Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on live kidney donation as a form of charity. Half the members of a Christian sect have gone through the surgical operation of donating a kidney to a stranger. The article questions whether pressure from “cult” members creates undue influence. Social and government pressure to donate both at death and while living is mounting. See Cato’s recent Policy Analysis “A Gift of Life Deserves Compensation.”
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Government and Politics
There Is No Such Thing as Mandatory Federal Spending
Sometimes, governments lie. For example, the U.S. government describes outlays for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as “mandatory” spending, in contrast to “discretionary” spending on things like national defense and bridges to nowhere.
Yet “mandatory” spending is not really mandatory. It too is discretionary, and everyone knows it. The only thing that makes “mandatory” spending different is that Congress creates legislative formulas that automatically determine spending levels, instead of determining spending levels each year through the regular appropriations process. Congress can change those formulas at its discretion, which means that such spending is actually … discretionary. Calling such spending “mandatory” is therefore a lie that serves only to conceal the choices Congress has made.
The U.S. government, its officers, and its agents should describe federal spending as either “automatic” or “appropriated.” There is no such thing as mandatory federal spending.
Update: I stand corrected.
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Yikes
Need some data to go with your recent vague sense of impending doom?
Mike Huckabee’s future contract at the Iowa electronic market opened on December 5th at 12 cents. It had doubled by the close of business December 8th. He is now thought to be tied for second for the GOP nomination.
Now, if I had an adjustable rate mortgage, my day would be complete.
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Media Bias
There’s an interesting new blog called The Monkey Cage written by three political scientists at the George Washington University. Any blog that takes its motto from H.L. Mencken deserves a look from libertarians, even if the authors are not libertarians (I have no idea whether they are or not).
The blog has only been up for a few days, but it already has some interesting posts on voter ID, campaign finance, and negative advertising in campaigns. The authors don’t follow the conventional wisdom on those issues. For example, they praise the work of Cato visiting research fellow John Mueller on the bias in threat assessments of terrorism. (You can find the short version of Mueller’s work here).
One of the group, John Sides, has a concise and interesting post on media bias.
His claim that newspapers are in the business of confirming the prior beliefs of their readers seems accurate, and yet it confirms the original concern (or, at least, a legitimate concern) about liberal bias: responding to readers or viewers leads to a biased or distorted account of reality.
Is there a market for unbiased reporting? You would think so, but perhaps not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We may just dump media messages, bias and all, into the marketplace of ideas and trust that something like an unbiased political result will come out the other end.
Reading Sides, some might wonder: Why not relieve the media of market pressure as a way of dealing with bias? That prompts another question: Are NPR and the CPB free of political bias in their reporting and analysis?
The post also prompted the following thought: I have worked on the campaign finance issue for many years now and I have never talked to a reporter from major media who doubted any part, much less the whole, of the reform case. Political scientists have not found that campaign contributions have much effect on members of Congress (see the earlier link). But that has not affected the prior beliefs of reporters . One raw assertion of corruption by Fred Wertheimer outweighes a hundred careful studies of the influence of money on politics. That might suggest that how monolithic liberalism is in the media depends on the issue. But still, do reporters favor reform because they are liberal or because they get to write “Look, corruption!” a couple times a week? Or do they favor reform because it tends to suppress accounts of reality and messages that compete with the product offered by their employers? In other words, do they support regulations that confer directly nonproductive deadweight rents on their employers?
Finally, Sides does not discuss the Milyo-Groseclose study of media bias. Maybe he will in future posts.
We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to Help You Buy a House
There has been some good analysis of this week’s much-hyped agreement between the U.S. Treasury Department – which facilitated the meeting, we are told, but didn’t use any form of coercion – and mortgage lenders to bail out assist homeowners in danger of being slammed with a much higher monthly payment on their subprime mortgage come January. But there are some elements of the deal that haven’t been greeted with much skepticism – or, indeed, haven’t been reported much at all.
For starters, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson insists the agreement won’t cost taxpayers money. What he really should have said is that it won’t cost federal taxpayers money. But it might cost state taxpayers money. The White House will push Congress to let state governments issue tax-free bonds to fund programs that help homeowners refinance their mortgage. Those bonds have to be paid off by taxpayers some day. I usually like federalism, but this is not the sort I’ve grown to love.
Another part of the deal is to allow the Federal Housing Administration to expand its programs and help refinance 200,000 mortgages. As Paulson reminded reporters, the administration is asking Congress to increase the ceiling on the amount of FHA loans and lower the down-payment requirements to below the current rate of 3% of the home price. And here I was thinking big loans that were handed out with little or no money down were part of what got us into this problem in the first place. Silly me.
Nor is it really clear that the administration’s approach here won’t actually cost federal taxpayers money, either. The proposal allows the FHA to charge loan insurance premiums based on risk, like private lenders do. Currently, all FHA mortgage holders – at a high-risk of default or not – are charged the same amount. You realize this is a much-needed change when you discover that currently the FHA is running deficit of $143 million because so many of its loans have gone bad and the premiums it collects from all loans isn’t enough to cover the losses. But, as Bloomberg News reports, the post-refinancing default rate of the subprime loans that the White House now wants the FHA to play with could be between 40 to 60 percent. Taxpayers might get stuck paying for these loans after all.
The implicit theme of these proposals is that Uncle Sam might just be better at this mortgage business thing than the private sector. I guess it might be tiresome to insert a joke here about the U.S. Postal Service, eh?
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Food Fight
My post mocking Senators Harkin and Murkowski for micro-managing school menus has triggered a bit of chatter. Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein saw a reference to the post on Andrew Sullivan’s site and they both argue that somebody should monitor what kids eat. But they completely miss the point. The debate is not about whether kids should be allowed to eat junk food all day. As a parent, I worry about what kids will eat without appropriate guidance (heck, I worry about what I eat in the absence of adult supervision). Instead, this is a federalism issue. Should these decisions be made by parents and local school boards, or by headline-seeking politicians in Washington? The good news is that at least one presidential candidate is saying no to federal food police:
Fred Thompson wants the government to keep its hands off your dinner plate. …“I’m telling you, I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat,” Thompson said to applause when asked if his health care plan included any details on preventative care, a priority for Democratic candidates. “The fact of the matter is we got an awful lot of knowledge,” said the former Tennesse senator. “Sometimes we don’t have a whole lot of will power, and I don’t know of any government program that’s going to instill that.” Thompson, ever a fan of small government, said healthy living should be the responsibilities of families first.
Based on these sentiments, Thompson presumably does not want Congress micro-managing school cafeteria menus. But what about the other GOP candidates? Ron Paul surely is on the right side. Does anybody know where Giuliani, McCain, Huckabee and Romney stand on this issue?
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Taxes in 2009
All the Democratic presidential candidates appear to agree that taxes must go up.
We have been here before. Bill Clinton promised tax cuts in 1992 and then supported increases. Democrats in Congress supported Clinton’s tax hikes just as they had voted for the 1990 tax increases.
The result? Democrats lost almost one-quarter (63 seats) of their House caucus in the elections for the 103rd and 104th Congress. The Republican president that proposed the 1990 increases lost two years later.
The current group of Democratic presidential contenders may have forgotten this history lesson. I suspect congressional Democrats running next year will remember it.