Quotulatiousness

October 22, 2012

The “unbridgeable gap” of Gerald Caplan

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

In the National Post, Jonathan Kay pokes fun at Globe and Mail columnist Gerald Caplan:

… the plucky Caplan is still at it. And his theories remain ambitious and apocalyptic. Over the weekend, for instance, he grandly declared that Canada “is no longer a united county.”

“Why? Because an “unbridgeable gap” has opened up between “extremists” and people who are “level-headed.” Caplan suggests the former category is composed of Canada’s equivalent of “The Tea Party, the Koch brothers [and] the National Rifle Association.” The latter category, meanwhile, is composed of people who think like Gerald Caplan.

A few paragraph later, Caplan tells us that “Many Canadians believe the Harper government has shattered the historic mould. Harperland is a place many Canadians do not recognize as theirs. Mr. Harper seems not to share many traditional Canadian cultural values.”

Values like what, precisely? I wondered. Universal health care? The welfare state? Equalization? Bilingualism? Gay marriage? The land of unregulated abortion?

None of those have changed.

Or maybe Caplanites feel alienated in a country without a Wheat Board and a long-gun registry. But that’s like saying you don’t “recognize” your house since your wife rearranged the tupperware drawer.

July 1, 2012

Reason.tv: 3 Big Takeaways From Obamacare Decision

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

Here are the three most important things you need to know in the wake of the Supeme Court’s decision on The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare:

1. Government is still unlimited.
2. Mitt Romney is still lame.
3. Health care costs will still soar.

For more details, go to http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/29/3-essential-takeaways-from-the-obamacare

“… except in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

The National Post editorial board celebrates Canada Day by making a case for Canadian exceptionalism:

The acronym “EIC” can refer to a newspaper’s editor-in-chief, the various forms of the storied East India Company, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and, in scientific circles, Electromagnetically-induced chirality. But in these odd times, they might also be deployed, for verbal economy, to denote “except in Canada.”

As in: Banks all over the Western world have suffered a series of shocks since the 2008 financial crisis – EIC. Economies have slowed — EIC. Real estate bubbles have popped — EIC. Deficits have ballooned to crisis proportions — EIC.

OK: Perhaps national pride leads us to exaggeration. A more truthful acronym might be EICAG — to include Canada “and Germany.” Various smaller European nations, as well as countries in Asia and Latin America, also have fared well. Yet it is hard to remember a time (if ever there was one) when Canada’s fortunes, taken as a whole, were so rosy compared to those of all other Western nations. This good fortune is something worth celebrating as we prepare to celebrate Canada’s 145th birthday this weekend.

They even have some praise to lavish on two former prime ministers who don’t normally get a kind word from the right:

Canada’s relative lack of red ink also is no accident. Two decades ago, Canada was what Greece was today: a bloated welfare state running up massive bills that it couldn’t pay. The unpopular job of fixing the balance sheet feel primarily to Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin — and they accomplished the task without any of the political chaos that has been gripping Athens and other southern European capitals in the last year. The prosperity and stability we enjoy today is in large part due to what those two men did with the fiscal mess bequeathed to them by Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau.

Of course, not everything is going wonderfully well in the Dominion: we still have not emulated one of the notable successes of our European friends:

One of the few institutional factors holding Canada back is its healthcare system. As Shaun Francis writes elsewhere on these pages, our refusal to explicitly permit full-blown private alternatives to the current government-payer health monopoly is bad policy that is out of keeping with that of leading European jurisdictions.

Fortunately, this is a shortfall that can be cured easily. As the furor over Obamacare in the United States shows, building a universal public health system is difficult. But Canada has already done this heavy lifting over the last 50 years: All we lack now is a parallel private track — and that is something that will spring into being without any governmental action at all, save the legislative stroke of a pen needed to modify the Canada Health Act accordingly.

March 30, 2012

Reason.tv: Remy explains health care mandates

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

March 28, 2012

The “Greatest Generation”, then the “Luckiest Generation”, and now the bill comes due

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

John Kay on the luck of the Baby Boomers:

I belong to a lucky generation: too young to have experienced the Depression, or the second world war, or postwar austerity. The first political figure I recognised was Harold Macmillan, who told voters they had never had it so good.

