12 March 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
ObamaCare Cost-Estimate
Watch, Day #265 [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 08:20P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
Today, the Congressional Budget Office released what may be the
penultimate cost estimate of ObamaCare. Or maybe it will be the 12th-to-
the-last. Whatever.
That document — unlike the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan —
includes no cost estimates of the legislation’s private-sector mandates.
As I have written previously, the private-sector mandates accounted for
60 percent of the cost of the Clinton plan. The Obama plan is remarkably
similar, which is probably why Democrats have systematically
suppressed any such estimates this time around.
President Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the CBO estimates do
not reflect the legislation’s full cost. Yet it has now been 265 days since
Congress saw the first version of the Obama health plan, and we’re still
waiting for a full cost estimate.
And so, the ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch maintains its lonely vigil.
At least The New York Times is listening.
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FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Slippery Standards Slope [Cato
at Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 05:42P.M.
By Neal McCluskey
The draft national curricular standards released yesterday, as I wrote
earlier, will in all likelihood do little or no educational good if adopted.
They’ll either be ignored or, if hard to meet, dumbed-down.
That said, the really troubling question is not whether the standards will
do any good, but whether they will do much harm.
The answer: Oh, they’ll do harm. They’ll move us one step closer
to complete centralization of education, which portends many potentially
bad things, from total special-interest domination to even more wasteful
spending.
Perhaps the most concerning possibility is that complete centralization
— meaning, federalization — will lead to nationwide conflict over what
the schools should teach, much as we are seeing in Texas right now
and witnessed in the 1990s, the last time Washington tried to push
“voluntary” national standards. Back then national standards in several
subjects were proposed, and a national firestorm was set off over what
they did, and did not, contain.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative folks clearly learned
from the nineties experience, assiduously avoiding even the appearance
of mandating the reading of specific literary works and focusing instead
on skills. (The draft standards include a lot of reading exemplars but
don’t require knowledge of any specific literary pieces). As a result, the
response so far seems much less heated than occurred in the nineties,
though critiques of the proposed standards certainly do exist. Once
control over language arts skills and mathematics is fully centralized,
however, can we really expect specific content standards in literature and
other subjects to be left entirely to states and districts?
It seems unlikely: Once Washington connects receipt of federal
funding to performance on national standards for some subjects, it is
very likely to expand into others. After all, aren’t science, history, and
other topics as important as reading and math?
“Promoting” science is a huge favorite of federal politicians, so it’s
certainly hard to imagine science — and the freighted questions about
human origins and climate change that go with it — not becoming a
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
target for nationalization. Similarly, since many public schooling
advocates argue that we must have government schools to create good
citizens, it’s hard to envision the controversy-laden subjects of history
and civics not entering the sites of federal politicians. And when they do,
we can either expect the sparks to fly, or the standards that are set to be
so milquetoast as to be meaningless.
Wait. Am I being overly alarmist about this, trying to start a trumped-up
slippery-slope scare to undermine the current national standards push?
Nope. National standards supporters are already talking about targeting
science and history. For instance, in the forward to International
Lessons about National Standards, a recent report from the national-
standards-loving Thomas B. Fordham Institute, it is written about the
CCSSI:
Our authors would prefer for science to be included in this
first round, and we’d like to get to history sooner rather than
later.
And Fordham is not alone. Indeed, the CCSSI folks have already been
talking about creating national science and social studies standards!
When should all kids learn evolution, if at all? How much Hispanic
history should students know? How many Founding Fathers should high
school grads be able to identify? What caused the Civil War? Is global
warming a major threat? Are we a Christian nation? How these and
numerous other bitterly contested questions will officially be answered
will suddenly have to be duked out by every American, and the winners
will get to dictate to the entire nation.
So the language arts and math standards revealed yesterday are, almost
certainly, just the camel’s nose under the tent. Unfortunately, that means
the whole destructive beast isn’t far behind.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Every Time I Say “Terrorism,”
the Patriot Act Gets More
Awesome [Cato at
Liberty“Terrorism,” the Patriot
Act Gets More Awesome]
MAR 11, 2010 04:38P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
Can I send Time magazine the bill for the new crack in my desk and the
splinters in my forehead? Because their latest excretion on the case of
