Category: reason

On November 29, as most
Americans staggered through a tryptophan-induced haze, the federal
government published
final rules (PDF) for the Health Insurance Providers Fee—or
Health Insurance Tax, to be more honest. It’s a strange fee; one
for which the amount to be collected is predetermined, and then
parceled out among each “covered entity” that charges premiums for
health coverage, proportionate to the insurer’s share of net
premiums. Which is to say, it’s a tax that hits individuals, and
small-to-medium-sized businesses that have to pool risks, but
explicitly excludes the sort of “self-insured plan” offered by
large employers. Unless you work for a large company that
self-insures, you can expect the fee to be passed on and to add a
couple of percent to the cost of your health coverage.

How much the tax will add to your bill is a bit
of a guessing game, since the government has already decided how
much it will collect, but the size of the market is a bit up in the
air in the age of crashing government Websites and legally required
policy cancellations. Buried on page 832 (yes, really) of the
Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (PDF) is Section 9010(e),
which announces, bluntly, that the IRS will collect:

• $8 billion in 2014
• $11.3 billion in 2015
• $11.3 billion in 2016
• $13.9 billion in 2017
• $14.3 billion in 2018

After that, “the applicable amount shall be the applicable
amount for the preceding calendar year increased by the rate of
premium growth.”

It’s good to have confidence in how much revenue you’ll collect,
isn’t it? I’ll bet the health insurance providers who will be
passing this tax on to their customers wish they had the same
confidence.

In fact, the new tax is enough of a concern that insurers, like
Aetna, are
distributing brochures (PDF) explaining why premiums are
subject to a somewhat unpredictable new levy. “Because the new
federal fee will impact the cost of plans going forward,” cautions
Aetna, “we feel it’s important for you to understand this fee. By
doing so, you can better anticipate and plan for the expected
impacts.”

How much will the new tax add to the average health coverage
bill? The Heritage Foundation’s David R. Burton
says it “will increase individual and small group health
insurance premiums by an additional 2–3 percent.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and
former director of the Congressional Budget Office, performed

detailed calculations of the costs Obamacare is likely to inflict
on health care, and
predicts the “anticipated impact is as much as 3 percent or
nearly $5,000 per family over a decade.”

When the Obama administration promised us cost control on health
care, we should have realized that meant upwards.

On November 29, as most
Americans staggered through a tryptophan-induced haze, the federal
government published
final rules (PDF) for the Health Insurance Providers Fee—or
Health Insurance Tax, to be more honest. It’s a strange fee; one
for which the amount to be collected is predetermined, and then
parceled out among each “covered entity” that charges premiums for
health coverage, proportionate to the insurer’s share of net
premiums. Which is to say, it’s a tax that hits individuals, and
small-to-medium-sized businesses that have to pool risks, but
explicitly excludes the sort of “self-insured plan” offered by
large employers. Unless you work for a large company that
self-insures, you can expect the fee to be passed on and to add a
couple of percent to the cost of your health coverage.

How much the tax will add to your bill is a bit
of a guessing game, since the government has already decided how
much it will collect, but the size of the market is a bit up in the
air in the age of crashing government Websites and legally required
policy cancellations. Buried on page 832 (yes, really) of the
Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (PDF) is Section 9010(e),
which announces, bluntly, that the IRS will collect:

• $8 billion in 2014
• $11.3 billion in 2015
• $11.3 billion in 2016
• $13.9 billion in 2017
• $14.3 billion in 2018

After that, “the applicable amount shall be the applicable
amount for the preceding calendar year increased by the rate of
premium growth.”

It’s good to have confidence in how much revenue you’ll collect,
isn’t it? I’ll bet the health insurance providers who will be
passing this tax on to their customers wish they had the same
confidence.

In fact, the new tax is enough of a concern that insurers, like
Aetna, are
distributing brochures (PDF) explaining why premiums are
subject to a somewhat unpredictable new levy. “Because the new
federal fee will impact the cost of plans going forward,” cautions
Aetna, “we feel it’s important for you to understand this fee. By
doing so, you can better anticipate and plan for the expected
impacts.”

How much will the new tax add to the average health coverage
bill? The Heritage Foundation’s David R. Burton
says it “will increase individual and small group health
insurance premiums by an additional 2–3 percent.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and
former director of the Congressional Budget Office, performed

detailed calculations of the costs Obamacare is likely to inflict
on health care, and
predicts the “anticipated impact is as much as 3 percent or
nearly $5,000 per family over a decade.”

When the Obama administration promised us cost control on health
care, we should have realized that meant upwards.

My new col at Time.com is about
the huge amounts of public dollars that are shoveled at college and
pro football.

As someone who enjoys following both levels of competition, it
pisses me off that people who never bought a ticket or even watched
a game are on the hook for something that is in no way a core
function of government.

