Obama's Bundlers

Don't believe anything you hear from the Obama campaign about Bain Capital or private equity or Wall Street.   Here are the biggest bundlers for the Obama campaign, people who have each arranged for contributions in excess of $1 million.   In the top five, four are individuals employed by Ariel Capital Management, Jordan Real Estate Investments, HBJ Investments, and Grosvenor Capital Management.  (The fifth and biggest bundler is Jeffrey Katzenberg of Hollywood fame.)   A casual Internet search reveals that these are a mutual fund company, a real estate company that also does private equity investments (i.e., buys companies like Bain Capital), another investment company, and a hedge fund.  

Hypocrisy alert!

Are You Man Enough?

There's a point in the great scene from Glengarry Glen Ross where the real estate executive is laying into his soon-to-be-fired salesmen with the caustic comment that there is money laying around out there and "are you man enough to pick it up?"   Well, there's wealth out there in America waiting to be picked up -- wealth in natural gas, oil shale, convential oil reserves, and offshore oil.   Here is a summary from Walter Russell Mead, one of my favorite bloggers:

While the chattering classes yammered on about American decline and peak oil, a quite different future is taking shape. A world energy revolution is underway and it will be shaping the realities of the 21st century when the Crash of 2008 and the Great Stagnation that followed only interest historians.  A new age of abundance for fossil fuels is upon us.  And the center of gravity of the global energy picture is shifting from the Middle East to… North America.

The two biggest winners look to be Canada and the United States. Canada, with something like two trillion barrels worth of conventional oil in its tar sands, and the United States with about a trillion barrels of shale oil, are the planet’s new super giant energy powers. Throw in natural gas and coal, and the United States is better supplied with fossil fuels than any other country on earth. Canada and the United States are each richer in oil than Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia combined....

The other important change in the new world energy picture is one I wrote about earlier this week: Israel’s potential emergence as a major oil and gas producer. With trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and potentially as much as 250 billion barrels of recoverable shale oil, Israel may be on the verge of joining the wealthiest Arab states as a world class energy producer.

These changes won’t take place overnight, but they are coming faster than many understand. US domestic oil production is up almost half a million barrels a day thanks to North Dakota, and the surge in US natural gas production is already changing international trade patterns. More change will come.

As I wrote a few days ago:   "America has enough energy to create an economic Golden Age... no civilization in history has ever turned its back on its own wealth in such an irrational way."  Are we men enough to pick it up?

Shameless Page Count Hype -- More Lolo Jones!

The Regular Guy Believes got a big boost a couple of weeks ago in page counts with a picture of Olympic track athlete Lolo Jones.   Far be it from me to shamelessly hype the blog, but, well, what the hell.   Think of it as being for America!

Girl of the Day - Kelly McGillis

Somewhat alarmingly, Kelly McGillis (Tom Cruise's love interest in Top Gun) turns 55 today.   But forget Top Gun, McGillis' best role was in a very fine movie directed by Peter Weir and co-starring Harrison Ford called Witness:




FYI, McGillis late in life, and after two failed marriages with two children, came out as a lesbian.  Meh.   Who cares? 

All You Need to Know

The reality is that there are "low information" voters out there who are not yet focused on the Presidential campaign.   So don't worry too much about polls showing Obama and Romney still neck-and-neck.  In the next four months people will start to focus on one question:  Did Obama do the job of President well enough to be re-elected?   I don't see how the answer to that question is anything but a resounding No.

Those aren't the results on jobs that the American people had a right to expect, period.   And Obama's recent lament that he "tried really hard" won't satisfy or convince very many adults.  

Girl of the Day - Summer Nights! (Olivia Newton-John)

Not much time... going to the zoo.   Here's a blast from the past:

Do. The. Opposite.

