by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT
Randy Holcombe wrote an eloquent essay last month on the subject of “Black Lives Matter.” It’s a worthwhile piece to reproduce in its entirety.
“My initial reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, like many old white guys, was that All Lives Matter. But recent events have changed my thinking on this.
My old thinking: Racial discrimination is a reality, but race is just one of many personal characteristics on which people discriminate. Good-looking people tend to be favored over ugly people. Tall people tend to be favored over short people. People with British accents tend to be favored over people with Southern accents.
Everyone should be treated as an individual and not judged based on personal characteristics over which they have no control. That doesn’t always happen, but a free society does not force people to deal with others except on terms that are mutually agreeable. If someone discriminates based on race or any other characteristic, those discriminated against must deal with this as best they can. People can’t be forced to drop their biases.
My new thinking: When those who hold racial biases also hold government-issued firearms and are given a mandate to go after the bad guys, this is life-threatening to those who the people with the guns and the mandate are biased against. Everyone who is reading this is well aware of the number of video recordings of white cops killing black victims who posed no immediate threat to anyone.
On the rare occasions when I’m stopped by the police, I’m a bit nervous about it. If I were black, I would have good reason to be terrified.
I place some of the blame for the current situation on the war on drugs, and some on the way police are trained.
As for the war on drugs, any victimless crime requires that law enforcement actively search for violators, because those violating the law are trying to keep their activities hidden, and nobody has an incentive to report the activity. Victims of robberies or muggings report those crimes to the police and want the police to help them. Buyers and sellers of drugs want to hide what they are doing from the police, who then have to come up with various pretenses to try to detect drug activity.
It creates an adversarial relationship between police and citizens. All citizens. Because the police don’t know whether you’re a drug dealer or a drug user, everyone’s privacy is subject to violation and everyone is a suspect. But if police suspect that some races are more likely to be involved in drug activity than others (even if it is true), those people are subject to more invasive policing, and the relationship between those people and the police is even more adversarial.
As for the way police are trained, I have a minimal amount of firearms training, most of it from law enforcement personnel, and my views are partly based on that training. I admit up front my training is minimal and welcome anyone to provide more information and set me straight if I’m wrong. Two things have bothered me about the training I’ve received.
First, there was an emphasis on using a firearm to get a “bad guy.” That’s the term that was used over and over again. I’ll agree that muggers, home invaders, and carjackers are bad guys. Because of the law enforcement background of the people who ran the courses I took, I assume that they are trained using the same language. Their job is to get the bad guy. This type of training creates an adversarial mindset among law enforcement personnel, in contrast to “the policeman is your friend” type of propaganda we’ve heard.
When the police stop someone for questioning, the officer’s mindset isn’t “I’m your friend,” it is “there is a good chance this is a bad guy. That’s why I’m questioning him.” Combine that with a racial bias, and it’s bad for blacks.
Second, I’ve done some scenario training, also run by law enforcement personnel, and the heavy emphasis in the training I had was on shooting quickly to neutralize the threat. Something bad was always happening in those scenarios. It was never a mistake to draw and shoot quickly. The mistake was to fail to recognize the threat until the “bad guy” had the upper hand.
Think about the recent police shootings in this context. Police are trained that they are going after bad guys, and they are trained to react quickly to neutralize any perceived threat. Those police were just doing what they have been trained to do.
The war on drugs combined with the nature of police training makes police view themselves in an adversarial relationship with citizens. Combine this with the increasing militarization of the police, and the police start to look more like an occupying force rather than the protector of our rights.
The situation is unfortunate for everyone, but when a group of people find themselves more suspect just because of their race, it’s especially bad for them. Sure, all lives matter. But black lives are the ones most threatened by the ever more adversarial police state.”
by | BLOG, BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, TAXES
Massachusetts launched a new (modest) fee within the transportation industry with the stated attempt at modernization. But this isn’t that at all. It is a nickel taken for every transaction from one group of companies, and the proceeds will benefit another group of companies — their own competitors.
This new fee is imposed on “transportation network companies, or TNCs, such as Uber, Lyft, and Fasten. When Governor Charlie Baker signed a law earlier this month regulating TNCs, it included a little-discussed component. For every trip, the TNCs will have to contribute a nickel to a new fund to support modernization, training, and improvement of the taxi and livery industry. The 5-cent fee will stay in effect until the final day of 2021.”
Imagine having to involuntarily contribute to a fund whose stated purpose is the very companies/industry with whom you compete! That’s exactly what is happening here. It’s estimated that the nickel fee will generate about $15 million in revenue over the next few years, collected by Mass Development, the state economic development agency.