Here’s the start of the col:

As we enter the drama-filled final week of the regular college
football season and the final month of the National Football
League’s schedule, forget about GM and Chrysler, Solyndra, or even
cowboy poetry readings. Fact is, nothing is more profitable, more
popular, and more on the public teat than good old American
football. That’s right. You, dear taxpayer, are footing the
bill for football through an outrageous series of giveaways to
billionaire team owners and public universities that put pigskin
before sheepskin.

It’s just not right when governments shovel tax dollars at
favored companies or special interests, even when those firms are
called, say, the Minnesota Vikings or the Scarlet Knights of
Rutgers University. …

Especially in an age of busted government budgets, even the most
rabid sports fan should agree that it’s an outrage that the
highest-paid public employee in
a majority of states is a college football coach (in
another 13, it’s a basketball coach).

Read the whole thing. 

And here’s hoping that Ohio State murderlizes Michigan State in
the Big 10 champeenship game.

• President Obama
  downplayed the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups in defending
  the job his administration has done and the trustworthiness of the
  federal government in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris
  Matthews.
• A federal judge
  ruled Greenville County Schools did not have to stop
  student-led prayers or activities being held at places of worship
  while a lawsuit against the practices goes to court.
• A DC police officer, Linwood Barnhill, is being
  investigated for allegedly running a prostitution ring after a
  missing 16-year-old girl was found in his apartment. He has not
  been arrested or charged, but police executed a search warrant for
  alleged child pornography and sex trafficking of a minor.
• A rocket
  carrying an unknown payload for the National Reconnaissance
  Office, which manages  the government’s space-based spy
  satellites, launched successfully off the coast of California.
• At a summit of African leaders being held in Paris, French
  President Francois Hollande
  urged the creation of a regional security force to deal with
  crises like the one in Central African Republic to which France is
  responding with its latest intervention.
• Jordan will
  take the UN Security Council seat previously rejected by Saudi
  Arabia.
• A private company
  wants to land a micro-spacecraft on the surface of the moon in
  2015.

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You could always detect a pinch of socialistic seasoning in the
church’s theological stew. But in this case, the pope doesn’t
simply point out that the wealthy aren’t doing enough to help
alleviate poverty. He uses the recognizable rhetoric of the
political left to accuse free market systems of generating and
nurturing that poverty. For starters, it’s troubling that the pope
fails to make any genuine distinction between Western poverty
(terrible) and the poverty of the Third World (unimaginably
terrible). But is it really true that “absolute autonomy of markets
and financial speculation” are the driving reasons for poverty and
inequality? David Harsanyi says the Pope should recognize the
powerful role that markets have had in alleviating global poverty
and furthermore, he should not conflate poverty with
inequality. 

View this article.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are reporting
that the number of measles cases so far this year are running three
times higher than the recent average. As USA Today

reports:

The USA is experiencing a spike in measles, with 175 confirmed
cases and 20 hospitalizations so far this year, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s about three times the usual number of cases of measles,
CDC Director Thomas Frieden said Thursday. The USA has seen nine
outbreaks this year, with the largest in New York, North Carolina
and Texas.

More than 98% of measles patients were unvaccinated, Frieden
said.

“This isn’t the failure of a vaccine; it’s the failure to
vaccinate,” Frieden said….

The country’s safety net has become more porous in recent years,
as like-minded parents who refuse vaccines have clustered in the
same communities.

In August, for example, a visitor who had traveled abroad
infected 15 people at a Texas megachurch. One of those infected was
a 4-month-old baby, too young to have received a first measles
shot.

For more background see my article, “Refusing
Vaccinations Puts Others At Risk.”

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp has
changed its protocol. Undeterred by criticism about transparency
and humans rights violations, officials at the camp will no longer
disclose information about detainees on hunger strike.

Despite bearing the
motto “safe, humane, legal, transparent detention,” Guantanamo
Bay “officials have determined that it is no longer in their
interest to publicly disclose the information,” the Associated
Press reported on Tuesday.

Until then, the camp released daily information about the
detainees, many of whom have never
been charged for crimes and are being held indefinitely without
trial. Others, as Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille
points out, remain at the facility despite being cleared for
release years ago.

The AP points out the significance of the military’s new silence
on the matter, as hunger strikes have acted as an “unofficial
barometer of conditions at the secretive military outpost” and the
“number of hunger strikers” can be seen “as a measure of discontent
at the prison.”

“Guantanamo allows detainees to peacefully protest, but will not
further their protests by reporting the numbers to the public. The
release of this information serves no operational purpose and
detracts from the more important issues, which are the welfare of
detainees and the safety and security of our troops,” stated Navy
Cmdr. John Filostrat, who oversees the camp’s public relations.