The genius (and horror) of the Clinton Presidency was that, while advancing the growth of the liberal welfare state, he never did (or at least, after Hillarycare, never tried) things that would create obvious points of reference for labeling him as a liberal welfare statist.   With Obama we have an even more horrific Presidency, but more clarity; his programs, his demeanor, his rhetoric, his cronies -- everything identifies him as a statist of the first order, i.e., not just a liberal or a progressive, but as a true socialist.   And that makes the choice in the upcoming election a true choice... we can have more of Obama, or we can go in the 180 degree opposite direction.   Riffing off of Victor Davis Hanson's list of policies Obama has introduced to harm the economy, Romney should promise to (and make this the mantra of his campaign) "do the opposite":

If one wanted to ensure permanent 8 percent to 9 percent unemployment, one might try the following:
1. Run up serial $1 trillion deficits
2. Add $5 trillion to the national debt in three and a half years... Romney needs to pledge and lay out a specific plan leading to a balanced budget by the end of his first term.   We can't wait.  
3. Impose a 2,400-page, trillion-dollar new federal takeover of health care, with layers of new taxation, much of it falling on the middle class and employers, even as favored concerns are given mass exemptions...  Romney needs to pledge and then follow through on the repeal of Obamacare.
4. Scare employers with constant us/them class warfare rhetoric about a demonized one-percenter class and its undeserved profits; constantly talk about raising new taxes and imposing regulations, ensuring uncertainty and convincing employers of unpredictability in regulation and taxes. You cannot convince a country to go into permanent near-recession, but President Obama is doing his best to try.... Romney needs to pledge and then follow through on permanently lowering capital gains and dividend taxes, as well as marginal income tax rates, in order to re-incentivize the American investor/entrepreneurial class.
5. Appoint a bipartisan committee to study the fiscal crisis and then neglect all its recommendations.... Romney needs to adopt some hybrid of the Simpson-Bowles and Ryan plans with regard to reforming entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) to make them financially feasible in the future.
6. Subsidize failed green companies, while denigrating successful gas and oil concerns, as well as putting rich oil-and-gas federal leases off limits.... Romney needs to aggressively deregulate the energy industry, including pledging that the federal government will no longer subsidize some forms of energy production over others; he needs to open up drilling on federal lands and offshore; and he needs to rein in the EPA to allow the construction of new coal plants, new nuclear power plants, and new petroleum refineries.   America has enough energy to create an economic Golden Age... no civilization in history has ever turned its back on its own wealth in such an irrational way.
7. Vastly increase unemployment insurance, disability, and food-stamp constituencies, while promising all sorts of mortgage, credit-card, and student-loan bailouts.   Romney needs to pledge to reform the unemployment, disability and food-stamp programs, the bankruptcy code, and to get the federal government out of the mortgage industry and student-loan industry, period.   We need to stop asking the responsible among us to subsidize the irresponsible.   That's what's really "unfair" in the American economy.
8. Borrow hundreds of billions for stimulus programs that are not shovel ready, but are rather aimed to bail out state budgets, pensions, and unions.... The power of public employee unions must be broken.   If I were Romney I would propose a constitutional amendment stating that public employment may not confer any property rights, including in pensions or retiree medical benefits, and that such benefits remain gratuities/gifts of the people that may be modified.
9. Federalize elements of non-profitable private companies, while threatening to shut down profitable plants for supposed union or environmental incorrect behavior.... Romney needs to pledge, and work to enact into law, a policy stating that the federal government will not intervene to bailout any company in any industry.   The market will decide winners and losers, not political connections or cronyism.

One might add to this in foreign policy:  be a friend to Israel and England, our best allies; stand firm against Iran, our enemy; support Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and all other countries of Eastern Europe who were once under the thumb of the Soviet Union; be suspicious of Russia, and vigilant in countering its aggression; be suspicious of China and vigilant in monitoring its expansion; be a friend to India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand -- all of the countries of the broader Anglosphere; police our borders with Mexico.   Etc., etc., etc.   In all cases,

Do.   The.    Opposite.

The Assumptions Built Into Obamacare

A very interesting article by the estimable Jay Cost over at the Weekly Standard suggests that many of the assumptions built into Obamacare -- and, in fact, necessary for it to work -- are illogical and contrary to centuries of learning about economics:

The bill is built on far too many questionable assumptions. If any one of them fails to hold, the entire thing could fall apart.