Colleen “Jihad Jane” LaRose and its relation to Patriot Act surveillance
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12 March 2010
powers is absolutely maddening:
The Justice Department won’t say whether provisions of the
Patriot Act were used to investigate and charge Colleen
LaRose. But the FBI and U.S. prosecutors who charged the
46-year-old woman from Pennsburg, Pa., on Tuesday with
conspiring with terrorists and pledging to commit murder in
the name of jihad could well have used the Patriot Act’s fast
access to her cell-phone records, hotel bills and rental-car
contracts as they tracked her movements and contacts last
year. But even if the law’s provisions weren’t directly used
against her, the arrest of the woman who allegedly used the
moniker “Jihad Jane” is a boost for the Patriot Act,
Administration officials and Capitol Hill Democrats say.
That’s because revelations of her alleged plot may give
credibility to calls for even greater investigative powers for
the FBI and law enforcement, including Republican
proposals to expand certain surveillance techniques that are
currently limited to targeting foreigners.
Sadly, this is practically a genre resorted to by lazy writers whenever a
domestic terror investigation is making headlines. It consists of
indulging in a lot of fuzzy speculation about how the Patriot Act might
have been crucial—for all we know!—to a successful investigation, even
when every shred of available public evidence suggests otherwise. My
favorite exemplar of this genre comes from a Fox News piece penned by
journalist-impersonator Cristina Corbin after the capture of some
Brooklyn bomb plotters last spring, with the bold headline: “Patriot Act
Likely Helped Thwart NYC Terror Plot, Security Experts Say.” The actual
article contains nothing to justify the headline: It quotes some lawyers
saying vague positive things about the Patriot Act, then tries to explain
how the law expanded surveillance powers, but mostly botches the basic
facts. From what we know thanks to the work of real reporters, the initial
tip and the key evidence in that case came from a human infiltrator who
steered the plotters to locations that had been physically bugged, not
new Patriot tools.
Of course, it may well be that National Security Letters or other Patriot
powers were invoked at some point in this investigation—the question is
whether there’s any good reason to suspect they made an important
difference. And that seems highly dubious. LaRose’s indictment cites the
content of private communications, which probably would have been
obtained using a boring old probable cause warrant—and the standard
for that is far higher than for a traditional pen/trap order, which would
have enabled them to be getting much faster access to more
comprehensive cell records. Maybe earlier on, then, when they were
compiling the evidence for those tools? But as several reports on the
investigation have noted, “Jihad Jane” was being tracked online by a
groups of anti-jihadi amateurs some three years ago. As a member of
one group writes sarcastically on the site Jawa Report, the “super sekrit”
surveillance tool they used to keep abreast of LaRose’s increasingly
disturbing activities was… Google. I’m going to go out on a limb and say
the FBI could’ve handled this one with pre-Patriot authority, and a
fortiori with Patriot authority restrained by some common-sense civil
liberties safeguards.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
What’s a little more unusual is to see this segue into the kind of
argument we usually see in the wake of an intelligence failure, where the
case is then seen as self-evidently justifying still more intrusive
surveillance powers, in this case the expansion of the “lone wolf”
authority currently applicable only to foreigners, allowing
extraordinarily broad and secretive FISA surveillance to be conducted
against people with no actual ties to a terror group or other “foreign
power.” Yet as Time itself notes:
In fact, Justice Department terrorism experts are privately
unimpressed by LaRose. Hers was not a particularly
threatening plot, they say, and she was not using any of the
more challenging counter-surveillance measures that more
experienced jihadis, let alone foreign intelligence agents, use.
Which, of course, is a big part of the reason we have a separate system
for dealing with agents of foreign powers: They are typically trained in
counterintelligence tradecraft with access to resources and networks far
beyond those of ordinary nuts. What possible support can LaRose’s case
provide for the proposition that these industrial-strength tools should
now be turned on American citizens? They caught her—and without
much trouble, by the looks of it. Sure, this domestic nut may have
invoked to Islamist ideology rather than the commands of Sam the Dog
or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories… but so what? She’s still one more
moderately dangerous unhinged American in a country that has its fair
share, and has been dealing with them pretty well under the auspices of
Title III for a good while now.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
For ObamaCare to Become Law,
House Must Approve Senate Bill
Unchanged [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 03:52P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
According to Roll Call:
The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack
Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill
before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation
package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.
So…before you can amend a law, it has to be a law? What a concept.
