Topic: General

Exposing the Absurdity of Washington’s Anti-sequester Hysteria

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

To save America from the supposedly “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts caused by sequestration, President Obama has instead asked Congress to approve an alternative fiscal package containing additional tax increases.

So why is the sequester so bad? Does it slash the budget by 50 percent? Does it shut down departments, programs, and agencies?

Sounds good to me. We need to reduce the burden of government spending, so some genuine budget cuts would be very desirable.

The pro-spending lobbies in Washington certainly are acting as if spending would be “cut to the bone.” As documented by my colleague Tad DeHaven, they’re claiming horrible things will happen.

So what’s the real story? Well, the Congressional Budget Office today released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, and Tables 1-1 and 1-5 allow us to see the “brutal” impact of the sequester.

As you can see from this chart, the sequester will “cut” spending so much that the budget will grow by “only” $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Sequester 2013

Rather anticlimactic, I admit. No widows dying in snowbanks. No blood flowing in the streets.

So you can let the women and children back in the room. It turns out that all the hyperbole and hysteria about the sequester is based on the dishonest Washington definition of a budget cut—i.e., when spending doesn’t rise as fast as projected in some artificial baseline.

Yes, some parts of the budget are disproportionately impacted, such as defense. But even the defense budget climbs over the 10-year period and the United States will still account for close to 50 percent of global military outlays when the dust settles.

The bottom line is that there’s no reason to worry about the sequester and there’s certainly no reason to go along with Obama’s plan to replace the sequester with a tax-heavy budget deal.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Federal Spending Has Always Been Wasteful

By
Chris Edwards

A new article by Ivan Eland describes how wars have stimulated growth in the American welfare state. I was interested in his discussion regarding the overexpansion of pensions following the Civil War:

In 1879, the Arrears Act caused many veterans, who hadn’t realized they were disabled until the government offered $1,000 or more for finding aches and injuries, to flood the Bureau of Pensions with claims.  Although, according to its commissioner, the bureau was the largest executive bureau in the world, it had few means to detect fraudulent claims, which were rampant. During election years between 1878 and 1899, Republicans used the bureau to dole out pensions rapidly and heavily in key electoral states.

In 1890, a quarter century after the Civil War ended, pension eligibility expanded to include any soldier who had served 90 days or more during the war and was unable to do manual labor—whether or not he was injured during the conflict, or even whether he had seen combat. Similarly, widows of soldiers serving in the war for 90 days or more got pensions, regardless of whether their husbands had died in the conflict.”

Republicans supported lavish pensions to groups in their political constituency (Union veterans) to justify continued high tariff walls to protect Northern industries, which were among the most influential supporters in their political coalition. The interests of such industrialists coincided with those of pensioner lobbies and the bureaucratic empire of the Bureau of Pensions to widen the program over time.

Politically driven overspending and waste is nothing new in Washington. In the 19th Century, there was tons of waste in federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was also a very troubled agency:

Fraud, corruption, and bribes were common in the BIA during some periods in the 19th century. One reason was because local BIA officials had substantial discretionary control over cash, goods, trading licenses, and other items handed out by the agency. In the years following the Civil War, “Indian rings” of government agents and contractors colluded to steal funds and supplies from taxpayers and the tribes. The New York Times railed against the “dishonesty which pervades the whole Bureau.” And the newspaper argued that “the condition of the Indian service is simply shameful. It has long been notorious that rascally agents and contractors have connived to cheat the Indians. … It now appears that a ring has long existed in the Indian Bureau at Washington for the express purpose of covering up these frauds and facilitating others.

Topics: 
General, Tax and Budget Policy

ObamaCare’s Priceless Warm Glow

By
Michael F. Cannon

Ed Kilgore says ObamaCare opponents don’t care about cost-benefit analyses:

many of them just can’t bring themselves to even notice that…Obamacare with its Medicaid expansion, health care exchanges, and regulatory mandates [does] actually provide health coverage to people in exchange for the money and the “liberty” surrendered.

Speaking of, what is the exchange rate between liberty and “liberty”?

But about those benefits. What benefits do broad-based expansions of health insurance, like ObamaCare, actually provide? Aside from giving Kilgore a warm glow, that is.

It turns out there has been only one—one!—scientifically rigorous study of that question. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found Medicaid coverage confers modest improvements in self-reported health and financial security. The first batch of that study’s results appeared more than a year after Congress enacted ObamaCare. And there remains to this day absolutely zero evidence that Medicaid or other broad-based expansions of health insurance buy us the most health and financial security per dollar spent.

Then again, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment did not attempt to measure the value of the warm glow that Kilgore and others derive from Medicaid and ObamaCare, one that appears to be worth trillions of dollars of other people’s money.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

The 100th Anniversary of the Income Tax…and the Lesson We Should Learn from that Mistake

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

What’s the worst thing about Delaware?