His statement was true, if foolish, and my contemporaries and I benefited. The government paid us to go to university. We took for granted we would choose between attractive job offers. I was quickly appointed to a post from which it was practically impossible to be fired and which offered a pension scheme with generous, index-linked benefits. I bought a flat with a mortgage whose value was wiped out by inflation. By the time I was paying a higher rate of income tax, the level had been cut from 83 per cent to 40 per cent. My life expectancy is several years longer than my father’s, and I have already considerably exceeded the age at which his father died.

If young people today want to attend university, they will have to pay for tuition and borrow to meet living expenses. When they graduate, they face a much more competitive job market. Few careers will offer the job security once characteristic of middle-class employment. Defined benefit schemes have almost disappeared from the private sector, and public sector pensions are to be substantially less generous. Tax rates must rise, partly to pay for the care and medical treatment I will demand as senility advances. The only financial consolation for the next generation is the windfall when we leave them our houses.

The first half of the baby boom generation certainly were the luckiest cohort in human history. The second half of that generation didn’t do quite as well, the Gen X kids and the Millennials are going to be stuck with most of the bill for all the government-provided goodies that the early boomers have arranged for themselves. Pensions and healthcare, in particular, will have to be reined in for younger workers … just as the bulk of the early boomers have squeezed all the juice out of the system.

Aside from retroactively cutting back the benefits to baby boomers, the only other way to mitigate the financial burden is growth, but most governments in the west are pursuing goals that will not help and in many cases will retard economic growth.

March 27, 2012

Reason.tv: Obamacare goes to the Supreme Court

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:33

Does the fate of a federal government with limited powers rest in the hands of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia? And if so, will he rule against broad federal powers (as he did in the Gonzales case) or in favor of the feds’ right to regulate just about anything (as he did in the Raich case)?

The Supreme Court case over The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, “is certainly the most important case on the reach of federal power in 50 years” says attorney and legal scholar Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “The constitutional principle of where is the line drawn on federal power — that’s a matter that our children and grandchildren will have to live with.”

The ruling will come sometime in early June, predicts Sandefur, who tells Reason.tv that the Affordable Care Act raises multiple constitutional issues: Can part of the law be struck down and other upheld? Is the “individual mandate,” which forces all Americans to purchase insurance as a condition of simply being alive, legal? Does the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid shred the right of states to govern their own finances?

November 3, 2011

A “fat tax” would not improve anyone’s health or the healthcare sector

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Politicians and “food celebrities” in many western countries are calling for a tax on obesity, either on the foods that “make people fat” or on obese people themselves. Other than being incredibly regressive (poor people in the west tend to be fatter than well-off people), such a tax would do nothing to address the problem it is supposed to solve:

The regular calls for a fat tax — whether on the ‘wrong’ foods or on fat people themselves — are symptomatic of two regressive trends in society. The first is the view that experts know best, that these latter-day sages can come to an impartial view based on The Science, then guide government about the appropriate policy action. The new, evidence-based policy usually involves some kind of manipulation of our individual behaviour from gentle ‘nudges’ and increasing taxes through to criminalisation, as in the case of the smoking ban.

But this is not evidence-based policy, but policy-based evidence, with preconceived ideas being pushed through in the name of science at a time when those at the top of society have lost the ability to convince the electorate on the basis of a moral or political argument. This style of policymaking rarely solves social problems, but it does distort both politics and science.

The second worrying trend is the sheer intolerance towards obese people. Being very overweight has always attracted a certain amount of moral opprobrium. But Hatton’s outlook reflects a sea-change. Once, the NHS reflected a progressive outlook that disease was a misfortune that could strike any of us at any time and that the best thing to do was to share that burden across society. Now it’s every man and woman for themselves. In the worldview of Hatton and Coren, some morally weak individuals are costing them money and must be punished.

Ironically, this flows from a left-wing view of disease as having social causes. In the late Seventies, left-wingers correctly saw that some ill-health was the result of poverty, poor housing, polluted air, and so on rather than infection or bad luck. Unfortunately, this has morphed into the idea that disease is caused by individual behaviour — and so health professionals have taken to camping out in our private lives, demanding we stop smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things. Every naughty little pleasure must now be sacrificed to the god of longevity. If we don’t play ball, this intolerance suggests we should lose our right to treatment.

