Tag: news

President Bill Clinton famously predicted that “Obamacare” would
start getting popular the day after it was signed into law.
But even
thought the program reached its seven million-enrollment target
yesterday, Americans are not celebrating. In fact, support for the
program is at an all-time low.

Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia explains in a
piece on Al Jazeera’s opinion pages that this might be because
Americans’ experience with the program is not comporting with the
administration’s hype. The seven million figure sounds impressive,
but many of the folks included in it are insurance refugees whose
coverage Obamacare abolished, not the previously uninsured. These
folks are being forced to buy plans that cost more for benefits
they don’t want — while denying them the benefits they need.

“Obamacare promised to cut the ranks of the uninsured and offer
those already covered a better deal while bending the cost curve,
but such rosy predictionsare not panning out,” she notes.

Go
here to read the whole thing.

A
day after the end of Obamacare’s first official open enrollment
period, President Obama gave a speech on the White House lawn
touting the latest Obamacare sign-up figures.

Some 7.1 million people signed up for insurance through the law,
he said, a shade higher than the 7.04 million that White House
Press Secretary Jay Carney announced earlier today.

Obama admitted that problems with the health care system would
continue under the health law, with additional website glitches and
rising premiums for health insurance to come.

But the president credited the law for both expanding health
coverage and for slowing the growth of health care costs
nationally. It’s still unclear, however, how much effect the law
has had one reducing the number of uninsured. And experts are
divided about whether the health law deserves significant credit
for the recent slowdown in health care cost growth, which coincided
with the recession.

President Obama also took a few moments to chide Republicans for
their opposition to the law—and then declared the political battles
over the law finished. “The debate over repealing this law is
over,” he said. “The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.” The
latter may be true. I am certain the former is not. 

I’ll
be on Fox News Channel’s Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld
tonight. The fun starts at 3 A.M. Eastern Time and runs for an hour
on Fox News.

TV’s Andy Levy is guest hosting along with Joanne Nosuchinsky.
The other guests include The Daily Caller‘s Will Rahn and
Remy, star of many wonderful Reason TV videos (including the newish
one at the bottom of this post).

For more
details, go here.

Greg Gutfeld is promoting his new book,
Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You.

I highly recommend it, and not simply because it contains this
utterly unconvincing and unsubsidized blurb about Reason:
“The smartest magazine around. You want proof? Both me and [Andrew
Breitbart] applied for jobs there, and both of us were turned down.
I hold no grudges.”

While I have my disagreements with Not Cool (among
other things, Gutfeld disses leather jackets and refers to a
particular character actor as “sexy, in a male Angela Lansbury
sorta way”), it’s a comic tour de force that blows apart the
pretensions of those who would tell us all what to think and how to
live.

For more on his tour schedule – including a Michigan, Ohio,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and Florida swing, go here.

Los Angeles City Council has
voted to seize the local private business/large apartment trash
hauling industry, take control of it, and sell off exclusive
contracts to those it deems appropriate. The word “seize” is not
used, of course, but instead it’s all being sold as a recycling and
landfill-use reduction plan. It takes the Los Angeles
Times nine paragraphs to get past the environmental
back-patting to explain
what’s actually going on:

Currently, landlords for businesses and apartments choose
between competing businesses to haul their trash. Under the new
“exclusive franchise” system, Los Angeles will be divided up into
11 zones. Haulers will bid for city contracts giving them the
exclusive right to collect garbage in each zone.

The new system is hitched to environmental standards: To be
eligible to win each zone, haulers would have to provide separate
bins for recycling and use “clean fuel” vehicles, among
other ecologically friendly requirements.

The plan is backed by environmentalists and labor groups, who
say the system is the best way to help Los Angeles meet its goal of
diverting 90% of its trash from landfills. Activists say the system
will also mean fewer trucks crisscrossing city streets
and safer conditions for workers in a dangerous industry.

The city is turning a private competitive service into a
monopoly. The Times does note that the proposal puts
unions and environmentalists against business and private
property:

Business groups say the new system will put small
haulers out of business and ultimately drive up rates.

“The environmental benefits are subterfuge for an effort to
organize an industry that the unions couldn’t organize
themselves,” Central City Assn. of Los Angeles president and CEO
Carol Schatz told The Times last week.

Indeed, labor unions were chanting “Si se puede”
(“Yes, it can be done”) outside the council meeting after the vote
passed. Those union folks really, truly care a lot about the
environment, eh?

Only one council member voted against the new regulation,
Bernard C. Parks. He was also the only council member to vote
against the city’s pointless plastic bag ban. Reason
TV and Kennedy interviewed him in 2012. He was concerned this
new trash plan would harm small businesses. A head of a local
commerce association predicts the new monopolies could drive more
than 100 small haulers out of business and suggested the city could
require environmental and recycling policies among private haulers
without resorting to exclusive contracts.

Speaking of small businesses being harmed in Los Angeles, the
city is still
shutting down medical marijuana dispensaries that don’t fall
under the city’s protection racket put in place by a local ballot
initiative. The Los Angeles Daily News notes the city is
also
extracting fines from and charging landlords who rent to
unauthorized pot dispensaries, even though the city is still
causing confusion by sending out tax certificates to applicants
that don’t qualify to do business in the city. These certificates
are then being shown to landlords as evidence that the dispensary
is legal, even if it’s not.

(Hat tip to Cato’s Walter Olson)

In an article for Reason’s April 2014
issue Veronique de Rugy outlined the awful
situation France finds itself in, highlighting the country’s 11
percent unemployment rate and its annual growth rate of 0 percent.
The article also mentions the fondness for tax increases displayed
not only by the current Socialist President Francois Hollande but
also his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The article hit newsstands about a week before the second round
of French
local elections, which resulted in losses for the Socialists
and gains for the right-leaning Union for a Popular movement and
the nationalistic and xenophobic National Front.

In a blog post written after the elections, British
libertarian-leaning Conservative Member of the European Parliament
Daniel Hannan
highlighted the shocking level of industrial action in
France:

Only 40 percent of French people are in work of any kind, as
against 60 percent of Swiss. More days are lost through industrial
action than in any other EU state:  27 days per thousand
people per year, as opposed to 3.4 days  in Germany. The
French state last ran a surplus in 1974. The money has run out.

Hannan went on to write that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the
National Front, pushed for economic policies “arguably to the Left
of the Socialists”:

It is important to understand that Marine Le Pen positioned
herself to the Left of the UMP and, at least on economics, arguably
to the Left of the Socialists. She railed against capitalism and
globalisation, called for higher expenditure, and supported
state-run energy, healthcare, education, transport and financial
services.

The French National Front is not the only nationalist European
political party pushing for more government involvement in the
economy. In the U.K, the xenophobic British National Party
advocates for the abolition of university tuition
fees, protecting “British companies from unfair foreign
imports,” and other big government policies.

Despite the dismal state France finds itself in de Rugy believes
that “For cockeyed optimists, there are still slivers of hope”:

During his New Year address, Hollande turned into a rhetorical
supply-sider, making the case for cutting taxes and public
spending, improving competitiveness, and creating a more
investor-friendly climate. He also promised French businesses a
“responsibility pact” to cut labor-force restrictions and thus
promote increased hiring.

While free market economists don’t believe a word of this, it is
worth noting that France has reformed successfully before. Both the
1980s and the ’90s saw large waves of privatization, marginal tax
cuts, and slighter spending increases. To secure robust prosperity
for new French generations, leaders should extend the lessons of
these brief shining moments by seriously tackling government
spending and reining in destructive tax rates.

I hope the French Socialist president will learn from the past,
but I’m not getting my hopes up. 

More from Reason on France here.