Category Archives: regulation

SNAP Reforms

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The Senate’s Progressive-Democrats object to States having even minimal fiscal responsibility for managing Federal outlays to them for welfare programs. Their latest objections concern reforms to SNAP payments. Currently, the Federal government forks over 100% of the funding for a State’s SNAP program, and the State is solely responsible for disbursing those funds to eligible recipients. The current reforms, enacted last year, require those States with error rates—paying out to fraudulent recipients, for instance—above a low level (10%) to begin picking up a small part of the SNAP tab, with effect in 2028.

Progressive-Democrat Senators, en masse, object, and they’re blocking a farm bill unless they get that deadline extended. Their real goal is to functionally eliminate the deadline.

There is an alternative that would render this sort of Progressive-Democrat…foolishness…moot, and it’s one I’ve proposed before. Maybe its time has come, in response to Party’s studied intransigence to any reform that would reduce dependency on Party government.

Designate a nearby year as Year0, and add up all the Federal funds transfers for any purpose to each State in that year. Lump that sum into a single payment for the year. In each subsequent year, reduce that lump sum payment by 10% of the Year0 transfer, until the transfer is reduced, in about 10 years, to $0.00.

Federal transfers—taxpayer dollars—in general should not be getting made to any State except in exigent circumstances. The good citizens of Texas should not see their tax remittances pushed on over to New York or California. The good citizens of New York and California should not see their remittances relayed to Illinois or Iowa. Each State and territory in our union should keep its citizens’ tax remittances solely for the benefit of that State’s/territory’s citizens.

Exigent circumstances: when a State-wide or region-wide emergency arises that’s beyond the resources of that State or region, then Federal transfers (a going in allocation, to start the discussion, would be 50% grant and 50% loan at market interest rates) would be an appropriate means of assisting the State or region in dealing with the emergency.

Birth Tourism

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President Donald Trump (R) has signed a couple of Executive Orders aimed at curbing, if not eliminating, birthright citizenship. One of those orders seeks to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, birth tourism.

The second order instructs the departments of State and Homeland Security to take steps to limit foreigners from traveling to the US specifically to have children born there, a practice generally referred to as “birth tourism.” …
Though the order doesn’t specify how officials would screen for people intending to come to the US for the express purpose of giving birth….

One way to achieve this would be to not bother screening for purpose. Simply limit visas to three weeks duration for women with two months left in their pregnancy—and to strictly enforce the requirement to leave or be deported on expiry—and to refuse visas to women in their last month until after those women have given birth.

One More Thought on our Second Amendment

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The thought coalesced, finally, on reading a post over at Grim’s Hall, a blog I strongly recommend on GPs.

A problem I’ve had with Bruen from the start, hanging its hat on historical tradition as it does, is that the opinion, thereby, accepts as constitutionally legitimate any weapon regulation, so long as it’s been historically long-standing.

The Second Amendment carries no such caveat or exception, though. Its bar on the government is universal and unequivocal: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The first attempt to regulate that right should have been ruled unconstitutional. It’s not too late today.

…7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.”

This seems to me a patently erroneous argument by the Sages of the Seventh Circuit. The Founders, along with, especially, those members of the first Congress who wrote the Second Amendment, along with the People who ratified it, were no strangers to innovation and to technological advancement. Yet no one in any of the courts that I’ve seen have addressed the premise that with that broad awareness, and against the backdrop of so many of the Continental Army’s and Navy’s large weapons systems employed in the just-concluded Revolutionary War were privately owned, the Amendment was written to be technologically agnostic.

That backdrop, those large weapon systems being privately owned, strikes me as the only valid historical tradition.

Wrong Answer

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The subheadline contains the wrong answer, for those astute enough to see it, especially those more so than this op-ed‘s opinion writer, Judd Rosenblatt, who is the CEO of AE Studio and president of the AI Alignment Foundation:

The key is “alignment,” which improves capability while cordoning off dangerous knowledge.

Rosenblatt expanded on that not too much later in his piece:

…build the world’s most capable open-weight model in America, with the dangerous capabilities stripped out before release

Because nothing says limiting innovation and truncating freedom like censoring knowledge and capability. Never mind that that will limit and truncate only American innovation and knowledge; it’ll have no effect on our enemies.

He went on:

Using GRAM [Gradient-Routed Auxiliary Modules] to train language models, we found that knowledge about bioweapons, offensive cyber, and nuclear capabilities, and even antisemitism, could be routed into compartments, then removed. The released model behaved as if it never learned that information.
…
What matters is a safety standard that causes a dangerous capability to stay absent under adversarial testing.

The bioweapons, offensive cyber, and nuclear capabilities bits are seemingly obvious targets for censorship, but that knowledge is too easily compiled via a variety of sources, including other AI models that aren’t restricted. The real kicker, though, is that last: who gets to define what is a dangerous capability? And who sets the threshold between random data to information to knowledge? Will these Know Better definers decide that identifying or not defining hate speech (whatever that is) is a dangerous capability and the thresholds for that? Providing arguments for, or against, human involvement in global warming? Men in girls’ sports and bath- and locker rooms? Defining “woman?” Criticizing government? This list is endless.

The blatant…foolishness…of Rosenblatt’s idea makes me wonder about trolls and moles.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.