For instance, the Congressional Budget Office gave the authors of the bill a pretty good score on the efficacy of the individual mandate, declaring that only a small portion of the public would choose to go without health insurance. This is very important: If the mandate is too weak, too many people will forgo coverage until they get sick, insurance premiums will rise, more people will forgo coverage, and so on. It’s known as a “death spiral.”

CBO says it will not happen. But that is an assumption – one that not everybody agrees with. The insurance industry, for one. Though Democrats brutally demagogued insurers during the 2009-2010 drama to pass the bill, behind the scenes they worked assiduously to win their endorsement. They failed, but only because the mandate the Senate endorsed was so weak the insurers feared a death spiral. (There is also a chance that the mandate will lose some of its psychological teeth if people come to view it as a mere tax, which could increase the likelihood of a death spiral. Economics mingled with the realities of social psychology can produce some strange effects.)

 

There are plenty of other questionable assumptions like this scattered all throughout the bill. Consider:

-Will employers drop their insurance coverage en masse, knowing that their employees can get insurance on the exchanges? Democrats assume not, but there are signs that may not be the case.

-Can Medicare be cut by $500 billion without undermining quality of care? Democrats assume so, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is doubtful. 

-Can Medicaid handle about 15 million new recipients? Democrats assume so, but doctors are already loath to accept Medicaid because it pays so poorly.

-Can you increase the number of people demanding medical services, without a corresponding increase in the supply of services, without a huge spike in prices? Democrats assume so, but common sense casts doubt on this proposition.

With every contestable assumption built into the bill, the odds that the whole package will fail in some way increase substantially. Suppose an 80 percent chance of success on each of these five guesses; in that case, the likelihood that all of them will be correct is only 33 percent.

And because the components of the bill are so intertwined, a failure of one assumption could lead to a catastrophic collapse of the entire scheme, like a house of cards.

Time Horizons

I have occasionally commented on the phenomenon of American pundits (and some Catholics) criticizing the Church and the Pope (whether John Paul II or Benedict XVI) because they haven't modernized the Church by becoming more liberal on reproductive "rights" or on women entering the priesthood or on celibacy for priests, etc.   My comment is always:  the Pope and the Church have a different time horizon.   For many people, their time horizon is their own lifetime, and the concerns of their generation.   For the Baby Boomers who were teenagers in the 1960s, that means the push toward a more and more liberal social policy.   But for the Pope and the Church, the time horizon is eternity, or at least the span of the thousands of years since Christ.   With that different time horizon, they have different concerns.   They are, for instance, must less concerned with what the New York Times editorial board thinks.  

Naturally we care a lot about next November's presidential election, just as we here in Wisconsin cared a lot about last month's recall election for Governor.   But it's good to recall that there are things that human beings do that don't involve politics, or economics, that don't stop at the horizon of this year's disputes or a ten-year budget; things that draw our eye to the farthest reaches of time and space.   Religion is one.   And, perhaps on the opposite end of the spectrum (but perhaps not), pure science is another, and this week's announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN super-collider in Europe is instructive.   As much as we complain about our world, it is continually amazing what scientists and engineers have permitted us to learn:

After decades of careful experiment, physicists say they have found the "strongest indication to date" to prove the existence of the Higgs boson -- a subatomic particle so important to the understanding of space, time and matter that the physicist Leon Lederman nicknamed it "the God particle."

The announcement today, based on experiments at the Department of Energy's Fermilab near Chicago and other institutions, is not the final word, but it's very close. And it comes just before a major meeting this week in Australia, where more findings will be announced from the giant underground particle accelerator at CERN, the great physics lab in the Alps on the French-Swiss border.

"This is one of the cornerstones of how we understand the universe," said Rob Roser, a Fermilab physicist, "and if it's not there, we have to go back and check our assumptions about how the universe exists."

Obama Must Go

Send these charts to everyone you know.