The disease of intolerance is likely to have a far more detrimental effect on society than obesity ever could.

October 24, 2011

Wendy McElroy: Get government out of the food-banning business

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Wendy McElroy thinks that governments should get their “greasy hands” off her food choices:

Thus, when government dictates what you may or may not eat — takes away your choice — it is restricting your heritage, your religious and political choices, the control over your own body; telling you that a choice every bit as personal as freedom of speech or the art you view is not yours to make. It is making a fundamental decision for you, and they try to make it better by telling you it’s for your own good.

Imagine if the government had literary experts that decided that certain books weren’t good for you. They didn’t make you smarter or teach you anything. They weren’t classic pieces of literature. And even though you were happy to buy your books with your own money and read them privately, the state still decided it didn’t want you to have access to them. People would be outraged. Why is it any different when the government is counting calories instead of artistic merit?

The typical counter-argument is to say that since society pays for our health care, we owe it to society to lead healthy lives. In short, your neighbour has a vested financial interest in what goes into your body. If you won’t take care of it, the government will make you.

This line of reasoning — rather than justifying a Nanny State or a nosy neighbor dictating your personal choices — constitutes a powerful argument against socialized medicine, but it doesn’t do much to say that the government should control what you eat. If socialized medicine had been advertised decades ago as a government mandate to control the minutia of your daily life, then it would probably have never been implemented.

All of us should of course take care of ourselves, but for our own sake. We are the architects of our own lives and that includes our health. It is not the place of the state to try and control what we can eat because some people make bad decisions. Though it seems trivial to many, it’s an important point to make. Food is part of who we are and how we related to the world. We need to kick the government out of our kitchens.

October 2, 2011

Tyler Cowen on why “no new taxes” won’t work this time

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Almost everyone (except Warren Buffett) agrees that higher taxes are a bad thing, and the GOP candidates are all singing from the same hymn book about not imposing higher tax rates. Under normal circumstances, this might work. Tyler Cowen explains why these aren’t normal times and how “no new taxes” isn’t a serious way to deal with America’s financial problems:

Consider the example more closely. Cutting $10 in spending for every $1 in tax increases would result in $9 in net tax reduction. That’s because lower spending today means lower taxes tomorrow, and limiting the future path of government spending does limit future taxes, as Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate and conservative icon, so clearly explained. Promising never to raise taxes, without reaching a deal on spending, really means a high and rising commitment to future taxes.

Furthermore, this refusal to contemplate a tax increase — which I’d characterize as an extreme Republican stance — has brought what seems to be an extreme Democratic response: President Obama’s latest budget plan is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy. We may be left with no good fiscal options.

The problems with a no-new-taxes stance run deeper. Because it’s unlikely that spending cuts alone can balance the budget, politicians who espouse extreme antitax views often end up denying the scope of our long-run fiscal problems.

[. . .]

The more cynical interpretation of the Republican candidates’ stance on taxes is that they are signaling loyalty to a cause, or simply marketing themselves to voters, rather than acting in good faith. It could be that candidates are more worried about having to publicly endorse tax increases than they are about the tax increases themselves. If that’s true, it is all the more reason to watch out for our pocketbooks; it means that the candidates are protecting themselves rather than the taxpayers.

The final lesson is this: Many professed fiscal conservatives still find it necessary to pander to voter illusions that only a modicum of fiscal adjustment is needed. That’s an indication of how far we are from true fiscal conservatism, but also a sign of how much it is needed.

August 29, 2011

Kaus: Ten things Obama should have done differently

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Mickey Kaus thinks the President would have been much better off (and the US economy too) if he’d done several things differently:

Excessively well-sourced Obama boosters are now channeling, not just White House spin but White House self-pity. Both Ezra Klein and Jonathan Alter wonder aloud why our intelligent, conscientious, well-meaning, data-driven President is taking a “pummeling.” ”What could Obama have done?” (Klein) “What, specifically, has he done wrong .. .?” (Alter)

They’re kidding, right? There are plenty of things Obama could have done differently. Most of these mistakes were called out at the time. Here, off the top of my head, are ten things Obama could have done:

[. . .]

