Category Archives: regulation

Mendacity, and the Color of Money

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According to The Daily Caller,

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) expects to have more money for medical care than it can spend for the fifth fiscal year in a row.

In fact,

[The] VA carried over $1.449 billion in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2010 to 2011, $1.163 billion from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2012, $637 million from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, and $543 million from fiscal year 2013 to 2014.

[The] VA expects to carry over $450 million in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2015. VA received its full requested medical care appropriation of $54.6 billion this fiscal year, which is more than $10 billion more than it received four years ago.

Yet the AFGE, a Federal employee union, says that the VA is underfunded in the areas about which it cares. We’ve also seen this underfunding bit presented as an excuse for the failure of the VA to provide access to medical care—those secret waiting lists, for instance: the VA doesn’t have the funding to man the facilities to shorten/eliminate those waits.

But this isn’t contradictory. The VA is short of money here, and has an excess there, but it can’t just transfer the excess from there (the medical side for instance) to here (the AFGE’s identified shortfall side)—that’s a color of money problem: Federal funding that’s appropriated for a purpose requires Congressional approval to transfer the money to another purpose, even within Departments. It’s on Congress to stop overfunding one purpose and to stop underfunding another purpose.

And there’s this:

The Daily Caller reported that VA spent more than $3.5 million on furniture the night before the government shutdown on the last day of fiscal year 2013 so as not to lose that money in the department’s budget the next fiscal year.

This certainly looks shameful and shady—and it is, at bottom—but that’s not entirely the VA’s fault. Here it’s the case that, the VA’s medical care funding notwithstanding, in general Federal budgeting is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition: Departments cannot carry forward unused appropriated funds; they must spend the money in the fiscal year for which it was appropriated, or they lose the unspent funds.

These things are what come of a Byzantine budget process—it’s Congress’ failure of budgeting.

This does not, though, absolve the VA personnel of their mendacity in their failure to take care of our veterans as they’re charged to do. No amount of confusion from a labyrinthine budgeting process can excuse falsifying wait lists or simply not bothering, leaving our veterans without prompt care when it’s needed.

The SEC’s Nanny State

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The excuse here is the existence of so-called dark pools, or off-exchange stock trading in private venues like “banks or other firms.” It’s certainly true that the information exchange concerning companies whose stocks trade in the dark pools is less—often quite a bit less—than that available for exchange-traded stocks.

What the SEC wants to do, though, is push the dark pool trading onto the SEC-preferred stock market exchanges. In applying this pressure—it’s hard, even for this administration, simply to mandate the move—the SEC is proposing a rule that would, in a “pilot program,” force the dark pool to offer a better price for any stock (that the SEC chooses to have) included in the pilot program than is available on the exchange. Because participants in the dark pool mustn’t be allowed to exercise their own judgment outside of government oversight; participants in the dark pool mustn’t be allowed to arrive at their own agreements on suitable exchanges of value. They’re just not as smart as government bureaucrats. Or the participants in the government-preferred stock exchanges.

In March, 37% of all trading occurred away from stock exchanges, up from 33% two years ago, according to Tabb Group.

There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with excessive government regulation of those preferred exchanges. Oh, and the fees not paid in the dark pool on those completed trades. Here is a list of the fees charged by the NYSE, many of which are imposed by the government. On a per-share basis, they don’t look like much, but over the volume of trading that goes on, the fees add up to a handsome sum. The exchanges and the government want “their” money.

The real problem, though, is that the pressure against the dark pool is largely illegitimate.

Don’t understand the trade? Don’t have enough information? Don’t do the trade. Don’t know enough to know whether you have enough information to assess the risk? Don’t do the trade. It’s not that complicated.

Caveat emptor. Personal responsibility. Apparently the SEC thinks Americans are just too dumb to live under those precepts. Instead, they want caveat imperium [sic: most of you get my point. For the scholars who see the grammatically correct meaning, I suggest that’s on my point, also). Government responsibility.

