Senate Republicans Offer a Bill to Preserve & Expand ObamaCare

By Michael F. Cannon

Yesterday, I posted “Five Questions I Will Use to Evaluate the Phantom Senate Health Care Bill.” The phantom bill took corporeal form today when Senate Republicans released the text of the “Better Care Reconciliation Act.”

So how does the Senate bill fare with regard to my five questions?

1. Would it repeal the parts of ObamaCare—specifically, community rating—that preclude secure access to health care by causing coverage to become worse for the sick and the Exchanges to collapse?

No. The Senate bill would preserve ObamaCare’s community-rating price controls. To be fair, it would modify them. ObamaCare forbids premiums for 64-year-olds to be more than three times premiums for 18-year-olds. The Senate bill would allow premiums for the older cohort to be up to five times those for the younger cohort. But these “age rating” restrictions are the least binding part of ObamaCare’s community-rating price controls. Those price controls would therefore continue to wreak havoc in the individual market. The Senate bill would also preserve nearly all of ObamaCare’s other insurance regulations. 

2. Would it make health care more affordable, or just throw subsidies at unaffordable care?

The Senate bill, like ObamaCare, would simply throw taxpayer dollars at unaffordable care, rather than make health care more affordable.

Making health care more affordable means driving down health care prices. Recent experiments have shown that cost-conscious consumers do indeed push providers to cut prices. (See below graph. Source.)  

How Cost-Conscious Consumers Drive Down Health Care Prices

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Topics:
Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare

California’s Fishy Licensing Fees

By Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald

One of the liberties protected by the Constitution is the right to do business in other states, on the same terms as companies based in those states. That right is enshrined in the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, section 2, one of the handful of individual rights that the Framers saw fit to safeguard even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. In fact, ensuring the opportunity to do business out-of-state on equal terms with a state’s residents was one of the principal motivations for holding the Constitutional Convention in the first place. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has condoned California’s violation of that right.

California enacted a set of commercial-fishing license fees that require nonresidents to pay several times more than residents. The system is explicitly discriminatory, harshly regressive, and intentionally protectionist. The Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit, in substantively identical circumstances, have ruled these kinds of provisions to be impermissible: States must charge license fees equally to residents and nonresidents alike, or else bear the burden of justifying their discrimination (which California has made little real effort to do). But an en banc majority of the Ninth Circuit quite literally imposed the opposite rule. Not only did it uphold California’s discrimination, but it supported its holding with guesstimates of tax payments and rough calculations of economic costs that the state itself had never supplied. The result is conflict between two federal circuits and an open door for new methods of discrimination that the Constitution has always forbidden.

Now, a group of fishermen, with amicus support from Cato, is asking the Supreme Court to hear their case and strike down California’s differential commercial fishing license fees. Under the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning, everything California spends on fishery regulation is considered a “subsidy” to that industry—a subsidy paid by resident taxpayers for which the state must be compensated. This framing ignores the fact that nonresident fishermen also pay California sales tax and California income tax for income derived from in-state activities (when their income is enough to qualify for taxation, which it often isn’t) and directly contradicts controlling Supreme Court precedent. This dangerous rationale could otherwise be applied to any number of the nearly one-third of US occupations currently regulated by the states, and if unchecked could contribute significantly to creating just the sort of balkanized national economy that the Constitution was intended to prevent.

The fact of the matter is that California is attempting to protect local business interests at the expense of nonresidents and dress up its blatantly protectionist violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause in reasonable-sounding language about fairness. The Supreme Court should grant certiorari and remind the Ninth Circuit that this sort of behavior is constitutionally unacceptable.

Topics:
Law and Civil Liberties

More School Choice, Less Crime

By Corey A. DeAngelis

One of the original arguments for educating children in traditional public schools is that they are necessary for a stable democratic society. Indeed, an English parliamentary spokesman, W.A. Roebuck, argued that mass government education would improve national stability through a reduction in crime.