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. Whoever else is to blame, the UAW’s demands for pay and work rules clearly contributed to the need for a taxpayer-subsidized auto bailout. To make sure that future unions were deterred from driving their industries into bankruptcy, Obama demanded cuts in basic pay of … exactly zero. UAW workers gave up their Easter holiday but didn’t suffer any reduction in their $28/hour base wage. Wouldn’t a lot of taxpayers like $28 hour jobs? Even $24 an hour jobs?

[. . .]

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”–two misguided pieces of legislation that Obama must have known had no chance of passage but that he had to pretend to care about to keep key Democratic constituencies on board. What was the harm? The harm was that these issues a) sucked up space in the liberal media, b) made Obama look feckless at best, delusional at worst, when they went nowhere; c) made him look even weaker because it was clear he was willing to suffer consequence (b) in order to keep big Democratic constituencies (labor, Latinos) on board.

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism” — that is, fears that he was creating a more Putin-style economy in which big businesses depend on the government for favors (and are granted semi-permanent status if they go along with the program). I don’t think Obama is a corporatist, but he hasn’t done a lot to puncture the accusations. What did electric carmaker Tesla have to promise to get its Dept. of Energy subsidies? Why raid GOP-donor Gibson’s guitars and not Martin guitars? We don’t know. At this point, you have to think the president kind of likes the ambiguity–the vague, implicit macho threat that if you want to play ball in this economy, you’re better off on Team Obama. That’s a good way to guarantee Team Obama will be gone in 2013.

Oh, and for a bonus bit of unwelcome news for President Obama, his uncle has just been arrested for drunk driving. His illegal alien uncle, who now faces deportation.

August 22, 2011

US government spending: “we’ll pay for it all by raffling off unicorn rides and following leprechauns to find pots of gold”

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

Steve Chapman notes the difficult transition from supporting spending cuts in general to supporting specific program cuts:

The good news is that the idea of serious spending restraint has more support than ever before. The bad news is that getting people to support the concept is easy. The hard part is getting beyond the concept, and there is no sign so far of doing that.

Several Republican presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum, have taken what sounds like an uncompromising stand. They’ve signed on to a plan sponsored by a group called Strong America Now to eliminate the federal deficit by 2017 without tax increases.

But the plan is not a plan. It’s a fantasy. As Strong America Now’s website explains, it is supposed to “detect and eliminate 25 percent of spending per year across the federal government.” Per year. Seriously.

Not only that, but those cuts are supposed to excise nothing but vast quantities of waste — rather than programs that actual people care about. And my impression is that we’ll pay for it all by raffling off unicorn rides and following leprechauns to find pots of gold.

[. . .]

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid soak up some 40 percent of the budget, and their share will expand as baby boomers sidle off into retirement. But in an April Economist/YouGov survey, only 7 percent of Americans — including just 9 percent of Republicans — favored lower funding for Social Security. Medicare? Also 7 percent, with 11 percent of Republicans agreeing.

Even the rise of the Tea Party and the fight over the debt ceiling have not caused people to come to grips with fiscal reality. An August Economist/YouGov poll found that 56 percent of Americans said we can bring spending under control without reductions in Social Security and Medicare. Only 24 percent admit what every fiscal expert knows.

August 17, 2011

Ontario enables a “snitch line” in the fight against private health care

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

The Ontario government is fighting back against even the hint of privatization of health services in the province by, among other things, setting up a new snitch line:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that people are trying to get around (the law)…. I think it’s really important that we all protect our universal health-care system,” the Health Minister said in an interview. “It’s just important that we are ever-vigilant.”

Critics, however, call the initiative a politically motivated waste of money that could be better spent on improving actual medical services. In the lead-up to this fall’s provincial election, the Liberal government seems anxious to portray itself as a steadfast defender of public health care.

“How is this going to improve patient care for anybody?” Brett Skinner, president and health-care analyst at the conservative Fraser Institute think-tank, asked about the snitch line. “It’s not helping patients get better access. In fact, it’s designed to prevent patients from getting better access.”

The Canada Health Act generally forbids health-care providers from charging patients directly for services that are covered under medicare. Various private health services have cropped up in Quebec, B.C. and Alberta in recent years, however, with little interference by the federal government.

The Ontario Liberals, on the other hand, have presented themselves as strenuous foes of private health care.

