What party is he?

Myron Magnet at City Journal:

As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to  the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

The Tea Partiers wanted a second American Revolution that would sweep away the Administrative State that the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty set loose to devour and fatten on the carcass of the Founders’ republic, replacing a government of limited and enumerated powers with an unlimited government that rules by administrative decree and redistributes wealth as if it belonged to the governors and not the governed. No wonder Obama’s Internal Revenue Service worked to squash that movement as tyrannically as George III’s tax collectors. Let’s see if the new revolutionaries picked a leader who knows what they want and how to get it.

More Good Samaritan action

This story has South Texas a little stirred up:  several days ago, two armed guys robbed a jewelry store in a San Antonio mall.  One unarmed customer tried to intervene somehow when they were confronting another customer, and was shot and killed for his trouble.  Another customer, who was armed and licensed for concealed-carry, shot one of the robbers and chased the other out of the store with gunfire; the second robber later was arrested.  The first robber is in the hospital in serious condition.

Now it develops that the mall had previously posted signs prohibiting the carrying of weapons.  The police don't seem unduly upset; their statements focus on the reasonable response of the armed citizen and the need for others to exercise good judgment in these dangerous situations.  The mall manager is busy making statements about how his first priority is the safety of his customers, which may mean trusting and waiting for the police, who knows.  I suppose he's trying to figure out whether he's likely to lose more customers by emphasizing his gun-free policy or by congratulating the citizen who ignored it.

Personally I like the effect of knowing that, even in a purportedly gun-free mall, the chances of an armed customer in the store you're trying to rob are pretty decent.

The Texas legislature, by the way, is again considering measures to permit open carry without a license, treating the 2d Amendment as our license.  It's just the Wild West out here, ain't it?  Y'all come on down.  We have our own electrical grid, too.

Hiding the ball

Congressional testimony from AEI's Thomas Miller about why the individual mandate isn't achieving the hoped-for painless political results:

One of the strongest driving forces behind officeholders resorting to the individual mandate is the desire to substitute “off-budget” mandated private funds in place of more visible taxes that they would otherwise find hard to impose to meet their insurance coverage goals and finance additional health care spending. Making the full costs of mandatory coverage more transparent reduces popular support for the latter. The hope instead is that an individual mandate can obscure the full sticker-price shock to taxpayers because mandated private spending is not officially treated as part of the federal budget. Instead, employers and insurers are enlisted as surrogate “tax collectors” through less transparent and politically accountable means.

* * *

[A]n individual mandate often promises, but never manages, to pay for itself. In order to get lower-income individuals to comply with a mandate to purchase more insurance than they can afford, or want, to purchase, substantial taxpayer subsidies are used to fill some of the affordability gap. Insurance mandates create a perpetual conflict between their escalating costs, limited public and private resources to pay for them, and the false guarantees of richer coverage ahead. The imbalances may be financed through various combinations of higher taxes, reduced benefits, higher premiums, lower take-home pay, fewer economic opportunities, and less insurance coverage for everyone else. Doing so also reduces portions of any projected increases in new premium “revenue” expected by insurers and health care providers from expanded coverage. Eventually, some of those less-visible costs are reimposed on the initially more “fortunate” newly insured.

* * *

The penalties for failing to comply with the mandate also are rather modest in proportion to the likely average premium cost of required coverage. The predictable result was that millions of individuals calculated that it is much less expensive to pay the penalty than to purchase mandatory insurance. The law’s guaranteed-issue incentives for potential purchasers, coupled with loose enforcement of eligibility for special enrollment periods between annual open season windows, encouraged individuals to enroll “just in time” when sick and “go bare” when healthy (and pay less in penalties than in total premiums), further ensuring limited and erratic mandate compliance.

An argument I often encounter is that we've got to have the individual mandate because we have EMTALA, so uninsured people will get free (to them) but expensive (to us) emergency room care when we might have treated them more cheaply with preventive care at clinics. Setting aside whether preventive care really is cheaper, I remain skeptical whether you really can force people to pay in advance for their uncertain future health benefits when (1) they don't or can't afford to plan ahead effectively otherwise, and (2) it's fairly clear they'll have acceptable options if they roll the dice instead. This is why I say that solving the healthcare cost problem for some people is always going to be an issue of charity, whether we face it or not. If we're going to do it, let's do it, not pretend we can make them pay for their own charity.

And so we're left with people like me, who are absolutely by-golly going to be insured one way or another--but in a delusory quest to force it on people who resist it, we have to take my own insurance away and make it inhumanly difficult to replace.  But if I refuse to vote for Clinton I'm a racist misogynist who doesn't care about the poor.  

