Archive for the ‘Cato Publications’ Category
Thursday Links
- “Consistent bets for higher oil prices in futures markets have not been particularly lucrative.”
- “The vast, swaying bulk of America’s military has absolutely nothing to do with effectively combating terrorism—including the large land armies that we deploy to Muslim countries in efforts to destroy and then reconstitute their states.”
- “‘Poking and prodding’ is what good government does to perfect strangers. And that’s what the Obama administration has been doing, with unusual zeal, for the past 2 1/2 years.”
- The Cato 2011 State Legislative Guide is designed to help state policymakers free their constituents from the burden of overextended government and addresses unfunded pension liabilities, ballooning Medicaid enrollment, massive budget gaps, failing education systems, and other important issues.
- The Kentucky v. King decision has delivered a blow to Fourth Amendment protections:
Read more here.
Wednesday Links
- Next up for marriage equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Please join us at 12:00 p.m. Eastern today as co-counsels for the plaintiffs Theodore Olson and John Boies join Center for American Progress president John Podesta and Cato chairman Robert A. Levy for a panel discussion on marriage equality, exploring legal and moral questions dating back to the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that ended state bans on interracial marriage. If you cannot join us here at Cato, please tune in to watch a live stream of the event.
- “Republicans have an opportunity for a much more important debate, which will frame the election campaign next year.”
- In President Obama’s next speech, Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher Preble hopes “that the president reaffirms the importance of peaceful regime change from within, not American-sponsored regime change from without.”
- What will former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s next position on health care be?
- Like cleanliness next to godliness, so is democracy next to tyranny.
- The U.S. hit the debt limit–what’s next?
The Morality of Profit
The free market needs and deserves a moral defense. Cato senior fellow Tom G. Palmer delivers part of that defense, regarding economic profits, in a new video:
This is an installment in a series entitled “The Morality of Free Enterprise,” a joint project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, where Palmer serves as the vice president of international programs, and the John Templeton Foundation.
Palmer is also the director of Cato University; so if you’d like to hear more from him, we hope you’ll register today and join us July 24-29 in historic Annapolis, Maryland for our annual summer seminar on political economy. Students may also apply for a scholarship.
President Obama’s ‘War on Fun’
My DC Examiner column this week focuses on Barack Obama’s transformation into our National Noodge, nudging, shoving, poking and prodding Americans into healthier lifestyles via the powers of the federal government.
A year ago, the New York Times got all excited about the “new age of regulation” the administration was busy ushering in. The president had elevated “a new breed of regulators”: folks like regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, who wants to “nudge” Americans toward healthier consumption choices, and CDC head Thomas Frieden, who, as NYC health commissioner, proclaimed ”when anyone dies at an early age from a preventable cause in New York City, it’s my fault.”
Today’s column tracks how this killjoy crusade is playing out:
Quitting smoking was “a personal challenge for [Obama],” the first lady explained recently, and she never “poked and prodded.”
Of course not. It’s obnoxious to hector your loved ones. “Poking and prodding” is what good government does to perfect strangers. And that’s what the Obama administration has been doing, with unusual zeal, for the past 2 1/2 years.
You’re not a real president until you fight a metaphorical “war” on a social problem. So, to LBJ’s “War on Poverty” and Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” add Obama’s “War on Fun.” Like the “War on Terror,” it’s being fought on many fronts…
Among them: graphic warning labels for cigarettes; a ban on clove cigarettes and possibly menthols; shutting down online poker sites; banning caffeinated malt liquor; mandatory menu-labeling and ratcheting down allowable sodium levels in food to “adjust the American palate to a less salty diet.” Even healthy “real food” aficionados can find themselves in the crosshairs, as Dan Allgyer, an Amish farmer selling raw milk discovered last month, when FDA agents and federal marshals raided his farm.
Last year, in a remarkably silly column entitled “Obama’s Happiness Deficit,” Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wondered whether the president’s political difficulties stemmed from the fact that “he doesn’t seem all that happy being president.” I couldn’t care less whether Obama’s enjoying his job. He asked for it, he got it. But if he isn’t having fun, he shouldn’t take it out on the rest of us.
Sit Down, Mitt, You’re Not Helping
An excerpt from my latest Kaiser Health News column:
Mitt Romney’s reversals on abortion, gay marriage, gun control, campaign finance and immigration leave one with the impression that when Mitt Romney is with you, he’s with you. At least until he leaves the room….
Romney once said, “I would be happy to take credit” for ObamaCare. As he should: Romney bears as much responsibility for ObamaCare as any Democrat. Now he wants to repeal it. This absurd attempt to have it both ways is turning Romney into a laughing stock. The longer he drags it out, the more oxygen he will suck out of the effort to repeal ObamaCare.
