You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now.
How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to
someone who is lonely or discouraged.
Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today,
but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
Dale Carnegie
Image of the Day
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| Via Citizens Against Government Waste |
(HT Carpe Diem). Of those professors and university administrators whom contributed in 2013:
Over 8 out of 10 professors and administrators have contributed to Democratic candidates, causes, organizations and PACs in 2013...A little over 1 out of 10 professors and administrators donated to Republican and conservative causes, organizations or PACs. The donations were split among a variety of candidates and organizations, ranging from Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez, Maine’s liberal Susan Collins to the Republican National Committee (RNC).The Healthcare Cancellation Kerfuffle
I haven't found a good explanation in print yet of why so many grandfathered policies are being cancelled all of a sudden; we see obscure explanations like the following:
The [grandfathering] rule essentially prevents insurance companies from keeping their grandfathered status if they make changes to their plans. In practice, insurance companies are loath to leave their plans unchanged so grandfathered plans are disappearing, and people are being forced to change their plans to meet Obamacare’s more robust coverage requirements.From a "progressive" source:
From an insurance company’s point of view, grandfathered plans limit flexibility, since it cannot significantly modify benefits, premiums or cost-sharing.
Under the ACA, a grandfathered plan can lose its status if out-of-pocket costs increase above the rate of medical inflation plus 15 percent, co-insurance rates increase, annual benefit limits decrease, employer contributions decrease by more than 5 percent, or the plan eliminates coverage for a previously covered condition.It's difficult to see how modest tweaks to co-pays, benefits, deductibles, etc., would explain why companies are canceling thousands, even millions of profitable policies, just as we're heading into 2014. But the same op-ed unwittingly provides a clue:
A grandfathered plan is any policy in existence before March 23, 2010, when the ACA became law. Grandfathered plans must eliminate lifetime benefit caps, offer coverage to dependent children over age 26 and eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions in 2014, but they are exempt from most other ACA reforms.Bingo! I think we have a winner. I have repeatedly talked about guaranteed issue and community rating being a problem, a perversion of the very concept of insurance; they basically void underwriting, risk assessment; insurers are basically required to offer money-losing policies from day 1. I don't want to hear any "progressive" rationalization of how various plans, approved by state regulators, have an inadequate benefit base, are canceled as soon as anyone so much as files a claim (in particular, an alleged abusive process called "rescission", i.e., insurers looking for a loophole, like an innocuous application error, to get out of paying a claim), and so on. This is so intentionally misleading "progressive" propaganda, I finally found a relevant post from healthcare guru John Goodman. Here is an excerpt:
In fact, it has been illegal since 1997, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for insurers to drop coverage because someone gets sick. And even before then, the practice almost never happened...
Rescissions [when an insurer cancels a policy and returns the premiums to the policyholder, thus voiding the original contract. It almost always happens because the insurance application form is discovered to have fraudulent, misleading or simply wrong information on it] are very rare. They apply only to the individual market (less than 10% of private health insurance) and even then they occur less than 4/10ths of 1% of the time. Even when it does happen, there is almost always an appeals process where the decision is reviewed by an internal committee and often submitted to outside reviewers. Further, when insurers are wrong – as they may sometimes be – it is the job of state regulators to correct this injustice.I originally intended to point out that many reputable insurers are in the individual policy market and would tarnish their reputation with abusive practices, it would be hard to see how millions of people would be duped into paying for health insurance that didn't deliver on promised benefits, but Goodman makes the same point:
Think of it this way: Do you think there would be a vibrant, active, ongoing life insurance industry if insurers could renege on their part of the contract after someone dies? How many of us would buy fire insurance if the insurers could change their minds and refuse to pay after our house burns down? Would you buy auto insurance from Allstate if the “good hands” could disappear after a collision occurs?
These things do not happen becauseThe CNN piece doesn't meet my personal standards for readability; when we think of grandfathering policies, we are talking about exemptions from new policies. But, as I've quoted above, this isn't true. The Democrats were worried about grandfathered plans becoming workarounds to the ObamaCare exchanges and decided to add rules and regulations that from their perspective leveled the playing field. But even Dem projections showed up to two-thirds of plans would be cancelled because of the restrictions in the grandfather clause. The GOP introduced a bill to block implementation of the restrictive grandfather clause and the Democrats voted it down in a party-line vote, despite GOP predictions of a wave of cancellations exactly like what we're seeing.
- Insurers are contractually obligated to keep their side of the bargain and courts enforce these obligations just like any other contract;
- Regulatory agencies enforce good behavior, quite apart from any lawsuit, and;
- An insurer that routinely refused to pay claims would lose customers and go out of business.
