Tag Archives: political economy

EPA Jobs?

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The Environmental Protection Agency has sent out more than 1,000 buy-out notices to its employees….

The positions are being eliminated, and the incumbents aren’t being offered positions elsewhere on the government’s teat payroll.  The horror.  The union-demanded, if not God-given, sinecures are not sinecures, after all.  American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 President Michael Mikulka is quite vocal with his dismay.

EPA wants over 1,200 of us to leave, purportedly to save money going forward and claiming that they no longer need the positions occupied by staff that in some cases worked at EPA for over 30 years[.]

Because the existence of a union-protected job means the employer needs that job, and the longer its existence, the deeper into perpetuity that need must be.  Sure.

Mikulka also insisted that the EPA would be less active without those jobs, speaking like that would be a bad thing.  He said this, too:

We’re going to have to do less with less.

Recall that, during the Obama government shutdown in 2011, the EPA rated over 90% of its workforce as unessential and furloughed them for the duration of the shutdown.  Certainly, that per centage was true only for the short-term, but a huge fraction of those 90% really are unessential, and they could be released were the EPA to be returned to its original mission of science-based protection of the environment and moved away from supporting its politically motivated pseudo-science climate funding industry.

The agency certainly can do less with less.  And it should.

It’s Time

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…to sweep the ones we can’t trust from the Republican Party of Castrati and from Congress.

When Republicans voted on the repeal-only bill in 2015, they knew Mr Obama would veto it, making their vote largely symbolic. Of the GOP senators currently in the chamber, 49 voted for it at the time.  …

Moreover, many GOP lawmakers have already acknowledged that they would vote differently now that the stakes are far higher….

Now that these persons have to take action more concrete than virtue signaling, they’re exposing themselves as porch dogs.  They’re betraying their country, and more specifically, they’re betraying their constituents, to whom they promised for the last seven years, they’d repeal Obamacare and replace it.

However,

Both [Susan, R, ME] Collins and [Shelley Moore, R, WV] Capito said Tuesday they were unlikely to support the procedural vote for a repeal-only approach.

Senators even are too timid to face debate on the floor of the Senate on so simple a measure.

Capito is being especially disingenuous.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people.  I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.

Yet, that’s exactly what she’s doing by supporting Obamacare’s continued existence.  That program not only is devastating the pocketbooks of Americans, including West Virginians, Americans across the country are losing their health coverage plans in droves as health plan providers abandon the market in counties after counties, even whole States.  This is happening now, and it will be increasingly so as long as repeal is blocked by Senators like Capito, with or without a replacement program in hand.  Capito knows this.

Serious reform takes courage.  These worthies don’t have it; they’re quailing, even now, at a first step of repeal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is suggesting he’ll call for a vote on a straight-up repeal, to take effect in two years, during which Congress could work out and pass a replacement program or set of programs.

McConnell should hold the vote, even knowing the porch dogs will vote against repeal and so defeat it (many of whom will vote even against open debate); will vote against their promise; will contradict their vote in 2015, cast as it was deep in the safety of an Obama veto.  Put the porch dogs on record with their votes.  Let them stand exposed and identified.

This is what primaries are for.

A Union

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…doesn’t like Amazon buying Whole Foods.

[United Food and Commercial Workers International Union President, Marc] Perrone plans to file a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that letting Amazon buy Whole Foods would trigger a wave of store closures and eventually quash customer choice.

With a straight face, he argued in his complaint (which somehow fell into The Washington Post‘s hands before the filing) that

Regardless of whether Amazon has an actual Whole Foods grocery store near a competitor, their online model and size allows them to unfairly compete with every single grocery store in the nation.

So, doing a better job of competing in an industry, doing a better job of selling products customers want, is in some way unfair.  Hmm….

And

I’ve got concerns, and our organization has concerns, about what technology does and at what cost to society[.]

Sure he does.  So long as society is defined as union society.  Because technology improvements benefit the broader society of ordinary American citizens.  Just compare tech-developed and built cars with buggies and wagons.  Compare today’s house with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s communications media with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s cars with yesterday’s, come to that.

The union, Perrone said, is worried that America’s shifting shopping preferences will spark a crisis in its industry the same way automation and trade with China and Mexico has wiped out factory work.

Our factory work hasn’t been wiped out; it’s just changed its character because competition made those manufacturing industries get better and do better.

The union just wants a protection from competition.

Imagine that.

Questions for Susan Collins

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Susan Collins is the Republican Senator from Maine whose refusal to vote for the health care reform bill on offer (and any of the prior efforts) is centered on her insistence that the bill’s cuts to reductions to growth in Medicaid payments to the States—Maine in particular—are too great.  Collins needs to be asked, and required to give straight, substantive answers to, a number of questions.

What is Maine’s government doing to reduce the costs to its citizens of health care and of health coverage?

What is Maine’s government doing to make health care available to its citizens in the absence of health coverage?

On what is Maine’s government spending its citizens’ tax money on instead of Medicaid?  What does the Maine government consider to be more important than the health of its citizens?

On what basis does she insist that the citizens of New York, Illinois, California, Texas—any of the other 49 States—must be required to pay into Maine’s Medicaid program?

The Cruz Amendment

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has a provision in the latest Senate health bill that’s on offer, one that would allow sellers of actual health insurance to sell non-Obamacare compliant policies on the condition that they also sold Obamacare compliant plans on the ObamaMart.  The idea, and it’s a sound one, is that those plans, better tailored their customers’ needs, would soon have commensurately lower premiums, deductibles, and copays and thereby be more affordable.

Health plan sellers don’t like it, though.

While this setup could offer healthy people less expensive policies, insurers and actuaries say it would likely prove dysfunctional over time, pushing up rates and reducing offerings for people buying the compliant plans.

That’s a market decision, though; nothing in the provision or in the overall bill would require the plan sellers offer fewer compliant plans or at higher premiums.

Aside from that, those non-compliant plans would be better tailored—market forces would require it—have fewer items covered that a plan purchaser doesn’t want or need—market forces would push plan sellers to stop forcing contraceptive coverage on men and geriatrics or prostate cancer coverage onto women—and they would, as advertised, have much lower premiums, smaller deductibles, and lower copays.

They would also attract customers, low income and others, from those ObamaMart plans into the non-compliant market because those better tailored and cheaper plans would better suit their needs, too.

Maybe the health care coverage welfare plan providers—sorry, the health insurance companies—don’t want the noise of competition; maybe they prefer the steady, safe income of government subsidies in the form of customers trapped in their protected monopoly in the health “insurance” industry.  Maybe that’s why so many of these companies are leaving ObamaMarts, leaving folks with few plan choices or no plans to buy at all—because the industry as Obamacare has changed it is so sound.

On the other hand, the Progressive-Democrats in Congress should jump on this provision with both feet.  Obamacare plans are terrific, they insist.  Surely, in their wonderfulness, these plans would win resoundingly in the competition of the market place.  Especially with so many of those plans still subsidized through other provisions in the bill.  Wouldn’t they?