Along the way, I explain why every distinction he tries to draw between RomneyCare and ObamaCare falls flat.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Tuesday Links
- Why are we still in Iraq?
- Despite the world’s greatest nation-building efforts, things in Bosnia are still getting worse.
- Vouchers offer parents more choice in education than they currently have, but education tax credits are still better at helping the poor.
- Although federal courts have already held parts of current National Security Letter statutes unconstitutional, we still have a way to go in restoring civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.
- While Osama bin Laden has been dispatched, we still have many issues to navigate in our national security strategy. Please join us on Facebook at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, where Cato legal policy analyst David Rittgers, who served three tours in Afghanistan with Army Special Forces, receiving an Army Commendation Medal with “V” Device for valorous action and two Bronze Star Medals, will give a LIVE video update on the future of national security policy and strategy. Submit your questions for him here.
Monday Links
- It is false to assume that GM’s earnings report means the auto bailout was a success.
- It is false that, among other things, failing to raise the debt limit means defaulting on our obligations.
- It is false that Osama bin Laden’s death means torture is a good idea.
- It is false that international institutions can deliver what they say they can deliver.
- It is false that oil speculators are to blame for fluctuating oil prices:
Friday Links
- Despite GM’s recent profitability, the auto bailout was a bad idea.
- A parent fixing a nutritious lunch is a better way to combat childhood obesity than the school taking pictures of what children eat.
- Spending cuts for an increase in the debt ceiling are a step in the right direction — but they need to be real spending cuts.
- Please join us Tuesday, May 17, 2011 for a Book Forum on Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, featuring the author Douglas A. Irwin, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College; with comments by Daniel Griswold, director of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Complimentary registration is required by noon, eastern, Monday May 16, 2011. We hope you can join us in person, or online.
Thursday Links
- Is saving 1,315 people 12 minutes a day worth $196.5 million?
- You don’t need a PLAN when you have Twitter.
- The EPA, the price of copper, and the car you drive.
- GM has had a few profitable quarters. The federal government still needs to divest from the auto industry, even if taxpayers take an immediate hit.
Obama Admin. Repeats Discredited Cost-Shifting Claim in Federal Court
Defending ObamaCare in federal court yesterday, the Obama administration’s acting solicitor general, Neal K. Katyal, peddled the widely discredited claim that the uninsured increase your and my health insurance premiums by $1,000:
“When people self-finance their health care,” Katyal contended, “that raises the cost of health care overall by $43 billion a year, and that raises the average family’s premiums by $1,000 a year. That will price untold numbers of people out of the market.”
That estimate comes from two left-wing groups, Families USA and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
When President Obama himself made this claim, FactCheck.org reported:
[Obama] said ”the average family pays a thousand dollars in extra premiums to pay for people going to the emergency room who don’t have health insurance.” That’s from a recent report by Families USA, a group that lobbies for expanded government coverage. But another study for the authoritative Kaiser Family Foundation thinks that figure is far too high.
Serendipitously, the same day that Kaytal was repeating this discredited claim in federal court, USA Today reported:
Jack Hadley, senior health services researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va…has found that privately insured individuals don’t end up paying higher premiums to make up for the uninsured because hospitals that serve lower-income families don’t have a lot of patients with insurance. He said the government pays about 75% of those unpaid hospital bills either by direct payment or through a disproportionate payment of Medicaid. (emphasis added)
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Wednesday Links
- On immigration, the president offers mostly nice words, not much else.
- The debate about the debt ceiling is important—take the time to get it right.
- When it comes to defense appropriations, it is worth keeping in mind that restraining ambition is the first step in sensibly trimming military spending.
- There is no empirical evidence that national standards improve educational outcomes.
- The tax code is not an appropriate tool for social engineering, despite bipartisan attempts to use it for that purpose.
Law Professors against “Tyrannophobia”
Over at the American Conservative, I have a review of Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele’s new book Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Funny enough, the working title for my book on presidential power was “Executive Unbound,” but P&V have a very different take on the dangers of concentrating power in the executive (they coin the term “tyrannophobia,” for irrational fear of executive abuse).
From the review’s intro:
The New York Times book editors assigned their review to the Straussian political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, the self-styled expert on “manliness” who’s as rabid a supporter of the imperial presidency as you’re likely to find. In the late Bush era, Mansfield wrote a 3,000-word Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Case for the Strong Executive,” arguing that defects in the rule of law ‘‘suggest the need for one-man rule.”