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12 March 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
ObamaCare Will Include
Taxpayer-Funded Abortions
[Cato at Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 03:32P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
According to MSNBC, Democratic leaders have given up on trying to
appease pro-life House Democrats:
House leaders have concluded they cannot change a divisive
abortion provision in President Barack Obama’s health care
bill and will try to pass the sweeping legislation without the
support of ardent anti-abortion Democrats.A break on
abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic
leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change
health care in America. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying
to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a
small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in
the House…
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of
the Energy and Commerce Committee…predicted some of the
anti-abortion lawmakers in the party will end up voting for
the overhaul anyway.
Pro-life Democrats will vote for taxpayer-funded abortions? Without
even a fig leaf of a compromise?
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The Senate Bill Would Increase
Health Spending [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 01:53P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
Ezra Klein quotes the Congressional Budget Office’s latest cost estimate
of the Senate health care bill when he writes:
“CBO expects that the legislation would generate a reduction
in the federal budgetary commitment to health care during
the decade following 2019,” which is to say that this bill will
cover 30 million people but the cost controls will, within
a decade or so, leave us spending less on health care
than if we’d done nothing. That’s a pretty good deal. But
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
it’s not a very well-understood deal.
Indeed, because that’s not what the CBO said.
First, the CBO said the “federal budgetary commitment to health care”
would rise by $210 billion between 2010 and 2019 under the Senate bill.
Then, after 2019, it would fall from that higher level. And it could fall
quite a bit before returning to its current level.
Second, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” is a concept
that includes federal spending on health care and the tax revenue that
the federal government forgoes due to health-care-related tax breaks, the
largest being the exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance premiums.
If Congress creates a new $1 trillion health care entitlement and finances
it with deficit spending or an income-tax hike, the “federal budgetary
commitment to health care” rises by $1 trillion. But if Congress funds it
by eliminating $1 trillion of health-care-related tax breaks, the “federal
budgetary commitment to health care” would be unchanged, even
though Congress just increased government spending by $1 trillion.
That’s what the Senate bill’s tax on high-cost health plans does: by
revoking part of the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, it
makes the projected growth in the “federal budgetary commitment to
health care” appear smaller than the actual growth of government.
Third, the usual caveats about the Senate bill’s Medicare cuts, which the
CBO says are questionable and Medicare’s chief actuary calls “doubtful”
and “unrealistic,” apply. If those spending cuts don’t materialize, the
“federal budgetary commitment to health care” will be higher than the
CBO projects.
Fourth, Medicare’s chief actuary also contradicts Klein’s claim that the
Senate bill would “leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done
nothing.” The actuary estimated that national health expenditures would
rise by $234 billion under the Senate bill.
And really, Klein’s claim is a little silly. Even President Obama admits,
“You can’t structure a bill where suddenly 30 million people have
coverage and it costs nothing.”
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12 March 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Jay Greene Minces No Words
on National Ed. Standards [Cato
at Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 01:37P.M.
By Andrew J. Coulson
Jay makes a number of good points in his blog post on the subject, but
particularly effective is his likening of “voluntary” education standards to
“voluntary” state speed limits tied to federal highway funding.
When someone takes your money and will only give any of it back if you
do as he says, are your actions really voluntary? That’s what the Obama
administration and other “voluntary” standards advocates are proposing.
More soon on the folly of imposing a single set of age-based education
standards on the entire nation. Stay tuned.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
They Spend WHAT? The Real
Cost of Public Schools [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 01:10P.M.
By Chris Moody
Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local
budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and
reported in the media often leave out major costs of education, and
understate what is actually spent.
In a new study, Cato’s Adam B. Schaeffer reviews district budgets and
state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of
Columbia. Schaeffer finds that, on average, per-pupil spending in
these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.
In this new video, Schaeffer explains the whole thing in under three
minutes:
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com 12 March 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Open All of Obama’s Health Thursday Links [Cato at

