Category Archives: regulation

Welfare, Work, and the Stimulus

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It turns out Obama’s HHS waiver of the work requirement for welfare (in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, signed into law by President Bill Clinton) wasn’t the first Obama waiver of the work requirement.  No, it’s just one more instance of the wealth redistribution in which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama believes so much.

The Congressional Research Service has a new report out, albeit one done at the behest of an Evil Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (the report can be found here or here).  This report demonstrates that the Obama Stimulus Package, drafted up shortly after his inauguration in 2009 and passed just after that also waived the requirement for work in order to get welfare.

Typically the food stamp program requires that group [“able-bodied adults” between 18 and 49 years old who have no dependents] to work or participate in a training program at least 20 hours a week to continue receiving benefits after three months. The stimulus law, though, allowed states to suspend the rule from April 2009 to October 2010—and most states did.

The CRS study showed that in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data was available, the number of food-stamp recipients in that group was at nearly 3.9 million. That’s up from 1.9 million in 2008.

Though food-stamp enrollment was already rising at the time in part due to the recession, the study noted the number in this group “increased more rapidly than the overall caseload.”

Their percentage of that caseload grew from 6.9 percent in 2008 to 9.7 percent in 2010.

This was no effort to accommodate spiking unemployment, though.  Indeed, it never was intended to—unemployment would never rise above 8% and would fall back to 5.5% by the end of 2009 with the stimulus, Obama promised us.  The waiver was, nevertheless, extended beyond 2010.

The latest CRS report noted that while the stimulus law lifted the food stamp work requirement until late 2010, the law allowing extended unemployment benefits likewise allowed most states to waive those work requirements in 2011 and 2012.

Bread and circuses.

Is AARP Tax-Exempt?

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The short answer is yes—it’s a 501(c)4 non-profit.  Follow-up question: should it continue in that status?

If the information outlined in Kimberly Strassel’s Wall Street Journal article last Friday is accurate, I suggest the follow-up’s answer should be “No.”

…AARP worked through 2009-10 as an extension of a Democratic White House, toiling daily to pass [Obamacare].  We know that despite AARP’s awareness that its seniors overwhelmingly opposed the bill, the “nonpartisan membership organization” chose to serve the president’s agenda.

71 pages of emails tell the story.  For instance,

As early as July 2009, Mr. Sloane [AARP Senior Vice President David] was sending the administration—”as promised”—his “message points” on Medicare.  Ms. DeParle [an Obama senior aide Nancy-Ann] assured him “I think you will hear some of your lines tomorrow” in President Obama’s speech—which he did.  Mr. Rother [AARP Policy Chief John] advised the White House on its outreach, discouraging Mr. Obama from addressing seniors since “he may not be the most effective messinger [sic]…at least to the McCain constituency.”  Better to manage these folks, he counsels, through the “authoritative voices of doctors and nurses.”

And

Ms. LeaMond [AARP Executive Vice President Nancy] worried that the Medicare spin wasn’t working against public criticism of the bill.  She emailed Mr. Messina [another Obama senior aide Jim] and Ms. DeParle that she was “seized” with “concerns about extended coherent, strong messaging by Republicans on the Medicare savings.”  To pull off the legislation, she mused, “we”—the White House and AARP—will need a “concerted strategy.”

And so on, including AARP internal polling passed on to DeParle and Messina that indicated AARP’s membership opposed the developing Obamacare by 98%.  This last isn’t legally relevant to AARP’s tax exempt status; it just shows how…out of touch…AARP management was with its membership.

Plainly, the aggregate of these emails demonstrates violation of the non-partisan requirement for such non-profits.

RTWT.

Our Judiciary’s Selective Enforcement

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The Ninth Circuit strikes again.  The Ninth agreed with a Federal district court that an Idaho law that lets state authorities bring criminal charges against pregnant women who seek abortions by using medications purchased online would likely be found unconstitutional (the Ninth Circuit ruling can be found here).  The Ninth, however, overruled the lower court’s enforcement injunction, saying it was too broad.  Instead, the Ninth substituted its own injunction: state authorities are enjoined only from enforcing the Idaho law against the particular woman who brought the case, not from enforcing the law everywhere else.

The WSJ‘s Law Blog provides a summary of the case:

In May 2011, Mark Hiedeman, the prosecuting attorney in Bannock County, Idaho, brought criminal charges against Jennie Linn McCormack, an unmarried mother of three, after she purchased medications over the Internet in 2010 to terminate her pregnancy.  There are no licensed healthcare providers who offer abortions in southeastern Idaho and Ms McCormack, who didn’t want to have additional children, claimed the medications were prescribed by a physician outside of Bannock County.