What’s worse is that there is no actual plan on how the money will be spent support modernize, train, and improve the taxi and livery industry — it’s still up in the air. But since the fee is now a given, this article here gives a wealth of interesting suggestions for the agency; it simultaneously exposes the fact that the Massachusetts bureaucrats are engaging in crony capitalism at its finest. Why is the government in the business of picking winners and losers among businesses?
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES
This is an excellent editorial piece from the Wall Street Journal discussing the surprise announcement that Aetna, one of the leading insurers in this country, was withdrawing from the vast majority of Obamacare exchanges. But instead of sitting up and seriously considering this massive defection as a wake-up call (unlike all the previous failures), the Democrats want to blame Aetna itself in order to safeguard the narrative that Obamacare is working perfectly well. I have reproduced the piece in its entirety below; it’s worth the read.
“Democrats claimed for years that ObamaCare is working splendidly, though anybody acquainted with reality could see the entitlement is dysfunctional. Now as the law breaks down in an election year, they’ve decided to blame private insurers for their own failures.
Their target this week is Aetna, which has announced it is withdrawing two-thirds of its ObamaCare coverage, pulling out of 536 of 778 counties where it does business. The third-largest U.S. insurer has lost about $430 million on the exchanges since 2014, and this carnage is typical. More than 40 other companies are also fleeing ObamaCare.
The mass exodus will leave consumers consigned to the exchanges with surging premiums and fewer options, but don’t mention these victims to Democrats. They’re trying to change the subject by claiming Aetna is retaliating because the Justice Department is trying to block Aetna’s $37 billion acquisition of Humana.
The 2010 ObamaCare law makes it nearly impossible for non-mega insurers to operate, and a tide of regulations has encouraged consolidation. Aetna says the Humana tie-up will create economies of scale that could sustain the money-losing exchange policies.
But Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is now emoting on Facebook that “The health of the American people should not be used as bargaining chips to force the government to bend to one giant company’s will.” This week the Administration also released a July 5 letter from Aetna in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Democrats claim the document shows CEO Mark Bertolini conditioning Aetna’s ObamaCare cooperation on merger approval.
This is some gall. Aetna was answering a June 28 “civil investigative demand,” in which Justice’s antitrust division specifically asked how blocking the merger would “affect Aetna’s business strategy and operations, including Aetna’s participation of the public exchanges related to the Affordable Care Act.”
Soliciting sensitive internal information that Aetna is legally compelled to provide—and then making it public to sandbag the company—is the behavior of political plumbers, not allegedly impartial technocrats. If police tried this, it’d be entrapment.
Mr. Bertolini had merely replied that the legal costs of an antitrust suit would strain Aetna’s performance. The insurer would have “no choice but to take actions to steward its financial health” and “face market realities,” such as reducing unprofitable business. Public companies have a responsibility to shareholders, and the wonder is that any insurer is still part of the exchanges.
ObamaCare’s troubles aren’t the result of any business decision. The entire industry is caught in the law’s structural undertow. Despite subsidies, overall enrollment is flat, there’s too much monthly churn, and the exchanges aren’t attracting enough healthy people to make the economics work.
Blame the law’s architects, not Mr. Bertolini, who must wonder what happened to the political goodwill he has tried to bank over the years. Aetna was inclined to accept the exchanges as loss leaders to support ObamaCare’s mission of universal coverage. The company led ObamaCare’s industry pep squad in 2009 and 2010.
The calculation then was that subsidies would open a new market, and consumers would be mandated to buy their products. But in the final frenzy to pass the law, Democrats decided that insurers made too much money and they imposed price controls on profit margins. Now insurers are accused of declining to throw away more money.
The ObamaCare implosion means that about a quarter of U.S. counties will have only one or two plans, and in some zero. Areas in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas seem to be hardest hit, though the extent of the damage is still emerging.
Democrats figure they have insurers over a barrel because a Hillary Clinton Presidency is coming. She’s running on higher subsidies for beneficiaries, a taxpayer bailout for the industry, and a “public option” akin to Medicare for the middle class. In health care the solution to a problem caused by government is always more government, which will create new problems and beget more government.
