In his ongoing effort to micromanage the U.S. economy President Obama used his Dec. 12 weekly radio address to promote his proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. It will be filled with bureaucrats second-guessing entrepreneurs and is sure to improve the performance of our financial institutions — much in the manner of the SEC’s bureaucrats alertly nailing Bernie Madoff just 30 years into his Ponzi scheme. Never mind that the federal government had much more to do with the financial meltdown than the banks did, the real knee-slapper in his address was his claim that the CFPA “would bring new transparency and accountability to the financial markets…” This, from a man demanding passage of a 2000-page health care reform bill that no one, including Mr. Obama, has read. So much for transparency and accountability.

The good news is that a bill has been introduced in the House this week under the broad heading of immigration reform. Even during a recession, Congress should be working to change our immigration system to reflect the longer-term needs of our economy for foreign-born workers.

The bad news is that the actual bill put in the hopper by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D‑IL, on Tuesday would do nothing to solve the related problems of illegal immigration and the long-term needs of our economy.

As I argued in a recent blog post and a Washington Times op-ed, immigration reform must include expanded opportunities for legal immigration in the future through a temporary worker visa.

Any so-called reform that is missing this third leg will be doomed to fail. We will simply be repeating the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal workers and ramped up enforcement, but made no provision for future workers. Rep. Jeff Flake, R‑AZ, agrees.

• The top five most unbelievable lines from the health care reform debate this year.

• Alan Reynolds: Hey, leave Lieberman alone. “Human interest stories are sure to get readers’ sympathy. But emotion is no substitute for common sense.”

• The money behind climate science.

• Podcast: “Trouble for the Race to the Top Fund.”

• Cato Weekly Video: Is there a contradiction between Christianity and capitalism?

The headline strikes fear: “House Takes Steps to Boost Cybersecurity,” says the Washington Post.

What boondoggle are they embarking on now?

Cybersecurity is hundreds of different problems that should be handled by thousands of different actors. The federal government is in no position to “fix” cybersecurity, as I testified in the House Science Committee earlier this year.

But this is a good news story. Realizing that its own cybersecurity practices are not up to snuff, the House of Representatives will be ramping up training for its staff.

Better awareness of the ins and outs of securing computers, data, and networks will disincline Congress to undertake a rash, sweeping “overhaul” of the systems and incentives that produce and advance cybersecurity.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a story in Wired regarding the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. The gist was that government subsidies to particular manufacturers are putting non-recipients at a competitive disadvantage in obtaining private capital. The author, a former Tesla Motors official, noted that “this massive government intervention in private capital markets may have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation by reducing the flow of private capital into ventures that are not anointed by the DOE.”

An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal builds on this theme by detailing the political shenanigans surrounding the DOE’s awarding of a loan to Finnish high-end automaker, Fisker Automotive:

When tiny Fisker Automotive Inc. hit a financing glitch last year, threatening its plan to build a fancy gasoline-electric hybrid car in Finland, it turned to the U.S. Department of Energy…Within months, Vice President Joe Biden, the former senator from Delaware, was helping lure the embryonic car company to a shuttered General Motors Co. factory four miles from his house in Wilmington, right across the tracks from Biden Park. Soon, Fisker Automotive, a two-year-old business that has yet to sell a car, won loans from the federal government totaling $528 million.

A DOE spokesman claimed that, in the Journal’s words, the subsidy decision process is insulated from politics. Oh sure, and I drive an emissions-free car that runs on fairy dust.

As the following snippet illustrates, multiple Delaware politicians teamed up to tilt the system to their state’s advantage:

On June 1, GM said it was closing 14 plants, including the one in Delaware…State officials and politicians were determined to keep it alive. In the middle of August, they learned the plant had drawn interest from Fisker. CEO Henrik Fisker came to see it and dropped by the office of a Delaware senator, Tom Carper, a Democrat. The visit unleashed a flurry of activity. Gov. Jack Markell, also a Democrat, quickly called an old friend at Kleiner Perkins to check on Fisker. Kleiner Perkins itself has political roots. A leading partner, John Doerr, sits on President Barack Obama’s economic advisory board, and another partner is former Vice President Al Gore.

Of course, the story can’t end without some grandstanding from the master of hyperbole himself, Joe Biden:

In a rousing speech, Mr. Biden recalled how every election year, including his first in 1972, ‘I would stand here at this gate and shake hands at every shift.’ He told of many ‘long talks’ he said he had had with Mr. Fisker. He called the project ‘a metaphor for the rebirth of the country.’

The article is long, but worth the read for those concerned that American capitalism might be taking a corporatist turn for the worse.

This weekend, the Congressional Budget Office released “a very strange memo” titled, “Budgetary Treatment of Proposals to Regulate Medical Loss Ratios.” You wouldn’t know it from the title, but that little memo is the smoking gun that shows how congressional Democrats have very carefully hidden more than half the cost of their health care bills.

First, a little history. Like both the House and Senate bills, the Clinton health plan would have mandated that individuals and employers purchase private insurance. In its 1994 score of the Clinton plan, Bob Reischauer’s CBO included those mandated “private” payments in the federal budget –- i.e., as federal revenues and federal expenditures.

And yet, none of the CBO scores of this year’s bills include the costs of similar individual/​employer mandates as federal revenues or federal spending.

My read of the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan is that the private-sector mandates accounted for around 60 percent of the Clinton health plan’s total cost, the remainder being (traditional) government spending. So how is it that the CBO made the full cost of the Clinton health plan apparent to the public in 1994, but may now be revealing only 40 percent of the cost of the Obama health plan?

For some time, I’ve suspected the answer is that congressional Democrats have very carefully tailored their individual and employer mandates to avoid CBO’s definition of what shall be counted in the federal budget. Democrats are still smarting over the CBO’s decision in 1994. By revealing the full cost of the Clinton plan, the CBO helped to kill the bill.

Since then, keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks. While head of the CBO, Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO’s orientation to make it more open and collaborative. One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget. The CBO even published a paper on the topic. Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you’ll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers.

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun. It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget. Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped. Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

On Day #179 of the ObamaCare Cost Estimate Watch, Sen. Jim Webb (D‑Va.) wrote in The Winchester Star of his involvement in the Senate health care debate:

At the start of this debate I was one of eight senators who called on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to post the text and complete budget scores of the health-care bill on a public web site for review at least 72 hours prior to both the first vote and final passage. This request was agreed to, affording proper transparency in the process.

On the contrary, as I explain in this Richmond Times-Dispatch oped, Reid did not comply with Webb’s request.

Indeed, a memo recently issued by the Congressional Budget Office suggests that Reid has been working very hard to conceal the legislation’s full cost all along.