Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

General Reform

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25% of us don’t see doctors because that costs too much.

32% of older millennials (is there such a thing?  Gad) skip the doctor.  13% of Americans don’t have any health coverage plan at all—paying the penalty is more valuable to them.  Half of us don’t think we’ll have affordable health insurance much less Obamacare’s health coverage welfare.

This, together with today’s other post, just illustrates the fact that no single part of our economy—or of our Federal government—can effectively be treated in isolation: not Obamacare alone, not Federal spending alone (especially not by “cutting” through reducing the rate of growth in spending), not taxing alone, not debt handling alone.

They’re a system, and the system as a whole must be reformed, not convenient parts of it.  That’s Systems Management 101.

Losing Health Coverage

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The CBO and Progressive-Democrats in Congress loudly claim that millions will lose their health coverage plans under Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare.

What the Progressive-Democrats are carefully ignoring (the CBO not so much; they weren’t tasked with comparing the Republican plans and Obamacare) are the real millions that already are losing or are about to lose their health coverage plans because Obamacare is collapsing now.

The nation’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, will extract itself from the majority of the ObamaCare market in the state of Ohio by 2018, the company announced Tuesday, raising questions about the future of its exchange participation.

And

The decision could leave 20 counties within the state without access to coverage under the Affordable Care Act[.]

Anthem is considering leaving Obamacare altogether in the not-too-distant future.

Anthem handles over a million customers in the health coverage market, now considerably fewer under Obamacare, and perhaps shortly none at all.  Nor is Anthem alone in being unable to continue under Obamacare.  Aetna and Humana will be leaving next year, and those customers will be losing their coverage.

Those people actually, not speculatively, are losing their coverage.

The Rich Are Out Of Money?

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They are in Connecticut, anyway, or at least out of trust in the State’s government regarding their money.  Or the State is out of rich.  Aetna, Inc, one of the giants of health and dental coverage that’s headquartered in Connecticut is looking hard at joining the exodus from the State, having grown tired of being the State’s tax piggy bank.

Governor Dannel Malloy (D) says he’ll match other states’ financial incentives—not exceed—if only Aetna will stay, but as The Wall Street Journal put it, “taxpayer money can’t buy fiscal certainty and a less destructive business climate.”

The result of the Left’s assaults on the wealthy’s pocketbooks?  The Left has shattered its own rice bowl.  The State’s Office of Fiscal Analysis

reduced its two-year revenue forecast by $1.46 billion. Since January the agency has downgraded income-tax revenue for 2017 and 2018 by $1.1 billion (6%). Sales- and corporate-tax revenue are projected to fall by $385 million (9%) and $67 million (7%), respectively, this year. Pension contributions, which have doubled since 2010, will increase by a third over the next two years. The result: a $5.1 billion deficit and three recent credit downgrades.

The remaining rich are bugging out, headed for States that appreciate the jobs—and resulting expanded incomes and revenues for those States—that these guys and their companies bring with them.

[emphasis added] In the past five years 27,400 Connecticut residents…have moved to no-income-tax Florida, and seven of the state’s eight counties have lost population since 2010. Population flight has depressed economic growth—Connecticut’s real GDP has shrunk by 0.1% since 2010—as well as home values and sales-tax revenues.

Hmm….

Another Hypocrisy of the Left

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Among the tax reforms in the current plan before Congress is the elimination of the state and local tax payments as deductions from individuals’ Federal income tax returns.  Who actually benefits from these deductions, though?  Taxpayers in New York, California, and a couple of others.  States dominated, for the most part, by the Progressive-Democratic Party.  There’s an ox being gored.

Who else benefits from these deductions?

…88% of the benefits in 2014 flowed to taxpayers who earn more than $100,000, while 1% went to those who earn less than $50,000….

That’s not quite the Progressive-Democrats’ hated 1%, but they’re included—and the poor, whom the Progressive-Democrats pretend to want to help, get almost nothing for the deduction: they don’t have enough income to be able to use it—even if they live in those Blue States whose governments so loudly pretend to be on their side.

The Progressive-Democrats aren’t even consistent in their opprobrium.

The deduction is worth about $100 billion a year—the sixth largest individual income tax break. The Tax Foundation estimates that eliminating the write-off would raise $1.8 trillion in revenue over a decade.

Not even the prospect of all this money for Federal coffers—$180 billion per year to offset those $100 billion of deductions—is enough to draw the Progressive-Democrats in.

Heaven forfend that they take an alternative course.  They could jump on that large increase in the Federal take with both feet, and in parallel (especially since the deduction goes away) those Blue State governments could lower their own tax bites….

Some Thoughts on the Paris Climate Accord

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Some information provided by Matthew Dalton in The Wall Street Journal is illuminating, if not in the way he—or the WSJ—might have intended.

The US’s willingness under the Obama administration to propose major emissions reductions and put money on the table helped solidify global consensus behind the deal. It also helped persuade politicians world-wide of the need to seek more ambitious cuts and channel more money into the fight against global warming, officials and experts say.

Our willingness to put money on the table “helped persuade politicians world-wide [to] channel more money into the fight against global warming” contains a couple of disingenuousities.  One is that the greater amount of money to be channeled is American taxpayers’ money, since the other nearly 200 nations party to the thing aren’t putting up much money at all—in fact, large polluters like India pledged themselves to do nothing under the accord until some trillions of dollars in “foreign aid” had been transferred to them.  Pakistan, unmentioned by Dalton, pledged to “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.”  But that only defines the word “peak;” it commits to nothing—other than to be one of the receivers of (American taxpayers’) OPM.

The other disingenuousity is the cynically presented strawman of “the fight against global warming.”  The folks objecting to our leaving the accord will have to play with their dolly without me.  There’s no fight against global warming.  There is an effort to mitigate human activity’s impact on climate change, even though that impact has not had its significance established, or even suggested in any credible way.  Even the direction of climate change is not established: it was just a short time ago that the same Climate Federal Funding Industry was trying to raise funding by frightening us into worrying about the coming Ice Age.  (This is also the same collection of rent-seekers who tried to raise money with fear mongering about catastrophic global overpopulation.)

There’s also this from Dalton:

Despite the strong reaction of world leaders, the US’s financial contributions have been relatively small so far and its decision to withdraw doesn’t necessarily halt America’s progress on the emissions front.

Indeed.  The uproar is over the fact that the others won’t have such easy access to OPM—us American taxpayers’ money.  Never mind that in their bleating, these “world leaders” ignore the simple fact that we’re the leaders in cutting both pollution and CO2 emissions—we’re already at 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, and it hasn’t even been established that this plant food even is a pollutant.

And this:

When they signed the accord, governments acknowledged that the most difficult work was left unfinished. The pledges to slash emissions made by more than 190 nations fell far short of the reductions scientists say are needed to avoid the most damaging effects of climate change.

That bit of dishonesty speaks for itself.

Looks like President Trump isn’t as dumb or irresponsible as these worthies claim.  The Paris Climate Accord was, and is, nothing but cynical virtue signaling by the intended recipients of OPM and by the developed nation leaders’ who promised pennies of their own and dollars of ours.