Category Archives: regulation

What Personal Data? It’s Government’s Data

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And we don’t care about its security.

Security experts worried that 35 state health exchange websites were vulnerable to hackers and were rated as “high risk” for security problems before ObamaCare’s launch….

Fears that the health law’s websites could put consumers at risk have plagued the program’s rollout from the beginning, but the administration told The Associated Press that the documents offer only a partial and “outdated” snapshot of an improving situation.

Never mind that “improving” now doesn’t alter the fact that the security failures existed at the time of the rollout.  And HHS rolled out their ObamaMart, anyway.  For example:

In order to connect to Federal computers, state and other outside systems must undergo a security review and receive an “authority to connect.”

With [Obamacare], states needed approval to connect to a new Federal data hub, an electronic back room that pings Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security to verify personal details….  The hub handles sensitive information, including income, immigration status and Social Security numbers.

[In an] email from Sept 29, a Sunday two days before the launch, Teresa Fryer, chief information security officer for the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote of the state security approvals, “The front office is signing them whether or not they are a high risk.”

…CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner approved nine states to connect although the approval document noted that “CMS views the October 1 connections to the nine states as a risk due to the fact that their documentation may not be submitted completely nor reviewed…by Oct. 1.”

The Obama view of citizens’ personal security: “Hey, we got away with it; nothing bad happened.  We think.  It’s all good.”

Misallocation of Resources

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…driven by Big Government.

JP Morgan Chase & Co said Tuesday it will cut more jobs at bank branches and its mortgage unit this year than previously planned, as the largest US lender adjusts to slowing home-loan demand and customers’ growing preference to bank online.

That’s one aspect of the restructuring.  JPM says they’ll lose some 8,000 employees from its branches and its mortgage unit.  However, they’re looking to increase their “controls staff” by some 3,000.  A company’s controls staff are the folks dedicated to ensuring company compliance with government laws and regulations, as well as with its own internal rules.

Are the two related?  Not directly, although burgeoning Federal rules are hampering the housing industry and mortgage lending, generally.  Yet the fact remains,

The new figures show…a continued buildup in the bank’s staffing levels dedicated to dealing with regulators and legal issues.

An increase of 3,000 for its controls staff out of a total company employment of some 260,000 (net of those cuts) might not seem like much, but its Controls section is much smaller, and this is a significant (re)allocation of its employment emphasis.

The problem is, compliance isn’t productivity.  Compliance employees don’t increase the amount of product—or improve competition for product sales—in an economy.  All they can do is cost money to appease government.

Annals of Obamacare Lies

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is spouting more of them.  And with a straight face, too; it’s like she actually believes what she’s saying.  Which would be even worse.

There is absolutely no evidence and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act.

Leaving aside the well-documented instances of reduced hours, delayed (or canceled) hiring, canceled plant expansions, and so on that are occurring as a direct result of Obamacare, Sebelius is having a negative impact on jobs with her own Departmental edicts.  She’s already ordered, for instance, the Obamacare-maximum allowed cuts to funding for home health care services.

The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40% of providers would have negative margins.

In fact, those cuts put in jeopardy 498,000 jobs of home health care workers who work just for that 40% of firms that will be forced into the red—the kind of home health workers who allow Yvonne Wightman, 98, to avoid expensive hospital or nursing home stays by getting care at home.

But it’s all good: now Ms Wightman has that lowered-cost Obamacare Plan to cover those stays.  Oh, wait….

“Pass the Bill…”

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“…in order to see what’s in it….”

Here’s another of those tidbits that’s in it that Pelosi and her gang chose not to know about before passing Obamacare:

Tucked deep in the Affordable Care Act is language requiring all restaurants with at least 20 locations to list nutritional information alongside each and every item on their menu.

Sit-down restaurant chains, with their menus now required to be cluttered with “nutrition” information instead of letting their patrons see a readable menu—because Big Government knows better—are also faced, unfortunately, with a rapid-fire alteration of their menus as this “nutrition” information gets frequently “updated:” recall how rapidly the USDA’s food pyramid has been changing over the last several years.

Those places have it easy, though.  Consider the walk-/drive-in places, like hamburger joints and pizza houses, where the customer gets to mix and match from among “each and every item” to form a custom meal to buy.  As Peter Doocy put it at the above link:

Take Domino’s.  There are 34 million different pizza combinations available at the chain, when all crusts and cheeses and toppings are factored in.

Now imagine walking into a Domino’s and navigating a menu board with 34 million different options on it.

And in Domino’s case (and most pizza houses, come to that),

90% of their business comes in over the phone or online.  And none of those people ever set foot in the store, where the menu board would be.

Think about the advertising brochures Domino’s might have to send out to potential callers that included this information.  Think about how many pages on their Web site would be needed to carry this information.

Think about an utterly mendacious law that needs to be repealed, even if its replacement is the status quo ante.

Random Pseudo-Thoughts on Free Speech

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Erin Ching ’16, of Swarthmore College, without a trace of irony:

What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.  I don’t think we should be tolerating [Christian thinker Robert George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.

Sandra Korn, ’14, of Harvard:

[T]the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me.  After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication.  Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities.

And

…why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

This is what we’re teaching at our colleges and universities?  Maybe there’s too much “academic” freedom for the students, and not enough teaching of rigorous thinking.  Which flows from too much “academic” freedom of a different sort for the professors and their failure to teach the techniques of rigorous thinking.

h/t Robby Soave of The Daily Caller