Tag Archives: morality

Union Favoritism

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The Wall Street Journal tells the tale.

Washington, DC has an 8.5% unemployment rate, and it has come up with an ingenious plan to keep it high: the city council voted 8-5 late last month to require a $12.50 an hour “living wage” for certain big retailers, well above the current national minimum of $7.25.

The wage floor applies to stores with 75,000 square feet of space and $1 billion in parent-company revenues….

[T]he proposed law exempts companies operating under collective-bargaining agreements.  …supermarket chains like Safeway and Giant get a pass because they have union workforces.  So paying a non-living wage is fine as long as it also finances union dues.

Meanwhile, the unions keep jobs scarce and available only to union members.  And union power intact.

Hmm….

Obamacare Fail. Again.

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President Barack Obama has admitted that another critical aspect of his Obamacare is a dismal failure.  This time he’s

delaying a requirement that verifies the income levels of those seeking taxpayer subsidies until after the 2014 midterm elections.

Instead, the new insurance marketplaces operated by states and the District of Columbia will take the consumer’s word that they qualify for the subsidies[.]

And

Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, and a consumer advocate, said it’s not unprecedented for the government to use the honor system, and compared it to reporting cash tips to the Internal Revenue Service.

It’s also like the 21%-25% of Earned Income Tax Credits that go to people who aren’t eligible (according to Treasury’s Inspector General) because their eligibility is self-verified, too.

Or rather than an admission of failure, is this just another administration excuse for lax pay outs of monies that aren’t deserved, even under the law?  As the Wall Street Journal puts it,

[A]nyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects.

Of course, a third alternative also includes none of this as abject failure.  These cynical (say I) delays simply are for building the dependency of Americans on government largesse, trapping us into voting for the Progressive party.

Government-Mandated, Privately-Funded Welfare

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Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year, while the premiums paid by sicker people are set to become more affordable, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of coverage to be sold on the law’s new exchanges.

And

The exchanges, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s health-care law, look likely to offer few if any of the cut-rate policies that healthy people can now buy….

At the same time, the top prices look to be within reach for many people who previously faced sky-high premiums because of chronic illnesses or who couldn’t buy insurance at all.

And

Several big provisions in the law taking effect in six months affect rates for the estimated 20% of Americans who don’t have coverage through an employer, Medicare or Medicaid.  Plans must be available to consumers regardless of their health and must cover certain items such as hospitalization, maternity care and prescription drugs.

This is naked wealth redistribution—welfare—paid for, in part, on the backs of the young and healthy, who need no insurance.  Moreover, these young, as all Americans, ought to be able to choose for themselves the risks they’re willing to run; Government has no role to play here.

The rest of this welfare is paid for by the insurers: those policies that are required to be available to all comers, in the emergency rooms, must be provided by the insurers under Obamacare, at premiums that have nothing to do with the risk being covered—including the actual now-prior existing condition diagnosed in those ERs.  Watch the losses mount as these policies are canceled as soon as the emergency is past.

The Wall Street Journal article goes on, but these are the highlights.

There are other redistribution facets to Obamacare that are nor mentioned in the article, also.  Unmentioned here is another massive welfare payment suite, paid for by insurers: all of that coverage, all of those plans “that must be available…regardless of health,” must be available in hospital emergency rooms, and they must be buyable in real-time.  Watch the insurers’ losses mount as these policies are canceled as soon as the “emergency” is past.

Another thing that’s missing is the availability to the poor and much of the middle class of Health Savings Accounts.  True enough, these folks don’t have much money to put aside, but they are functionally prevented from putting away any of what they do have for their future health problems by the requirements for having HSAs at all.  Government won’t allow these except for those with a high-deductible policy—typically in the $3,000 and up range.  Our poor and much of our middle class can’t afford that much out of pocket expense, so they’re denied the opportunity to save for their own future health.  Deeper into the middle class, individuals and families still have other imperatives that limit their willingness to spend that much to get an HSA.

Certainly, with actual insurance in a free market, high risk pools will have higher premiums, but they’ll be able to get policies—even those with preexisting conditions.  But the rest of the rates will go down, and the market as a whole will go down, even with the higher premiums for higher risks.  A broader range of policies will exist, also.

These are the wages of welfare dishonestly masqueraded as insurance.

Regulation and Free Speech

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A mandate of the Dodd-Frank financial law, [a] Securities and Exchange Commission rule requires companies that use certain minerals linked to violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding region to file a report with the SEC saying what steps they took to verify the minerals weren’t taxed or controlled by rebel groups.

Never mind that those steps involve proprietary information.  Or that the government-mandated message would tar the companies, inaccurately, with a bigotry brush.

The National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, representing a broad group of businesses, in a hearing in federal district court in Washington said the regulation is unconstitutional because it forces companies to make disclosures linking their products to human-rights violations.

Paul Keisler, a lawyer representing the NAM and the Chamber, argued the rule is just a Scarlett Letter requirement and represents, further, government-mandated speech, not free speech.  Even so,

SEC Assistant General Counsel Tracey Hardin…argued the rule wasn’t different from advertising restrictions requiring fast-food restaurants to post the calories contained in their menu items or cigarette labels containing warnings about the dangers of smoking.

This, though, is just a cynical conflation of two widely disparate situations.  The one impacts directly the health (or not) of the user.  The other has no impact on the user, nor does it on the purported victims, since the minerals of interest here have a ready world-wide market, demonstrated by the high prices those minerals command.

Wait—there’s Citizens United.  But, no, Mr Corporation, that doesn’t count.  Just sit down and say the words Government gives you to say.

A Disgusting Court

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A while ago, I wrote about racism on the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court wrote in its DOMA ruling

What has been explained to this point should more than suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage.

And

…no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect [of DOMA] to disparage and to injure….

And so on.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in dissent of this ruling [emphasis in the original],

At least without some more convincing evidence that the Act’s principal purpose was to codify malice, and that it furthered no legitimate government interests, I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent [emphasis in the original, cites omitted],

[T]he majority says that the support­ers of this Act acted with malice—with the “purpose” “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples.  It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” to “impose inequality,” to “impose…a stigma,” to deny people “equal dignity,” to brand gay people as “unworthy,” and to “humiliat[e]”their children, (emphasis added).

I am sure these accusations are quite untrue.  To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act.  But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to con­demn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.  To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.

The Supreme Court wrote in its California Proposition 8 ruling that the private group bringing the case to the Court had no standing to do so, even though this is the group that was instrumental in getting Proposition 8 onto the ballot and passed in the first place.  Only State Government officials had standing to defend the proposition in court, and they had refused to mount a defense.

The Court thereby ruled that the people have no standing to defend their own voice, only the State can (not just may) do this.  The Court has thereby ruled that the people no longer are sovereign; Government is sovereign.

This is a disgusting Court, and Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia are justified in their seeming embarrassment.