Care Meetings to C-SPAN [Cato Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 12:44P.M.
at Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 12:51P.M. By Chris Moody

By Michael F. Cannon • Greece, here we come…. Congressional Budget Office estimates

budget deficits will average nearly $1 trillion per year for the next
From my op-ed in The Daily Caller: decade.

ObamaCare would dramatically expand government control • Matt Drudge re-titles a Cato op-ed: “Mob Tactics Used to Push
over health care. Healthcare Through.”

Each new power ObamaCare creates would be targeted by • Daniel Griswold: “On trade, as on so much else, the populists have
special interests looking for special favors, and held for it wrong again. Free trade and globalization are great blessings to
ransom by politicians seeking a slice of the pie. families across America.“

ObamaCare would guarantee that crucial decisions affecting • Could Dennis Kucinich bring both sides of the aisle together to end
your medical care would be made by the same people, the war in Afghanistan?
through the same process that created the Cornhusker
Kickback, for as far as the eye can see. • Podcast: “Seventies Redux?” featuring John Samples, author of the
forthcoming book The Struggle to Limit Government.
When ObamaCare supporters, like Kaiser Family Foundation
president Drew Altman, claim that “voters are rejecting the
process more than the substance” of the legislation, they’re
missing the point. FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

When government grows, corruption grows. When voters Orwellian Headline of the Day
reject these corrupt side deals, they are rejecting the
substance of ObamaCare. [The Club for Growth]
MAR 11, 2010 12:23P.M.
If Obama is serious about fighting corruption, he should
invite C-SPAN to into every meeting he holds with members Right after the House GOP What chutzpah!
of Congress.

Then we’ll see whether he’s lobbying House members based

on the Senate bill’s merits, or promising House members
judgeships or ambassadorships in exchange for their votes.

What’s going on behind those closed doors, anyway? Aren’t

you just a little bit curious?

Or does corruption only happen when Billy Tauzin is in the room?