An Exchange With A "Progressive" Troll
I hinted at the start of this exchange in a rant at the start of yesterday's FB corner. I've recognized this troll from various other LFC threads with his usual predictable nonsense; it seemed inevitable that sooner or later he would target me. In this case, he decided not to let it go, but come back for a second helping (also very predictable). (And I don't believe for a second he'll stop there; do I think one of my replies will result in a Eureka moment where he suddenly realizes the errors of his way? Of course not. It wouldn't surprise me if he comes back for more, but it's probably not worth my time to pursue a thread that few, if any, will ever read.) For the convenience of readers, here's the comment which initially set him off:
Virtue is intrinsic to moral development. One does not help people by enabling dysfunctional behavior or by reinforcing undue dependence on others. The virtuous man does not compel virtue in others or otherwise subordinate them to himself.
I will not let the likes of Glenn Beck demonize the word 'progressive', Glenn Beck who calls himself a libertarian and says we should beat kids until they believe in God. It is shameful to be the richest country in the world and still have a homeless population. We also have the world's largest prison population. Land of the free. Ha! Free market. Ha! Crony capitalism billionaires are running both the corporations and the government, but you're gonna try to take people's food instead of focusing on the criminals at the top. Why don't you focus on the criminals at the top?
First, I don't or have ever listened to Beck, but I would rather live in a world full of Becks than pretentious holier-than-thou hypocrites like yourself, whom think envy of others is noble. If and when a person becomes a billionaire, it's by being successful in the consumer marketplace, which benefits the economy as a whole. Unlike the government, businesses can't force you to pay for something you don't want or need. Stop exaggerating the ills of cronyism--the government, even spending money it doesn't have, only accounts for a fraction of GDP, and unless you make billions in profits from government contracts, which are typically up for bid, you're making money from elsewhere in the economy. Homeless--some people are homeless by choice, others face problems, in part due to public sector economic and monetary policy failures; many private-sector charities seek to help those temporarily down on their luck. An economy with a $1.8T regulatory regime is hardly a laissez-faire economy. I personally don't drink, smoke or do drugs, but I don't have the "progressive" mindset of putting people in a cage for their own good. You would be better off stop reading crackpot conspiracy theories, scapegoating rich people for government failures, and starting to think for yourself instead of listening to megalomaniac "progressives" whom make a living off the public sector teat and couldn't so much as run a lemonade stand.
Facebook Corner
(LFC.) Hi, I am a libertarian. I have been voting for several years, every election since 18 I voted for libertarian. However since then the State has grown, rather than shrunk. Although I still have hopes, I am getting pretty weary of the system and utilizing it as a means to reduce the state. Even with candidates like Amash, Cruz, Rand Paul while I don't deny their good intentions, I have grave doubts that they can prevent the state from growing. Plus I have my doubts that, again, as well as their intentions are and hearts in the right place, they can reduce the state. And in some cases some of the politicians elected, not necessarily the ones I named, end up being part of the same system.
Now I concede that I do think those same individuals are important because they bring ideas to the national spotlight and introduce newcomers, like Ron Paul who was an educator, but ultimately I am beginning ideas and alternate means of reducing the state are needed.
What are your thoughts?"
First, Ron Paul is a medical doctor, not an educator, although he's become more high profile in homeschooling since retiring from Congress last year. I think to some degree you're correct: we are on a $3.7T Titanic--and just look at a no-brainer like privatizing the USPS; we are one of the few countries not to do so. Most offices lose money--no dispute about the facts, but it's all but politically impossible to shutter money-losing facilities. (Incidentally many of the money-losing facilities are in red area strongholds.) I, too, have been frustrated by GOP legislators whom pick on small-change things like public television subsidies; Romney should never have been debating Big Bird. But notice that the GOP has to battle off all the special interests vested in the status quo; the Dems have successfully politically attacked the GOP over the slightest reforms of the Ponzi scheme entitlements. We know that we can elect the likes of Calvin Coolidge, someone with the balls to actually veto spending bills, to pay down on the debt. A couple of concluding notes: the GOP House has at least kept a spendthrift like Obama from spending even more--the budget has actually leveled off since 2010, a critical first step. Second, I think it will take the equivalent of a massive public sector failure and the GOP equivalent of a 2008-style super-majority election to make the kinds of reforms needed. Our earliest change is 2016 since Obama will be a lame duck after next year's election--but a GOP win of the Senate would be a step forward--because we can use the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. Obama could still veto a bill that "doesn't spend enough"; a lot depends on his approval ratings, but most likely he would have to negotiate to dress up his legacy (e.g., immigration reform); he'll also come under partisan pressure from Dems worried over a 2016 change election.
