Category Archives: morality

Progress

Posted on by
Reply

Veterans face delays when applying for education benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), making it more difficult for them to receive an education after leaving the military, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed last week.

And [emphasis added]

veterans lack information on the timeline for receiving their GI benefits and face a backlogged call center at the Department of Veterans Affairs when they have questions, on top of delays in actually receiving the benefits.

And

It took the VA 31 days on average to process a new application for GI benefits under the post-9/11 GI bill in fiscal year 2012, 8 days longer than the VA’s goal, while it took the VA 17 days to process benefit payment claims, 5 days longer than the VA’s target.

Those might seem like trivial delays, until you have to live through them.  I was a beneficiary of an earlier GI benefit program, and at the time the money was the difference between bankruptcy and paying bills—like tuition, books, etc—which is what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck.  A day’s delay can be a disaster, not just 8, or 5 days.

More, this is in addition to the VA’s existing disability claim arrears.

Of the nearly 900,000 pending disability claims, nearly 600,000 are backlogged, meaning they have been waiting for over 125 days. The average wait time is between 270 and 330 days, depending on how you calculate the figure, while the number of backlogged claims has risen by 2,000 percent since 2009[.]

But the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, General Eric Shinseki, says progress is being made in the dysfunctional VA, and Shinseki is an honorable man—so are they all, all honorable men in the VA.

The GAO’s report can be seen here.

It’s Time

Posted on by
Reply

…to fire some school “leadership.”

Just a few short weeks ago the Kountze High School Cheerleaders and all of America celebrated when Liberty Institute secured a victory in the famous Bible Banner Case.

But now, joining a host of radical left groups like the ACLU and the extremist Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Kountze ISD wants to eliminate the free speech rights of its students.

Faith.  Jesus Christ.  Hope.  Love—these are dirty words for students in Kountze, Texas.

Maybe not for the students, but certainly for the Kountze ISD School Board.  Or maybe not even for them, maybe joining the appeal is a measure of their timidity in the face of FFRF or ACLU pressure.

In the end, though, this assault on our religious freedom—which includes both clauses [emphasis added]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

—must be stopped.  Groups like FFRF actively wish to deny us that second freedom—to freely exercise our religion, demanding that the only religion to be allowed to be freely exercised is the religion of atheism.

And a primary way of stopping the attack must include firing leadership that is too timid to defend the freedom or that actually agrees with the FFRFs of the country that such a freedom cannot be had.

The Kountze ISD school board must be replaced.  En masse.  Right away.

Insurance Fraud

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, are bragging about their army of community organizersnavigators that they’re prepping to go out and entice Americans, especially young Americans, to sign up for Obamacare.

The reasons for needing young Americans to sign up include these two, in particular: Obamacare fails in an enormously expensive fashion (even more so than its spectacularly expensive present failure, even before it’s fully implemented) unless young—healthy—Americans sign up so their premiums (artificially inflated compared to the cost of truly risk-based health premiums) can be used to subsidize old(er) Americans’ (which includes me) premiums (artificially suppressed compared to the cost of truly risk-based health premiums).  The second reason is that Americans, including young Americans, aren’t economically, or fiscally stupid—that’s just a projection of the Progressives’ on shortcomings onto others—and so they’ll need to be…persuaded…to sign up.

It’s useful, then, to understand what these community organizersnavigators (dang—I keep getting these terms confused) will do and what their backgrounds will contain.  What they’ll do is contained in the “navigate” root term.  In order to guide their charges to an “appropriate” policy and to assess eligibility for their own premium subsidy (too low income, for instance, which in a free market world would be another argument for a young, healthy American not to spend any money on health insurance), these guys will need to collect extensive financial and personally identifying information from each young American.

What are the acceptable backgrounds for these “navigators?”  Apparently, any background is acceptable; HHS will do no background checks at all.  Any felon will do.  Any person lacking the education of a high school graduate will do.  These wonders won’t even need to be bonded or carry Errors and Omissions coverage.  There isn’t the first particle of a pretense of consumer protection in their navigator function.

Can you say, “identity theft?”  Can you say, “incompetence?”  Can you say, “Government sponsored insurance fraud?”

Aside from that, there’s a simple exercise that all Americans should do, but especially young Americans just starting out in the world; it’s easily done on a spreadsheet.

The penaltytax for not buying health insurance acceptable to the government (e.g., an Obamacare policy) is $695 for a single person (as many (most?) young Americans will be, at least for a significant portion of the period covering this exercise).  A typical health insurance premium (not the cheapest or most expensive) for a healthy, single 25-year-old man runs to $1,600 per year.

