In a 60-to-39 vote, Senators voted to quash a Republican filibuster, moving it closer to a final vote where it will need the votes of only 51 of the Senate’s 60 Democrats to pass it (60 votes are needed to stop a filibuster). The vote was along strict party lines: all 60 Democrats voted to advance the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) lined up the 60 votes through payoffs to wavering Senators and left-wing unions (some mismanaged unions will receive a taxpayer bailout of their health plans, to the tune of up to $10 billion).

The Dean of Harvard Medical School recently gave Obama’s healthcare plan a “failing grade,” saying it will harm America’s health and finances, and hamper medical innovations needed to save patients’ lives.  Dean Jeffrey S. Flier wrote in the Wall Street Journal that along “with dozens of health-care leaders and economists,” he had concluded that the bill “will markedly accelerate national health-care spending,” would harm care “by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies,” and would reduce “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies” that save lives.

Other experts agree.  The health-care “reform” bill backed by President Obama “would reduce senior care,” increase “medical costs,”  and “could jeopardize access to care for millions,” report health care experts at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.   It is one of the most expensive bills of all time.  The House recently passed a similar bill by the razor-thin margin of 220 to 215.

The bill will raise taxes on the middle class.  It will increase taxes on individuals, employers, and hospitals, impose new taxes on medical devices and cosmetic surgery, and levy a 40% tax on health-care plans above $8,500.  It will increase the deficit, and cost taxpayers at least twice as much as predicted.

It contains special-interest pork, such as payoffs for trial lawyers, and racial preferences that drew criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The bill restricts national competition in health insurance, which is permitted in countries with cheaper health care.

ObamaCare spends money on frills like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” and tax increases, says one of Obama’s own economic advisers, Martin Feldstein.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health care. Obama often contradicts himself. In the very same speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health care.

CNN noted that Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” contradicting Obama’s claim that the bill will leave you free to choose your doctor and keep your healthcare plan without government interference.

The bill does nothing to curb massive waste and fraud in existing government healthcare systems like Medicare and Medicaid, even though it proposes to make massive cuts in Medicare (cuts so painful that most of them will never happen: year after year, Congress waives “the annual cut in fees paid by Medicare to physicians” mandated by an earlier law.  The cuts were added to the bill only to reduce its apparent cost.  As economist and former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin notes in the Wall Street Journal, the promised cuts to pay for ObamaCare will not happen: “Senate Democrats chose to ignore this reality and rely on the promise of a cut to make their bill add up. Taking note of this fact . . . destroys any pretense of budget balance.”)

Backers of ObamaCare have refused to cut medical costs through malpractice reform, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying that such reforms would save “only” $54 billion.  The Pacific Research Institute estimates that just one type of cost that could be reduced through malpractice-lawsuit reform — defensive medicine — costs around $200 billion annually (which is almost as much as France spends annually on healthcare for all of its citizens; like most countries, France has no punitive damages, and fewer lawsuits against doctors).

One reform opposed by the Democrats — setting up specialized health tribunals to hear malpractice cases — would be particularly helpful. Replacing uninformed juries with specialized health courts would provide more consistent rulings from case to case, eliminate meritless cases, reduce defensive medicine, and more speedily compensate injured people who truly are victimized by doctors’ carelessness. Such tribunals already exist in countries like “Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand.”

Martin Feldstein, one of Obama’s own advisors, has said that Obama’s health-care plan would explode the federal budget deficit and lead to “crippling deficits,” as well as “higher taxes, debt payments, and interest rates” that would cut America’s standard of living. Feldstein also noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and predicted that it would lead to massive tax increases. Other analysts have predicted that it will drive up medical costs and inflation.

Obama is relying on $2 trillion in imaginary savings to pay for his health care plan. He is also relying on tax increases, which breaks Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class.  Obama’s support for the bill, which will massively increase the deficit in the future, also breaks his promise not to sign a healthcare bill that adds even “one dime” to the deficit, now or in the future.

Scary stuff! Phony stuff! And a desperate effort to distract from an alarmist media’s greatest nightmare: That the epidemic has peaked, as I write in National Review Online.

Yet the mainstream may possibly, maybe, sorta, be starting to catch on.

“Health officials say swine flu cases appear to declining throughout most of the U.S.,” reports AP. But, making evident its reporter hadn’t actually bothered to look at the data or try to comprehend it, the story concluded “They say it’s hard to know whether the epidemic has peaked or not, and many people will be gathering - and spreading germs - next week at Thanksgiving.” Well, there you go, there is a possible  exception to the rule of infectious disease epidemic curves known as Farr’s law. It’s called “Thanksgiving.”