Republicans have no obligation to participate. They had no hand in creating this mess and they’ve been mocked by Democrats and the media for years for warning about ObamaCare’s flaws and trying to repeal and replace the law. Assuming the GOP holds at least the House, they should insist that any “fixes”—which are fast becoming inevitable—create a rational health-care market. Democrats deserve to be held accountable for the collapse of their ideas.”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, CONSTITUTION, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES
Aetna’s decision to withdraw from 11 out of 15 state exchanges is a big deal; it follows the paths of UnitedHealth Group and Humana, both large insurance companies who have also chosen to cut ties with Obamacare. (Incidentally, the DoJ is trying to block a Aetna-Humana merger; are they worried about competition?)
A short analysis by Market Watch provides some insight into the decision and the current state of Obamacare:
**Aetna explained the decision as a way to “limit our financial exposure moving forward,” after pretax losses of $200 million in the second quarter and losses totaling $430 million on individual products since January 2014. The company did not specify what portion of the losses was attributable to individual public plan offerings.
**The company criticized the ACA’s “inadequate” risk-adjustment mechanism, which is meant to limit insurers’ losses as they start covering sicker individuals. It’s a common criticism from health insurers, which have long said that the risk-pool program isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, though others say big insurance companies should instead change their model to keep costs down.
**Of Aetna’s exchange membership this year, more than half is new, with those needing expensive care making up “an even larger share” in the second quarter, the company said.
**Coupled with the risk pool, this makes premiums costlier and “creates significant sustainability concerns,” the company said.
The affect of these withdrawls means fewer insurers and fewer choices for consumers than when the law first began several years ago. That’s not good. The law needs some reform. MarketWatch notes, “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has indicated a willingness to make changes to the risk-pool mechanism, although it’s unclear whether legislation to that end would be passed.
Any fixes will also depend on strong enrollment figures. Premiums have increased for 2017, but the financial penalty for not having health insurance has also increased. Whether that penalty, an average of $969 per household, according to a Kaiser analysis, will prompt increased enrollment is a “big wild card,” according to a co-author of the Kaiser report. A rise in premium costs “suggests additional enrollment growth is not a given,” said Riggs, having potential negative implications for hospital and managed care, along with investors in those spaces.”
Will this have an impact on the 2016 election? It will be interesting to see — especially since the open enrollment period is slated to begin on November 1, just days before the 2016 election. The cost of premiums, especially if they are substantially higher, may affect people’s voting decisions. Of course, don’t put it past the Administration to delay open enrollment until Nov 15 and shift everything by two weeks, in order to avoid a “November surprise”. The only thing that’s not a surprise at this point is that the law continues to founder considerably, at the expense and disruption of everyday citizens.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, POLITICS
I recently posted an article from the National Review, which was an update from a previous article written 20 years ago — in 1995 — on the same subject: Hillary Clinton’s too-good-to-be-true commodity trading luck. The article provides an excellent analysis on all the things inconsistent with Hillary’s trade activity from the 1970s, documented the inconsistencies with Hillary’s explanations of how she seemingly got lucky, defied the odds, and made large sums of money.
Here’s a primer on commodity trading, and why Hillary Clinton’s trade deals are important for this election cycle. It’s very clear for anyone that Hillary really didn’t do any trading as she claimed; she allowed her broker to execute trades on her behalf.
With commodity trading: say you want 100 shares of X. You buy it with your trader, the trader goes down to the floor, does the transaction, it gets recorded under your name, and that’s that. So for instance, if you are buying futures — say 1000 head of cattle at a certain price — you are not actually buying the cattle, you are buying a future price. That means, you buy what you think the price will be at a certain point in time. With commodity trading you have the right to buy or sell these contracts, you have margins in which to operate,, and you can end up earning money or losing money if the price fluctuates widely.
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Now back in the day when Hillary was trading, the futures were often handled differently than they are currently. The brokers were so busy, they didn’t have the time or ability to record who did what in real-time like they do today; it was done after the market closed — but that’s also when a lot of buying and selling. happened. So Hillary Clinton’s broker, who had tied to Tyson Food and was a cattle producer could engage in beneficial trading; folks like him were always buying and selling futures because they were directly in the market.
The National Review article (Clinton’s Cattle Futures) is important because it provides a very detailed explanation of Hillary’s transactions. Hillary Clinton really wasn’t buying cattle; she was getting payoffs through her broker and who was just throwing profits into her account.
Three important points can be gleaned from the information. First, Hillary told everyone that anyone could have profited from the type of trading she (supposedly) did. But she really didn’t do the trading; in fact, it’s quite obvious that she didn’t even understand what kind of transactions were taking place. Most of her deals were actually downward movements when the market in general was going up, but she didn’t know that. It’s called trading on the short side — and no rational, inexperienced trader would know to or understand the thought of trading against the market trends, yet she did on several occasions, quite lucratively. Even today, she talks about riding a strong market, showing she doesn’t obviously understand that much of her profits were made by doing the exact opposite.
