Tag Archives: responsibilities

“Our Federal Dollars”

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.  Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has illustrated the addictive nature of Federal funds transfers to the States and lower government jurisdictions with that phrase.

In defending his city’s lawsuit against the Federal government over DoJ’s decision to withhold Federal monies from cities that violate Federal law by protecting illegal aliens from enforcement of immigration law, Murray said this:

The federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities.

Our federal dollars.  The dollars aren’t theirs.  Those dollars are Texas citizens’ money.  Those dollars are New York citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Illinois citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Oregon citizens’ money.  Those dollars are the money of the citizens of every State and territory in the nation, including Washington.  Those dollars are money transferred from all those other citizens around the nation.

This is what such transfers lead to: the powerful addiction of a sense of entitlement to other people’s money and the loss of any sense of responsibility for a jurisdiction’s own money.

Satisfaction

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No, this isn’t a Rolling Stones reference.  It’s a reference to Kevin Williamson’s opening line in his National Review piece, On the Outside, Looking Out.

This is the great paradox of our time: in 2017, it has never been easier for us to satisfy our wants, but we seldom have been more dissatisfied.

Indeed.  Perhaps because our wants being so easily satisfied, there’s no satisfaction in their satisfaction.

Perhaps because our wants being so easily satisfied, so many of them are so trivial.

Perhaps both.

Perhaps it’s time to refocus on what’s truly important.

Delays

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The House Republicans were forced to cancel yesterday’s scheduled American Health Care Act vote.  The Freedom Caucus, the Caucus of No, couldn’t be satisfied.  Congressmen like Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Caucus of No Chairman Mark Meadows (R, NC) refused late compromises, all the while insisting by implication from their refusals that constituents of other Congressmen, for instance Tom Cole (R, OK), worked for them and not that Cole worked for his Oklahoma constituents—and that those Oklahoma constituents might have different imperatives than those Congressmen of the Caucus.  So, no compromise from the No-ers.

Even after regulation changes that were part of Phase II of the overall three phase repeal and replace plan were offered to be brought into this Phase I AHCA, the No-ers refused.  Never mind that even the need to make such an offer displayed a monumental distrust by the No-ers of their ex-Congressional colleague, Tom Price, now Secretary of Health and Human Services and the gentleman who would have carried out those regulation rescissions of Phase II.  Even the No-ers’ plaint that they wanted those regulation removals written into law rather than merely rescinded makes no sense: that could have been legislated next year, by this same Congress, and that, as change to a done, deal would have thereby much easier to do.

Nor did a single member of the Caucus of No offer either any plan for getting the changed bill past a Senate filibuster from these too-large changes or any explanation of why their demanded changes would have permitted the bill still to go through via reconciliation and a majority-only vote.

It’s clear that the Freedom Caucus, this Caucus of No, is little more than a collection of yapping porch dogs, or alternatively just a bunch of right-handed virtue-signaling snowflakes, with little interest in actually improving our health provision system or restoring our health care to us constituents and our doctors.

Obamacare Replacement

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One aspect of the plan on offer in the House is this:

…whether it includes enough reform to arrest the current death spiral in the individual insurance market.

Notably, the bill includes a new 10-year $100 billion “stability fund” that allows states to start to repair their individual insurance markets. Before ObamaCare, it wasn’t inevitable that costs would increase by 25% on average this year, or that nearly a third of US counties would become single-insurer monopolies. With better policy choices, states can make coverage cheaper and more attractive for consumers and coax insurers back into the market, and the stability fund is a powerful tool.

Right idea, but it needs a tweak.  As with all Federal transfers to the States (even though nearly all of them do not have this), this transfer needs a sunset (ideally, but not as a deal breaker, on a declining balance to the sunset date) by which the transfer will cease to exist.  States need time to adjust their budgets as their addiction to Federal money is broken, but in the end the costs a State inflicts on itself must be the sole responsibility of that State.

Then there’s this:

The larger goal is to start to restore the traditional state regulatory authority over health insurance that ObamaCare supplanted for federal control. Local governments understand local needs best. With more flexibility, autonomy and accountability, the GOP hope is that reform Governors can pry open markets and help promote a larger and more dynamic business.

The larger goal still, and an even better one, should be to reduce regulation altogether to a great degree, and let the markets regulate health insurance products and costs.

In the end, too, local governments do understand local needs better than remote Federal, and State, governments.  But the greatest understanding is even more local: the patient and his doctor.  These are the participants in a free market for health insurance products—nation-wide and freely crossing State borders—whose “regulatory” activities should prevail.

Internet of Things

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…and default passwords.  Default passwords are foolish in any device, but here’s a particularly failing example.  A laundromat in Colorado had a security camera connected to the Internet (as is typical of security cameras), and it began hosting a particularly malicious bit of malware.

Bill Knapp, owner of Security Solutions LLC, whose firm installed the laundromat’s surveillance system, which included the security camera:

One of the hardest parts of this business is that everyone loses their passwords[.]

And when the camera manufacturer was called upon to reset the password, it could only reset it to the default password, which is well-known, as that’s how the consumer gets in to set up his system—which should include resetting the default password to an individual, hard-to-break one.

Steve McGregory, a researcher at security firm Ixia, about poorly secured devices:

Within nine seconds of turning on these things, they get hit[.]

There’s a hint there.