July 18, 2011

It won’t hurt just the “rich”

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Michael Boskin illustrates just what the current levels of US government spending will mean when translated into personal tax rates:

Many Democrats demand no changes to Social Security and Medicare spending. But these programs are projected to run ever-growing deficits totaling tens of trillions of dollars in coming decades, primarily from rising real benefits per beneficiary. To cover these projected deficits would require continually higher income and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare on all taxpayers that would drive the combined marginal tax rate on labor income to more than 70% by 2035 and 80% by 2050. And that’s before accounting for the Laffer effect, likely future interest costs, state deficits and the rising ratio of voters receiving government payments to those paying income taxes.

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%. The income tax increases to cover the CBO’s projected federal deficit in 2016 raises that to 52%. Covering future Social Security and Medicare deficits brings the combined marginal tax rate on that middle-income taxpayer to an astounding 71%. That teacher working a summer job would keep just 29% of her wages. At the margin, virtually everyone would be working primarily for the government, reduced to a minority partner in their own labor.

Nobody — rich, middle-income or poor — can afford to have the economy so burdened. Higher tax rates are the major reason why European per-capita income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is about 30% lower than in the United States — a permanent difference many times the temporary decline in the recent recession and anemic recovery.

While policy makers may shrug off the impact of higher tax rates, it has a significant effect on individual choices when it comes to part-time jobs, overtime, and even raises. Even if in reality working a few hours of overtime won’t make a difference, psychologically, the higher tax burden can act as a deterrent: “why put in the effort if the government gets more out of my effort than I do?”

June 6, 2011

“How are we supposed to have a mature debate when any criticism is seen as treason?”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Mark Piggott on the need to be honest about the state of the British NHS in order to improve healthcare:

The UK National Health Service is like a relative: we are allowed to slag off this national treasure, but woe betide anyone else who tries it. I have no idea if the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, really wants to improve the institution or dismantle it and sell it off to the highest bidder, but whatever his motives, anyone who uses the system knows it needs surgery; no amount of knee-jerk op-eds will change that salutary fact.

In this unhealthy climate I feel obliged to state that I believe in the NHS; many medics do a fine job and healthcare should be free at the point of need. Yet having witnessed the care provided to my grandmother, 89, following a diagnosis of lung cancer, I believe that unless the NHS is willing to admit and tackle its flaws, it will have to shoulder some of the blame if the private sector convinces politicians it can run things better.

[. . .]

After collecting my father from the lobby, we went back to the ICU. A bossy woman at the nurse’s dock insisted she wasn’t on that ward; I had to point nan out, in one of the few occupied beds behind her. The woman compounded her mistake by acting as if we were in the wrong. Many users of the NHS will be familiar with this attitude: that ill people and their relatives are simply a nuisance preventing the otherwise smooth running of the system.

[. . .]

The doctors organisation, the British Medical Association (BMA), reacting with customary promptness, has called Lansley’s reforms ‘mad’. They may be right, but the BMA, like the politicians, has a vested interest in how the NHS is run. As can be witnessed by its endless lectures on the evils of alcohol, the BMA appears to be in the fortunate position of being able to get any message, no matter how authoritarian, to the media, who then obligingly splash it across every front page and news bulletin. Perhaps we haven’t really changed that much from the days of my grandparents, who always believed that doctor knew best.

May 26, 2011

Here’s a different way to pay for socialized medicine

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Kevin Drum has an interesting proposal in Mother Jones:

So here’s an idea: why not reform Medicare by means testing it? Conservatives should love this idea.

Here’s how it works. Basically, we leave Medicare alone. Oh, we can still go ahead with some of the obvious reforms. Comparative effectiveness research is a no-brainer for anyone who’s not part of the Republican leadership. Ditto for some of the delivery reforms on the table. Or allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices. It would be great if that stuff works. But if it doesn’t, then people will need to pay more for their care. So why not have dead people pay? They don’t need the money any more, after all.

So Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don’t have to pay it, though. It’s just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you’ve gotten lots of free medical care. If it’s large, you’ll pay for it all. If you’re somewhere in between, you’ll end up paying for part of the care you’ve received.

Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That’s fine. I suspect they wouldn’t end up spending as much as you’d think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn’t it?

It has the virtue of acknowledging that free healthcare isn’t actually “free” at all.

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