Tag Archives: politics

When the Bad Man Comes

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Forty-nine people were murdered in their house of worship in Christ Church, New Zealand last Friday. The thug

slaughtered worshipers at Al Noor [mosque] in a roughly two-minute rampage within that building. He then left for about two minutes before re-entering the building and firing on people on the ground for a further minute.

Left and came back.  Then he drove five miles across town to another mosque and started in again.

The butcher was active for thirty-six minutes before police arrived—that’s thirty-six minutes from the first call to the police, not from the start of the shooting.

When the bad man comes and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.

Our Progressive-Democrats want to disarm us with their idiotic gun “control” laws.  New Zealand’s gun laws already require a citizen to satisfy the local police in order to get permission to bear any arm at all, and they want to tighten gun laws further.

The nature of this pseudo-logic is succinctly laid out by Rogério Mendonça of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress:

The logic of the left is always the same: if a crazy guy uses guns to kill people, the solution is to take guns away from people who have nothing to do with what happened[.]

This would be criminal were it not so self-evidently insane.

Mendonça then supplied the right answer:

Now imagine if a decent person had been armed at that school [referring to a Brazilian school attack in which eight children were murdered]. They could have stopped the attack from ending in the bloody way it did.

Just as is often done in the US; after all, the first responders are those already at the scene.  However, these successful defenses don’t get the publicity that mass killings in gun free zones get.

A Thought on Ol’ Beto

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The Wall Street Journal had one, and so do I.

The question now that he’s running for President is whether his elusive idealism can triumph in 2020 over the Democratic Party’s socialist and identity politics vanguard.

And he seems to be good at fund-raising; although I’m not convinced one way or the other based solely on his Senate campaign in 2018.

While he lost to Mr Cruz by three points, he won 59% of voters under 44, 51% of college graduates, 65% of moderates, and 62% of single women.

He got these numbers because Cruz was not all that popular in those demographics, not because ol’ Beto was attractive to them.  Besides that, he’s earned the frustration and ire of his fellow Progressive-Democrats with his refusal to share his remaining campaign millions with those fellows.

But the remark that drew my attention was the one with which the WSJ opened its piece, this subheadline:

He’s the fresh, elusive outsider like Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

No, Hamlet on the Rio Grande is just an attention whore like Joe Biden, only less smooth.

Robert Francis O’Rourke has little chance of surviving the primaries, especially once Party’s identity politics starts taking him to task over his Hispanic cultural appropriation.

Still, Republicans need to take him seriously, especially were he to survive the primaries.  That’s the path to easily despatch him, as he should be over his vague (because they’re not thought out, not because they’re tactically vague) ideology that contrasts with his thoughtless concretenesses like tearing down barriers that channel illegal aliens, drug smugglers, human traffickers.

It’s dangerous to underestimate even agonizing Hamlets.

A Governor Misrepresents

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New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo (D), has provided another example of the dishonesty of Progressive-Democrats as he continues to whine about his State’s excessive State and local taxes no longer being deductible above a high maximum on Federal income tax forms.

He said Trump intentionally targeted states whose populations oppose him by a majority.

And

You pay your state income tax, they then tax your state income tax payment. First time ever.

No, the first is misleading.  The SALT cap was aimed at capping Federal tax deductions generally in order to level tax requirements, at least a little, across all income levels.  That only a few States have SALT set so high that their rich residents routinely exceed the $10,000 threshold is an outcome of those few States having such excessively high taxes; it has nothing to do with where the deductibility limit is set.

The second is an outright lie.  Only New York, et al., are taxing their citizens’ State income; the Feds are simply not allowing wealthiest to deduct all of their State and local taxes from their Federal income tax bill.  Not allowing a deduction is not the same as taxing.

On the other hand, if there is double taxation; it’s the States applying the second income tax on the same income.  It’s their choice to come in behind the Feds’ income tax and apply a second—their own—income tax to that same income.