5
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
If There’s Money, We Want It!
(Whatever “It” Is.) [Cato at
Liberty“It” Is.)]
MAR 11, 2010 12:05P.M.
By Neal McCluskey
There seems to be a real trend in Washington to declare support for a bill
now, but actually have the bill exist later. It’s been most obvious in the
health care marathon, where often purely notional pieces of legislation
have been boisterously celebrated or bemoaned for months. It’s also the
case with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which may or
may not be tacked on to health-care reconcilation because supporters
don’t, you know, want to actually debate the thing. Currently, there is no
Senate version of SAFRA, and it’s unclear what changes would need to be
made to the House version to make it reconcilable.
So why are so many people willing to take big chances on legislation that
only exists in the fertile minds of congresspeople? As this Inside Higher
Ed article on community colleges illustrates, it’s often because they want
taxpayer money — $12 billion is the community colleges’ hoped for
windfall – no matter what:
Sensing the urgency of the moment on Capitol Hill, many
community college advocates believe that budget
reconciliation is the most likely route for passage of the AGI
this year. They argue that time is of the essence for those
community college trustees and presidents visiting town for
the summit to lobby their representatives and senators
without focusing on quibbles over the bill.
“I know there’s a lot of discussion for many of you [about]
what’s in the program,” said Jee Hang Lee, ACCT director of
public policy. “‘What’s in the final program for SAFRA?
What’s in the final program for AGI? What is it going to look
like?’ What we’ve heard is that, for the most part, the House
and Senate staffs and the White House have something in
place. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know many
people who do know what it looks like. But they have a broad
agreement on the structure of these programs, so that’s nice
to know that they have because that means it’ll likely get
funded.”
Still, he advised visiting trustees and presidents to be direct
in their support for the bill and wait until later to work out
potential kinks in its specific provisions.
“My point is that you just need to press hard to get this
money and get it passed, and we can work out some of the
details, I guess, later, I guess through the negotiated rule-
making period,” Lee said.
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12 March 2010
Hmm. And I guess money grabs like these explain a good bit of why the
national debt is now approaching $12.6 trillion.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Senator Graham’s Inexplicable
National ID Support [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 12:03P.M.
By Jim Harper
Compromise is catnip in Washington, D.C. That’s my best guess at why
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) would endorse New York Senator Chuck
Schumer’s (D) widely reviled plan to create a mandatory biometric
national ID system.
Schumer’s national ID plans have no more definition today than when he
wrote about them in his 2007 campaign manifesto Postitively American.
Among the thin gruel of that book is a two-page lump displaying more
ignorance than understanding of how identity systems work and fail.
Schumer doesn’t know the difference between an identifier—a
characteristic used to distinguish or group people—and an identification
card or system, which does the entire task of proving a person’s
previously fixed identity. (My thin gruel on the topic is the book Identity
Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.)
“All the national employment ID card will do is make forgery harder,”
says Schumer.
No, that’s not all it would do: It would also subject every employment
decision to the federal government’s approval. It would make
surveillance of law-abiding citizens easier. It would allow the
government to control access to health care. It would facilitate gun
control. It would cost $100 billion dollars or more. It would draw bribery
and corruption into the Social Security Administration. It would promote
the development of sophisticated biometric identity fraud. How long
should I go on?
Senator Graham’s take is equally simple: “We’ve all got Social Security
cards,” he said to the Wall Street Journal. “They’re just easily tampered
with. Make them tamper-proof. That’s all I’m saying.”
No, Senator, that’s not all you’re saying. You’re saying that native-born
American citizens should be herded into Social Security Administration
offices by the millions so they can have their biometrics collected in
federal government databases. You’re saying that you’d like a system
where working, traveling, going to the doctor, and using a credit card all
depend on whether you can show your national ID. You’re saying that
bigger government is the solution, not smaller government.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com 12 March 2010

The point for these senators, of course, is not the substance. It’s the thrill FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
they experience as nominal ideological opponents finding that they can
agree on something, securing a potential breakthrough on the difficult FACT CHECK: Misleading
immigration issue.
Bennett Campaign Owes Utah
They’re only ”nominal” ideological opponents, though. Chuck Schumer
has always been a big government guy—and long a supporter of having a an Apology [The Club for
national ID, despite the lessons of history. Lindsey Graham is not really
his ideological opponent. Typical of politicians with years in Washington Growth]
D.C., Graham is steadily migrating toward the big-government ideology MAR 11, 2010 11:50A.M.
that unites federal politicians and bureaucrats against the people.
WASHINGTON S COMMITTEE. 202-955-5500.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
House GOP Passes One-Year
Minnesota Gubernatorial
Earmark Moratorium [The Club
Candidate Running on a
for Growth]
MAR 11, 2010 12:01P.M. Platform of Tax Hikes
Wow. [Americans for Tax Reform]
MAR 11, 2010 11:50A.M.

