contraception

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The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that.  However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.

One inconvenience is the actual cost of contraception—to the user, not the rest of us who must pay for these “free” items.  Contraceptive pills can be had at places like Walmart for $9/mo, vaginal contraceptives are cheaper, condoms (don’t men have a role here, too?) are $6.50 the dozen.  These are not prices that will shatter anyone’s piggy bank.

Contraceptives are used to treat medical conditions, and they can be terribly expensive?  That’s the other inconvenience.  No they aren’t; those aren’t contraceptives.  They’re medications used for treating a medical condition; they happen to have a (if not the) major side effect of being anti-conceiving.  Insurance plans already covered such meds, and Obamacare could have, too, but the Progressive-Democratic Party eschewed that when they rammed through Obamacare.

In the end, there’s no reason anyone should pay for contraceptives other than the users.  Full stop.