Yet even Mansfield blanched at Executive Unbound’s case for unbridled presidential power. He began his review by noting indignantly, “Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively, offer with somewhat alarming confidence the ‘Weimar and Nazi jurist’ Carl Schmitt as their candidate to succeed James Madison for the honor of theorist of the Constitution.”
Gott im Himmel! A book that embraces a leading “Nazi jurist,” applauds the American presidency’s liberation from law, and is apparently hardcore enough to scare manly Harvey Mansfield? What sort of work is Executive Unbound? A Satanic Bible for worshippers of the strong presidency? The black-metal version of John Yoo?
As I dug into the book—while Tomahawk missiles rained down on Libya in yet another unauthorized presidential war—that’s what I was expecting. But Posner and Vermuele have produced something very different and, quite to my surprise, I liked it.
You can read the rest here.
HHS Plays Chicken Little — Again
USA Today reports on a new Obama administration study:
On average, uninsured families can pay only about 12% of their hospital bills in full. Families with incomes above 400% of the poverty level, or about $88,000 a year for a family of four, pay about 37% of their hospital bills in full, according to the Department of Health and Human Services study.
Oy, where to begin?
This is pre-existing conditions all over again. In the hope of saving ObamaCare from the gallows, the Obama administration is blowing a real but relatively small problem way out of proportion.
The best data indicate that the problem of the uninsured not being able to pay their medical bills is real but relatively small. “Uncompensated care” for the uninsured accounts for just 2.8 percent of health care spending. To put that in perspective, 30 percent of Medicare spending is pure waste, according to the Dartmouth Atlas. Moreover, studies show that the uninsured who do pay their bills pay so much more than private insurance does that they more than make up for the uninsured who don’t pay their bills. That is, total uncompensated care may be negative.
This HHS report adds nothing to our understanding of this problem. Everyone already knows that nearly everybody would have a hard time paying an expensive hospital bill if they didn’t have health insurance.
In fact, this report detracts from our understanding of the problem. It essentially says that if all uninsured people were to experience a hospitalization, only some of them would be able to pay the entire bill for some hospitalizations—not necessarily their own hospitalization—with their liquid assets. That’s as non-illuminating as saying that very few “D” students could afford to pay four years of college tuition (say, $100,000) with the money in their bank account:
- Just like few “D” students are headed to college, very few of the uninsured are going to be hospitalized. Not only are most of the uninsured young and healthy, but most of them buy insurance as they get older.
- The “D” students who do go to college probably won’t be attending the most expensive colleges. Likewise, the uninsured who are hospitalized are likely to have relatively less-expensive episodes of care.
- Of the “D” students who attend college, some would be able to pay for some of their tuition from their bank accounts. But rather than tell us how much of these hypothetical medical bills the uninsured could pay, HHS reports the number that would be unable to pay these hypothetical medical bills “in full,” and that total billings for those hypothetical hospitalizations—not the unpaid amount—account for 95 percent of medical care provided to the uninsured.
- Some of those “D” students could obtain student loans and pay off their tuition over time. Likewise, some of the uninsured will be able to borrow money or sell their houses or cars to pay their medical bills. But HHS doesn’t account for the ability of the uninsured to borrow, nor does it count their ability to tap non-financial assets like cars and houses.
In short, HHS bent over backward to make this problem appear bigger than it is. Moreover, they couched their misleading findings in ways that lent themselves to even greater exaggeration. For example, the above quote from USA Today,
uninsured families can pay only about 12% of their hospital bills in full.
paints a far darker picture than what HHS actually found:
On average, uninsured families can only afford to pay in full for about 12% of the admissions to hospital (hospitalizations) they might experience. [Emphasis added.]
It’s almost as if HHS was hoping reporters would misreport their findings in a way that made the problem sound worse.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Attention Students: Internships and Cato University
What’s harder to get into than Harvard? The Cato Institute summer internship. Harvard just announced that “an all-time low of 6.2 percent of applicants were offered admission to the Harvard College Class of 2015, beating records for the sixth consecutive year.” Harvard’s acceptance rate is slightly lower than the rate at Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia.
But not lower than the Cato summer internship rate! Cato’s incoming interns survived an application process more selective than Ivy League universities, with about 4 percent of applicants offered an internship. The process is a little less competitive for Fall and Spring internships, and we encourage students to check out the application deadlines for those upcoming classes.
Also note: There are no more summer internships available, but you can still apply for a scholarship to Cato University this summer until Friday.
Of course, non-students are also welcome at Cato University, which is being held this year in beautiful and historic Annapolis, Maryland, the city where George Washington returned his military commission to the Continental Congress and became, in the words of George III, “the greatest man in the world” by giving up power and establishing the new country on the firm path to republican government. We’ll have a mix of people of all ages from all over the country and indeed the world, and we hope you’ll sign up today.
