Tag Archives: political economy

California Has Banned Insurance for Car Drivers

Posted on by
Reply

As everyone (apparently except the California Insurance Commission members) knows, insurance is the transfer of risk and fiscal responsibility for its realization from one party to another for an agreed fee that’s commensurate with the risk and expected cost being transferred.  The California Insurance Commission has eliminated that for California drivers, mandating that driving coverage be provided independently of the risk transferred.

California has banned auto insurance companies from considering gender when setting insurance rates for private passenger cars.
The Gender Non-Discrimination in Automobile Insurance Rating Regulation went into effect on Jan 1, 2019.

Never mind that men and women drive differently and represent different risks while driving.  This move makes differing risk irrelevant, and so it cancels the risk aspect of coverage for events occurring while driving.

Commissioner Dave Jones claims that the move will

ensure that auto insurance rates are based on factors within a driver’s control, rather than personal characteristics over which drivers have no control.

He’s being disingenuous or ignorant.  Again: what was being insured was actual driving performance, not gender.  That that performance is measurably different between women and men has been actuarially understood for decades.

One outcome of the Commission’s move will be to drive up coverage rates for women—who had enjoyed lower rates because they are lower risks, safer drivers.

Arrogance of the Left

Posted on by
Reply

This is made blatantly, nakedly clear by New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.  In his State of the City speech last week, he laid bare the premier goal of the Progressive-Democratic Party, even above doing away with ICE and with our borders generally.  He said—and he meant every word of it:

Here’s the truth. Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.

His first sister is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) who wants to raise taxes on those wrong hands to 70%—or more; she, like her fellow Party apparatchiks, have articulated no limiting principle to such raisings, they’ve carefully declined to say how much is one’s “fair share.”

After that, de Blasio’s brothers and sisters of the Party want free education and free, single-payer medical care for all, including illegal aliens (remember their open border demand).

How to pay for all of this Party largesse?  The first goal: by taking all that money that’s in the wrong hands and giving to the correct, deserving holders of the money.

Mind you, who are the correct holders, who are the deserving holders, will be defined by those members of the Progressive-Democratic Party.  They’re the ones who Know Better than those with the money, those who’ve earned the money, how that money should be used.

It isn’t their money, anyway.  It’s the Party’s money.  Party generously will let us have some of it for a period of time, though.

A Judge’s Error

Posted on by
Reply

The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.

Pelosi Abandoned DACA Recipients

Posted on by
1

‘Way last December, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) revealed the depth of Progressive-Democrats’ opposition to anything Trump or Republican.

[Then-]House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…rejected the idea of partially funding President Donald Trump’s border wall in exchange for amnesty for “Dreamers….”

Recall that in President Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address, he laid out his four pillars of immigration policy:

  • legal status for 1.8 million illegal aliens brought to the US as minors, including those who had not registered under DACA
  • a secure border
  • ending the visa lottery
  • ending chain migration

Aside from “secure border” including a wall along parts of it in Trump’s lexicon, notice that he offered legalization for 1,000,000 more DACA types than the Progressive-Democrats had pretended to fight for during the Obama administration.

The Progressive-Democrats were for DACA recipients relief before they decided to completely abandon them.  Can the Progressive-Democratic Party get any lower, any more despicable, in its hysterical opposition to Trump?

Political Power

Posted on by
Reply

Here come the Progressive-Democrats, and they’ve made their priorities clear in the House with the first things they want to get done.  Here’s some of what’s in their HR1:

  • “campaign-finance reform”—requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues. Except when rich folks like Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending on Progressive-Democrats.  Those names aren’t required to be exposed.
  • provisions from the Honest Ads Act—just regulates online political ads the same as broadcast television. Regulation: name those donors, again. Never mind that even nefarious ads intended to “influence” the 2016 elections accounted for all of 0.01%—that’s 1 in 10,000—of all the online ads in that cycle.
  • expanded definition of “electioneering communications” to include communications targeted to any particular constituency. An online ad running only in Texas that mentions a New York politician would be “regulable.”
  • The Federal government would gain control over the means by which States run elections. Because a remote, isolated central government, especially one run by Progressive-Democrats, Knows Better than a local State government how that State should run its elections.

For Progressive-Democrats, it’s all about personal political power.  Remember this in the coming election season.