Does Nobody Remember Project Exile?

If President Trump wants to "send the Feds to Chicago," he doesn't need any new tools. All he needs to do is instruct his Justice Department to prosecute felons taken with guns, or drug dealers taken with guns, according to the standards of Project Exile. Those laws are still on the books, and this Clinton-era program had the support of the NRA, so there ought to be no political cost for doing it.

The number of shootings in Chicago would fall rapidly once the gangsters realize that the probable penalty for getting caught with a gun under these circumstances has risen from ~30 days in the local jail to 5-10 years in Federal prison. My guess is it won't even take very long, or require very many convictions, to change these people's attitudes about whether or not it's worth carrying a gun as a disqualified person.

They might still knife each other, but the shooting epidemic ought to be readily solvable with existing authorities and not much additional effort.

So I Guess We're Doing This Wall Thing

Immigration orders on deck, including a construction order for 'the Wall.' Over/under on Mexico finally paying for it?

"A gilded despair"

Funny how now that some of the right people are thinking about TEOTWAWKI prep, it's time to think mournfully about the breakdown of civility.  And clearly the breakdown isn't the sort of thing we saw in Ferguson or the Pink Hat March, but the behavior of those awful people who elected Trump, not realizing the danger that he was going to become a fascist dictator.

I worry about Trump in a lot of ways, but honestly not that he'll be a fascist dictator.  I worry that he'll be ineffectual or wobbly, not that he'll be wildly successful in becoming Kim Jong Il.  It's already pretty clear he won't wobble on a number of conservative issues, so perhaps I'll have to grit my teeth only over trade protectionism and Keynesian stimulus spending.  I don't see any support for my initial fear that he would be ineffectual, either, but we haven't yet gotten into the nitty-gritty of any legislation.  I will cheer if he slaps the Republicans around and keeps their eye on the ball.

"If it's a no, we'll give them a quick no."

A prompt up or down: that alone would be a solid basis for any regulatory reform.  But reviving the Dakota and Keystone projects is enough to make me cheer the new administration even more loudly.  Their treatment under the prior administration was a travesty.

Where Were You Eight Years Ago?

Chuck Schumer intended to make a reasonable point that Obama didn't receive a courtesy that Tom Cotton was asking for on behalf of a Trump nominee. He ended up opening himself up for a hard-hitting comeback.

Yippe-ki-yay

I wondered about that remark in the inaugural address about Islamic terrorism.

It's the waiting list that kills ya

Prospective VA head Shulkin encounters difficulty.

Accept 90% allies

And say "Yes" to success, advises Kurt Schlichter to his fellow disappointed movement conservatives:

Again, don’t be the guy staring into the mirror saying “Well, I’m perfect. I guess those people who voted for Trump because I was failing to meet their needs are just stupid for prioritizing their interests over my preferred ideology.”

You don’t have to love that Trump is the Republican president, but you should at least put aside your wounded pride long enough to seize the opportunity he presents. Don’t let your hurt feelings consign you to a chair in the corner where you pout, arms crossed, as Trump accomplishes a bunch of the things you’ve been promising for the last couple decades but never delivered.

OK by me

Even though he's a Harvard puke, I'll be happy with Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

How many people would lose insurance, again?

My Facebook feed is clogged with hysterical warnings that tens of Americans will lose their health insurance if the Republicans repeal Obamacare. I don't like to dismiss this warning, as I know to my cost just how awful that threat feels. Part of me says, "You can't very well threaten me with whatever you've already done to me," but if there really are a lot of people who finally managed to get insured under the ACA when they never could pull it off before, I want to know how many of them there are, what's in store for them, and what it might cost to figure out a way to protect them. The Daily Signal reports:

The Obama administration estimated that the average monthly effectuated enrollment in the exchanges was 10.4 million people in 2016. This is significantly below original projections from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that 21 million people would be getting their coverage through the law’s government-run exchanges in 2016.

According to the IRS, in 2015, 12.7 million taxpayers claimed one or more exemptions from Obamacare’s mandate to purchase coverage and another 6.5 million taxpayers paid the penalty rather than sign up for coverage.

So 11.4 million signed up, but 19.2 million were eligible and declined. I've also read that a previous Heritage Foundation estimate of 14 million new insureds included 11.8 million who were shunted into Medicaid, leaving only 2.2 million who'd signed up in the post-ACA private individual insurance market. This article quotes an AP estimate that 4.7 million pre-ACA insurance policies (in the individual market?) were cancelled upon implementation of the ACA. Again, I'm not feeling the vibe that the repeal will be worse than the implementation.

