It turns out you can still buy a 20 oz. sweetened beverage in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York. And guess whose municipal coffers you’re benefiting when you do? Ira Stoll has details. Earlier podcast here.
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George Will Quotes Cato Study Showing IPAB Is Even Worse than Romney Says
In Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney claimed that ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board is “an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have.”
President Obama officially denies it, yet he confirmed Romney’s claim when he said, “what this board does is basically identifies best practices and says, let’s use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do.”
In this excerpt from his column in today’s The Washington Post, George F. Will quotes my coauthor Diane Cohen and me to show that IPAB is even worse than Romney claimed:
The Independent Payment Advisory Board perfectly illustrates liberalism’s itch to remove choices from individuals, and from their elected representatives, and to repose the power to choose in supposed experts liberated from democratic accountability.Beginning in 2014, IPAB would consist of 15 unelected technocrats whose recommendations for reducing Medicare costs must be enacted by Congress by Aug. 15 of each year. If Congress does not enact them, or other measures achieving the same level of cost containment, IPAB’s proposals automatically are transformed from recommendations into law. Without being approved by Congress. Without being signed by the president.
These facts refute Obama’s Denver assurance that IPAB “can’t make decisions about what treatments are given.” It can and will by controlling payments to doctors and hospitals. Hence the emptiness of Obamacare’s language that IPAB’s proposals “shall not include any recommendation to ration health care.”
By Obamacare’s terms, Congress can repeal IPAB only during a seven-month window in 2017, and then only by three-fifths majorities in both chambers. After that, the law precludes Congress from ever altering IPAB proposals.
Because IPAB effectively makes law, thereby traducing the separation of powers, and entrenches IPAB in a manner that derogates the powers of future Congresses, it has been well described by a Cato Institute study as “the most anti-constitutional measure ever to pass Congress.”
Our paper is titled, “The Independent Payment Advisory Board: PPACA’s Anti-Constitutional and Authoritarian Super-Legislature.” It broke the news that, as Will writes, ObamaCare “precludes Congress from ever altering IPAB proposals” after 2017.
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How Much ‘Compassion’ Is Really Just Posturing?
Magatte Wade, a Senegalese-American businesswoman in New York, writes in The Guardian:
Last Saturday I spoke at the Harvard Women in Business Conference, an annual event that I love…
Later, during a discussion on Going Global, a young woman asked, “For the Americans on the panel, how do you deal with being a person of privilege while working in global development?” My eyes lit up with fury as she directed her question specifically at the white Americans on the panel. I let them answer, then smiled and added with a wink: “I am an American, you know, and also a person of privilege.” She instantly understood what I meant.
Her question assumed that those of us in developing nations are to be pitied…
For many of those who “care” about Africans, we are objects through which they express their own “caring”.
To drive the point home, Wade posts this excellent video of “actor Djimon Hounsou perform[ing] a powerful rendition of Binyavanga Wainaina’s piece How Not to Write About Africa.”
(NB: The title of the original article appears to be “How to Write about Africa,” without the “Not.”)
It runs both ways. In Replacing ObamaCare, I discuss how “the act of expressing pity for uninsured Americans allows Rwandan elites to signal something about themselves (‘We are compassionate!’). ” Also:
My hunch is that this is an under-appreciated reason why some people support universal coverage: a government guarantee of health insurance coverage provides its supporters psychic benefits — even if it does not improve health or financial security, and maybe even if both health and financial security suffer.
Or as Charles Murray puts it: “The tax checks we write buy us, for relatively little money and no effort at all, a quieted conscience. The more we pay, the more certain we can be that we have done our part, and it is essential that we feel that way regardless of what we accomplish.”