ER Visits Up with the Advent of Obamacare

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Stephanie Armour and Louise Radnofsky pointed this out earlier in the week in The Wall Street Journal.

Among other things, they mentioned

The median ER charge was more than $1,200 for the most frequent outpatient diagnoses in a study of over 8,000 ER visits in 2006-08….

This is right before Obamacare was enacted.

Notice that ER charge. A significant fraction of the deductibles on Obamacare health coverage plans is larger than that—ranging from $2,000 to above $10,000, depending on family size, the specific plan selected, and so on.

Since the ER charge is less than the deductible, even if these ER patients had an Obamacare plan, where is their incentive to see a doctor in his office? He’s still paying those $1,200 out of his pocket. The proud possession of a health plan is irrelevant to that.

Another Administration Overreach

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A family built a stock pond on their private property in order to provide more reliable water for their cattle.

The Johnsons believed they had done everything necessary to get permission for the pond, where the tiny Six Mile Creek runs through their property south of Fort Bridger, WY. The Wyoming State Engineer’s Office provided the permit and even stated in an April 4, 2013 letter to the Johnsons: “All of the legal requirements of the State Engineer’s Office, that were your responsibility, have been satisfied for the Johnson Stock Reservoir.”

The pond not only improved the situation for their cattle, it improved the local environment. The Johnsons noted:

Before we didn’t have ducks and geese. … Now you can see bald eagles here, we have moose come down. We have blue herons that come in every evening. Before we did this…it was basically just a little irrigation canal.

But they didn’t say, “Mother, may I?” to the EPA. The EPA is up in arms about this effrontery, and they seem to have gone so far as to make stuff up in their assault on the Johnsons, their property rights, and the property rights of American citizens in general. The EPA is charging that the Johnsons’ pond is guilty of

“…the discharge of pollutants (i.e., dredged or fill material) into the waters of the United States….”

Never mind that the only tests done—not by the EPA, curiously, but done by the Johnsons, instead—demonstrate

…that the water leaving the pond is cleaner than the water entering it.

Meanwhile, the EPA also is continuing to ignore Congress as Congressmen ask for clarification of what the EPA thinks it’s doing on this matter.

In a follow-up letter to the EPA, [Senator David (R, LA), Ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee] Vitter and his colleagues have asked for, but so far not received, clarification of the potential fines involved.

Those fines run from $75,000 per day to $185,000 per day, depending on how the rule the EPA claims to be operating is interpreted. Hence this question, among others.

But this administration, and its EPA henchmen, are above the law. They say.

Whither our Technological Edge?

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USAF Colonel Dean Hullings, of AFSC’s Cyber Superiority Division told a National Space Symposium audience that the US is behind other countries in cyber defensive and offensive capabilities. The only other countries in the mix, it seems to me, are Russia, the PRC, Iran, and Israel. We don’t need to be leading from behind here.

It’s not only a lack of interest on the part of an administration bent on withdrawing the United States from the world and abrogating our leadership role, though. Bureaucracy—not unique to any particular administration, but an entity in itself—is having a major effect, also.

The agency responsible for cyber-related acquisitions—of any type—is the National Reconnaissance Office, a DoD agency separate from the AFSC. The NRO also is set up to do satellites, not networks or cyberspace—it lacks the expertise here to do equipment, software, or personnel acquisition.

This weakness is overlain by the DoD’s poor acquisition process.

Just getting through the budget system takes about two years. Add the requirements process and you’re talking another two years. That means you are about three years behind the latest technologies, thanks to Moore’s Law.

And, again, there’s that bit about understanding what it is that’s being acquired, whether by NRO or DoD generally:

[F]oreign suppliers might build code into chips or firmware to thwart or warp how a US weapon works….

But that’s not enough of a threat.  There’s this, too:

Militaries have been messing with each other’s radios and radars for generations, transmitting deceptive signals to spoof and jam them. But if the enemy’s radios and radars are run by computers—and most now are—you can also transmit signals to hack them. Then, if the enemy’s computers are linked together—and America’s certainly are—your virus can spread throughout their network.

Hmm….