Tag Archives: morality

Susan Rice…Has No Regrets

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Susan Rice, currently President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, said this on Sunday to NBC Meet the Press‘ David Gregory:

[W]hat I said to you that morning, and what I did every day since, was to share the best information that we had at the time.  The information I provided, which I explained to you, was what we had at the moment.  It could change.  I commented that this was based on what we knew on that morning ….

Compare that with this transcript of a conference call in which a State Department official described real-time reporting of the events in Benghazi by folks present in and during the attack.

State knew the truth in real-time, as that transcript demonstrates.  And Susan Rice, then State’s Ambassador to the UN, surely knew, also, at least by the time she went on those Sunday talk shows a week after the attack and murders.  She knew at the least because she was, and is, a highly intelligent, dedicated woman who would have moved to corroborate the talking points she was given and not simply have parroted them.  She knew because, of course, State would have passed along the above transcript for her review before sending her out on the talk tour.

Due Process, Progressive Style

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During a confab at the University of Virginia concerning college students and sexual misconduct, the following remarks were made in all seriousness:

Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth College, a position newly created just for her:

Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation? If we know that a person is reasonably a threat to our community, why are we not removing them and protecting the safety of our students?  It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students.  And higher education is not a right.  Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege.

Childress went on to claim that 90%-95% of sexual…misconducts…are unreported, committed by repeat offenders, and intentional.  She seems not to have disclosed how she knows the per cents of unreporteds, despite their not having been, you know, reported.  She also seems not to care that due process is a fundamental right, acknowledged in the 5th Amendment—which Amendment, as well as the Constitution as a whole, most assuredly are not waived at the campus gate.

But wait—there’s more!  Linda Fairstein, Senior Advisor for the Sexual Misconduct Consulting Group at K2 Intelligence, told the panel that criminal acts

should only be handled in the criminal justice system.

But only if the criminal justice system gets it right.  If not, the college administrators must step in and administer justice.  After all, a prosecutor might decide there isn’t enough of a case from which to get a conviction.  Properly administered justice, then, must depend not on an actual crime’s beyond reasonable doubt, but on the much more conveniently squishy “preponderance of the evidence;” just 50.1% of certainty.  Because

If there’s no other forum, now it’s a matter of getting it right.

Never mind that it was done right in the first place, by the criminal justice system.  If there’s no case, there’s no case.  Americans, even students on a college campus, remain innocent until proven guilty—not until a college administrator gets the outcome he wants.

There’s nothing more naked, more despotic, more anti-American than guilt by accusation.

Not a Change of Heart

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President Barack Obama, speaking to a crowd of House Democrats at a party retreat in Maryland, touted his executive order powers on Friday….

While saying he’s willing to work with Congress, he added, “I’m not going to wait, because there’s too much to do.”

But in an earlier time, when it was President George Bush the Younger, then-Senator Barack Obama (D, IL) was saying this:

The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the Executive Branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.

He just lied the first time.

A Thought on the Contraceptive Mandate

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Notre Dame, et al., finally are getting their day in court concerning the Obamacare Contraceptive Mandate.  Notre Dame’s case centers on the premise that the government’s compromise in formulating the mandate still leaves religious organizations required to be agents authorizing contraceptive coverage, which violates Notre Dame’s (et al.) religious beliefs.

Two things about this case disturb me.  One is the Seventh Circuit’s attitude in hearing the case, as illustrated by this exchange:

Matthew Kairis (representing Notre Dame): The government is requiring Notre Dame to play a role.

Judge Richard Posner: But that role seems so trivial.

The role exists, and it forces the school to violate its fundamental religious tenets.  There’s nothing trivial about that.

The other thing is this argument by the government’s attorney, Mark Stern.  It’s a slippery slope, Stern claims, threatening the heart of the contraception mandate.  This goes along with his distortion of Notre Dame’s position:

It’s not enough that Notre Dame is going to get out of it, they don’t want anyone else to get in.

The first is at the center of the problem with the contraceptive mandate: the mandate forces religious entities and secular entities that try to operate according to their owners’ religious tenets (see, for instance, the Hobby Lobby case) to violate those tenets, and so is a violation of the Establishment Clause.  Of course the mandate should be threatened.  It should be eliminated.

As to the latter, surely Notre Dame has an opinion on the morality of other organizations providing contraceptives and abortifacients.  However, Notre Dame is not presuming to speak for them or about their legal right to provide these things, nor is Notre Dame arguing that health plan providers should be barred from offering coverage that provides these things.  Notre Dame and its fellow plaintiffs are merely arguing that they ought not be forced to be parties to the transactions.

Moral Hazard and Obamacare Welfare

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The recent CBO report on the mid- and long-term effect on willingness to be employed of Obamacare hinted at the moral hazard of Obamacare and of welfare, generally [emphasis added].

