This seems odd, but no more odd than so much else that is going on around us. The tanning salon tax may seem a rather small piece in the giant jigsaw of US fiscal issues, but it may prove monumental this year. It was also only a rather small piece of the legislation in which it first arose, the Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010 and signed by President Barack Obama. Pne provision there requires that tanning salons using ultraviolet lamps pay an excise tax. The real reason for this was that the guesstimated revenue from that tax made the numbers come out right. The purported reason was that salons cause skin cancer so it is fair to use the proceeds from such a tax to support healthcare programs. The tax, 10% of the charge, is imposed on consumers by the shops in the same manner as a state sales tax, and the salon pays it to the US Treasury quarterly. The Trump budget bill, in the firm in which it was unveiled by the Ways and Means ...
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Supplemental briefs in the matter of KENNEDY v. BRAIDWOOD MANAGEMENT arrived at the US Supreme Court Monday, May 5. The court had requested them subsequent to oral argument on the case, which is itself unusual. KENNEDY is the latest in a line of cases challenging the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Specifically, this case involves the ACA's creation of the Preventive Services Task Force, a body that passes on which preventive medical services must be covered by compliant insurance plans. Braidwood, a small Christian owned business in Texas, doesn't want to be required to pay so its employees can be protected from HIV infection. Braidwood says that the coverage mandates raise an issue under the appointments clause, Art. II, section 1, clause 2. This clause distinguishes between "officers of the United States" on the one hand and "inferior officers" on the other. Officers of the United States must be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the...
Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton, and a man who had held important economic policy posts in each of the last two Democratic administrations, died on March 16, of suicide. As I write, I do not know the means of suicide. I'm not sure if I should even be wondering why, or if the silence should be taken as a good thing, a giftless horse into whose mouth I should not look. He was 58 years old. His political views were standard-issue center-left. One of the facts that draw my attention, looking at some of the bio notice issued since his death, is: why was his time in the Obama administration so brief? Krueger was named chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors in November 2011, three years after Obama's election. He left that office in August 2013. So he was there for less than two years out of an 8 year term. Then the President brought in Jason Furman instead. Was there a power-struggle story there that we in the general public have never been told...
It may seem a perverse subject for meditation on inauguration day for Donald J. Trump, but I'd like to take a Big Picture look at the woman who conspicuously isn't the center of today's ceremonies, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Think back on 2007, the early jockeying on the Democratic side, before any actual primaries or even caucuses had been held. HRC at that time was using the phrase "help make history." Support for her was helping to make history. She wasn't using the phrase "glass ceiling" much in that cycle, but the appeal suggested by the phrase was the same. This would have been a perfectly sensible appeal for her to make, if the chief intra-party opponent had turned out to be Christopher Dodd or Joseph Biden, just another WASPy white guy. It might have been somewhat less sensible if the intra-party opposition had coalesced around, say, Joseph Lieberman or Bernie Sanders. But we'll get back to that. A less hypothetical point is this: th...
I used to believe there was an enduring 30 year cycle in the history of the US which became especially evident in presidential politics. Four years ago I abandoned that belief in the face of what seemed clear Popperian falsification. Now I'm wondering if I have to go home again, in a conceptual sense. The 30 year idea included the view that there is a general drift of reform in our history in which each train of reform runs out of steam as its central figures age, get tired, and fall out into competing factions. When that train has lost forward momentum, there is a strong counter-reform move. I don't remember what the term for this is. Let's call it the Rightward Shove for now. The second election of Grover Cleveland to the Presidency, in 1892, was such a shove. Never mind now just in what respects. The next Rightward Shove after that came in 1920 , bringing in Harding and bringing an end to the Progressive Era. The next Shove after that ... 1952 , Eisenhow...
It has 8 months left to run, but here are some retrospective thoughts on almost-the-whole of it. 1. Gitmo's infamous detention camp remains open. This wouldn't necessarily stick in one's craw except that Obama issued an executive order as early as January 22, 2009, with the confetti from the inaugural parties still incompletely cleared away, that said it would be closed within one year. 2. Another one that goes back a ways. Obama early on pressed for a cash-for-clunkers bill, which he signed on June 26th of that first year, supposedly to revive the auto industry. It was a cheap gimmick that had no good effect at all. 3 . The whole rebellion in Libya thing was horrendously mismanaged. Absurdly, the administration seems to have thought it was exercising what it called "smart power" in this connection., Nothing smart about it. Ended with the need to use a random video as a cover for whatever the heck actually happened in Benghazi. 4. Waffling o...
Yesterday, I spoke to the issue of the cycles of American history. I abandoned one cyclical theory and reverted to another one, the long-cycle theory that focuses on constitutional changes. If that theory holds up, and if I'm applying it properly, then this year should see a party re-alignment which will make the Democratic Party dominant for sometime to come, and will make the US a social democracy on the European pattern. I find that result unsatisfying, so naturally I will look for other live options. I also find it unsatisfying, by the way, to resign myself to merely passive observer status. what I want is a way forward that has some real contact with what is going on and that, if it manifests, might lead to a result I'd recognize as an improvement over the status quo. That could happen, if the polarizing tendency of both primary competitions intensifies from here, and if Michael Bloomberg turns out to have political talent transferrable outside of the bounds of Ne...