Public education advocates, such as Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman and the American Federation for Teachers’ Randi Weingarten, still insist that children must be forced to attend government schools in order to preserve democratic values.

Theory

In principle, if families make schooling selections based purely on self-interest, they may harm others in society. For instance, parents may send their children to schools that only shape academic skills. As a result, children could miss out on imperative moral education and harm others in society through a higher proclivity for committing crimes in the future.

However, since families value the character of their children, they are likely to make schooling decisions based on institutions’ abilities to shape socially desirable skills such as morality and citizenship. Further, since school choice programs increase competitive pressures, we should expect the quality of character education to increase in the market for schooling. An increase in the quality of character education decreases the likelihood of criminal activity and therefore improves social order.

Evidence

There are only three studies causally linking school choice programs to criminal activity. Two studies examine the impacts of charter schools and one looks at the private school voucher program in Milwaukee. Each study finds that access to a school choice program substantially reduces the likelihood that a student will commit criminal activity later on in life.

Notably, Dobbie & Fryer (2015) find that winning a random lottery to attend a charter school in Harlem completely eliminates the likelihood of incarceration for males. In addition, they find that female charter school lottery winners are less than half as likely to report having a teen pregnancy.

Note: A box highlighted in green indicates that the study found statistically significant crime reduction.

According to the only causal studies that we have on the subject, school choice programs improve social order through substantial crime reduction. If public education advocates want to continue to clench onto the idea that traditional public schools are necessary for democracy, they ought to explain why the scientific evidence suggests the opposite.

Of course, these impacts play a significant role in shaping the lives of individual children. Perhaps more importantly, these findings indicate that voluntary schooling selections can create noteworthy benefits for third parties as well. If we truly wish to live in a safe and stable democratic society, we ought to allow parents to select the schooling institutions that best shape the citizenship skills of their own children.

Topics:
Education and Child Policy

Even Sex Offenders Have Constitutional Rights

By Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that a North Carolina preventing sex offenders from accessing social media and other websites – without any attempt to tailor restrictions to potential contact with minors – violated the First Amendment. But restrictions on the freedom of speech aren’t the only unconstitutional deprivations sex offenders face.

In 1994, Minnesota passed what has become arguably the most aggressive and restrictive sex-offender civil-commitment statute in the country. The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) provides for the indefinite civil commitment of “sexually dangerous” individuals, over and beyond whatever criminal sentence they may have already completed.

And while there is technically a system in place whereby committed individuals can petition for release or a loosening of their restrictions, in the more than 20 years that the MSOP has existed, only one person has ever been fully discharged (someone in the program for offenses committed as a minor, and he was only discharged after a court challenge). As Craig Bolte, one person committed in the MSOP, has testified, there is a distinct feeling that “the only way to get out is to die.”

The Supreme Court has held that states have the authority to commit individuals against their will outside the traditional criminal justice context, but only for the purpose of keeping genuinely dangerous people off the streets while undergoing rehabilitative treatment. Punishment and deterrence are legitimate goals exclusively of the criminal justice system, so any deprivation of liberty for either of those two purposes must follow only from that system, with all the procedural protections our Constitution requires.

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Topics:
Law and Civil Liberties

Three Lessons from the Tax Defeat in Kansas

By Daniel J. Mitchell

Leftists don’t have many reasons to be cheerful.

Global economic developments keep demonstrating (over and over again) that big government and high taxes are not a recipe for prosperity. That can’t be very encouraging for them.

They also can’t be very happy about the Obama presidency. Yes, he was one of them, and he was able to impose a lot of his agenda in his first two years. But that experiment with bigger government produced very dismal results. And it also was a political disaster for the left since Republicans won landslide elections in 2010 and 2014 (you could also argue that Trump’s election in 2016 was a repudiation of Obama and the left, though I think it was more a rejection of the status quo).

But there is one piece of good news for my statist friends. The tax cuts in Kansas have been partially repealed. The New York Times is overjoyed by this development.