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How Convenient
William G. Shipman, co-chairman of Cato’s Project on Social Security Choice, notes
If you listened to President Obama during the first presidential debate, you’d think job growth during his presidency has been robust. He stated right up front “Over the last 30 months, we’ve seen 5 million jobs in the private sector created.” Well, 30 months is interesting because he’s been president for 44 months, so what’s happened since he’s been in charge? From January, 2009 through August, 2012, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, non-farm private sector employment has fallen by 261,000 jobs. Federal government employment has risen by 14,000, state government jobs have fallen by 158,000, and local government jobs have fallen by 532,000. Total jobs lost: 937,000. If you cherry-pick the data, February, 2010 shows the lowest private-sector employment since Obama has been president, down 4,317,000 jobs since his inauguration. So any comparison using that date as the starting point would result in the greatest growth in employment. It’s also 30 months ago from the Bureau’s latest reported data. How convenient to use that date. Do you think the president knew this, or did he forget that he took office in January, 2009? Cherry picking data to cover the reality of overall job losses does not help the American people go back to work, and it certainly doesn’t help the credibility of the President.
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All Eyes on Venezuela on Sunday
Venezuelans will go to the polls on Sunday for their most important presidential election in a generation. At stake is the end of the thuggish, corrupt, and autocratic 14 year-old regime of Hugo Chávez.
The opposition, led by Governor Henrique Capriles Radonsky, has a real chance of winning the vote—if it’s fairly done. The most credible polls show a very tight race with still a number of Venezuelans undecided. However, there are good reasons to believe that most of the undecided are actually “hidden” votes for Capriles, people who are intimidated or afraid to express their support for the opposition candidate.
As I’ve written before, it won’t be a fair election. Four out of the five seats in the National Electoral Council (CNE) are loyal chavistas. The CNE has resorted to increasingly dirty tricks. The latest has been to announce that people who mark one of Capriles’ pictures in the ballot won’t actually be voting for him, but for a lesser known third candidate (see the explanation here).
The electoral registry, which is controlled by Cuban operatives, has increased its size by 58 percent since 2001, even though Venezuela’s population has risen only 18 percent during that period. Fourteen of the country’s 24 states have more registered voters than total adult population. There is even the documented case of 2,272,706 voters that appear to live at the same address.
Thus, even though the opposition claims that it is well prepared to defend its votes at the polling stations, it is very likely that in the dawn hours of Monday, the CNE will announce Chávez as the winner. In my opinion, there is no real scenario under which Chávez would accept defeat by Capriles. The question then becomes: what happens next?
One thing to watch for is the reaction of the so-called Bolivarian militia, which consists of die-hard chavistas that have been well armed with Russian rifles and trained by the government to “defend the revolution.” Some estimates put their number at 25,000 people, enough to terrorize those opposition supporters who might consider going to the streets to protest against electoral fraud. It is still a mystery what the reaction of the army would be if chaos broke out in the streets of Caracas and elsewhere. Several generals have profited enormously from the regime, and they would loath to see Chávez go. But the extent to which they actually control the troops is unknown.
The Obama administration has been wise to avoid making statements about Venezuela’s election prior to the vote. Any comment by a U.S. official will play into Chávez’s hands as a gross interference by the “Empire” in Venezuela’s sovereignty. Nonetheless, Washington should keep an eye on the election and its aftermath. The outcome will likely have far-reaching consequences for the region.
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DHS Fusion Centers: Small Part of Homeland Security Waste
Fusion centers are “pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions.” That’s the Washington Post’s summary of a report, two years in the making, released Tuesday by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigation.
With all due respect to the Senate investigators, who did thorough and commendable work here, it does not take two years and 140 pages to reach their conclusion. Along with the ACLU, Cato scholars have made similar arguments for years.
Fusion centers grew from the revelation in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks that federal security agencies, states governments, and local law enforcement were failing to share information about terrorists. Although the attacks resulted as much from the difficulty of distinguishing pertinent information from the rest as from impediments in information-sharing, it was reasonable to address the second problem. But whether that required physical spaces devoted to information sharing—let alone the 70-plus of them we now have spread across the country—is another story.