Still, there are definitely people out there, like myself, who bought Obamacare policies and are wondering how they'll replace them, now that they've lost the protection from pre-existing conditions that they previously enjoyed under their longstanding pre-ACA guaranteed-reissue plans. I've been hearing that the Republicans had some kind of protection in mind for people with pre-existing conditions, and of course Trump says he does without explaining how it would work. It appears that all four Republican plans currently circulating include proposals for some kind of one-time opt-in for people who have maintained their coverage, much as was the case under the late-1990s HIPAA law.

We've Got Next!

Never mind

Honestly, I never guessed that President Trump would turn out to be a true-blue climate skeptic, blessings on the man. Evidently some federal bureaucrats can read the tea leaves better than they can read a model. I'm sure they'll all go work in the private sector now.

That explains it

I've been wondering how I could feel so out of synch with a feminist movement:

Today, feminism is not so much a movement as a grab bag for the usual assortment of progressive causes. “Free birth control and Palestine,” one popular sign said, which about sums it up. If you believe in one, then you’re assumed to automatically believe in the other one. Feminism used to be a big tent. Today, admission is restricted to those who are willing to beg forgiveness for their intersectional privilege and deplore Israel.

There's that word "intersectional" again. I guess I should go look it up; has it really got a recognizable meaning now? Is it a Venn diagram thing?

Having a very good crisis

“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” says George Soros. It's not easy to fathom what he means by "just." During the Nazi reign, Soros's Jewish father arranged to give him a new identity as the adopted Christian godson of a Hungarian government official. In that new life, at the age of 14, he accompanied his adopted father in the bureaucratic task of preparing to confiscate Jewish property by going door to door taking inventories. An interviewed quizzed him about any leftover guilt from those days:

KROFT: For example that, “I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.” None of that?

SOROS: Well, of course I c— I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets—that if I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.

After the war, he escaped Soviet retaliation for his youthful Nazi collaboration and somehow made his way through the London School of Economics. Becoming rich while concluding that society was corrupt and must be torn apart to be remade, he ultimately put his fortune at the service of a variety of causes whose common link appears to be agitprop and disruption. So clearly "just" means "different from this," but I'm still unclear.

But you know where all the dark money is coming from?  Those awful Koch brothers.

Conscience

This Quartz article about a billionaire's club called Sineidesis ("conscience") comes at the question of "what in the world is happening" from an unusual variety of perspectives.  Is this part of a 16-year cycle of Rep/Dep shifts?  If you look at that cycle more carefully, do you have to make up pre-Galilean epicycles to make it fit?  Is this 476 A.D. Rome, or the French Revolution?  Are we in the middle of a vast shift in the tides of globalism?  Can a consortium of civic-minded billionaires force private capital to take over where the U.S. government leaves off in battling hotcoldwetdry and making the world safe for Big Bird?  More to the point from my perspective, can they find a way to get ordinary citizens and workers invested in their aims out of enlightened self-interest?  Are we lurching between authoritarianism and populism, and if so which one are we leaving, and which are we heading for?

The author fails to light on any particular convincing explanation, but I did appreciate the acknowledgement that institutions with an appearance of solid eternity have often been known to melt away almost overnight, if their foundations become brittle, narrow, and unpopular.  It's as though the consent of one's fellow human beings persistently mattered, no matter how certain one may be that he is acting in their own best interests, which they're too ignorant to understand.

I was sorry to find the article ending with a snooty little dig at fake news.  The author assumes that anyone not taking the establishment press at face value must have lost its allegiance to Truth, as backwards an assessment as I can easily imagine.  Does no one realize that if you lie long enough, people who care about truth will find other ways to satisfy that thirst?  I struggle with the idea that the press does not know it is stuffed with liars, and yet they clearly do lack this self-awareness.  It's the only way they could conclude that "people don't care about facts any more."

Maybe That's Not What They Thought They Were Doing

The Intercept:

FOURTEEN SENATE DEMOCRATS joined all but one Senate Republican in confirming Rep. Mike Pompeo as the new CIA director on Monday evening, failing a crucial first test of whether Democrats would present a united front to defend human rights and civil liberties in the Trump era.

Possibly they didn't think this was a big test on human rights and civil liberties. Maybe they thought they were voting to confirm a guy they've all known for years, thus shifting him from one place of power and responsibility in the government to another.

Fascists Everywhere!

The wave of paranoia comes to a campus near Bowling Green, Ohio.