Category: national politics & policies

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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 Which is why few programs are ever repealed, despite failing to meet original expectations.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. . . .”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies responsibility

Overkill, Not Parsimony

defense, defense spending, war, budget, military, protection

Two truths: national defense is a necessity; national defense is a racket.

The latter is the case because the former is the case. Big spenders rely on “better safe than sorry” to always push the envelope, over-investing rather than under-investing.

So, we are trapped — and our new president knows this. Before Trump ran for office, he said that sequestration cuts to the Pentagon budget had not gone far enough. But when he threw his hat into the ring, he promised to “make our military so big, so powerful, so strong that nobody — absolutely nobody — is going to mess with us.”

President Trump now proposes over fifty billion dollars in new defense spending. More soldiers, more ships, more fighter jets.

John Stossel argues that Americans are not necessarily suckers for this game. At least, a majority does not support increasing military spending.

More importantly, Stossel challenges the whole “overkill always” strategy. “America is going broke, and our military already spends almost $600 billion dollars [annually],” Stossel says. “That’s more than the next seven nations spend — combined.”

Now would be a good time to not only rethink Middle East policy, but to re-consider our expensive role as world policeman (speaking of “national” defense). During the campaign, Trump was criticized for questioning our alliances and demanding more of our allies. But he was right. I hope he’ll get tough in prodding our allies to ultimately provide their own defense.

Even more basic? Demand an audit of the Pentagon before new funds are thrown into the five-sided money pit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Bigly Truthiness

truthiness, Trump, propaganda, lies, truth, journalism, journalist, The Economist, rhetoric

“Journalists should be tough when powerful people say untrue things,” writes the Books and Arts columnist for The Economist.

I’m with “Johnson,” that pseudonymous author, except for one thing. In calling President Trump a Big League liar, he himself seems to miss the whole truth, nothing but the truth.

At the very least, The Economist scrivener proves himself rather obtuse . . . especially for a column de plume tipping the hat to the great Samuel Johnson. Many of the Trumpian falsehoods he mentions are indeed whoppers. No doubt. But a few cry out for a more subtle reading.

After distinguishing between falsity, lying, and fantasizing, “Johnson” speculates that Trump may actually believe “his own guff.”

But then, about Trump’s murder rate statements, Johnson quickly runs off the rails: “Mr. Trump said something wildly wrong about something easily checkable, leaving an adviser, Kellyanne Conway, flailing to cover for him. . . .” But Conway did suggest that Trump may have been speaking about certain cities wherein the murder rate has gone up.

Trump often speaks as hyperbolist: murder has gone up in a few major cities; he relates the fact as if murder had gone up generally. This annoys sticklers. Me, included. But Trump’s been using the rhetoric of exaggeration.

You could call it the rhetoric of inexactitude.

It’s how he trolls.

Trump could also be charged with “truthiness,” comedian Stephen Colbert’s signature 2005 coinage about confidence in factoids for intuitive reasons, sans evidence.

But so might this “Johnson.” When subtle men miss homespun subtleties, one has to wonder whether they might miss it for . . . intuitive reasons.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Adios, California?

CalExit, secede, secession, California, divide, partition, self determination

Californians account for more than one of every ten Americans.

For now.

Three years ago, an initiative sought to split the mega-state up. Had that measure succeeded, the U.S. Congress would have decided whether to permit the Golden State to become six separate states — with ten more U.S. Senators.

Now, a group called “Yes California” is petitioning for a 2018 ballot measure on leaving these United States altogether: Secession. “California could do more good as an independent country than it is able to do as just a U.S. state,” says its website.

Supporters argued in a recent Washington Post feature that California “subsidizes other states at a loss.” Indeed, it’s one of 14 states that get less money back from the federal government than paid in taxes.

And there’s Trump. Opposition to the president is palpable. California provided Hillary Clinton with a 4.3 million popular vote margin over Republican Donald Trump, 1.5 million more than her national margin.

“It’s understandable why the election of an evil white supremacist swindler as president,” wrote Zócalo Public Square’s Joe Mathews in the Fresno Bee, “has given the idea of California independence such currency.” Nonetheless, he opposes #CalExit as divisive and “not very Californian.”

Nationally, for partisan reasons, Republicans may cheer it, while Democrats shudder.

Me? I’m for self-determination.

But, remember: Northern Californians have been agitating to secede from the state since 1941. Those desires are picking up steam — especially with trepidation over whether the Oroville dam will hold. Folks feel unrepresented in the state capitol.*

And they are. Already 21 of the 23 northernmost counties have made declarations to form the State of Jefferson.

Let Californians decide . . . county by county.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Note that Trump won by a landslide in the counties that would comprise Jefferson, our would-be 51st state.

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folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Stockholm Syndrome?

Ami Horowitz, Sweden, Tucker Carlson, terrorism, terrorist, violence, immigrants

Can we handle the truth? Governments and media professionals don’t always think so.

Journalist Ami Horowitz, whose interview with Tucker Carlson caught President Trump’s attention last week, noted that, despite what he learned (and recorded) at street level in Sweden, Swedes in general and government personnel in particular* seem resistant to acknowledging the levels of violence in Muslim migrant communities.

The media firestorm that followed Trump’s off-the-cuff comments seemed more evidence of the same, as did the Washington Post coverage of yesterday’s riots in Stockholm, in the 89 percent immigrant suburb of Rinkeby.

“Multiple criminologists in Sweden . . . said the notion that immigrants were responsible for a large proportion of crime in the country was highly exaggerated,” the Post report explained. “Nevertheless, the integration of immigrants into Swedish society is a problem that the government has been struggling to address.”

Yet, in the wake of a 2013 riot by migrants, David Frum noted that, “Sweden does not report data on crimes by foreign-born people, only by foreign passport holders — meaning that an immigrant who has been naturalized will be counted as a Swede for statistical purposes.”

The media, like the Swedes, seem protective. Not of native-born Swedes, but of the immigrant populations.

Swedes really are well meaning. But good intentions are not enough. In Sweden, as throughout Europe, Muslim immigrants have been let in but not assimilated. Unskilled, most émigrés cannot find jobs . . . and you know what they say about “idle hands.”

Bending over backwards to downplay problems, though, isn’t the answer. It prevents Swedes and others from coming to the correct conclusion: the best way to help others is not to put them on the dole in your (foreign!) land, but to aid them close to home.

And stop bombing and destabilizing their countries, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.  

 

* The policemen interviewed in Horowitz’s video have claimed they were taken out of context. Horowitz denies that charge here.

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