Category: national politics & policies

Categories
Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

DumpCare

healthcare, Trumpcare, Obamacare, medicine, costs, regulations, Medicaid, single payer

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan insists that his “TrumpCare” plan to replace ObamaCare will decrease medical insurance rates. Others argue that his American Health Care Act will increase those rates. Likewise, he expects it to reduce strain on federal budgets; others deny this outright. The “coverage” issue is just as contentious.

TrumpCare is a mess because it is isn’t “DumpCare.” What’s needed is not yet another regulation-plus-subsidy system. We need repeal and then . . . more repeals.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has never really been on board with this. He has promised that no one would lose “coverage,” assuming that “coverage” is “health care.”

It is not. State charity programs like Medicaid (upon which ObamaCare relied way too much) are merely ways to pay for services. Dumping a gimcrack payment system is not the same as decreasing medical services. “DumpCare” wouldn’t dump care, only insane government.

For example, we know that health care outcomes for poor folks without Medicaid turn out to be better than poor folks with Medicaid.* Increasing the number of people on formalized subsidy programs is no panacea.

Besides, ObamaCare severely under-delivered on “coverage.”

New programs, nevertheless, are traps, regardless of demerit: once you provide a benefit, folks come to rely on it and demand more — objecting when it’s taken away. Which is why few programs are ever repealed, despite failing to meet original expectations.

So far, the “small government party” hasn’t found the courage to actually limit government. Do Republicans really believe what they say, that fewer regulations and subsidies will lead to lower costs and better service?

It seems Republicans won’t take their own prescription.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid “natural experiment” provides reasons to question the merits of the program. As the initial, randomized, controlled study found, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services. . . .”

Printable PDF

 

Categories
Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Almost Right

Politifact, Snopes, facts, fact check, bias, propaganda, lie, truth, interpretation, analysis

The popular fact-checking sites, such as Snopes and Politifact, cannot stick to the facts.

When Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) predicted that a recent repeal of “three regulations” would save “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs,” Politifact rated the statement “Half True,” on the grounds that, well, not all experts agreed.

In 2015, objecting to a reported low figure for the Clinton Foundation’s grants to other groups that actually did things, PunditFact gave a “Mostly false” judgment despite admitting that the statement was “technically true.”

NBC engaged in a similar move, admitting to the technical truth of a claim about unemployment, but said it was “extremely misleading.”

Snopes found reasons to tag a “Mixture” rating onto the simple fact that Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub mass murderer, was a registered Democrat. He was*.

The funny thing is, these sites are “Almost Right”: fact checking isn’t enough.

Facts can be true, but deceptively used.

Unfortunately, these “fact-checkers” repeatedly fail to clearly distinguish matters of fact from matters of context. They could offer a double analysis and double rating: True/False for the factual; Clear/Caution, to cover interpretations and implications.

Why don’t they?

Perhaps for the same reason the CIA is planning a Meme Warfare Center — to provide a “full spectrum meme generation, analysis, quality control/assurance and organic transmission apparatus”** — instead of a Center for the Analysis of Popular Argument: the idea is not to increase knowledge.

It is to maximize influence.

Which leaves us on meme patrol, ever vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* What Snopes did was speculate that the terrorist perhaps changed his mind after initially registering a decade before the shooting.

** I wrote more about this in Sunday’s Townhall column (from which this Common Sense foray is adapted; see relevant links here), and first broached the goofy/ominous CIA proposal with Saturday’s featured video.

Printable PDF

 

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies too much government

The Weight of Politics

Donald Trump, Trump, diet, fat, stress, weight loss

Folks sure go crazy over diets. And that’s without the insanity of politics à la mode.

Consider the new Trump Diet — actually, several of them.

Actress Lena Dunham pledged to move to Canada if Donald Trump won last November. Instead, she stayed to offer a new weight loss scheme. “Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’” she told Howard Stern. “And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’”

So, there is hope!

Conversely, comedian Judd Apatow complains, “It’s very hard to lose weight in the Trump era.” The acclaimed Hollywood producer, director and writer adds, “Most of us are just scared and eating ice cream.”

Not Barbra Streisand. Oh, yes, she tweeted: “Donald Trump is making me gain weight.” But she made it clear that “after the morning news, I eat pancakes smothered in maple syrup!” At least, her new song, “People, People Who Need Pancakes,” is moving up the scales — er, charts.

With mixed results for shedding pounds in the U.S., let’s graze elsewhere.

Certainly, no diet regime has been as successful, nor as rigorously tested, as the Maduro Diet — made famous in Venezuela by President Nicolás Maduro. The entire socialist nation is on it, and a new survey discovered that three of four Venezuelans lost “at least 19 pounds” during 2016.

Think socialism doesn’t produce results? Fat chance.

Still, such a steady diet of politics is hard to stomach. Instead, maybe we better concentrate on exercising . . .