In 2014, for example, a single person or a family whose income is 150 percent of the FPL [Federal Poverty Level] and is eligible for subsidies will pay 4 percent of their income for a certain “silver” health care plan purchased through an exchange; if their income is 200 percent of the FPL, they will pay 6.3 percent of their income for that plan.  An increase in income thus raises the enrollee premium (and reduces the subsidy) both because the percentage-of-income formula applies to a larger dollar amount and because that percentage itself increases.  People whose income exceeds 400 percent of the FPL are ineligible for premium subsidies, and for some people those subsidies will drop abruptly to zero when income crosses that threshold.

That’s the mechanism through which this particular iteration of moral hazard works.  It’s a tradeoff of a short-term gain of minor security in return for giving up the opportunity for better lives in the longer term and permanently through working more hours, including to the point of working full-time, thereby increasing their earned income.

This mechanism is, in fact, an enormous marginal tax on the next dollar of earned income, and it hits our poor and marginal citizens the hardest.  This tax reduces the net value of the income increase from taking a better job or working more hours.  It’s a cynical poverty trap.

It’s not that these folks are lazy—that’s a question only in the minds of Progressives trying to distract from their failure by demonizing Republicans and Conservatives.  It’s that this iteration of moral hazard has honest men making entirely rational economic decisions—to stay on the welfare program(s).

Beyond the damage inflicted directly on these subsidized people’s true welfare and their morality, the moral hazard inflicts a broader failure, too:

Apart from harm to individuals, ObamaCare is also wasting human potential because fewer workers mean a less prosperous, less dynamic economy.  Contrary to liberal patronizing, many near-seniors, moms, and the rest like their jobs and contribute to productivity.  The 2.5 million worker ObamaCare job exodus, CBO estimates, translates into a 1.5% to 2% reduction in the total number of hours worked, which means less growth.

That failure, that slowed growth rate, reduces the ability of those who do wish to work more, who do wish to make things concretely better for their families, to do so.  It hits hardest, again, our poor, but this effect extends to the lower- and mid-middle class man who is working and looking to work more and earn more.

Here’s a concrete example, courtesy of Keith Hennessy, via AEIdeas:

  • A family of four with one wage-earner has $35,300 of income this year and no health insurance through work. Because of the significant Affordable Care Act subsidies, this family can buy health insurance for only $1,410/year.
  • The other spouse wants to take a part-time job to supplement their family income. This part-time job would earn them an additional $12,000 per year (gross).
  • But this additional income would reduce their ACA premium subsidy, so they would now have to pay $2,970/year for the same health plan.
  • This reduced subsidy, a direct result of the spouse’s part time work and higher family income, reduces the value of the $12,000 of added income by $1,560 (=$2,970 – $1,410). That subsidy reduction is 13 percent of the gross income increase.
  • So maybe this spouse chooses not to take the new part time job because the net financial benefit of additional paid work just isn’t worth it.”

When all the welfare payments (means-tested, also) for which a family in this income stratum is eligible are included in this sort of calculation, the subsidy reduction becomes a much larger per centage of the income increase—and even can be larger than that increase: a net income reduction from earning more through working.

This is illustrated in the graph below from Pennsylvania State Secretary of Public Welfare that shows how public benefits interact with each other to create welfare cliffs—income cliffs—that “phase” out as income smoothly increases.

What this means is that as people in these low-end earner brackets make more money, they face massive effective marginal tax rates—sometimes the equivalent of 100%.  Every dollar they earn would lose them more than a dollar in public assistance.

Hennessey extended his example [emphasis his]:

My back-of-the-envelope calculation, using H&R Block’s tax calculator, is that the ACA increases this moderate income family’s marginal effective [federal] tax rate by 13 percentage points, from about 37% to about 50%. The 37% includes very little income taxes, but a lot of reduced EITC and reduced refundable child credit, as well as higher employer and employee-side payroll taxes.

Then, the moral hazard question Hennessy asked, but which the Progressives avoid:

Finally, the hard one: do the benefits of the premium subsidy to this family outweigh the costs of trapping this family at this income level by killing the financial benefit they receive from more work, education, training, or other professional advancement?

This is moral hazard.  It’s economically more efficient, at least in the near term—that paycheck to paycheck, welfare payment to welfare payment time frame in which our poor and working poor exist—to not work more, to not earn more, but rather to continue the welfare payments.  This is not a matter of laziness; this is that cynically created poverty trap.

Again, it reaches beyond the welfare recipient, too.  Those who do make the choice to work more are forced by that choice to pay for those who choose to work less: the former are the ones who must pay the taxes that partially cover the welfare payments, with government borrowing covering the rest (a future tax on those working men and their children).