For a long time, I thought of US politics in terms of a 30 year cycle. I thought of this as the "short cycle" of two, for I also had and still have a long cycle theory. But the short cycle was specifically keyed to Presidential election, so it manifested itself in 32 or 28 year intervals (since 30 is not divisible by four). Pursuant to the short cycle theory I compared President Obama's election in 2008 to the election of other relatively obscure figures who carried on the impetus of a reform movement past its prime. A haberdasher in 1948 was elected as the last hurrah for the New Deal. Four years later he bowed out, letting Adlai Stevenson take the fall for Eisenhower's victory. Twenty eight years after 1948 brings us to 1976, when a peanut farmer became President as a final upsurge of New Frontier/Great Society liberalism. Four years later he was mugged by an Ayatollah on the way to defeat by Ronald Reagan. Thirty-two years from 1976 brings us t...
The June cover story is a piece by David Bromwich entitled "What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama's Legacy." It is not quite as negative as the headline suggests. Bromwich, whose image you see here, considers Obama superior not only to his precursor, but almost certainly superior to whomever shall be his successor. There is a lot of quotable material here. I'll confine myself to just two quotes, though they will be substantial ones. That said, there is this: "In foreign policy, Afghanistan was the first order of business in Obama's presidency. His options must have appeared exceedingly narrow. During the campaign, he had followed a middle path on America's wars. He said that Iraq was the wrong war and that Afghanistan was the right one: Bush's error had been to take his eye off the deeper danger. By early spring of 2009, Obama knew that his judgment -- though it earned him praise from the media -- had simply been wrong. The U.S. effort in Afghanist...
President Obama apparently decided to support the omnibus budget bill late Thursday morning, December 11th. He supported the bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told him the threat of a government shutdown in the first quarter of 2015 was otherwise a real one, and the President should act quickly to get that off the table. The next few hours appear to have been hectic ones, as alliances formed and shifted both for and against the bill, across party lines. The bill came to be called "cromnibus," apparently for "Continuing Resolution Omnibus." [Personally my first impression was that the "cr" stood from "cram." Alas not.] At 9:37 Thursday evening, the bill passed the House, 219 to 206. Obama and House Speaker Boehner had both kept enough of their troops in line to get the result they both wanted. The Senate passed it on Saturday night, with a vote of 56 to 40. The 40 who voted "no" included both Elizabeth Warren and Te...
Susan B. Anthony List is an organization opposed both to abortion and to the Obamacare Act. During the congressional campaigns on 2010, the SBA List bought a billboard ad in the 1st Congressional District of Ohio (which includes most of the city of Cincinnati, and which was represented at the time in the US Congress by Steven Driehaus). The ad would have consisted of a photo of Driehaus and the words, "Shame on Steven Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion!" I say it "would have" consisted of this, because the billboard was never actually erected. Driehaus' campaign, with the help of the Ohio Elections Commission, was able to persuade the billboard company to refrain from running it on the ground that it stated a plain falsehood. The question of the accuracy of that ad seemed a fairly straightforward one. Driehaus had voted for Obamacare. SBA doesn't seem to have had any other vote that he might have cast in mind, other than that ...
Earlier this month, I wrote about a dispute over the history of HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program. This was the program supposedly designed to help homeowners who were in over the heads. A couple of those who participated in the early Obama administration, notably including Neil Barofsky, portrayed here in full smile, have since said that Geithner administered the plan in an openly cynical bankers'-ass-protecting spirit. At the time I last wrote about this, Geithner's own view of the incident was known only through bits and pieces, such as his quote to an interviewed from The New York Times that I cited in that blog post. Since then, Geithner has come out with his own book on his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. Does this shed any light? Fortunately, amazon allows me to read inside Geithner;'s book at will, so I don't actually have to buy the thing to see what he said about HAMP. He portrays himself as a faithful public servant who wo...
If Obamacare fails, one sure political consequence is a revival of pressures for something more sweeping, for a single-payer program. Nowadays advocates of such a program in the US call it "Medicare for all." One of the points they make draws on the supposed efficiency of Medicare. Overhead costs are only 2%. Private insurance plans have overhead at 20% of spending. So the former must represent a better way of doing things than the latter ... right? Holman Jenkins made several valuable points about this in a recent WSJ column, among them these: First, the 2% figure is a dubious one to begin with, since Medicare's overhead costs are in fact picked up by other parts of the Federal government. Much of a private insurer's "overhead," for example, is bill collection. That portion of "overhead" for Medicare corresponds to tax enforcement so it is picked up by the IRS. The 20%, then, contains items the 2% doesn't. [Also, HHS' budget i...
