Last month, I debated the direction America should take in reforming its health care sector with Prof. Hugh Waters of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. We squared off in front of students and faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, under the auspices of the college’s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement. Those interested can find more information here or listen to the debate here.

Earlier this month, I spoke at a Federalist Society event on a panel titled, “Health Care: How Our Tax Laws Affect How Health Care is Paid for and Delivered,” with Bob Helms of the American Enterprise Institute and Prof. Amy Monahan of the University of Missouri-Columbia. (Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania was scheduled to speak, but had to cancel.) For the most part, I plugged my Large HSAs proposal. Those interested can watch or listen to the forum online.

Listening to the Democrats talk about trade on the campaign trail and in Congress, you might conclude that the party is monolithically skeptical about the merits of new trade agreements.

As they campaigned in Ohio and elsewhere, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tripped over themselves in competing to see who could denounce NAFTA and other trade initiatives in the harshest terms. Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi re-wrote established rules on handling proposed trade agreements by shelving the agreement the Bush administration signed with our South American ally Colombia.

In a welcome dissent in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, C. Fred Bergsten, founder and director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, sounds a warning against “The Democrats’ Dangerous Trade Games.”

Bergsten has long-standing ties to the Democratic side of the aisle, having served in Jimmy Carter’s administration as assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury during 1977–81.

Bergsten pulls no punches in his op-ed this morning:

[O]ur venerable House of Representatives, in the context of the Colombia agreement, has recklessly changed the rules for congressional action on trade legislation. By rejecting long-settled procedures that prevented congressional sidetracking of trade deals negotiated by presidents, the House has hamstrung U.S. trade policy and created the gravest threat to the global trading system in decades.

By effectively killing “fast track” procedures that guarantee a yes-or-no vote on trade agreements within 90 days, lawmakers in Washington, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have destroyed the credibility of the U.S. as a reliable negotiating partner.

The op-ed is well worth a read, especially among Democrats who are feeling uneasy about the direction of their party on trade.

You don’t have to be a libertarian to be amazed at the way the government’s many tentacles often work at cross-purposes. The Wall Street Journal reports today on the U.S. milk industry:

Federal regulators are investigating allegations that the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, has manipulated milk and cheese prices … the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is looking into whether DFA sought to drive up the price of milk.…

Manipulating milk and cheese prices! Driving up prices! It’s a good thing that we have the government to help protect us from such abuses.

Oh, wait a minute. The federal Department of Agriculture runs an extensive array of marketing orders, import controls, and other programs to squelch dairy competition and keep prices artifically high.

USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon is an expert at distilling complex data about governments down to bite-size pieces. Today he finds that:

Taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, a USA TODAY analysis found. That’s nearly $500,000 per household.

When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household. That is more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.

Kudos to USA Today for running such hard-data stories on the front page. Too many newspapers opt for the “human interest” angle when reporting on government economic policy.

Cauchon’s data raises many questions. For one, how could governments have gotten away with imposing $62 trillion of unfunded obligations on young Americans?

At the state and local level, taxpayers have been sleeping as union-backed politicians have jacked-up compensation levels for the nation’s 16 million state and local workers. 

The Washington Post pointed to an example of state and local irresponsibly yesterday. The paper lambasted Montgomery County, Maryland, for its “staggeringly generous” compensation increases for county workers, increases that will add to the $62 trillion total and likely push up county taxes down the road. 

The Church of Universal Coverage is whipping itself into a fervor over the Healthy Americans Act (S.334), a piece of legislation originally introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D‑OR) that promises “affordable, guaranteed private health coverage that will make Americans healthier and can never be taken away.” Wyden has enlisted seven Republican senators as cosponsors, including such conservatives as Lamar Alexander (TN), Bob Bennett (UT), Mike Crapo (ID), and Judd Gregg (NH). 

That guarantee and that bipartisan support have generated opeds in major newspapers, a web site, journal articles, a preliminary scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, and much twittering among the left-wing blogocracy that this could be the vehicle for achieving universal coverage. There’s even a clever video that, come to think of it, supporters of market-based health care reforms could emulate in selling their own ideas.

What’s most interesting about all this is that so many conservative Republicans are acquiescing to a sweeping government takeover of the health care sector. The Healthy Americans Act wouldn’t go quite so far as to enact the Left’s long-sought dream of “Medicare for All,” where government would dictate the terms of coverage for all Americans, set the prices, and cut checks to the doctors. Rather, it would throw us all into a Medicare Advantage-like program, where government would dictate the terms of coverage, set the prices, and cut checks to … insurance companies. Call it “Medicare Advantage for All.” I have more to say about how the Healthy Americans Act would operate in this podcast. 

The conservative group Americans for Tax Reform claims the Act would constitute “the largest tax increase in history.” Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey accuses the bill’s GOP supporters — in particular Sen. Chuck Grassley (R‑IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate’s committee of jurisdiction — of “signing on with the government-run health-care Democrats.” 

So why would conservative Republicans sign on to such a bill? In particular, why Bennett, who has done an admirable job as a member of the Joint Economic Committee of trying to explain free-market concepts to his fellow senators? 

Given the general lack of health-policy literacy on the Right, it seems plausible that these conservatives just didn’t know what they were doing — or that their understanding of the legislation was sufficiently dim that any resistance could be overcome just by dangling the words “health savings accounts” in front of them.

A more troubling prospect is that these conservative senators and their staffs knew exactly what they were supporting, but made the calculation that their immediate political needs are more important than their fellow citizen’s health and freedom.

Kevin Carey of Ed Sector blogged yesterday that he has intercepted a communication revealing “what extremist libertarians say when they think they’re talking to one another.” He is referring to this month’s issue of the highly classified Cato newsletter. I knew we should have used the Cone of Silence instead of 3rd class mail!

The title of Carey’s post proclaims: “Cato Renounces School Vouchers.” This would be difficult, since Cato has never advocated vouchers, or, for that matter, anything else. The Cato Institute does not take policy positions, its scholars do.

Carey also suggests that I am personally “abandoning vouchers,” citing an interview in our newsletter in which I explain one of the advantages education tax credits enjoy over vouchers. As it happens, I have been pointing to that and other advantages of tax credits for the last decade: in my 1999 book Market Education: The Unknown History, in the 2001 Cato paper “Toward Market Education: Are Vouchers or Tax Credits the Better Path,” in the 2002 Independent Review essay “Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Why Tax Credits are Better than Vouchers,” and more recently.

Vouchers have many redeeming qualities when compared to both conventional government-run schools and charter schools, but since I concluded, while researching Market Education, that tax credits have important advantages over vouchers, I have recommended credits. 

The most puzzling part of Carey’s post is its conspicuous self-contradiction. On the one hand, Carey claims that tax credits “only help people who make enough money to pay taxes.” On the other, he quotes my advocacy of tax credits for donations to non-profit scholarship funds serving low-income families. Since such programs already exist and are growing in several states, and are serving people who pay little or nothing in taxes, Carey’s post disproves itself.

Hmm. Is this some devious strategy to undermine “extremist libertarians” by doing our jobs for us, thereby putting us out of work?