First, here's the only chart you need to think about when you think about the unemployment numbers that came out today (8.2%).   Those numbers reflect only people who are still in the work force; if the labor force participation rate were as high as it was in 2008, the number would be more like 11-12%.   So you can be fooled by the unemployment "rate" -- you have to look at the reality of how many people out of the whole population have jobs -- the employment/population ratio.   It doesn't look good, and it's not getting better:

If you have to look at the unemployment rate, you should compare it to what Obama promised it would be if we enacted his $800 billion stimulus plan in early 2009.   The failure of the plan is obvious:

And, it's also plain that Obama is doing a much worse job in combatting this recession than other Presidents have done in the past:

The Obama "recovery" is the red line... every other recovery from a recession since World War II has been much, much better, and much, much quicker.

Why has the Obama recovery been so slow?   Victor Davis Hanson gives a good summary of the job-killing, growth-killing policies Obama and the Left have pursued:

If one wanted to ensure permanent 8 percent to 9 percent unemployment, one might try the following:
1. Run up serial $1 trillion deficits
2. Add $5 trillion to the national debt in three and a half years
3. Impose a 2,400-page, trillion-dollar new federal takeover of health care, with layers of new taxation, much of it falling on the middle class and employers, even as favored concerns are given mass exemptions.
4. Scare employers with constant us/them class warfare rhetoric about a demonized one-percenter class and its undeserved profits; constantly talk about raising new taxes and imposing regulations, ensuring uncertainty and convincing employers of unpredictability in regulation and taxes. You cannot convince a country to go into permanent near-recession, but President Obama is doing his best to try.
5. Appoint a bipartisan committee to study the fiscal crisis and then neglect all its recommendations.
6. Subsidize failed green companies, while denigrating successful gas and oil concerns, as well as putting rich oil-and-gas federal leases off limits.
7. Vastly increase unemployment insurance, disability, and food-stamp constituencies, while promising all sorts of mortgage, credit-card, and student-loan bailouts.
8. Borrow hundreds of billions for stimulus programs that are not shovel ready, but are rather aimed to bail out state budgets, pensions, and unions.
9. Federalize elements of non-profitable private companies, while threatening to shut down profitable plants for supposed union or environmental incorrect behavior.
10. Do not address changing the above policies, but rather blame others for such self-induced stagnation.
Do the above and you can pretty much always ensure something like the present slow-down.

Obama.   Must.   Go.  

Girl of the Day - Janet Leigh

Born in 1927, Janet Leigh is probably best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.   But to me her best work was as the understanding girlfriend of Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate.    Here's the great train scene where they meet: -- some of the best dialogue ever:

Girl of the Day - Edie Falco

Not exactly a swimsuit model type, but the Regular Wife and I have been really enjoying finally getting around to watching The Sopranos.   Edie Falco plays Carmela Soprano, the wife of the mobster, and she's great.

By the way, a thought on home-building and TV-watching.   I just finished reading Alan Furst's newest novel, Mission to Paris (a great read, although not as good a novel as some of his earlier books... this one feels like he's in it for the money now, which is OK, but it's not the same as reading something that comes from some idiosyncratic place inside the writer).   I read it on the Kindle.   I have probably a cubic foot of Alan Furst novels downstairs, among the probably several hundred cubic feet of books in my library, but this one will only exist in the Internet cloud.   Meanwhile, we are watching The Sopranos streaming through Amazon, so we won't have to store those DVDs either.   Again, I probably have maybe ten cubic feet of my house devoted to storing DVDs, and another ten or so to storing CDs or old records (yes, we still have some!).  

Anyway, it occurred to me that the Internet is not just revolutionizing the way we read or view or listen to entertainment; it's likely to revolutionize the design of homes, since we will need much less space to store things that now can be stored as data on a smaller and smaller device.   Just a thought.

It's also mildly worrisome.   If everything is ultimately stored in a cloud, when the system crashes, will we be back to a new Dark Ages where we have to travel to the library at Alexandria (or wherever) to read ancient texts?   Maybe.   But then:  if the Internet and its attendant infrastructures crash, reading books will probably be the least of our worries.

***

P.S. Falco turns 49 today.   Younger than the Regular Guy!