Carol Rosenberg, who covered the number of hunger strikers daily
for the Miami Herald, reports that he asked
Filostrat to “elaborate on how the daily report interfered with
troop security and detainee welfare,” but Filostrat refused.

The most recent (and likely final) report stated that 15
prisoners were on strike. All of them were in poor enough condition
that they had to be force-fed, a process that has been
considered a form of torture.

Earlier this year, in a mass protest the hunger strike reached

a peak participation rate of 106 of the 166 being held at the
facility. The numbers dropped and officials declared the strike
over in July. This is not exactly accurate, though, as there was
never
a day without multiple prisoners on strike.

David Golumbia
writing at
Jacobin is steamed at the supposed “deletion of the left”
by supposedly dominant “cyberlibertarians.”

He starts off going wrong with a rather gross misunderstanding
of what being “of the left” in American terms means these days:

The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces
democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones
authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of
information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes
hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes
what was the domain of elites.

Most on the Left would endorse these ends. The widespread
availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals
would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals
in some form. Yet the Left today is scattered, nearly toothless in
most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology
promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a
stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?

What the left really wants is a centralized elite authority that
pursues particular ends it claims to desire, often allegedly on
behalf of “the people”; people who really want dethroned authority,
free flow of information, and decentralization are
libertarians.

Why would a left that wants to see a world shaped to its own
particular desires–about income distribution, market and personal
choice and behavior, and forced change in people’s transportation,
energy, and consumption choices, embrace a world of greater
decentralization and choice? 

Rather than engaging the real reasons why the mentality implied
by the “digital revolution” hasn’t lead to a resurgent leftist
world of policy, Golumbia decides to blame those who actually
recognize that there is a pretty natural connection between digital
practice and ideology and libertarianism. What’s more, he gets mad
at leftists in the digital realm who even hold any truck with
libertarians:

When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who
carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they
side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when
those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their
work.

This, much more than overt digital libertarianism, should
concern the Left, and anyone who does not subscribe to libertarian
politics. It is the acceptance by leftists of the largely
rhetorical populist politics and explicitly pro-business thought of
figures like Clay Shirky (who repeatedly argues that representative
democratic and public bodies have no business administering public
resources but must defer to “disruptive” forces like Napster) and
Yochai Benkler (whose Wealth of Networks is
roundly celebrated as heralding an anticapitalist “sharing
economy,” yet remains firmly rooted in capitalist economics) that
should concern us….

The first line above is wonderful: markets and most especially
the Internet (where no one knows you are a dog, if you don’t want
them to) are wonderful realms for mutually pleasurable and valuable
interactions where, blessedly, ancient obsessions about agreement
on religions, or race or culture, are irrelevant. They are even
places where, to get to where what I’m implying will stop making
sense to many people even though the beautiful advantages for peace
and mutual advantage of just treating certain things as
irrelevent to civilized interaction are the same as in the old
Enlightenment project of getting over race, religion, and gender,
and nationality in deciding who we’ll tolerate, political
belief becomes relatively unimportant.

But to the leftist, one must “carefully examine the political
commitments of most everyone they side with….” and act
accordingly.

The rest of the essay goes on (among many other things,
including relying on
Philip Mirowski’s tendentious vision of libertarianism’s dark
soul) to make typical category errors about what he’s speaking
about (no, libertarian belief in liberty and spontaneous order is
the very opposite of his claim that “cyberlibertarianism holds that
society’s problems can be solved by simply construing them as
engineering and software problems”); usual assumptions that
anything anyone might make a profit at is for that very reason
suspect and unsavory; and a core vagueness about
what exactly leftist goals are, because sometimes just saying:
“managing everyone’s lives and a vast roundrobin distribution of
wealth in all directions via a massive national machinery of power
that we then hope will do the nice things we approve of with it”
can be a hard sell.

The digital revolution has given us 3D printers–which help
people
make guns regardless of regulation. It has given us the means
to gamble
from our own homes. It has given us an experimental
currency outside government control and management. It has
allowed communities of affinity to discover facts and arguments
they would not have the means to encounter in a more centralized
world of news and communication, and propelled strange candidates
like
Ron Paul to prominence.

All that has not been accident. It is inherent in a very
libertarian-at-heart “digital revolution.”

The Left alas, will have to invent its own institutions and
methods to get what it wants–like, say, an attempt to register and
restrict access to and prohibit tools of personal defense, picayune
shaping of people’s choices of fun, a huge central bank by which to
manage the currency for its elite needs and enrich the well
connected, and politicians who say only those things that near
majorities want to hear. Wherever will the Left find its dream
coming true? I feel for them.

I took on an earlier iteration of crummily argued attacks on
techno-libertarians back in 2000, in a review of Paulina
Boorsook’s crummy book Cyberselfish.

