A Prediction

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With the government newly fully operational again (the pundits’ hysteria notwithstanding, it never did fully shut down), the shutdown-delayed jobs report is out.

US job growth defied expectations in September, according to a Labor Department report issued nearly seven weeks late due to the government shutdown.

The headline was more specific.

Hiring Defied Expectations in September, With 119,000 New Jobs

This strikes me as a spike, not a resumption of a trend.

I don’t ordinarily make predictions on labor, but here’s one I make this time: the October jobs report, covering the bulk of the period of the “shutdown,” will reflect a spike down in new jobs, possibly even a negative number, paralleling August’s revised jobs report.

The October report will show me to be correct, or it will demonstrate why I don’t often make this kind of prediction.

Don’t Obey Unlawful Orders

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Six Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have published on X a political ad calling on senior military and intelligence officers to disobey unlawful orders. They’re also doing this as though it’s a new concept. They know, full well, though, that obeying unlawful orders has been illegal for decades, if not centuries, and made most famously plain during the Nuremberg trials.

Those six are Senators Elissa Slotkin (D, MI) and Mark Kelly (D, AZ) and Congressmen Jason Crow (D, CO), Maggie Goodlander (D, NH), Chris Deluzio (D, PA), and Chrissy Houlahan (D, PA).

Kelly was challenged on X repeatedly to name the allegedly illegal order(s); he repeatedly refused to do so. Instead, he cowered behind his combat experience and having been “shot at” along with his breathtakingly arrogant claim that he knew what insurrection was, even if his challenger did not.

Congressman Jason Crow was repeatedly asked by Martha MacCallum on her show to name the law(s) that were violated. He repeatedly refused to do so, cowering instead behind cynical evasion and Alinsky-esque attempts to change the subject.

None of the others were willing to identify the order(s) they considered illegal, and they were similarly unwilling to identify the statute(s) or constitutional clause(s) those allegedly illegal orders violated. All they have is this deliberately unsubstantiated, cynical, dishonest conspiracy theory that they’re proselytizing as loudly as they can.

This is, sadly, and dangerously, all too typical of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. They lost an election they thought was all theirs. They have no policies they believe in enough to put on the table and debate the merits of. Now, these six, cowering behind their intelligence and military service, are spewing the nonsense of smear.

That’s all Party has. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

New Acquisition Strategy

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants one, and he’s on the right track. Critical to that will be his willingness and ability to fire the bureaucrats in DoD who stay in the way of the critical changes Hegseth wants, but that’s a separate story. What Hegseth wants is faster, more flexible acquisition processes that enable, rather than hinder, competition in acquisition and production and that foster rapid contract letting and fast production of the contracted for articles. In loose sum,

… Overregulation, diffused accountability, and insufficient competition [must be eliminated]. “Every process, every board, and every review must justify its existence,” the secretary said.
The Pentagon essentially wants to make faster and more flexible contracting authorities the default instead of the exception, and give more priority to the private economy to solve military problems.

One step along this evolution was this that the WSJ editors noted:

Welcome is concentrating more authority in a “portfolio acquisition executive,” who could oversee a suite of programs and make tradeoffs on cost and performance. The current system includes far too many layers of authority. “Program managers answer to dozens and dozens of folks” and “have to go get permission to move a dollar to a better priority,” a former US Navy secretary for acquisition told Congress this year.

Hegseth needs to be absolutely draconian in removing those extraneous layers and terminate the vast majority of the bureaucrats incumbent in them. Very few bureaucrats will warrant reassignment within DoD, and there are—or should be—very few open slots for reassigning into.

I add a couple of improvements to all of this. Hegseth wants to buy the 85% solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100% solution, but as articulated, it’s insufficient, with too much room for weasel-wording added pricing costs by the contractor. Rather than simply jawboning against endless specs, requirements creep must be stopped cold. Changes to the specs often are warranted, but better is the enemy of good enough, preventing the good enough from being acquired at all, leaving us completely without. “Better” should be included in follow-on contracts—or new contracts—and only after “good enough” has been in operation for some years. That will determine whether that “better” really is and, if so, will provide justification for that “better” going to testing and production.

In parallel with cutting off requirements creep by the contractor, requirements creep by DoD personnel must be cut off, also. Those new and better requirements that come from Pentagon bureaucrats (and here I include the myriad flags and O-6s and O-5s looking for Efficiency Report material for the sake of their personal careers and/or for post-retirement employment with those contractors) must only be considered after the system they’re “improving” has been in the field, operationally employed for some years.

A second parallel is cutting off mission creep by DoD personnel. The system under consideration is being designed, built, and employed for a particular class (narrow or broad) of missions. If the mission changes, or a new mission is identified—and they will be—those needs can only be considered for the next upgrade to the existing system, or the changed/new mission’s needs will call for a new system.

