Tag Archives: regulation

Costs of Obamacare

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The Washington Health Benefit Exchange…has enrolled 160,000 paying customers in ObamaCare exchange health plans but that’s more than 50,000 short of goal, which has led to an extension of the enrollment deadline and a request that the Washington State Legislature fork over $125 million to fund the exchange.

There’s a hint there.

Republicans are angry because they were told the exchange would be self-sufficient by the end of this year.

Leading Democrats were also skeptical. They were expecting a much lower subsidy as the exchange bridges from federal seed money to being able to fund itself through premium taxes and fees paid by insurance companies and customers.

There’s a hint there, too.

And

New York’s governor wants a $69 million tax on non-exchange health insurance policies while Vermont has projected a $20 million shortfall by the end of 2015. There also is a bill in Rhode Island to scrap the state exchange and go with the federal exchange to avoid a $24 million hit to taxpayers.

Wait—is there a pattern emerging?

YGTBSM

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Senate Democrats are fuming over abortion language inserted into a bipartisan human trafficking bill that they failed to notice before voting to move the bill to the floor.

Failed to notice for the two months they’ve had it. Another case of irresponsible Democrats not bothering to read legislation on which they vote—even in committee.

Democrats are now threatening to block the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 2 by a unanimous vote and is now being debated before the full Senate.

Because spending your tax dollars on abortion is more important to Democrats than is protecting women and children from sex slavery. And one of its fallouts: pregnancies.

The NAACP is Right on This

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There’s a school district in Prince George’s County, MD (which works out to suburban DC), that’s looking to set up two public (not private) high schools for immigrants and second generation students who don’t speak English—and to teach in their old country language.

The NAACP is objecting, and they’re right on this one, albeit for some wrong reasons. Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP, had this:

It risks turning Prince George’s County into a segregated school system[.]

He said the setup is a violation of Brown v Board of Education, and he’s close. He’s also worried that this will divert resources from the existing school system, and he’s right here, too. This objection, though, isn’t that important; any effort to add schools will divert those resources.

Tehani Collazo, Senior Director of Casa’s Schools and Community Engagement section, disagreed, also with reason:

If we are saying all [English-language-learning] students must go to these schools, that’s one thing. But we are not.

Like the many that already exist across the country, the International Schools are schools of choice. They are built on an innovative and proven model that will help support the needs of our most struggling group of learners—English Language Learners.

They’re both missing the larger point, though, about American education in this context. The segregation argument is close, but it misses.   Brown was about forced segregation; this is voluntary.

On the other hand, “schools of choice” are appropriate for a lot of things, but not in this context. There can’t be any choice about being taught in English.

Immigrants need to assimilate into American culture; it’s our culture that has created the opportunities we have and that underlie our enormous success. Our culture isn’t learned by students and their families holding themselves apart from it, which is what happens when students go to American schools to learn in their own language instead of in English.

Language is thought, and English is the language of American culture. It’s entirely likely that English needs to be taught with greater emphasis in those of our public schools that have large fractions of their student populations who don’t speak a version of English natively. However, public funds should not be spent on public schools that will teach only in a foreign language. That’s not how American culture will be learned; that’s not how immigrants will assimilate.

Clinton’s Emails

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Ex-First Lady, one-time Senator, and woman who once sat in the Secretary of State’s chair had a press conference.

QUESTION: How could the public be assured that when you deleted emails that were personal in nature, that you didn’t also delete emails that were professional, but possibly unflattering?

And what do you think about this Republican idea of having an independent third party come in and examine your emails?

CLINTON: Well first of all, you have to ask that question to every single federal employee, because the way the system works, the federal employee, the individual, whether they have one device, two devices, three devices, how many addresses, they make the decision.

So, even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that.

In the first place, Madam, no, we don’t have to ask every single federal employee; we are, though, asking you. In the second place, even if every single federal employee made that error of judgment, it wouldn’t excuse yours. I notice, too, that you didn’t answer the question about how the public can be sure you didn’t also delete….

Nor is it lost on any of us that you ignored the second part of that question, too. Should we conclude, then, that you don’t want an independent evaluation?

Then there’s the apparent evidence tampering and the apparent violation of the Federal Records Act:

QUESTION: Did you or any of your aides delete any government-related emails from your personal account? And what lengths are you willing to go to to prove that you didn’t?

Some people, including supporters of yours, have suggested having an independent arbiter look at your server, for instance.

CLINTON: … I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done. When the search was conducted, we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records, and that’s exactly what we did.

[T]he process produced over 30,000 you know, work emails, and I think that we have more than met the requests from the State Department. The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private….

It’s a much longer-winded obfuscatory answer; I’ve excerpted here. But notice: she never did get around to answering the question of deletion and how anyone would know. She did, though, say that the server she used to conduct government business will remain private, and she was clear that she and her people were the ones who determined the work relevance of what she kept and what she deleted. She also continued to elide the question of an independent evaluator’s judgment.

Finally, a small aside: 30,000 work emails works out to about 20 emails per day over her four-year tour—an unbelievably small amount of email traffic for a SecState.

Keep this in mind during the Primary Season, and if she passes through it, in the fall of 2016.

Crony Capitalism

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Corporate fascism is, at its core, government management of each of the several economic sectors in a nation’s economy—agricultural, manufacturing, technology, communications, transportation, and so on. This management is executed by government through otherwise privately controlled business entities. De facto corporatism also is useful for reducing opposition and rewarding political loyalty.

Crony capitalism, on the other hand, is government influence of individual businesses in a nation’s economy—agribusinesses, automobile companies, alternative energy companies, telecommunications companies, and so on. Crony capitalism also is useful for reducing opposition and rewarding political loyalty.

How is crony capitalism different from corporate fascism? So far, the individual cronies can choose whether or not to play according to their government benefactors’ rules. So far.