Home care providers are government employees? Defining them as such is a novel strategy some unions are pursuing — with help from union-friendly politicians — in order to organize independent businesses who cater to clients who receive any sort of state subsidy. This is what happened to Michigan home day care providers Sherry Loar, Paulette Silverson, and Michelle Berry. The Mackinac Center’s Patrick Wright, who is representing them in a lawsuit, explains:

[I]n December 2008 these women were notified by mail that they were dues-paying members of the newly formed Child Care Providers Together Michigan union, a joint enterprise of the United Auto Workers and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Loar, Silverson, Berry and 40,000 other home-based day care providers in Michigan are now seeing a total of $3.7 million annually taken from their paychecks by the Michigan Department of Human Services and given to the union.

Here’s how the union did it.

The Child Care Providers Together Michigan was formed in or around 2006 with the intent of organizing “[a]ll home-based child care providers.” In July 2006, the DHS entered into an interlocal agreement with Mott Community College to create the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council. This, from all appearances, is a government “shell corporation” designed to get around possible political and constitutional obstructions to the arrangement. In September 2006, CCPTM filed a petition with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission seeking to organize against the MHBCCC.

MERC conducted a vote by mail in October and November 2006. Of the 40,500 home day care providers who would be effected by this decision, 6,396 voted. The outcome was 5,921 in favor of the union and 475 opposed. Neither Loar, Silverson nor Berry believes they were aware of or voted in that election.

In 2008, the CCPTM and the MHBCCC entered into what they called “a collective bargaining agreement.” The mechanism for collecting “union dues” was through child care subsidy payments made to needy families with children in home day care. When those payments were passed on to Loar, Silverson and Berry, dues were withheld. The Michigan Department of Human Services began collecting the dues in January 2009.

The Mackinac Center is seeking a writ of mandamus to keep the state’s Department of Human Services from deducting dues, which, at 1.15 percent of each subsidy check, would provide the UAW/AFSCME affiliate with $3.7  million annually.

The main arguments presented in the case are that the plaintiffs, as home-based business owners, are really independent contractors and not government employees of the MHBCCC, and that an interlocal agreement cannot expand the definition of public employee beyond what the Legislature has set.

This tactic is not new. As Wright notes, the Michigan effort follows the same pattern as the model established in California, Oregon, and Washington state for unionizing home care workers who look after disabled and elderly residents. In our Cato Institute paper on public sector unions, my co-authors and I noted this trend.

Now some unions are trying to expand the definition of “public” by trying to organize government contractors. Washington state provides a good example of this. There, the trend began in 2001, when voters approved a ballot measure, Initiative 775, to allow independent long-term health care providers to unionize and bargain collectively over hours, compensation, and working conditions. Then in 2007, Washington state authorized collective bargaining for adult-home-care providers who receive Medicaid and other state aid. Stretching the definition of “public employee” to any home-care provider who may contract with the state can give a public employee union a foothold in the private sector.

The full Cato study is available here.

Recent innovations, such as easy-open tabs on cans, have prompted the Department of Agriculture to issue a 13-page update to its food container inspection regulations. If you have some spare time on your hands, you can have a look by clicking here.

Charles Huang

Web and Media Associate

Competitive Enterprise Institute

chuang@cei.org

http://www.cei.org

http://www.openmarket.org

202-331-1010

According to The New York Times, several UNITE-HERE organizers have complained about a practice known as “pink sheeting,” in which union members are pressured to reveal private and potentially embarrassing personal information about themselves. Union organizers then allegedly use those workers’ stories to present as testimonials that illustrate the kind of hardships that the union has helped its members overcome.

More than a dozen organizers said in interviews that they had often been pressured to detail such personal anguish — sometimes under the threat of dismissal from their union positions — and that their supervisors later used the information to press them to comply with their orders.

“It’s extremely cultlike and extremely manipulative,” said Amelia Frank-Vitale, a Yale graduate and former hotel union organizer who said these practices drove her to see a therapist.

Several organizers grew incensed when they discovered that details of their history had been put into the union’s database so that supervisors could use that information to manipulate them.

UNITE-HERE President John Wilhelm denied that pink sheeting was common, and denounced “the organized campaign to condemn it” (as Times reporter Steven Greenhouse describes it) as an effort by SEIU to discredit UNITE-HERE.  As I’ve noted here before, SEIU is not above bullying its own members, and SEIU President Andy Stern has motive to go after Wilhelm’s union.

Before UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial & Textile Employees) and HERE (Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees) merged in 2004,  Stern has made no secret of his desire for SEIU to absorb the two unions. He offered HERE’s Wilhelm and UNITE chief Bruce Raynor to join SEIU. They declined and merged their unions with each other, but did join the Change to Win coalition, which Stern helped found in 2005 when he took SEIU out of the AFL-CIO (the Wilhelm-led UNITE-HERE has since rejoined the AFL-CIO). As The Las Vegas Sun’s Michael Mishak, who interviewed Stern in May 2009, notes:

To hear [Stern] tell it, two of the nation’s most progressive unions would not now be at war had they only listened to his advice five years ago. Back then, as Unite, the garment and apparel workers union, and Here, the hotel and casino workers union, considered merging, Stern suggested an alternative: join SEIU, which was surging forward as the country’s largest and fastest-growing union.