. . . our freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability education and schooling free trade & free markets national politics & policies responsibility

The Leading Edge of Higher Ed

apprentice, Praxis, education, training, skills, college, costs

“People are paying tons of money to be kept out of the real world . . . being taught by people most of whom have never even worked in the business world. It’s kinda crazy.”

Well, yeah. There’s a lot of crazy in modern college life.

Which is one reason to work around it. That’s what Isaac Morehouse — quoted above — has done.

Morehouse is the founder of Praxis. You may have heard him on The Tom Woods Show or seen him interviewed on Fox News. “The mindset of ‘obey the rules, follow procedures, chase credentials, chase grades, and wait to be told what to do and you’ll be handed this magical ticket to a job,’” Morehouse told Fox’s Tucker Carlson, “it’s just not true.”

His alternative is simple: leverage the apprenticeship idea, combine it with counseling and instruction, and arrange with participating companies a guaranteed job at program’s end.

Our college system deserves a failing grade. Colleges sponge away fortunes (often borrowed) from students, while neglecting to train them to do much of anything but . . . college work.

This means not only that college grads have trouble finding work, but, as Mr. Morehouse discovered before he hit upon the Praxis idea, there are many, many companies trying to hire competent workers, but unable to find them.

A market opportunity!! Praxis unites demand and supply, connecting companies needing smart, energetic, cooperative workers with willing, eager young folks seeking meaningful (and well-paid) employment.

You can find a good overview of his effort — and a way to sign up! — at discoverpraxis.com.

Praxis’s testimonials are inspiring.

As the future should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

 

Categories
Accountability media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

War on Page A-10

war, news, newspapers, defense, spending, Iraq, bombs, drones, soldiers

War was once big news. Now? Not so much.

Which may be a function of the never-ending War on Terror, no end in sight in Afghanistan and an Iraq War that is officially over . . . except for the fighting.

Last October, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein busied fact-checkers by claiming the U.S. was “bombing seven countries.” True, declared PolitiFact: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Yemen is better known after January’s raid that killed Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, wounded three other SEALs, and killed 14 to 25 Yemeni civilians, including children. Last week, during President Trump’s speech to Congress, Owens’s widow, Carryn, received a thunderous ovation.

But, as I argued at Townhall, “Ryan Owens and his widow and her three now fatherless children deserve more than applause.“ How about thoughtful policies and a Congress that holds the executive branch accountable?

Invading Iraq was a mistake. So was President Obama’s swerve over to destabilize Libya.

“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” President Lyndon Johnson once said . . . right before he sent more American soldiers to Vietnam.

Consider that U.S. Special Forces were deployed to 70 percent of the world’s nations in 2016. And, in recent weeks, President Trump asked for a $54 billion increase in military spending, and we have learned of Pentagon plans to seek a “significant increase in U.S. participation” against ISIS.

We owe it to those in uniform to ask tough questions, including: Is what we’re doing really worth a single American life?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Further reading:

Reason: Is the Military Really “Depleted” After Years of Record-High Spending?

The Atlantic: Fighting Terrorism With a Credit Card

The National Interest: America Is Never (Ever, Ever) Ending the War on Terror

Printable PDF

 

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights folly ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Campus Freedom in Peril

Charles Murray, protest, violence, free speech, Bell Curve, students, intimidation
  1. What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange?
  2. What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly?

Sociologist Charles Murray asked those questions near the end of his reflections on Thursday’s Middlebury College event, in which his speaking engagement was interrupted by shouting mobs and he and his colleagues were physically attacked*.

Murray thinks the answer to the first question is “more than 50 percent.” He doubts that is the answer to the second.

He is pessimistic about free inquiry on campus.

And has reason to be.

College faculty members are closing ranks, as many at Middlebury did, calling Murray — famous for books such as Losing Ground and The Bell Curve — “a discredited ideologue paid by the American Enterprise Institute to promote public policies targeting people of color, women and the poor”** and “not an academic nor a ‘critically acclaimed’ public scholar, but a well-funded phony.”

Mark J. Perry has listed many more complaints, all offered as reasons not to listen or debate with the famous intellectual.

That was last Thursday. On Saturday, a pro-Trump, “Proud Boys” march in Berkeley culminated not only in violence, bloodied faces, destroyed property, but also in the burning of a purloined “Free Speech” placard.

The University of California at Berkeley seems uninterested in controlling the mobs. Berkeley City Police have poorly defended non-leftist protestors. It’s open season on freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble.

Unless something is done, officially, mobbing will be the new normal. And our basic rights? A memory.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* His colleague Professor Allison Stanger was seriously injured in the riotous shoving and grabbing. Murray tweeted yesterday, “Everybody in the mob could be criminally prosecuted, but those who injured Prof. Stranger must be.”

** It is worth noting that his recent Coming Apart was entirely devoted to the economic performance and culture of white Americans.

Printable PDF