The wisdom of that spasm of bureaucratic creation turned largely on the truth of the official insistence in the panicky aftermath of the attacks that the United States was rife with thousands of hidden al Qaeda operatives and that mass casualty attacks would occur with the regularity of extreme hurricanes. Predictably, there weren’t enough terrorists to go around. And it doesn’t take Max Weber to see that their dearth wouldn’t cause the searchers to slacken their efforts. Fusion centers became a classic solution in search of a problem.
One way to justify fusion centers was to expand their enemy to “all hazards.” A second was to exaggerate the terrorist menace, for example by insisting that its quiescence indicated that it was not weak or absent, but well-hidden and patient (note: the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, especially when you are searching a lot; it’s just not proof of absence). Of course, advocates overstated the fusion centers’ contribution to terrorism arrests. And even without arrests, they could conflate activity with success, by pointing to, for example, leads pursued and cases opened as if they were security itself. That last technique continues today in the pushback to the Senate report.
Keep in mind that fusion centers, which cost federal taxpayers at most a few hundred million a year, are symptoms of a larger problem. The entire national security apparatus has grown by leaps and bounds since 2001 thanks to a threat that has, thankfully, proved vastly weaker than most thought.
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Romney and Obama on the Role of Government
President Obama and Mitt Romney effectively delivered clashing statements on the role of government last night. That’s an issue I discuss in the latest issue of Reason, in a review of two new books, To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government, edited by Steven Conn, and Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, by E. J. Dionne, Jr. It’s not online yet, so you’ll have to go to the newsstand to buy a copy! Obama seemed to be channeling the Conn book, with its endless repetition of “things the government did for us”:
I also believe that government has the capacity — the federal government has the capacity to help open up opportunity and create ladders of opportunity and to create frameworks where the American people can succeed. Look, the genius of America is the free enterprise system, and freedom, and the fact that people can go out there and start a business, work on an idea, make their own decisions.
But as Abraham Lincoln understood, there are also some things we do better together.
So in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said, let’s help to finance the Transcontinental Railroad. Let’s start the National Academy of Sciences. Let’s start land grant colleges, because we want to give these gateways of opportunity for all Americans, because if all Americans are getting opportunity, we’re all going to be better off. That doesn’t restrict people’s freedom; that enhances it.
And so what I’ve tried to do as president is to apply those same principles.
Romney had a different view:
The role of government — look behind us: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
The role of government is to promote and protect the principles of those documents. First, life and liberty. We have a responsibility to protect the lives and liberties of our people, and that means the military, second to none. I do not believe in cutting our military. I believe in maintaining the strength of America’s military.
Second, in that line that says, we are endowed by our Creator with our rights — I believe we must maintain our commitment to religious tolerance and freedom in this country. That statement also says that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to pursue happiness as we choose. I interpret that as, one, making sure that those people who are less fortunate and can’t care for themselves are cared by — by one another.
We’re a nation that believes we’re all children of the same God. And we care for those that have difficulties — those that are elderly and have problems and challenges, those that disabled, we care for them. And we look for discovery and innovation, all these thing desired out of the American heart to provide the pursuit of happiness for our citizens.
But we also believe in maintaining for individuals the right to pursue their dreams, and not to have the government substitute itself for the rights of free individuals. And what we’re seeing right now is, in my view, a — a trickle-down government approach which has government thinking it can do a better job than free people pursuing their dreams. And it’s not working.
His rhetoric was certainly more appealing to libertarian voters. But when Romney waxes eloquent about freedom, the rubber rarely meets the road. He’s the father of the health care mandate. His view of liberty, above, is a strong military. His closing argument, about the candidates’ “two very different paths,” ended with a promise not to cut Medicare or the military. He promised to deliver “energy independence” and to crack down on countries that sell us goods.
More on why libertarians are skeptical about big government here — and in Reason!