The second important point was the margin. Especially today, but even back then, no professional broker would allow you to execute a trade and any penny of movement that would make you lose thousands or cause your balance to be severely in the negative. For their own sake, they’d make sure you had collateral your account, and you need to have decent margin in case the cattle price changed 4-5 cents (which would translate into thousands). But Hillary Clinton regularly made trades with risks in the thousands, even if she only had hundreds in her account — and even negative on occasion. Hillary and Bill also lived on meager salaries with very little (if any) collateral. The fact that she was allowed to trade with consistently little-to-no margin is actually a violation of trade rules because it also puts the trader at risk — there’s no way any regular customer could do that.
3) The third salient point is in regard to the trading activity. There were a series of trades that she bought within 10% of the lowest price of the day, and when she sold, she sold within 10% of the highest price of the day. As any serious trader knows, there is no way anyone could consistently do that — unless there was help. If the broker was waiting at the end of the day, he could put the buys at below price and sells at the high price, so that she always made money; it is quite plausible this was the case, due to the record keeping methods and the name misspelling (HILARY) substantiate this.
It’s quite annoying to read the National Review article and consider how it squares up with the people who investigated Hillary’s trades at one point and declared there was no problem. Given what we know now, do these experts still think they were correct, or do they know they were bamboozled along with the rest of us.
There’s no possibility Hillary is telling the truth in this matter.
by | BLOG, ECONOMY, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
I always like to periodically check in on what’s going on in the world of federal debt and federal tax collections. The good folks over at CNS News consistently report the figures that come out of the U.S. Treasury so we can periodically see how our federal finances are doing. Here’s the latest snapshot:
During the 90 full months President Barack Obama has completed serving in the White House—February 2009 through July 2016–the U.S. Treasury collected approximately $19,966,110,000,000 in tax revenues (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars), according to the Monthly Treasury Statements.
During those same 90 months, the federal debt rose from $10,632,005,246,736.97 to $19,427,694,579,786.64—an increase of $8,795,689,333,049.67.
In July, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today, the federal government took in $209,998,000,000 in taxes and spent $322,813,000,000—running a one-month deficit of $112,815,000,000.
So far in fiscal 2016, according the Treasury statement, the federal government has collected approximately $2,678,824,000,000 in taxes and spent approximately $3,192,487,000,000—running a deficit of $513,662,000,000 for the first ten months of the fiscal year.
Given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that there were 151,517,000 people employed in the United States in July, the $19,966,110,000,000 in taxes the Treasury has collected during Obama’s first 90 full months in office equals approximately $131,775 per worker.
The $8,795,689,333,049.67 in additional debt the federal government incurred during Obama’s first 90 full months in office equals approximately $58,051 per worker.
The Treasury only needs to pull in another $33.89 billion in taxes to reach the $20 trillion mark for Obama’s presidency. (The $19,966,110,000,000 the Treasury pulled in during the first 90 full months of Obama’s presidency equals approximately $221,845,666,666.67 per month).
During the first 90 full months George W. Bush was president (February 2001 through July 2008), according to the Monthly Treasury Statements, the Treasury collected approximately $16,048,182,000,000 in taxes.
(From February 2001 through January 2009, the Treasury collected $17,251,191,000,000 in taxes. Bush was inaugurated on Jan, 20, 2001 and left office on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was sworn in.)
The $16,048,182,000,000 in taxes the Treasury collected during Bush’s first 90 full months in office equaled approximately $110,273 for each of the 145,532,000 persons who had a job as of July 2008.
During the first 90 full months of George W. Bush’s presidency, the debt rose from $5,716,070,587,057.36 to $9,585,479,639,200.33—an increase of $3,869,409,052,142.97. That equaled approximately $26,588 in added debt for each of the 145,532,000 persons who had a job as July 2008.
Here, according to the numbers published in the Monthly Treasury Statements, are the total receipts the Treasury has brought during the 90 full months President Barack Obama has completed in office:
Feb. 2009-Sept. 2009: $1,330,887,000,000
Fiscal 2010: $2,161,728,000,000
Fiscal 2011: $2,302,495,000,000
Fiscal 2012: $2,449,093,000,000
Fiscal 2013: $2,774,011,000,000
Fiscal 2014: $3,020,371,000,000
Fiscal 2015: $3,248,701,000,000
Oct. 2015 – July 2016: $2,678,824,000,000
90 Month Total: $19,966,110,000,000