(Learn Liberty) People of all ideologies and backgrounds have advocated for a basic minimum income.
Do you think this age-old idea will ever come to fruition in the U.S.? Is this something you support?
Whereas I find the whole concept of Statist redistribution as morally hazardous, with any necessary short-term assistance provided by the private sector charities, churches, etc., I am sympathetic with an interim Murray-style reform of the existing paternalist, top-heavy bureaucratic, economic rent-seeking social welfare net, cutting out the expensive parasitic bureaucracy, and empowering the disadvantaged to spend the money directly.
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| Via LFC |
If I have spent my life developing a better mousetrap, and if I want to market my innovation which may pay back my time and effort--and some self-righteous pirate beats me to the marketplace with my own invention, he is stealing from me. Saying that I'm still with my original prototype is little consolation, when he is profiting from my work, not his.
Why is that everyone feels a need to blame the GOP? Was it the GOP that got us into 4 bloody wars last century, created the social welfare net, passed multiple Ponzi scheme entitlements, created a $1.8T regulatory empire? Bush never had a super-majority in Congress, and the Dems controlled the Senate for half his tenure. And remember--Bush's disagreements with the Dems involved that he didn't spend nearly enough on education, the doughnut hole on the new Medicare drug benefit. Did Bush make mistakes? Of course. But since Obama spent his entire first term bashing Bush, and years before then, isn't this rather like pushing on a string? Do the moderators really think they are being seen as "pro-Bush"? Why don't you talk about the hypocritical Obama carrying on Bush mistaken policies, doubling down on Afghanistan, even renominating Bernanke?
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| Via LFC |
(LFC). A $10 minimum wage does not produce high-paying jobs. In fact, it destroys jobs, because jobs that were being done for below $10 per hour and can be replaced by machinery will be replaced by machinery. Government price fixing of the minimum wage means supply and demand don't meet: There's a shortage of jobs aka unemployment. The minimum wage makes low-skill workers too expensive to hire. (Teal)
for many companies, labor is their largest expense, raise that, then automation becomes more viable
The largest expenses stem from human training and hiring costs, not from wages. It is eight-to-ten times more expensive for a corporation to hire someone than it is for the same corporation to pay their annual salary
[Discussant's] point is invalid because it isn't relevant to the salient discussion of lower-end, less skilled labor. There's not a lot of training in flipping a burger, operating a cash register or cutting a lawn or expense in recruiting teen workers; look at the long lines of job applicants, say, when WalMart opens a new store. The problem is little gains in productivity at the lower end; price-fixing in general fails, creating surpluses (e.g., minimum wage) or shortages (price cap). Hiring does occur at the margin; if you have a surplus of unemployed at the existing wage, raising the minimum wage just results in more unemployed and/or reduced working hours. Raising the minimum wage also makes substitutes (like mechanization) more cost-effective. Few jobs are minimum-wage--proving that most jobs don't benefit from the price fix. All the government achieves is arbitrarily shutting the door on starter jobs for mostly teen or young adult workers not supporting a household.
(LFC citing this article). "Yet, don't mistake their differences of opinion as an “agreement to disagree.” Libertarians on both sides of the debate continually engage with the other side. But not because they are looking to win the debate. They are looking to discover the truth."
No, I find that libertarians are more interested in battles of ideological purity, which is not unlike conservative purges in the GOP or "progressive" purges in the Jackass Party. To give a simple example, consider the intolerance of AnCaps to minarchists. I've almost never seen minarchists go after AnCaps unless directly provoked. And libertarians often go after, say, GOP conservatives, even though they are the most viable allied opposition to the Statists in control of the federal government. Few people seem to remember that it was the GOP conservatives whom bitterly opposed Bush's unpaid-for expansion of Medicare benefits and whom fought passage of TARP. Yet this group takes every chance to bash GOP conservatives as simply "Progressive Dems, Lite Edition".
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| Via LFC |
(LFC). The Chinese central government has enslaved millions of people for belonging to the wrong religion, criticizing the government, and other victimless crimes. The American central government has also enslaved millions of people for victimless crimes (source: http://bit.ly/1jdjzeZ), and the US has enslaved far more people than China (source: http://nyti.ms/RnZlBV). China is winding down slavery: Will the US? (Teal)
Oh, PLEASE. The Chinese government persecutes you for trying to have a second child....
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via LFC |
Musical Interlude: My Ipod Shuffle Series
John Denver, "Annie's Song". One of the greatest love songs of the 70's. The inner record producer in me has often daydreamed of doing the song as a duet, say paired with Enya or one of Celtic Woman in a more traditional Irish musical arrangement