David Golumbia
writing at
Jacobin is steamed at the supposed “deletion of the left”
by supposedly dominant “cyberlibertarians.”

He starts off going wrong with a rather gross misunderstanding
of what being “of the left” in American terms means these days:

The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces
democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones
authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of
information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes
hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes
what was the domain of elites.

Most on the Left would endorse these ends. The widespread
availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals
would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals
in some form. Yet the Left today is scattered, nearly toothless in
most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology
promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a
stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?

What the left really wants is a centralized elite authority that
pursues particular ends it claims to desire, often allegedly on
behalf of “the people”; people who really want dethroned authority,
free flow of information, and decentralization are
libertarians.

Why would a left that wants to see a world shaped to its own
particular desires–about income distribution, market and personal
choice and behavior, and forced change in people’s transportation,
energy, and consumption choices, embrace a world of greater
decentralization and choice? 

Rather than engaging the real reasons why the mentality implied
by the “digital revolution” hasn’t lead to a resurgent leftist
world of policy, Golumbia decides to blame those who actually
recognize that there is a pretty natural connection between digital
practice and ideology and libertarianism. What’s more, he gets mad
at leftists in the digital realm who even hold any truck with
libertarians:

When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who
carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they
side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when
those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their
work.

This, much more than overt digital libertarianism, should
concern the Left, and anyone who does not subscribe to libertarian
politics. It is the acceptance by leftists of the largely
rhetorical populist politics and explicitly pro-business thought of
figures like Clay Shirky (who repeatedly argues that representative
democratic and public bodies have no business administering public
resources but must defer to “disruptive” forces like Napster) and
Yochai Benkler (whose Wealth of Networks is
roundly celebrated as heralding an anticapitalist “sharing
economy,” yet remains firmly rooted in capitalist economics) that
should concern us….

The first line above is wonderful: markets and most especially
the Internet (where no one knows you are a dog, if you don’t want
them to) are wonderful realms for mutually pleasurable and valuable
interactions where, blessedly, ancient obsessions about agreement
on religions, or race or culture, are irrelevant. They are even
places where, to get to where what I’m implying will stop making
sense to many people even though the beautiful advantages for peace
and mutual advantage of just treating certain things as
irrelevent to civilized interaction are the same as in the old
Enlightenment project of getting over race, religion, and gender,
and nationality in deciding who we’ll tolerate, political
belief becomes relatively unimportant.

But to the leftist, one must “carefully examine the political
commitments of most everyone they side with….” and act
accordingly.

The rest of the essay goes on (among many other things,
including relying on
Philip Mirowski’s tendentious vision of libertarianism’s dark
soul) to make typical category errors about what he’s speaking
about (no, libertarian belief in liberty and spontaneous order is
the very opposite of his claim that “cyberlibertarianism holds that
society’s problems can be solved by simply construing them as
engineering and software problems”); usual assumptions that
anything anyone might make a profit at is for that very reason
suspect and unsavory; and a core vagueness about
what exactly leftist goals are, because sometimes just saying:
“managing everyone’s lives and a vast roundrobin distribution of
wealth in all directions via a massive national machinery of power
that we then hope will do the nice things we approve of with it”
can be a hard sell.

The digital revolution has given us 3D printers–which help
people
make guns regardless of regulation. It has given us the means
to gamble
from our own homes. It has given us an experimental
currency outside government control and management. It has
allowed communities of affinity to discover facts and arguments
they would not have the means to encounter in a more centralized
world of news and communication, and propelled strange candidates
like
Ron Paul to prominence.

All that has not been accident. It is inherent in a very
libertarian-at-heart “digital revolution.”

The Left alas, will have to invent its own institutions and
methods to get what it wants–like, say, an attempt to register and
restrict access to and prohibit tools of personal defense, picayune
shaping of people’s choices of fun, a huge central bank by which to
manage the currency for its elite needs and enrich the well
connected, and politicians who say only those things that near
majorities want to hear. Wherever will the Left find its dream
coming true? I feel for them.

I took on an earlier iteration of crummily argued attacks on
techno-libertarians back in 2000, in a review of Paulina
Boorsook’s crummy book Cyberselfish.

Yesterday, Naomi Brockwell and I attended a demonstration
demanding that fast-food restaurants boost their minimum wage to
$15 per hour, or a little more than double the current federal
minimum wage. The strike, which was led by a group called Fast Food Forward that’s
affiliated with the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU), was one of more than a 100 similar demonstrations held
in cities across the country.

The New York demonstration had about 150 people, but the number
of actual fast food employees participating in the strike was
small. It was business as usual at every restaurant we dropped
by yesterday morning and, at a McDonald’s restaurant on 23rd
Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, employees behind the
counter said they had heard nothing about a strike.

View this article.