The People’s Republic of China says it has ordered businesses doing business with northern Korean entities or individuals must shut down within 120 days.
This would be cool, if it happens. The PRC has said it would enforce other sanctions, also, and then only paid lip service to enforcement while engaging in business largely as usual with the north.
Believe it when you see it actually happen. If it does happen, believe the durability of PRC enforcement when it actually lasts.
The Wall Street Journal ran a couple of pieces on this, one by Matthew Futterman and Andrew Beaton (Behind the NFL’s Frantic Scramble to Hit Back at Trump) and the other an op-ed by Jason Riley.
The former centered on the purported disarray among the NFL’s management, players, players union, owners, and coaches as they tried to figure out how to ride the tiger they’d turned loose with their “protests.” The latter was a sort of coming-of-age piece wherein Riley went from national anthem sitter to a national anthem stander.
My two thoughts are closely related to each other. This is my view of the Futterman and Beaton piece:
….players—many of whom say they are deeply offended by the president’s statements….
That’s OK–many of us are deeply offended by players’ attacks on our flag and national anthem.
Goodell had released a statement that Trump had shown “an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL…failure to understand the overwhelming force for good [we] represent in our communities.”
Where is the good in the NFL’s divisive attacks on our national symbols? Where is the NFL’s respect for these?
These Precious Ones claim to protest inequities against minorities. This is nonsense. Were they interested in protesting inequities against minorities, they’d do that instead of attacking our flag and anthem. Were they interested in working against those inequities, they’d go into communities and work the problems rather than kneeling on the safety of the sidelines saying, “There’s a problem. Someone else fix it.”
This is what Riley’s piece generated in my pea brain:
The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement….
This is nonsense. If the players wanted to protest unjust treatment, they would protest unjust treatment. Instead, they’re attacking our flag and our national anthem, and they’re insulting Gold Star families and veterans who fought, many of whom were maimed or killed in those fights, for these guys’ right to protest.
The stereotype of “dumb jock” was ugly 50 years ago, and it’s no prettier today. These players know full well what they’re doing; perpetuating that stereotype by pretending they don’t is as ugly as the stereotype.
Because it’s my blog, and so I get to.
Gene Malcolm (@spike012002) has a tweet up:
Next, Japanese businessman will start wearing business suits. When will this cultural appropriation end?
There also is a joke wandering the rounds:
Q: What’s the difference between Los Angeles and yogurt?
A: One of them has a living culture.
Which makes me wonder, in the context of Malcolm’s tweet: between LA and yogurt, which is inflicting cultural appropriation?
Here are some stats regarding Obamacare’s impact on our poor, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
More than one in three of taxed [via the individual mandate penalty] households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.
And
More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000.
And
Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.
Never mind that these honest Americans can’t afford what Obamacare has on offer, they still have to pay the tax. Never mind that what is on offer is so bad they won’t buy it; they’d rather pay a tax they can ill afford.
This is what Senator John McCain (R, AZ) has said he prefers to Graham-Cassidy, never minding that the Arizona governor (for whom McCain claims great admiration) has strongly endorsed the bill. This is what Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said is better than a bill that repeals much of the funding for Obamacare and sends it instead to the States so they can set up their own health insurance/health coverage plan markets—including State-level Obamacare, if that’s their preference—never minding that States’ Rights has been part of his mantra since his first Senate election campaign. This is what Senator Lisa Murkowski (R, AK) seems to want to preserve over Graham-Cassidy‘s elimination of her State’s exploding premiums and imploding plan provider participation. This is what Senator Susan Collins seems to want to preserve, never minding Maine’s governor endorsement of the bill.
The WSJ pointed out that
…the point of this coercion was to substitute the government’s political preferences for individual judgment….
Just as these four Senators are substituting their own political preferences for the individual judgments of their constituents—whom the four are betraying with their support for Obamacare over Graham-Cassidy.
Remember this for the coming primary election season.
These are…triggered…by Thursday’s Wall Street Journal piece on how the Graham-Cassidy Plan Would Change Health Coverage.
The Congressional Budget Office has said that, without a rule requiring insurers to charge all customers comparable premiums, health plans could become prohibitively expensive for some people with pre-existing conditions.
The plans wouldn’t be insurance plans, either, since the premiums wouldn’t have anything to do with the risk being transferred. The plans would be welfare plans.
Separately, states could also waive a requirement that insurers provide a set of medical benefits like mental-health services and prescription-drug coverage. If those benefits aren’t required, people with costly medical conditions could have difficulty buying insurance with the relevant services or medications.
Certainly a possibility. However, that’s a matter between a State’s citizens and their State government. The Federal government has no legitimate role to play in this.
The bill seeks to distribute funding roughly equally among states. But under the ACA, 31 states expanded Medicaid, and some states had considerably higher enrollment in subsidized plans. Because that funding would go away to be replaced by block grants, some states would see a net funding gain and others would see a loss.
This is the only problem I have with Graham-Cassidy, albeit not for the reasons the WSJ cites others as having. With roughly equal funding across States, low-population States will get more per capita money than those with larger population without regard to the relative health of the populations. The block grants should be sized to each State’s population of citizens and legal immigrants, so that the per capita funding is roughly equal, not the per-State funding. The biggest “losers” would still tend to be States with Progressive-Democratic Party-led governments, but these also are the States with the most profligately wasteful spending, and on a host of programs, not only on Medicaid. There’s no valid reasons other States should be forced to continue to subsidize these wastrels with continued taxpayer dollar redistributions.
The bill rescinds the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which for the first time extended coverage to childless, low-income adults. So states couldn’t use their block grants to cover these low-income adults under Medicaid.
Money is fungible, though, and Medicaid is a State program, even if it is heavily subsidized with Federal (i.e., your and my tax) dollars. If a State thinks covering childless, low-income adults, et al., is a good idea, it certainly can reallocate monies from other spending to its Medicaid program for the purpose.
[T]he bill also for the first time places funding caps on traditional Medicaid and shrinks spending on the program significantly over time. Analysts say the reduced federal spending could blow a hole in state budgets….
It’s a start. The Federal block grants should be put on an annually declining basis so that over 10 years (say), the grants disappear, and the States would be free to—and responsible for—designing and funding their own Medicaid programs without Federal strings, without subsidization with the tax dollars of other States’ citizens, and without having to send their own citizens’ tax dollars to subsidize other States.
Too, the analysts are wrong on this, and they demonstrate a breathtaking lack of understanding of responsibility. Reducing Federal transfers to the States won’t blow a hole in any State budget. The only thing capable of blowing holes in State budgets are those States’ governments via their spending decisions. State governments just will have to spend their own citizens’ money, with less OPM coming in.
Unfortunately, guys like Senators John McCain (R, AZ) and Rand Paul (R, KY) prefer Obamacare to even this much compromise-y progress, and so they’re going to betray their constituents by voting to preserve Obamacare rather than replace it with Graham-Cassidy. Their reasons for preferring Obamacare? In McCain’s case, it’s all about ego and his precious Maverick status. Nothing will ever be pure enough to suit Paul, so he’ll just vote “No,” no matter what.
If this bill fails, that’ll be these two Senators’ legacy–voting to keep Obamacare intact. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) should bring the bill to a vote this week regardless of his vote count. He needs to put those Republicans who prefer Obamacare on the voting record for the coming Republican primaries.