Shattered - A Satire

The Regular Son came up with this version of the Rolling Stones' late 1970s classic, "Shattered":

"Shattered"

From the album "Some Liberal Academics"

By Prezidizzle Obizzle

Love and hope and change and peace are still surviving in D.C

But look at me

I've been shattered

My spending's so alarming

My panders never charming

My term's just a golfing party every week

We got people dressed in stoner hats, out disturbing traffic

Some kind of activism

Charisma, hopeychanginess

And tax and tax and tax and tax

And look at me, I've been shattered

All this chitter chatter, chitter chatter, chitter chatter

'Bout missile defense systems

I can't give it away till after my reelection

Then I'll be more flexible

Those who work get taxed and taxed

Disincentivise success

Success, success, success, does it matter?

What about my food stamps?

Pride and joy and hope and change

That's what makes up my campaign

Hope and change and AFSCME

Are still survivin' in D.C.

And look at me, I'm in tatters

I've been shattered

Folks, our economy's

Shattered

Folks, our GDP's

Shattered

Folks, health care for free's

Shattered

Your right to be free's

Shattered

Don't you know the unemployment rate's going

Up, up, up, up, UP!!!

To rap without a teleprompter is

Tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough

You got turmoil in the middle east, protests downtown

What a mess, this country's in tatters

I've been shattered, my brain's been battered

Splattered all over

The golf course

Slow Joe, he comes around, flatter, flatter, flatter

Not bad... methinks he has a future.   Here's the original:

Andy Griffith

Died today at age 86.   Big liberal, but big talent too, as here in a very early star-making turn:

Girl of the Day - Mystery Girl

Can you guess who this is?

I'll give a hint:  this is the same girl about twenty years later.

America Coming Apart, One Fraudulent Disability Claim at a Time

I've been reading Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart.   On one level, it's a sociological study of the changes in key indicators among white Americans between the years 1960 and 2010, and the resulting divergences in wealth, stability, success and happiness between poor Americans (which he captures with the name of a fictional town of "Fishtown") and upper-middle-class professional Americans (which he calls "Belmont").   On another level, however, Murray is really describing the decline of American morality, and its consequent effects on the survivability of the American experiment.   In that way, it's an update and report back to De Tocqueville 175 years later.   The prognosis is, to put it mildly, not good.   Sorry, Alexis.

One of the virtues Murray examines that has increasingly been lost in America, is the virtue of industriousness.   What would Murray, or for that matter de Tocqueville, make of the following story?

A record of 8,733,461 workers took federal disability insurance payments in June 2012, according to the Social Security Administration. That was up from 8,707,185 in May.

It also exceeds the entire population of New York City, which according to the Census Bureau's latest estimate hit 8,244,910 in July 2011.

There has been a dramatic shrinkage in the United States over the past 20 years in the number of workers actually employed and earning paychecks per worker who is not employed and is taking federal disability insurance payments.

In June 1992, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 118,419,000 people employed in the United States, and, according to the Social Security Administration, there were 3,334,333 workers taking federal disability payments. That equaled about 1 person taking disability payments for each 35.5 people actually working.

When President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, there were 142,187,000 people employed and 7,442,377 workers taking federal disability payments. That equaled about 1 person taking disability payments for each 19.1 people actually working.

In May of this year, there were 142,287,000 people employed, and 8,707,185 workers taking federal disability payments. That equaled 1 worker taking disability payments for each 16.3 people working.

The federal disability payments made to the record 8,733,461 workers in June averaged $1,111.42.

Two points, one requiring a bit of logic, the second requiring arithmetic.

First, over the past twenty years medical science has vastly improved.   For instance, the ability of medical science to ameliorate the effects of disabilities, either physical (through surgery or advanced prosthetics), or psychological (through anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications), has vastly increased.   There shoudl be a lower percentage of long-term disabled, not a higher percentage!   So what are we to make of the numbers cited above.   Logic yields onlly one conclusion:   roughly 4 million Americans and perhaps more are perpetrating disability fraud on their fellow Americans.   We are paying deadbeats who could work, but prefer instead to concoct "medical" reasons why they can't.  

Second, look at that average payment.    $1,111 per month.   Times 8.7 million recipients.   That's about $9 billion per month in federal disability payments, or roughly $110 billion a year.   If half of those individuals are fraudfeasors, deadbeats, scam-artists -- and I'd be willing to bet that's the case -- that means that we are simply transferring more than $50 billion a year from productive, honest, taxpaying Americans to lazy scoundrels.  