No, not Joe Biden. He’s just a typical feckless politician and the butt of some good jokes.

Instead, the so-called First State is actually the Worst State because almost exactly 100 years ago, on February 3, 1913, Delaware made the personal income tax possible by ratifying the 16th Amendment.

Though, to be fair, I suppose the 35 states that already had ratified the Amendment were more despicable since they were even more anxious to enable this noxious levy.

But let’s not get bogged down in details. The purpose of this post is not to re-hash history, but to instead ask what lessons we can learn from the adoption of the income tax.

The most obvious lesson is that politicians can’t be trusted with additional powers. The first income tax had a top tax rate of just 7 percent and the entire tax code was 400 pages long. Now we have a top tax rate of 39.6 percent (even higher if you include additional levies for Medicare and Obamacare) and the tax code has become a 72,000-page monstrosity.

But the main lesson I want to discuss today is that giving politicians a new source of money inevitably leads to much higher spending.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, International Economics and Development, Tax and Budget Policy

ObamaCare’s Triple-Digit Premium Hikes Dramatize the Need for Repeal

By
Michael F. Cannon

In 2010, the Obama administration excoriated health insurance companies for “rate hikes as high as 39 percent.” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote:

This is unacceptable…

President Obama has offered a health insurance reform proposal to help working families and small business owners.  It will hold insurance companies accountable by laying out common-sense rules of the road to keep premiums down…

Reform will change the rules and help stop exorbitant increases.

And the President’s plan will help reduce costs…

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, that double-digit rate increase “helped dramatize the need for regulation.”

That episode came to mind this morning when I read about a survey of health insurers that shows ObamaCare will neither “keep premiums down” nor “stop exorbitant increases” nor “reduce costs”:

The survey, fielded by the conservative American Action Forum and made available to POLITICO, found that if the law’s insurance rules were in force, the premium for a relatively bare-bones policy for a 27-year-old male nonsmoker on the individual market would be nearly 190 percent higher…

Most other studies have tried to estimate average premium increases, which have ranged anywhere from negligible to 85 percent and higher. This survey looks at individual examples in specific markets to show the itemized impact of the major Obamacare reforms…

On average, premiums for individual policies for young and healthy people and small businesses that employ them would jump 169 percent, the survey found.

These findings are in line with projections by neutral observers and even ObamaCare supporters like MIT economist Jonathan Gruber that the law will increase premiums for some individuals and small businesses by more than 100 percent. 

If double-digit premium increases dramatized the need for regulation, do triple-digit increases dramatize the need for its repeal?

Politico offers a strange rationalization for these rate hikes:

The increase will most likely be substantial for “a slice of the younger population,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist Jon Gruber, a supporter of the health law who has studied its impact on premiums.

And those are the people who, before Obamacare, benefited from insurers’ ability to charge older, sicker people much higher rates — or deny them coverage altogether — practices that have kept premiums for the young low.

Set aside the fact that these rate hikes effectively tax young workers to subsidize older workers who generally have higher incomes. According to this theory – I can’t tell if it came from Gruber or Politico – those young workers are today unjustly enriched because they’re not being robbed.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Regulatory Studies

On ObamaCare’s Discriminatory Subsidies, Brewer Bows When Arizona Should Keep Slugging

By
Michael F. Cannon

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) recently set aside her vociferous opposition to ObamaCare’s costly Medicaid expansion by announcing she will support implementing that expansion in Arizona. A significant factor in her reversal, she claimed, was that if Arizona did not expand its Medicaid program, then some legal immigrants would receive government subsidies while U.S. citizens would get nothing.

Brewer’s analysis of this “immigration glitch,” and her remedy for it, are faulty. Fortunately, she, Arizona’s legislature, and its attorney general have better options for stopping it.

An odd and unforeseen result of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding ObamaCare is that, in certain circumstances, the law will now subsidize legal immigrants but not citizens. What triggers this inequity is a state’s decision to implement an Exchange – not the decision to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. (Even if a state implements both provisions, legal immigrants would still receive more valuable subsidies than citizens.) The good news is that states can therefore prevent this inequity simply by not establishing an Exchange. If Brewer wants to avoid this “immigration glitch,” there is no need to expand Medicaid. She already blocked it when she refused to establish an Exchange.

The bad news is that the Obama administration is trying to take away the power Congress granted states to block those discriminatory subsidies, and the punitive taxes that accompany them. Contrary to both the statute and congressional intent, the IRS has announced it will impose that witch’s brew in all states, even in the 32 that have refused to establish an Exchange.

Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt has filed suit to stop that stunning power grab. If Brewer is serious about stopping the “immigration glitch,” the way to do it is by filing a lawsuit similar to Oklahoma’s, while adding a complaint that the Obama administration’s illegal subsidies also violate the Equal Protection clause.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Pages