The Minnesota DFL (the state’s Democratic party) has a crowded field
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS for the 2010 gubernatorial race, with about 10 credible candidates vying
for the nominate. One of them is Sen. Tom Bakk (DFL-C...
Pushback Against EPA’s
Attempts to Regulate Carbon
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Emissions Grows [Americans
On Tonight’s Kudlow Report
for Tax Reform]
MAR 11, 2010 11:59A.M. [Larry Kudlow’s Money
Americans for Tax Reform applauds the letters sent by business leaders Politic$]
and governors supporting Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) resolution of MAR 11, 2010 11:48A.M.
disapproval which would prevent the Environmental Protectio...

This evening at 7pm ET:

MARKETS .. CHINA INFLATION .. CORPORATE BOND

SPREADS .. U.S. HOUSEHOLD WEALTH .. TRADE DEFICIT

7
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
On board:
- Peter Navarro, “The Coming China Wars” Author; UC/Irvine Business
Professor
- David Goldman, Senior Editor First Things Magazine
CORKER/DODD & FINANCIAL REGULATION
CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood reports from
Washington.
Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, will be aboard
to discuss financial regulation as well as the growing controversy
surrounding high government pay.
OBAMA PUSHES TRADE INITIATIVE
NBC’s Steve Handelsman reports from Washington.
OBAMA’S TRADE INITIATIVE - WILL THIS HELP OR HURT
SMALL BIZ?
- Sallie James, CATO Trade Policy Analyst
DEBT THREAT: CALIFORNIA EDUCATION
CNBC’s Jane Wells reports from Los Angeles.
The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore will weigh in with his perspective.
Please join us. The Kudlow Report. 7pm ET. CNBC.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
A Tale of Two Frauds [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 11:10A.M.
By Tad DeHaven
The President has announced a government crackdown on Medicare and
Medicaid fraud. The effort appears to be an attempt to make it easier for
Americans to swallow the health care “reform” he’s trying to shove down
their throats. As House Republican leader John Boehner correctly asked,
“Why can’t we crack down on fraud without a big-government takeover
of health care?”
As I’ve noted before, improper payments made by Medicare and
Medicaid is may well be $50 billion more than the already appalling
$100 billion annual figure the president cited. Administrative efforts to
rein in fraud and abuse are welcome, but they won’t solve the huge and
fundamental inefficiencies of these programs. Because the law requires
government health care programs to quickly get payments out the door,
Uncle Sam will always be engaged in a costly game of “pay and chase.”
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12 March 2010
The broader problem is that government programs aren’t subject to
market discipline. Policymakers and administrators have little incentive
to be frugal because they face few or no negative consequences when
playing with other people’s money.
Most of us have noticed how good private companies can be at reducing
fraud. I recently received a call about questionable charges on my
Discover credit card. After quizzing me on a list of purchases made with
my card in the past 24 hours, it became clear that someone had gotten
control of my account. Discover immediately closed the account, opened
an investigation, and removed me from any liability for the fraudulent
charges.
What amazed me is that I only had about $300 worth of charges on my
card. It’s not a big account and thus not a big money maker for Discover.
Yet, within 24 hours of a string of suspicious charges, the company was
right on top of it before I even realized anything nefarious was going on.
Private markets don’t always work this well, but government programs
almost never do.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
What Is ‘Meaningful’ Health
Insurance? Who Decides?’ [Cato
at Liberty‘Meaningful’ Health
Insurance? Who Decides?’]
MAR 11, 2010 10:57A.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
Noting that premium increases, such as Anthem’s proposed 39-percent
hike in California, have caused individuals and employers to purchase
less coverage, Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman writes:
Rising health care costs and insurance company practices are
leading not just to more expensive premiums, but to
skimpier, less comprehensive coverage as well; slowly
redefining what we have known as health insurance. To be
sure, some economists argue that this is precisely what
should happen…But this is not likely how regular people see
it. Appropriate cost sharing is one thing, but we may be
reaching the point in the individual market where the policies
many people have simply cannot be considered meaningful
coverage.
Of course, this is the whole idea behind President Obama’s proposed tax
