Category Archives: politics

AHPs

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Association Health Plans are new plans that, by regulation, allow small businesses to band together across industries and state boundaries to form health insurance buying consortiums.  Using this larger size-generated buying power, they should be able to acquire cheaper, better tailored, more flexible plans for their employees, plans that those employees actually will want.

However.

The left says association plans are junk insurance that will blow up ObamaCare.

Some AHPs likely will be; that’s a fact of life in any market, free or centrally planned. However, a free market is self-regulating and quickly so; junk plans will be few and far between.  Blow up Obamacare?  That’s win-win.

A Proposed EU Budget

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French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed a proposed EU budget.  As you might expect, I have a question.  One of the points of agreement is the purpose of the “single eurozone budget” they want to create:

The EU will set up a single eurozone budget to boost investment and promote economic convergence among all 19 member states.

What does this purpose statement mean, exactly?  Who will pay into the budget and in accordance with what parameters?  Who will pick the investments to be supported and on what basis?  On these two matters, details are yet to be worked out, certainly; it’s early in the process.

But the larger matter is what these two mean by “economic convergence.”  Do they seriously intend to move the successful nations—the ones fiscally responsible, that don’t tax heavily or spend profligately, that actively enforce their (tax) laws—toward those nations that are less responsible, even irresponsible, that see their tax laws as suggestions rather than requirements, in addition to seeking to move (with what enforcement mechanisms?) those less responsible, even irresponsible, nations toward the successful ones?

That is, after all, what convergence means: bringing the two sides toward each other, rather than just one side toward the other.

So: why should the successful nations, the fiscally responsible nations, be held back in favor of those nations that have chosen a lower course?  Or is that not what Macron and Merkel meant with their convergence plan?

Why Should There Be a Cap?

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Scott Atlas wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal that all of us should have access to health savings accounts, instead of just the few well-off among us who can afford the high deductible health coverage plan that’s currently a prerequisite for having an HSA.  He also wants to raise the cap for contributing to one to $7,350 per year.

He’s on the right track, but he stopped short.  Why should there be a cap on HSA contributions?  Why can’t we contribute as much or as little as we want instead of what Government will permit?

Of course, with a properly low, flat income tax rate, tax reduction/avoidance/savings facilities like HCAs, IRAs, 401(k)s, etc, would have less value because there’d be less taxes to be avoided.  We’d have more of our money in our hands to spend as we see fit and to save for the purposes that suit us rather than suit the men of Government.

The Pope

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…gets another one wrong.  If he was accurately quoted by ANSA (Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata, an Italian news agency) and by the SIR agency of the Italian bishops’ conference—or by CRUX, which claims the quotes—that is.  They quoted him as

denouncing the pre-natal tests that can result in parents choosing to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is malformed or suffering other problems.

The Pope is aiming his fire at the wrong target.  Families intending to have the baby rather than abort it could benefit from pre-natal tests that find that the “fetus is malformed or suffering other problems.”  Such foreknowledge would give the family months in which to prepare financially, emotionally, physically, to join/generate support groups, all to increase the family’s ability to receive and nurture the baby.

Once again, the Pope is thinking with something other than his God-given rationality.

Child Abuse, Continuing

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In the ongoing dispute over separating children from their illegal immigrant parents (OBE with President Donald Trump’s EO ending the practice) Progressive-Democrat Senator Bob Casey (D, PA) said this:

Infest? We’re not talking about insects, these are children!  You are talking about kids who are scared, alone and being held in cages. You have the power to stop it, do it.

Casey isn’t talking about children, though, he’s talking about weapons he and his Progressive-Democrat fellows want to use for their personal political gain. These are not children in Progressive-Democrat eyes, they’re just mechanical tools for them to use.

Casey and his colleagues have the power to stop it, do it. They need to stop blocking legislation to reform immigration, bills that would fix this and would take care of the DACA children—goals they’re only pretending to want.

Progressive-Democrats’ weaponizing of children is despicable. They have the power to stop it.  Do so.