And this: those systems will consist of a platform for carrying and delivering to the targets those bullets, bombs, missiles, drones, what-have-you that will do the destruction of the targets. Those platforms must be as generic as possible so as to be able to carry new and improved bullets, bombs, … with as little physical modification as possible, requiring only software upgrades (which means the platform’s computers must be capable handling the newer generations of software). The flip side of that must include the requirement that the upgraded/replacement bullets, bombs, … and software must be designed to fit onto the existing platform as much as possible. It’s certainly the case that a platform will wear out or the new and improved bullets, bombs, … and software will truly need a new platform, but those should be the greatly infrequent exception rather than the norm.

The Problem with Obamacare Subsidies

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Tony LoSasso, DePaul University Professor of Economics, and Kosali Simon, Indiana University Distinguished Professor of Economics, think the problem with Obamacare subsidies is their structure and not their size, and they want a shift to a Centrally Planned scheme akin to the government-approved form of competition that is the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, wherein Government decides (still) what is a suitable subsidy and peg[s it] to a lower-cost, benchmark plan. Under this, the coverage who selects a higher-cost plan must pay the cost increment himself. That this is all too similar to Obamacare and its Bronze plan subsidization, with consumers choosing pricier options paying the difference isn’t particularly relevant here.

LoSasso and Simon are missing the beam in one eye for the mote in the other. The problem with Obamacare subsidies isn’t their size, nor is it to whom they should be sent, as some on the right are starting to propose.

The problem with Obamacare subsidies is their existence. This broad government coverage scheme of Obamacare, advertised—still!—as the Affordable Care Act, is not, never has been, and never was intended to be affordable. The Act was intended from the outset to nationalize our nation’s health care coverage industry.

The only real solution, the only one with long-term durability, is to move our health care coverage industry back to its actual health insurance roots, and then to go a few steps further. Make insurance plans entirely salable across State boundaries. What began that century or more ago in a nascent health provision and health insurance process as wholly local and completely intrastate has long since grown to nation-wide production and market facilities, and that’s readily regulable under our Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Make health insurance policies available in one State available to prospective insurees in all States. That alone will let policy costs to the insuree (premiums, co-pays/out-of-pocket caps, deductibles) go down since the insurer will have only one set of rules with which to comply rather than 51 (the States plus the Feds).

In addition, it’s necessary to take the shackles off what insurers (not government coverage purveyors) are allowed to sell and what customers, insurees, are allowed to buy. These salable policies would range, under true, unfettered by Government, competition, from the full-up policies of pre-Obamacare that covered a broad range of ails and potential ails to policies that would cover only specific or closely related ails and potential ails to everything in between, including the sale and purchase of customer-selected bundles of policies covering specific closely related ails and potential ails.

A freely competitive market with far more limited government involvement is what will drive health insurance costs down and policy quality up. And that will have an important sequela: doctor availability, even for those on the bottom economic rungs, will go up.

All of that will take taxpayers out of the business of paying for coverages that don’t apply to them, especially including those taxpayers who otherwise would eschew health insurance altogether.

Two Short Steps

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The IRS has moved to cancel its “experimental” Direct File program. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s…exceedingly pleasurable fantasy…of the IRS online platform that lets filers prepare their taxes for free and submit them through the state.

Aside from the program’s cost ($138 per tax return, which is more than many tax software sellers charge) the editors of The Wall Street Journal noted,

The bigger problem with the program is its threat to the norm of taxpayer autonomy. The push to cut out the tax “middle man,” meaning private services, would have resulted in millions of filers letting the IRS make both the first and final determination of their tax liability and connect to their checking accounts.

Notice that: the IRS gets to connect to our private checking accounts. With Direct File, that’s a deeper connection than simply allowing the IRS to direct deposit a refund. With Direct File, the IRS has been able to extract the tax due from a tax payer’s bank account.

With the cancelation of Direct File, us tax payers, us average Americans, avoided a two-step sequence of events. The first step would have been making Direct File no longer a trial being tested in 24 of our nation’s States, but instead rolling it out nation-wide.

The second step would have been mandating Direct File for all of us.

It wouldn’t have stopped there, though. It wouldn’t be even a short step, more like a small shuffle, after that to alter Direct File to have employers “Direct File” all employees’ pay checks to the IRS instead of sending them to the employees. With that, the IRS would extract the taxes it deemed appropriate and remit to the putative employee the remainder—the amount the IRS would deem appropriate for each tax payer to have.

We dodged a terrible pas-de-deux—that dance for the two performers of tax payer and Government—for the time being, but the Progressive-Democratic Party will return to power eventually, and dangerously sooner than us average Americans want.