on high-cost health plans: higher prices will cause people to purchase
less coverage, which will temper health care spending.
But whether Altman is correct depends on what the meaning of
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
“meaningful” is. When individuals pare back the amount of insurance
they purchase, they are revealing what they consider to be meaningful
coverage. (The same is true when employers opt for less-comprehensive
coverage, though employers’ revealed preferences are obviously a poor
proxy for what their workers value.)
If Altman thinks the coverage that individuals are choosing “cannot be
considered meaningful coverage” (note the passive voice), he is implicitly
stating that individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare. And
the only way to devise an alternative definition of meaningful coverage is
through the political process.
It is difficult to argue that the political process does a better job of
selecting meaningful coverage. That process forces many consumers to
purchase coverage that they don’t find meaningful (e.g., chiropractic,
acupuncture, circumcision), that they find offensive (e.g., abortion,
contraception, in-vitro fertilization), or for treatments that are
downright harmful (e.g., high-dose chemotherapy combined with
autologous bone-marrow transplant for late-stage breast cancer).
Letting consumers reveal their preferences is possibly the worst way to
define “meaningful coverage.” Except for all the others.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Positive Signals, Despite
Washington Threats [Larry
Kudlow’s Money Politic$]
MAR 11, 2010 10:32A.M.
If I told you that the dollar is up, gold is down, and profits are powerful,
would you be bullish or bearish? Well, I would be bullish — at least for
the short-run. There are a lot of positive signals out there right now,
quite apart from all the Washington tax threats and big-government
politics.
For example: The 10 percent NASDAQ stock correction was erased with
a good gain on Wednesday. The techie index is now nearly 2 percent
above the January 19 correction level. And the broader S&P; 500 is
coming back — it has recouped virtually all of its election losses.
There now is a growing consensus that the U.S. economy, at a minimum,
will outperform the economies of Europe and Japan. Plus, business
profits, the mother’s milk of stocks, could hit $90 a share. That comes to
an earnings yield of over 7.5 percent, or a price-earnings multiple of
about 13 times.
So let me ask you this: Do you want to own a 3.7 percent Treasury bond?
Or would you rather take a 6 percent corporate bond? Why not take the
stock yield which is much higher?
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12 March 2010
Now here’s a good leading indicator: Financial stocks are coming alive
again. Citigroup and AIG are leading the parade. The whole group has
recouped its correction loss, plus 2 percent. Others like Morgan Stanley,
BB&T;, BofA, and Goldman Sachs have good momentum. And corporate
bond rates are coming down. The Treasury curve is still steeply upward-
sloping. Heck, even a banker can make money with a zero interest rate
and a more than 3.5 percent 10-year bond.
And guess what? I love this. Rich people actually may be on the rise.
According to the new Forbes list, billionaires in the U.S. went from 359
last year to 403 in 2010. You can’t have successful free-market
capitalism without rich people. You can’t have capitalism without capital.
Washington doesn’t understand this.
We should not be eating our rich with punitive tax rates. We should be
rewarding them for their successful investing and entrepreneurship. No
capitalism without capital. Capital creates jobs. So let’s help those who
are the most successful; they help everyone else. (By the way, this is one
of the reasons why there is going to be one powerful political regime
change come November.)
On the downside, the U.S. just posted a record budget deficit in
February. Yet again. This, despite the fact that tax revenues actually rose
for the first time in almost two years, which is a sign that the economy is
improving. But here’s the rub: Spending increased almost 17 percent in
the last 12 months!
This is nuts. Stop the madness.
And here again, a new congressional bill that just passed the Senate will
cost $150 billion — and for what? Little temporary tax credits and more
transfer payments to the state. No spending-cut offsets whatsoever. Will
they ever learn? Ever?
But the wonder of wonders is that our mostly free-market economy and
stock market are pointing to recovery, despite Washington.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The President’s Budget [The
Club for Growth]
MAR 11, 2010 10:15A.M.
The Heritage Foundation has released its comprehensive review of
President Obama and Would double the publicly held national debt to
over $18 trillion.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Big Vote on GOP Earmark Ban