As Murray details, in 1960s it was considered a scandal if a grown-up man did not work.  Not anymore.

Hot, Hot, Hot

And by that I mean:   this:

Not this:

A Likely Story

And by that I mean:  if a business needs government subsidy, the reason is almost inevitably that it cannot get private investors to invest in it; and the reason for that is almost inevitably that its products are not marketable at a profit.   So, when government subsidizes something -- in this case another solar energy company -- it's a very likely story that the business will end up going belly up and the taxpayers will end up eating the loss:

In a decision that will surprise few energy observers, Abound Solar, a Loveland, Colorado-based maker of thin-film cadmium telluride solar modules has announced it will file for bankruptcy protection and suspend its operation. It’s the latest failure of an energy company that had received funding under the Department of Energy’s loan program. 

Although Abound had received a $400 million DOE loan guarantee for building solar-panel manufacturing in Colorado, the company says it has used only $70 million of the funding and has not used any DOE funds since August 2011.

In Fairness... Does the Market Love Obamacare?

After bouncing down yesterday, it's bounced back up.   

Or does the market love certainty, regardless of what the government policy is?

Or, on the other hand, is the market reacting to the deal on the Euro?

Either way, I wouldn't bet on the long-term positive effects of Obamacare on the American economy.  

Jay Cost on Roberts

Jay Cost also echoes my point from yesterday about Roberts' long-term chess move with the Obamacare decision:

Roberts actually secured two, hugely important consitutional victories (if not policy ones) for conservatives. He lmited the scope of the Commerce Clause in a meaningful way, spoiling the liberal hope that it confers upon the Congress a general police power. He also won a significant victory for supporters of our dual sovereignty system; by striking down portions of the Medicaid expansion, he sent a clear message that there are limits to how the federal government can use money to boss the states around. These are two enormous triumphs in the century-long war over the principle that the Constitution forbids unlimited federal power.

Unfortunately, the chief justice did not go the whole nine yards and just repeal Obamacare. However, the voters can still attend to that in November!

The last point is the most important and probably entered largely into the Chief Justice's calculus.   He knew the obvious:   that a decision by the American people in the election to elect Romney as President and a Republican Senate and House would lead to the repeal of Obamacare and, importantly, would have much more legitimacy than the legal ruling of a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court.   And he also knew the opposite:  that even if Obama was re-elected, in the fullness of time, once the Rube Goldberg contraption is implemented, people will realize what a mistake it was.

He also knew that, at age 57, he probably has 25 more years as Chief Justice, and lots more decisions to make that might be very difficult:

• on affirmative action in hiring and college admissions;
• on campaign financing and free speech;
• on the limits of Presidential power to prosecute undeclared wars;
• on privacy in the Internet age;
• on abortion, euthanasia and Life issues
• on the limits of current Congress' ability to borrow money from and impose liabilities on future generations of Americans.

In short, his long-term credibility, and the Court's, does really matter.

Responsibility and the Individual Mandate

The level of vitriole from some on the right aimed at John Roberts for the decision on the individual mandate is interesting.   One thing that bothers me though is the degree to which some conservatives have elevated the right not to buy health insurance to something almost sacred.   How dare the federal government require me under threat of a penalty to buy health insurance?   I should have the right not to have health insurance if I want to!

Well, of course, you have that right, and ought to have that right, and the federal government shouldn't be able to take away that right.   But let's not forget that it's a right to be extraordinarily stupid and irresponsible and selfish.   There's a word for adults who "choose" not to purchase insurance and then expect the rest of us to pick of the tab when they show up at the emergency room.   The word is... assholes.

To me the most effective mandate would be this... instead of penalizing people with a modest financial penalty if they don't have insurance, how about we just refuse to give them medical treatment if they can't pay for it?   If you don't have fire insurance and your house burns down, you're out of luck.   If you don't have flood insurance living next to the Mississippi, sometimes we do bail you out, but we shouldn't.   If you don't have life insurance when you die, your wife and children are probably going to be screwed.   So why should you be able to get away with spending health insurance money -- for the Regular Guy, it's about $23,000 a year for his family -- on cars and computers and vacations and crack cocaine for all I know, and still be able to get world-class health care if you get cancer, and all of it on my nickel?