Here’s the exercise: take the difference between that tax and that premium and grow it at, say 3% per year, which is roughly what could be had in a mutual fund that invests in a stock market index.  “Invest” those $905 every year in that hypothetical mutual fund at those 3%, and see the value will accumulate by the time our young American has reached early middle age.  I get a skosh (that’s the technical term) over $25,000 for our young man.  That’s money he could use for his own purposes, rather than government’s, purposes that might include being socked away, year on year, into his retirement plan, being committed toward his rent or mortgage, being spent in real time on food and clothing, even being spent on health insurance—of his choosing, and especially in a free market, from a constellation of policies that might be available.

Certainly, the actual value represented by those example $25k will vary widely, depending on individual circumstance and actual market performance, but the idea is clear.

A Moral Question

Posted on by
Reply

Dr Paul McHugh has one, in particular concerning Vermont’s just enacted Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, which authorizes physician-assisted suicide, and to which he objects.

As McHugh points out,

The reasons for opposing…physician-assisted suicide never went away.  The reasons have been with us since ancient Greek doctors wrote in the Hippocratic oath that “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it nor will I make a suggestion to that effect.”  The oath is a central tenet in the profession of medicine, and it has remained so for centuries.

Indeed, the reasons are both wide ranging and of long standing.  And wholly valid, for those who agree with McHugh.  However, these are all moral reasons, and morality is an arena in which government has no place, any more than it has a place dictating or preventing the exercise of religion—for it is through religion that most of us find our morals, including on the matter of suicide, physician assisted or otherwise.

Such morals are among (in the present example) the patient, those who love him (and where appropriate have control over his fate), the doctor involved, and God.  This is no place for government.

Moreover, nothing in Vermont’s law requires a doctor to participate in a patient’s suicide; the law only permits him to.  If a doctor considers such a participation to be immoral, or for any other reason he does not wish to participate, he remains free to decline.

But, but—economic pressures will force him to participate, or public opprobrium will force him to do so.  Nonsense.  Eliding, for instance, the fact that the widespread support for McHugh’s position demonstrates that opprobrium will be balanced with approbation, a doctor who allows himself to be pushed into an act he considers immoral—or allows himself to be pushed into overriding that “any other reason”—is not a victim of an absent law, but only of the weakness of his own morality.

A Thought on the IRS

Posted on by
Reply

Peggy Noonan wants an investigation into the IRS and its behavior over the last few years.  She has ample justification for one:

We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began.  We don’t know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal.  We don’t know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.

We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.”  We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting.  …  We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications.  And Ms Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011.  She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office.  But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: “Everything comes from the top.”

And, she points out that we know about Catherine Engelbrecht.  We also know that the weight of the targets do not support the premise of this being simply an inability by low-level IRS employees to interpret the relevant tax law—”they” interpreted it, in Noonan’s words, “with a vengeance.”  And we know who “they” is: as a worker in the IRS’ Cincinnati office told the Washington Post,

Everything comes from the top.  We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them.  There has to be a directive.

“The top” would include Lerner, who after denying any wrong-doing then pled the 5th in an effort to prevent anyone questioning whether that was true.  “The top” would include the ex-IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman, who lied to the House of Representatives when he testified that there was no targeting going on—even as it then was going full tilt.  “The top” would include soon-to-be ex-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who actively stonewalled, if not outright lied to, the House during his own testimony.

Noonan wants an investigation, a dead serious one:

The IRS has colorfully demonstrated that it cannot investigate itself.  The Obama administration wants the FBI—which answers to Eric Holder’s Justice Department—to investigate, but that would not be credible.  The investigators of the IRS must be independent of the administration, or their conclusions will not be trustworthy.

An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.

As she says, if the IRS isn’t stopped now, it never will be.  But an independent investigation also will meet with stonewalling and delay—and we have two critical national elections coming up in 2014 and 2016, short one and three years away.

What’s needed is a complete elimination of the IRS and a new agency put into its place— with today’s IRS incumbents, at all levels, ineligible to apply for work there.  (Separately, but just as critically, a total reform of our tax code into a simple flat rate, no exceptions system is necessary—which would dovetail nicely with replacing the present IRS with a much smaller, simpler tax collection agency.)  Unfortunately, this both is no more likely to happen than a serious investigation, and it also will take time.

Which puts a premium on getting started.