The lower court set aside the case against McCormack and enjoined the prosecutor from enforcing the law against anyone on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Set aside your views of abortion for a moment, and consider what this appellate court has done vis-à-vis the injunction.

The law under which Hiedeman attempted to prosecute McCormack was found by the district court to be unconstitutional, and the Ninth agreed: it is likely be found unconstitutional.  Yet the Ninth then overruled the district court’s injunction against enforcing that law at all.

Their logic centers on the premise that the law has not yet, in fact, been found unconstitutional, and so the original broad injunction went too far.  Yet injunctions, by their nature, are temporary—even permanent ones, which can be withdrawn for any number of reasons at any later date when they’re found no longer to be useful.

So where is the harm done by the lower court’s broader injunction?  The state is harmed by not being able to enforce a law that is, nominally, legitimate.  Women are harmed by being threatened with prosecution—and potentially prosecuted and convicted—for acting as McCormack did and who is protected from prosecution for those same actions by the injunction as modified by the Ninth.  The women who are under the gun here, also are in a time-sensitive situation: their pregnancy must be terminated promptly, or not at all.  We the People are harmed by this court’s announcement that selective enforcement of a law, as a matter of state policy, is entirely legitimate.

This is a rule of law question, regardless of what we might think of the legitimacy of abortion itself.

Americans Are Just Too Stupid

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That’s what Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is telling us.  We’re too stupid to manage our own fiscal affairs, so we need Know Betters in Big Government to do for us.

He’s using this argument on Social Security, in particular.  As you know, Social Security will be out of money in just a few short years, dependent solely on cash flow—incoming payroll tax revenue from current workers—to pay current retirees, and that cash flow is only sufficient (barely) to pay around 75% of the current benefits.  That’s how well the Know Betters in Big Government have done for us so far.

Obama’s solution? He promises to fight the privatization of Medicare and Social Security:

We’re going to keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it.  And that’s not by turning it over to Wall Street.

There are two insults to our intelligence here.  One is that he actually thinks we believe that any plan to privatize either of these does so by “turning them over to Wall Street.”  The other is, as I said, that we cannot manage our own affairs—we must rely on Know Betters to take care of us.

Now, before going further into Obama’s contempt for our intelligence, it’s useful to summarize the actual plans put forward by the Republican ticket and thereby expose the dishonestly presented red herring that is Obama’s straw man.  With regard to Social Security itself, Romney/Ryan are looking to gradually increase the retirement age and to slow the growth in benefits for higher income future retirees—the changes would not affect current or medium-term future (those already 55 years old) retirees.

For the Medicare aspect of the Social Security system, they propose fixed payments to future retirees (i.e., those younger than 55; there would be no change here, either, for current or medium-term future retirees), initially set equal to current Medicare payouts.  These folks then could use these funds to shop around for their own health insurance coverage and keep the money they save if they buy a policy that costs less than these payments.  The resulting competition also will bring down the cost of such coverage and improve the quality of the policies offered (magnifying future savings) since these folks, now with skin in the game, will shop aggressively.  Or they could stay in the existing Medicare program, which would remain unchanged.

There’s very little privatization here; certainly, there’s not enough to suit me.

But why does Obama object even to this little bit?  After all, private accounts (to take an earlier suggestion from Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan, but which is not in the proposal actually on the table today), created from a diversion of one-third of a worker’s current payroll tax payment, would let these workers earn a greater rate of return on those tax payments than Social Security provides them.  This would achieve a number of things: for one, it would give the workers a considerable measure of responsibility for their own futures, and this would let them shop around for the best investments—driving costs down through competition.  For another, it would let those workers set aside money for their own future (and ultimately for their own families’ future) and not have it all diverted for the current retirement of utter strangers.  For a third, it would allow these workers to satisfy their own moral obligation to “seek their own happiness” and to not be burdens on strangers, except temporarily and in the most dire conditions.

Opponents—Obama—object to this individual responsibility and freedom.   He says private accounts would make then-retirees dependent on volatile stock and bond markets.  And the move to private accounts would incur large transition costs, because tax payments diverted to the accounts are needed to pay benefits for current retirees.

The last is just a crude sophistry.  Transition costs are, by their nature, temporary—they are not permanent like, for instance, the cost of a failed, bankrupt social security system.  Moreover, the transition costs, while large (every dishonesty has a measure of truth in it, in order to achieve an appearance of plausibility) actually are easily borne.  A flatter (I say flat) and broader-based income tax system will bring in more revenue for the government through that broader base, fewer (I say no) deductions, credits, and the like, and through sharply increased economic activity which will generate increased income to be taxed.  This excess [sic] revenue can be used both to cover the transition costs and to pay down the debt (and exclusively to pay that debt once the transition is complete).