***

Oh, and by the way, the talk of the "right" not to buy health insurance on the right reminds me a good deal of the talk of the "right" to an abortion on the left.   They are both "rights" to do something that is extraordinarily mean, selfish, irresponsible and stupid.   You can argue that people ought to have that right without acting like it's a good thing that they exercise it.

***

In other words, the following are not mutually exclusive positions:

1. Roberts arguably got it right as a matter of constitutional law.  
2. Obama and the Democrats got it very, very wrong as a matter of public policy.
3. Although the federal government has the power under the constitution to tax individuals to coerce them into preferred behaviors (not smoking, not using gasoline, not going without health insurance), it's a power the government ought not to have and ought to use only very sparingly.
4. Just because the federal government ought not to be able to tell you to buy health insurance doesn't mean that you're not a jerk for going without it.

Roberts' Long Game

Sean Trende makes the point I made yesterday about Chief Justice Roberts' "long game":

Roberts has basically done what John Marshall did [in Marbury v. Madison]: Insulate the court from criticism of bald partisan bias and infidelity to, as he once put it, calling balls and strikes. He’s earning plaudits from the left. Though the right is grumbling, I suspect they won’t be doing so for long

This is not the last battle to be fought on the Roberts Court. It might not even be the most significant. In the next term, for example, the court is being asked to reconsider its affirmative action jurisprudence. There are almost certainly five votes to overturn court rulings from a decade ago upholding some forms of affirmative action.

Following that, the court will face a variety of tough decisions. There are probably five votes to uproot the entire campaign finance system, a decision that would make Citizens United look like small fry. And there are probably five votes to invalidate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

I don’t think invalidating the ACA would have affected the court’s legitimacy that much, at least outside of liberals in the legal academy. But taken as a whole, this series of decisions really might have irrevocably hurt the court’s reputation for independence.

But Roberts has something of an ace up his sleeve now. Accusations of hyper-partisanship are much harder to make against him, and he has more freedom to move on these issues.

Obamacare's Big Lie

In reading the Obamacare decision, one thing jumped out at me -- just how minimal the penalties are for not buying health insurance.   If it's a tax, it's not that much of one:

Beginning in 2014, those who do not comply with themandate must make a "[s]hared responsibility payment" to the Federal Government. §5000A(b)(1). That payment,which the Act describes as a "penalty," is calculated as a percentage of household income, subject to a floor based on a specified dollar amount and a ceiling based on the average annual premium the individual would have to pay for qualifying private health insurance. §5000A(c). In 2016, for example, the penalty will be 2.5 percent of an individual’s household income, but no less than $695 and no more than the average yearly premium for insurance that covers 60 percent of the cost of 10 specified services (e.g., prescription drugs and hospitalization). Ibid.; 42 U. S. C. §18022. The Act provides that the penalty will be paid tothe Internal Revenue Service with an individual’s taxes, and "shall be assessed and collected in the same manner" as tax penalties, such as the penalty for claiming too large an income tax refund. 26 U. S. C. §5000A(g)(1). The Act, however, bars the IRS from using several of its normal enforcement tools, such as criminal prosecutions and levies. §5000A(g)(2). And some individuals who are subject to the mandate are nonetheless exempt from the penalty—for example, those with income below a certainthreshold and members of Indian tribes. §5000A(e).

So, if you make $50,000, you'd pay a maximum of $1,250 in tax penalties if you decided not to buy health insurance.   If you are a young person making $20,000 a year or so, you'd pay a minimum of $695/yr.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT IS ENOUGH TO FORCE SOMEONE OTHERWISE DISINCLINED TO BUY HEALTH INSURANCE TO BUY HEALTH INSURANCE.  If I were young and healthy, I'd probably keep my money and pay the penalty, hoping I don't get sick, but knowing that, if I did, I could always get insurance because of the "must issue" requirements of Obamacare.   (Or I'd not pay... are there really going to be IRS agents to arrest non-compliers?   We can't police our borders, are we going to police Starbucks to arrest young health insurance scofflaws?)