The Republican Legislature and much of Kansas has finally turned on Gov. Sam Brownback in his disastrous five-year experiment to prove the Republicans’ “trickle down” fantasy can work in real life — that huge tax cuts magically result in economic growth and more, not less, revenue. …state lawmakers who once abetted the Brownback budgeting folly passed a two-year, $1.2 billion tax increase this week to begin repairing the damage. …It will take years for Kansas to recover.

And you won’t be surprised to learn that Paul Krugman also is pleased.

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Topics:
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

Fatalities and the Annual Chance of being Murdered in a European Terrorist Attack

By Alex Nowrasteh

Recent terrorist attacks in Europe have increased death tolls and boosted fears on both sides of the Atlantic. Last year, I used common risk analysis methods to measure the annual chance of being murdered in an attack committed on U.S. soil by foreign-born terrorists. This blog is a back of the envelope estimate of the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack in Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack in the United States from 2001 to 2017 is about 1 in 1.6 million per year. Over the same period, the chances are much lower in European countries.

Methods and Sources

Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom are included because they have suffered some of the largest terrorist attacks in Europe in recent years. Sweden and Germany are included because they have each allowed in large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers who could theoretically be terrorism risks.

The main sources of data are the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland for the years of 1975 to 2015, with the exception of 1993. I used the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism to fill in the year 1993. I have not compiled the identities of the attackers, any other information about them, or the number of convictions for planning attacks in Europe. The perpetrators are excluded from the fatalities where possible. Those databases do not yet include the years 2016 and 2017, so I relied on Bloomberg and Wikipedia to supply a rough estimate of the number of fatalities in terrorist attacks in each country in those two years through June 20, 2017. The United Nations Population Division provided the population estimates for each country per year.

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

How Many Libertarians Are There? The Answer Depends on the Method You Use

By Emily Ekins

There has been debate this week about how many libertarians there are. The answer is: it depends on how you measure it and how you define libertarian. The overwhelming body of literature, however, using a variety of different methods and different definitions, suggests that libertarians comprise about 10-20% of the population, but may range from 7-22%.

Notes: This estimate comes from an analysis I ran on the 2012 American National Election Study Evaluations of Government and Society Survey (EGSS) 2. Furthermore, if one imposes the same level of ideological consistency on liberals, conservatives, and communitarians/populists that many do on libertarians, these groups too comprise similar shares of the population.

In this post I provide a brief overview of different methods academics have used to identify libertarians and what they found. Most methods start from the premise that libertarians are economically conservative and socially liberal. Despite this, different studies find fairly different results. What accounts for the difference?

1) First, people use different definitions of libertarians

2) Second, they use different questions in their analysis to identify libertarians

3) Third, they use very different statistical methods.

Let’s start with a few questions: How do you define a libertarian? Is there one concrete libertarian position on every policy issue?

What is the “libertarian position” on abortion? Is there one? What is the “libertarian position” on Social Security? Must a libertarian support abolishing the program, or might a libertarian support private accounts, or means testing, or sending it to the states instead? A researcher will find fewer libertarians in the electorate if they demand that libertarians support abolishing Social Security rather than means testing or privatizing it. 

Further, why are libertarians expected to conform to an ideological litmus test but conservatives and liberals are not? For instance, what is the “conservative position” on Social Security? Is there one? When researchers use rigid ideological definitions of liberals and conservatives, they too make up similar shares of the population as libertarians. Thus, as political scientist Jason Weeden has noted, researchers have to make fairly arbitrary decisions about where the cut-off points should be for the “libertarian,” “liberal,” or “conservative” position. This pre-judgement strongly determines how many libertarians researchers will find.

Next, did researchers simply ask people if they identify as libertarian, or did they ask them public policy questions (a better method)? If the latter, how many issue questions did they ask? Then, what questions did they ask?

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Topics:
Government and Politics

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