Time to streamline the “stimulus”?
Category Archives: Business
A Healthcare Alternative
From CEI:
1. Modify tax policy to eliminate the disincentives for individual purchase of health insurance and health care.
2. Eliminate regulatory barriers that prevent small businesses from cooperatively pooling and self-insuring their health risks by liberalizing the rules that govern voluntary health-care purchasing cooperatives.
3. Eliminate laws that prevent interstate purchase of health insurance by individuals and businesses.
4. Eliminate rules that prevent individuals and group purchasers from tailoring health insurance plans to their needs, including federal and state benefit mandates and community rating requirements.
5. Eliminate artificial restrictions on the supply of health-care services and products, such as the overregulation of drugs and medical devices, as well as state and federal restrictions on who may provide medical services and how they must be delivered.
6. Improve the availability of provider and procedure-specific cost and quality data for use by individual health consumers.
7. Reform the jackpot malpractice liability system that delivers windfall punitive damage awards to small numbers of injured patients while it raises malpractice insurance costs for doctors and incentivizes the practice of defensive medicine.
Never happen. Makes too much sense.
Want To Slow The Economy?
Launch Reliability
With the summary of the Augustine report being released today, and a lot of people thinking about future space policy, while I don’t have time in the middle of a move to write anything fresh, I’ve written so much in the past that I can run some golden oldies. Here’s what I think is a relevant piece that I wrote over half a decade ago.
The Green Jobs Illusion
Why Van Jones was the right man for the job:
…let’s not miss the opportunity to point out that Jones’s promotion of “green jobs” was just as dubious, if not as reviled, as his dabblings in 9/11 Trutherism. As James Pethokoukis tweeted: “having a truther in charge of green jobs is a good fit… you need a certain willing suspension of disbelief for both”
To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.
They never learn.
The End Of The Soviet Union
It should be apparent by now that Communism never died. The Soviet Union died. Being a Communist, or a neocommunist, is not an intellectual anachronism at all — it is quite the fashion in the academy and our other institutions. Does Charles not realize, for example, that Obama’s friend Bill Ayers — who proudly calls himself “a small ‘c’ communist” — was in 2008 elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers? (See Sol Stern’s profile of Ayers and education, here). I’m not sure “pathetic” is the right word, but what is a perilous intellectual anachronism is the belief that the communist threat ended 18 years ago.
The Jones incident, moreover, does not indicate that “we had a communist in the U.S. government.” To the contrary, as I argued last night, we have a U.S. government in which Van Jones was quite consciously selected because his views are representative of the president who made him the “green jobs czar.” Van Jones isn’t Alger Hiss. There’s nothing covert about him. He didn’t snooker Obama into bringing him aboard. He is who he is, and that’s why Obama wanted him. Having a Communist in that job was perfect since the “green jobs” initiative is an important part of the hard Left’s agenda to use environmentalism as an additional justification for usurping command of the economy.
In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract — under such mushy labels as “social justice” and “green jobs.” That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.
Yes, the superficially attractive (to those unfamiliar with human nature or economics) but ultimately disastrous idea lives on in the academy, and now in Washington. And our wonderful media, of course, thinks it’s no big deal, or are even attracted to it, not recognizing it for what it is.
A Lie Gets Halfway Around The World
Mark Steyn is the victim of shoddy reporting:
As I understand it, what we’re supposed to miss about US newspapers will be the “layers of fact-checking” and rigorous editing. In reality, a significant percentage of American newspapering is little more than provincial wannabes doing New York Times karaoke – which might have made more sense before young Sulzberger drove his paper to junk stock and into the arms of its unlikely Mexican benefactor. Meanwhile, tens of millions of real people hear Rush’s show, but any similarity between the audio and the version that appears in the “newspaper of record” is entirely coincidental.
As for my former colleague in Dublin, too many overseas “bureaus” in Washington boil down to paying someone to relocate halfway round the world, sit in an office at the National Press Building and transcribe The New York Times and Wolf Blitzer’s “Situation Room” all day long. An expensive business model.
Expensive, with a crappy product.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related thoughts from Kaus:
I’ve been waiting for the day when a prominent pol resigns and for print MSM readers it appears to be out-of-the-blue, though everyone on the Web knows the whole story. But for WaPo’s Franke-Ruta and Kornblut, this would be that case. … In any case, more evidence that you can’t find out whats going on by reading the Times.
But you can find out things that aren’t going on, like Mark Steyn saying that Obama is like Saddam and the Dear Leader.
A Modern-Day Paul Revere
An interesting interview with a straight-talking former head of the GAO.
The Future Of Orion
Some thoughts from “Mr. X.”
A Shocker
Teen unemployment skyrockets as the minimum wage goes up.
This has long-term consequences — minimum-wage jobs are often the first rung of the employment ladder, leading to work habits and better jobs. Congress basically pulled the ladder up beyond manys’ grasp.