In recent days we've seen in quick succession: (1) a report that Iran's leaders were acknowledging the historic fact that there was such a thing as a Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews; (2) the unraveling of that report as a bit of overly hopeful mistranslation ; (3) frenzied attempt by the U.S. administration to arrange a photo op of the heads of state of the US and Iran shaking hands; (4) the failure of those efforts, and finally; (5) the hyping of a telephone call in which the two men finally do make some sort of contact. What, if anything, can or should we make of all of this? If I were a suspicious sort, the sort given to conspiracy theories, I might say that the fix was in for (5) even before reports (1) above. Reports (1) were in some sense planted, in order to prepare public opinion for the grand breakthrough that we're supposed to believe (5) was. That's if I were a suspicious sort of fellow ... but instead I'll simply observe that the noti...
I have to say "cheers," and "hear!hear!" and all that to the British Parliament, and perhaps especially to those Tory party members who defied party discipline to oppose the march toward war. US Presidents are hesitant to launch such adventures without the mother country's support. I got some sense of this back when Tony Blair was acting as W's enabler. Cameron stepped up to attempt to play the same role, but it appears at the moment that Parliament has led him to back down. That is good for them and it may prove lucky for us. I'm not sure I can call any possible result of all this "lucky" for the people of Syria. Their fate looks like a dim one on almost any conceivable time line for years to come. Yet I don't believe that US/UK intervention would have made it any better. Ever since the Obama administration has been talking up a strike, I've been wondering this: when do we start calling a series of [separate?] conflicts a...
Now that we are coming up on the second inauguration of Barack Obama I might as well say this: I'm still trying to get a fix on why I was wrong about the last election. I have long harbored two (strictly inconsistent) theories about the cycles in American politics. One was the Schlesinger theory, according to which politics in the US, especially at the Presidential level, works in roughly 30 year cycles. Since 30 is not divisible by four this, as observed in Presidential election results, required a periodicity of either 28 or 32 years. At any rate, according to the theory of Schlesinger cycles, Obama had to be another Jimmy Carter. After all: 1976 + 32 = 2008. Carter himself on this view was Harry Truman. 1948 + 28 = 1976. Truman only served one term (in his own right) and Carter only served one term (without qualification). So, if Schlesinger cycles were in operation, Obama would only serve one term. During this election cycle, when the opportunity to predict the outc...
I'm thinking about the actor Morgan Freeman these days. It isn't that I've ever been a big fan,but he has crossed my radar lately in two ways that may be related. So let's talk about Freeman, in this post and in the next. Regular readers of my blogs know that I'm a devotee of the animated show South Park , the wisdom of which I have cited on issues like literary fraud and Ritalin. Anyway, the day after out recent presidential election South Park ran an episode called "Obama Wins!" Despite the simplicity of that title, the episode was a complicated one, involving stolen ballot boxes, a Chinese General, and Disney's recent purchase of the intellectual property of Star Wars . At a couple of points in the convoluted plot, an animated version of Morgan Freeman shows up to explain things to the regular characters in the series. Indeed, one of the regular characters comments on how Freeman does exactly this in his movie roles. Does he? Maybe s...
Are accounting rules of any broader significance than just something for accountants to follow? do they themselves constitute data for the science of economics? or are they arbitrary, subject to erasure and thus re-writable at will? I've been thinking about this recently because of an argument I got into at a message-board site about the Bush adminsitration's bait-and-switch over the TARP legislation of 2008. As some of you will of course remember, the crisis-created coalition of Bush and Pelosi sold to the public and both houses of Congress a Troubled Assets Relief Program. The idea was that the government would buy up certain positions of the Wall Street banks, positions that typically involved both assets and liabilities, and that in the circumstances of the crisis involved way too much of the latter, too little of the former. But even as Congress was voting on TARP, on October 3, 2008 [a month before Obama's election, and less than a week after Congress had reje...
I began my blog entry here for July 26 by reflecting on President Obama's statement to entrepreneurs, "You didn't build that." This led me in time, through an associative train the station stops of which I won't here reproduce, to the words of William James on the moral philosopher and the moral life. On the final station of that roadway, I quoted James thus: "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world." In reflection...
I've just googled the expression "you didn't build that" and received more than 40 million hits. Most of them surely (and all of them that I see on the first page of the list) involve the President's recent speech, and his statement two weeks ago about how successful people should recognize that they didn't get there, they didn't build their business, on their own. It is pretty clear from the context, where the phrase "on your own" appears repeatedly, what is meant. There are efforts to create a furor over this, but the statement in itself is unexceptional. Of course you didn't get there alone. If you are a successful entrepreneur, you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are not a hermit living in a self-constructed hut in the rain forest. There aren't any customers or investors in the rain forest. Why would you try to create a business there? You built your business in the middle of a social world, and a lot of ...