So, Obamacare's Big Lie is not that the individual mandate was not a tax.   The Big Lie is that the individual mandate will force people to buy insurance, which will then offset the costs of the "must issue" provisions whereby insurers are required to offer insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.   It won't, which means that insurers will go out of business, and the government will take over.   It's inevitable economics.

Good Day for Obamacare, Bad Day for Obama?

Obamacare was upheld... but only as what will now be understood as a huge tax increase on the middle-class.

And now... so far 10 Democrats have voted to hold Obama's Attorney General in contempt of Congress in the Fast and Furious scandal.

More on the Obamacare Decision

Also, it should be remembered that Roberts' decision rejecting the Government's Commerce Clause argument is a long-term "win" for conservatism:

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures—joined with the similar failures of others—can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act.  That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned.

Everyone will likely participate in the markets for food, clothing, transportation, shelter, or energy; that does not authorize Congress to direct them to purchase particular products in those or other markets today. The Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave, simply because he will predictably engage in particular transactions. Any police power to regulate individuals as such, as opposed to their activities, remains vested in the States.

This will be strong precedent for invalidating future "mandates."   Congress could still go ahead and mandate things via a "tax," but they'll get called on it more often, and won't be able to deny that what they're doing is raising taxes.   Because Congressmen don't like to raise taxes (or rather, people don't like Congressmen who do), this ruling will provide some restraint on future government action to compel Americans to do something.

Stock Market Doesn't Like Obamacare Decision

Pretty obviously:

Understanding the Roberts Decision

It will be known as the Roberts decision, because the Chief Justice both authored it and provided the swing vote, much to the surprise of most commentators, including me.   I think Roberts' decision can best be understood as a measure of his deep and long-term conservatism in that he views the prestige of the Court and the Constitution as a long-term bulwark against tyranny, and the Obamacare decision, while enshrining bad law in the short-term, preserves and enhances that prestige for the future.   By maintaining a clear divide between what are questions of law for  the Court and what are questions of policy for the legislature, he sets himself up to make perhaps tougher decisions down the road; he will be insulated to a degree from future criticism because, in this case, he took the unpopular position.

I also think that on some level he believes that the American people, duped in 2008 by Obama, will correct their mistake via the political process, and that a political reversal of course in 2012 and a legislative repeal of Obamacare in 2013 is the way the system is supposed to work, rather than having 9 unelected judges overturn a complex piece of legislation.  

Here are some key passages:

We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders. We ask only whether Congress has the power under the Constitution to enact the challenged provisions. 

Our permissive reading of these powers is explained inpart by a general reticence to invalidate the acts of theNation’s elected leaders. "Proper respect for a co-ordinate branch of the government" requires that we strike down an Act of Congress only if "the lack of constitutional authority to pass [the] act in question is clearly demonstrated." United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629, 635 (1883).Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcingthose limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people.

Be Careful What You Wish For

A year ago the MSM and the Obama Administration were trumpeting an "Arab Spring" in which democratic forces in Egypt had risen up in the "Facebook Revolution" to overthrow the evil Mubarek regime.   Here now is the newly elected President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, doing a Jesse Jackson-style call-and-response with a mob of his followers:

Morsi: The Koran was and will continue to be our constitution.  The Koran will continue to be our constitution.  The Koran is our constitution.
Crowd: The Koran is our constitution.
Morsi: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.
Crowd: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.
Morsi: Jihad is our path.
Crowd: Jihad is our path.
Morsi: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
Crowd: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
Morsi: Above all – Allah is our goal.

To the yuppies in the MSM who dubbed the Egyptian coup the "Facebook Revolution"... going forward, you might want to remember to be careful what you wish for.

Big Day!

In addition to the Obamacare decision, the House is planning to vote on a contempt of Congress resolution against Attorney General Eric Holder, and at least some Democrats are planning to sign on according to this report from the Daily Caller.

Rats.   Leaving.   Sinking.   Ship.

Let the preference cascade begin!

Girl of the Day - Sunshine II

It's another sunny day here in Milwaukee... a good day for some Grace!