Category Archives: markets

White House Timidity

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President Barack Obama says he’ll veto a bill making its way through the House of Representatives that would repeal the oil export ban in place since Gerald Ford’s administration. Obama thinks he’s acting from a position of strength in saying “No” to anything Republican.

He’s actually acting from weakness and timidity. Leaving aside the destruction of potential American jobs such a veto, if carried through, would represent, there are a couple of foreign policy/national security aspects to lifting the oil.

The free flow of oil to Europe that lifting the ban would facilitate would go a long way toward weaning Europe in general and Ukraine, Poland, and Germany in particular from their current dependence on Russian oil exports.

Freely flowing oil will hold down the cost of energy and of materials industries: plastics are made from oil. Those lower costs strength the economies of all of the nations that use energy in their industries or that import other nations’ production—which is to say the economies of nearly every nation on the planer.

Both Russia and Iran need oil prices above $100/barrel in order to balance their national budgets and so to better fund their attacks on their neighbors, in Russia’s case, and to fund their terrorist clients and attacks on Israel, in Iran’s case. Freely flowing oil would keep oil prices in their current $50-ish range, if not push those prices lower.

But neither Putin nor Khamenei would like that.

Obamacare Strikes Again

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The Obamacare law set up “risk corridors” for insurers in an effort to smooth the transition from quasi- (albeit very quasi) free markets for health insurance coverage to Obamacare’s government mandated health welfare coverage. Health plan providers that did relatively well in the transition were supposed to pay a taste of their profits into a pool—the risk corridor—from which health plan providers struggling with the transition were supposed to be able to draw to ease their losses.

There’s this snippet in Anna Wilde Mathews’ and Stephanie Armour’s piece in The Wall Street Journal on these risk corridors [emphasis added].

Federal authorities said that insurers will at first receive only about 12.6% of the money that they requested from the program, known as risk corridors, for 2014, its first year of operation. Insurers have requested approximately $2.87 billion in payments from the program based on their 2014 results. But the pool available to make those payments is just $362 million, which came from collections from other insurers that did relatively well on their marketplace business.

That doesn’t look like very many health plan providers did well last year. That does look like most of the plan providers were harmed by Obamacare. And through them, lots of Americans are going to be harmed by this Democratic Party’s law, as health plan providers withdraw from ObamaMart or from health plan provision entirely.

Hypocrisy of the Left

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Sanctuary City San Francisco has

proposed new city regulations, which could only be aimed at High Bridge Arms, would have required the shop to take and preserve video of all transactions and turn customers’ personal data over to police on a weekly basis.

There was only one gun shop left in San Fran at the time these new rules were proposed. That shop already had 17 cameras installed and turned video over to the police on their request. However, as the shop’s General Manager said,

it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods[.]

Rather than accepting that increased invasion, not just of an honest business doing business, but of the privacy of honest Americans doing honest business, the gun shop is closing.

Clearly, the Sanctuary City’s government and the residents that elect them care more about the ability of illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime to get guns than they do about honest Americans’ ability to defend themselves.

Drugs

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Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has turned to bashing drug companies, and in doing so, she’s exposing her ignorance of economics. Last Tuesday, she proposed in all seriousness

a $250 monthly cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs and other measures to stop what she called “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies.
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Under Clinton’s plan, the monthly cap would limit what insurance companies could ask patients to pay for drugs that treat patients with chronic or serious medical conditions.

Then she added this gem:

“We need to protect hard-working Americans here at home from excessive costs. Too often these drugs cost a fortune,” adding drug companies keep the profits for themselves while “shifting the cost to families.”

Well, yeah, they do keep the profits. Contra her BFF, President Barack Obama, they did build that.

Here’s a thought, Madam, for holding down costs for us “hard-working Americans here at home” about whom you claim to care so much: reduce the costs to the manufacturers by getting your Big Government’s regulations out of their way. Increase the incentives for manufacturers to reduce costs by getting your Big Government out of the way of competition.

And think about this: if your monthly cap, pulled straight out of rectal storage, plays out, what will be the cost of those drugs to us hard-working Americans here at home when the drug companies, unable to recoup their costs, stop manufacturing the drugs altogether?

Democratic Party Policy Regarding New-borns

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The House recently passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act which requires that babies who survive an abortion attempt are to be cared for as though they’d been born more normally. The Act opens with these two paragraphs:

Sec. 2. Findings

Congress finds as follows:

(1) If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws.

(2) Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care.

President Barack Obama has said he’ll veto this bill that protects babies newly born under a procedure that was intended to have a different outcome. His…rationale…is this:

HR 3504 [Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act] would impose new legal requirements related to the provision of abortion services in certain circumstances, which would likely have a chilling effect, reducing access to care.

If the President were presented with HR 3134 [Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015] or HR 3504, he would veto them.

This is nonsense. The Born-Alive bill has nothing to do with abortion, per se, only with its aftermath. The abortion ended with the removal of the baby from the mother’s womb. The task now is to care for a newly born baby. That this particular baby was born via a procedure that is not one of the more normal birthing procedures is wholly irrelevant to that.

Of course, Obama knows that. His decision—in advance of seeing the bill actually passed—to veto a bill that explicitly protects the life of a newly born infant, and the silence of his fellow Democrats on his veto threat, says volumes about the Democratic Party’s policy toward new-born babies.