More on Cato’s internships here, including last year’s comparative acceptance rates.
Monday Links
- If you are a nonlawyer looking to understand what is going to be argued in the appellate courts regarding the health care legislation in the coming weeks, beginning with the Fourth Circuit in Richmond VA tomorrow, start right here.
- Just how libertarian is the 2012 Republican field?
- The U.S., not China, walks the green walk.
- Please join us Tuesday, May 10, at 4:00 p.m. for a Book Forum on America’s Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, featuring the author Jason W. Davidson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington; with comments by Charles Kupchan, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University; moderated by Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute. Complimentary registration is required by noon, eastern, Monday May 9, 2011. We hope you can join us in person, or online.
Want to Repeal ObamaCare? Stay On Message
Yesterday, I reluctantly dinged House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) for veering off-message after bravely introducing and winning House passage of badly needed Medicare reforms. Each said ill-advised things to the media that undermined the long-term goal of Medicare reform. I even emailed some colleagues, “Why can’t they stay on-message, as they have with ObamaCare?”
As if on cue, it appears that House Ways & Means Committee chairman David Camp (R-MI) may have outdone both Cantor and Ryan. Huffington Post reports that Camp used the word “dead” to describe the effort to repeal ObamaCare.
I know, I know, he probably only meant that repeal is dead in this Congress. Yes, yes, he was backed into it by a reporter. Yeah, he will probably push for repeal in the next Congress, just as he did in this Congress. Is Huffington Post seizing on the word dead and painting an inaccurate picture of just how much Camp really, really wants to get rid of this intolerable law? No doubt all of this is true. None of it matters one bit.
Camp is the chairman of a powerful congressional committee. He should know that’s exactly what reporters are trying to do. And he should know how to stick to the script. Rather than use his comments to signal once again how committed he is to ensuring that ObamaCare never takes full effect in 2014, he gave us a news cycle — hopefully no more than one — where the words ObamaCare, repeal, and dead appear in the same sentence.
Yes, Cut Medicaid – It Won’t Be as Painful as You Think
That’s the title of my latest Kaiser Health News column. An excerpt:
The budget blueprint passed last month by House Republicans… would encourage states to cut their Medicaid rolls. As it should: the evidence shows there are millions of people enrolling in Medicaid who don’t need taxpayer subsidies to obtain coverage, and experience shows that Medicaid cuts will not be as painful as you might think….
The president and the Republicans agree that balancing the federal budget is impossible without restraining Medicaid spending. That will be much easier, Mr. President, if we could stop pretending that every single Medicaid enrollee needs to be there.
Read the whole thing here.
Want Medicare & Medicaid Reform? Stay On Message
This morning’s tempest-in-a-teapot concerns an internally inconsistent and now-corrected Washington Post story that claimed House Republicans had abandoned the badly needed Medicare reforms contained in the budget plan they passed the other week.
The original headline read: “Medicare dropped from GOP budget proposal,” even though the article clearly states, “[House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor [R-VA] said, he would press for all the provisions in the Ryan proposal, including changes to Medicare and Medicaid.” The Post has since changed the headline to: “Budget talks: Republicans offer to seek common ground with Democrats.”
The confusion appears to stem from comments such as these by Cantor and House Budget Committee Paul Ryan (R-WI):
The biggest mandatory programs — often called “entitlements” — are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But Cantor said negotiators could avoid the “big three,” which Democrats have vowed to defend, by focusing on changes in other areas. “If we can come to some agreement [and] act to effect those savings now, this year, it will yield a lot of savings in subsequent years,” he said.
At a breakfast for reporters hosted by Bloomberg News, Ryan echoed that view, saying, “We’re not going to get a grand-slam agreement . . . because of just the political parameters” set by Obama. But Ryan said his budget offers a “menu of options . . . that I think we could get that are not necessarily the global agreement on, say, Medicare or Social Security.” That menu includes proposals from Obama’s budget request, such as ending grants for worsted-wool producers and requiring graduate students to pay interest on college loans while they are still in school.
Thus the problem appears to be that Republicans are rising to the media’s bait and trying to predict for reporters how the budget negotiations will play out in the end. Instead of staying on message — Making Medicare look more like Social Security is the only alternative to government rationing and higher taxes…Reform Medicaid the way Congress successfully reformed welfare in 1996…What’s your plan? — Republicans are negotiating with themselves, in public. So instead of getting a pro-reform message before the American people, we get news cycles that make reformers look weak by falsely reporting that Republicans have abandoned the field. This isn’t media bias: if Republicans care about entitlement reform, they need to be more disciplined.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