But more than this, a population that isn’t beholden to—isn’t dependent on—the incumbents aren’t a power base for those incumbents.  Obama’s Social Security and Medicare plans are just crass bread and circus vote pandering.  And they won’t solve the impending failures of Social Security and Medicare.

But Obama thinks we’re just too stupid.  Too stupid to manage our own affairs and too stupid to see through his empty rhetoric to the lie underneath.

“How Democrats Made America Exceptional”

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Indeed.  But not in a good way.  Alan Colmes has an op-ed of this title in The Wall Street Journal; let’s look at some of his claims.

Conservatives blast the left for not appreciating “American exceptionalism”—even though Barack Obama is the only president to have ever used that phrase, at least in the past eight decades or so.

Which Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama did pejoratively:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Sure.  Our exceptionalism is just one among 20.  Or 192.  But this is a minor quibble.

Here’s the important stuff.  Here’s Social Security, for example.

Roosevelt created Social Security [wrote Colmes], a program that today keeps 40% of seniors above the poverty line and helps families with disabilities and those who have lost loved ones.

FDR did this at a time when there were seven American workers for every retiree, and the retirees had a life expectancy of five years in retirement.  Moreover, FDR designed it as a supplemental income program, with the retirees still expected to look to their families for any additional support needed.  Today, Social Security has three workers for every retiree, and the retirees have a life expectancy of fifteen years in retirement.  And today’s family man is taxed for the current retirement support of utter strangers.  He’s not allowed to set that money aside for his own retired parents in particular, or for his own future retirement.  Under these demographic facts, Colmes objects to redesigning Social Security, so that the promise of a safety net can be kept—if under different guise.

[Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan] wants to dismantle that same Social Security program.

No, let’s just leave it alone, and let it fail completely.

Food stamps.  Ah, yes.

Today the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, feeds one in seven Americans. The program was established in 1939 by FDR’s then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.  Recipients are not all lazy bums sitting on their posteriors….

The only ones talking about food stamp recipients being lazy are Progressives trying to distract by denying a charge that isn’t being made.

More importantly, though, Colmes actually recites that food stamp dependency ratio like it’s a good thing that government policies have reduced 15% of Americans to such straits.  But why do we have a food stamp program at all?  FDR, via the National Labor Relations Act, put a floor under the wages employers were allowed to pay—at the height of the Depression, with 20+% unemployment—thus making it too expensive for employers to hire.  On top of this, he put a floor, with his Agricultural Adjustment Acts, under the price of food at which farmers could sell, ensuring that all of those out of work Americans—too many now unemployable by law—could not afford their daily bread.  Enter FDR’s food stamps, in an attempt to enable the artificially priced out of work to buy their food at those artificially inflated prices.  And those CCC and WPA programs of which Colmes is so proud?  Well-intentioned, to be sure.  But they worked in concert with FDR’s price and wage floors to crowd out the private employers that otherwise would have done the hiring—with the private economy’s far greater impact.  Indeed, these New Deal policies, far from providing relief from the impact of the Depression, prolonged it.

“Reproductive rights.”  Colmes has this to say:

The fight for women’s rights continues, as regressives try to put an end to already-established reproductive rights. Even if you don’t believe that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, as a 2011 Guttmacher Institute study showed, the overwhelming majority has[.]

and

If Messrs. Romney and Ryan have their way, reproductive rights would be overturned and millions of Americans denied health-care coverage.

Here Colmes is cynically conflating the right to choose to have children—or not—with insurance coverage for the birth control mechanisms and abortifacients that facilitate that choice.  And he insists that it’s OK to force people or their religious institutions to pay for these even when it goes against their religious beliefs.  The fact that so many of us are sinners, anyway, somehow excuses this.  More, Colmes conflates objection to being forced to pay for something that violates one’s conscience with denial of availability altogether.  This is just more cynicism.  There’s nothing wrong with birth control for those who want it.  Insurance policies even exist that cover the incredibly cheap contraceptives as well as the abortifacients.  The problem is when the user is, by law, allowed to force others to pay for her contraceptives, her abortifacients, instead of buying them with her own money.

Colmes’ Progressives want the wrong type of exceptionalism for America.  They don’t want the old, foundational exceptionalism of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and a limited government that recognizes both the fundamental wisdom of Americans and that it has no standing to do for us for our own good.  They want Big Government acting in our stead.