Today at 9:30am [The Club for
Growth]
MAR 11, 2010 09:07A.M.
House GOP The vote is 25 minutes away!
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The Standards Themselves Are,
Frankly, Irrelevant [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 08:45A.M.
By Neal McCluskey
Three days ago I reported that draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular
standards would soon be released by the Common Core State Standards
Initiative. Yesterday, they were. (If you want to get a sense for what the
proposed standards are follow the link to them. Don’t bother with the
appendices, though, unless you really want to get into the weeds.)
Naturally, in the coming days lots of people will be offering heaps of
commentary about what the standards do or do not contain. That’s not
my main concern (though reading through the English standards I am
dubious that mastery of them could be easily or consistently assessed).
You see, the content of the standards is largely irrelevant because the
main problem isn’t what the standards are, but standardization itself.
As I’ve blathered about on numerous occasions, it makes little sense to
expect all kids to master all the same things at the same rates. All kids
are different – they have different talents, desires, and abilities — and
to impose one, “best” progression on them is simply illogical.
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12 March 2010
Another problem with imposing a single standard nationwide — and yes,
this will be imposed, unless states suddenly decide they don’t like getting
their citizen’s tax dollars back from Uncle Sam – is that it prevents
competition between curricula. And that, in turn, kills innovation, the
lifeblood of progress. So unless these standards have achieved perfection
— and I’m pretty sure they haven’t — it’s a very dangerous thing to make
them the end-all and be-all.
Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to
believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement.
Government schools will still be government schools, and the people
employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to
excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the
standards toothless. And no one yet has offered a decent proposal, other
than school-choice supporters, for getting around that very inconvenient,
public-schooling truth.
All of these problems help to explain why there is no
convincing empirical evidence that national standards drive superior
educational outcomes. Unfortunately, most national-standards
advocates will talk themselves blue in the face about what’s in the
standards, but avoid at all costs the question of whether
standardization makes sense in the first place.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Questions for Thoughtful
ObamaCare Supporters [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 11, 2010 08:40A.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
What does it say that the American polity has consistently rejected a
wholesale government takeover of health care for 100 years?
What does it say that public opinion has been consistently against the
Democrats’ health care takeover since July 2009?
What does it say that Democrats are having this much difficulty enacting
their health care legislation despite unified Democratic rule? Despite
large supermajorities in both chambers of Congress, including a once-
filibuster-proof Senate majority (see more below)? Despite an
opportunistic change in Massachusetts law that provided that crucial
60th vote at a crucial moment? Despite a popular and charismatic
president?
What does it say that 38 House Democrats voted against the president’s
health plan?
What does it say that Massachusetts voters elected, to fill the term of Ted
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com 12 March 2010

Kennedy, a Republican who ran against the health care legislation that
Kennedy helped to shape?

What does it say that the only thing bipartisan about that legislation is
the opposition to it?

What does it say that 39 senators voted to declare that legislation’s

centerpiece unconstitutional?

What does it say that health care researchers — a fairly left-wing lot —
think the Senate bill is unconstitutional?

What does it say that the demands of pro-life and pro-choice House
Democrats, each of which hold enough votes to determine the fate of this
legislation, are irreconcilable?

What does it say that House Democrats are actually contemplating a

legislative strategy that would deem the Senate bill to have passed the
House — without the House ever actually voting on it?

Given that ours is a system of government where ambition is made to

counteract ambition, what does it mean that the only way to pass this
legislation is for the House to trust that the Senate will keep the House’s
interests at heart?

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