The States as double-taxers is demonstrated in two ways. One is the seven States that don’t have—don’t need and don’t want—an income tax on their citizens’ income, with an eighth State kicking its State income tax to the curb as of 2021, and the two that only tax dividends and interest payments.

The other is the number of States whose income tax requirements require submission of the Federal income tax data (not income data) as the basis for the States’ application of their own income tax.

And a double-taxation mitigating factor: most of those States that do apply their second income tax to the Feds’ income tax don’t have their SALT set so high that the payments aren’t fully deductible from the Federal income tax.  Only a few States have their SALT set usuriously high—and that’s the deliberate choice of the men of those States’ governments.

A No-Deal Brexit

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The Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week that, in the words of the piece’s subheadline,

A no-deal crash out of the EU may be the best outcome now.

The rest of the thing was a string of rationalizations of why this is true, but the heart of the matter is that subhead.

In fact, though, a no-deal departure always has been the best outcome.

A priori because that’s what the Brits voted for in their referendum—they wanted their sovereignty and control of their own borders back. Full stop.

In retrospect because Brussels has acted in bad faith, solely to punish the Brits for their effrontery, ever since. EU leadership, lately in the person of Donald Tusk, has acted in echo of Jacques Chirac’s slam on eastern European nations:

It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.

There’s no reason at all for the Brits to talk further with the EU regarding the terms of Great Britain’s departure for freedom.

Update: Yesterday, the British Parliament voted against a no-deal Brexit and in favor of going to Brussels and beg for more time to negotiate. What happened to the courage that led Great Britain to build a globe-spanning empire?

Fortunately, Parliament’s move is non-binding. We’ll see whether Prime Minister Theresa May has the courage required to stay with the scheduled date for British departure, currently 29 March.

Medical Services Price Transparency

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Hospital and insurers want to keep their pricing agreements hidden from those who must pay those prices, especially those who must pay under the duress of huge costs and the immediacy of the need for medical services.

Hospitals and insurers are gearing up to battle a Trump administration plan that could require the public disclosure of negotiated prices for medical services, part of an effort to lower US health-care costs.

Because price transparency facilitates competition, which in a capitalist, free-market economy helps drive costs down.  But hospitals and insurers insist

such a move would force them to disclose prices that would be of little use to consumers, who just want to know what they need to pay out of their pockets, not the full price of the service.

It’s true enough we want that bottom line—so we can shop around—but we also want those intermediate prices so we can get an idea of the markups we’re being expected meekly to accept.

A transition to actual transparency also would be disruptive:

While hospitals fear new demands from insurers to lower prices, insurers could also face price pressures if hospitals that get lower reimbursements demand the higher rates their competitors have won. Also, insurers that have wrangled the steepest discounts may not want those rates exposed to competitors that would then be able to push for similar pricing.

That’s uncomfortable, but it’s also temporary.  After a remarkably short time (depending on how piece meal the transition would be vs ripping the band-aid off and being done with it vs something in between), prices would stabilize, consumers would be better off, and hospitals and insurers would be adapted to open competition.  Just like the rest of the economy—say home improvement or grocers—is.

Moreover, insurer contracts are complex and hospital systems typically have multiple contracts with each insurer, each with different terms.
“It’s going to be a big lift to actually make this happen,” said Niall Brennan, chief executive of the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute, who said he applauds efforts to make health-care pricing more transparent. If it does move forward, “It’s going to put a lot of hospital CEOs and CFOs in the hot seat.”

That last is the crux of the matter.  Transparency will embarrass some folks.  Never mind that the embarrassment often would be unjustified, except in our current professional victim environment.  Those CEOs and CFOs, for the most part, were simply doing their jobs in getting the best prices for their companies—and doing their fiduciary duties to their shareholders.

Complexity, on the other hand, might be a valid beef. However, that’s a consideration related to how to implement price transparency; it has nothing at all to do with whether price transparency ought to be implemented.