Unite President Bruce Raynor and Here leader John Wilhelm declined.

Instead they formed Unite Here, parent of the Culinary Union, promising to organize large numbers of workers nationally. The honeymoon was short-lived, and long-simmering tensions between the two leaders erupted into public view this year, with Raynor calling for a divorce and Wilhelm struggling to keep the merger intact

Yet whatever SEIU’s motives, the claims made against UNITE-HERE are serious enough to warrant further investigation. (Thanks to Vincent Vernuccio for the Times link.)

For more on SEIU, see here.

For more on UNITE-HERE, see here.

But, the early versions of any technology are often clumsy.  Books, after all, have long been less accessible to the visually handicapped.  This is not unusual; many visual projects - movies, TVs, plays, operas - all remain inaccessible.  But, the goal of civilization is not the utopian goal of making everything available for everyone but rather to make the world more accessible to more people and Kindle certainly advances that goal.  With some skill or with the assistance of a sighted individual, Kindle allows the blind the opportunity to “read” vastly more books than ever before.  While, readers have always been available and audio books are increasingly common, these are generally more expensive.  Moreover future Kindle products will almost certainly embody audio instructions to guide the blind through the various menu functions.

Utopian passions are dangerous.  The search for the perfect can too easily make it impossible to attain the good.

The tax increases (in billions) include:

1. 40% excise tax on health coverage in excess of $8,500 (individuals) / $23,000 (families). . .
2. Additional 0.5% Medicare (Hospital Insurance) tax on wages in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) – begins in 2013 – $54 B tax increase
3. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs – begins in 2010 – $22 B tax increase
4. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices – begins in 2010 – $19 B tax increase
5. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices – begins in 2010 – $60 B tax increase
6. Cut in half (to $500K) the amount of an executive’s compensation that a health plan can deduct from its corporate income taxes – begins in 2013 . . .
7. Impose 5% excise tax on cosmetic surgery and similar procedures – begins for surgery in 2010 – $6 B tax increase!

The bill will cost far more than projected. The bill uses “accounting tricks” to keep the short-term costs down, by temporarily raising taxes before spending explodes. But in every year thereafter, it will increase the deficit, notes an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. “In its true first decade (2014 to 2023), CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.”

The Dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey S. Flier, gave the health care bill a “failing grade” in an analysis published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, saying that it would drive up costs and stifle medical innovation.

The health care “reform” bills “would reduce senior care,” increase “medical costs,”  and “jeopardize access to care for millions,” reported experts at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.    They will explode state and federal deficits, and contain payoffs for trial lawyers and racial preferences.

ObamaCare spends money on frills like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health care.  In a speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health care.

A CNN commentary noted that Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” such as the freedom to choose your doctors, keep your existing plan if you like it, and choose what’s in your plan.

Mass delousing was planned for the entire populations, which would be spayed “on the hoof” at fifty “public powdering stations.” Transport planes brought emergency supplies of . . . DDT . . . and eventually sixty tons would be shipped to Italy. At one commandeered palazzo, MPs carrying sacks of the stuff stood by with spray guns . . . . “The men were sprayed from head to foot,” [as one witness described it]. “The women were shot down their bosoms and backs and were sprayed back to front” Other spray teams prowled caves and shelters, and soon the typhus epidemic ended.

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.

[. . .]

Worse, [the] legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies . . . rather than the patients who should be our primary concern. . . Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all. [emphasis added]

The health care “reform” bill backed by President Obama “would reduce senior care,” increase “medical costs,” and “could jeopardize access to care for millions,” report health care experts at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The House recently passed the bill by a vote of 220 to 215.

The bill will raise taxes on the middle class. It will also explode state and federal deficits and cost far more than promised. It contains special-interest pork, such as payoffs for trial lawyers, and racial preferences.

The bill will increase tax rates to “European levels of taxation.” It restricts national competition in health insurance, which is permitted in countries with cheaper health care.

ObamaCare spends money on frills like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” and tax increases, says one of Obama’s own economic advisers, Martin Feldstein.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health care. Obama often contradicts himself. In the very same speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health care.

CNN noted that Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms.”

A few things the FCC should consider:

-Subsidies don’t make broadband access any less expensive. They just change who pays for it. In this case, that would be anybody with a phone. Which probably includes you. The great economist Ludwig von Mises observed that “A government can no more determine prices than a goose can lay hen’s eggs.”*

-The tax would make owning a phone more expensive. And when something becomes more expensive, people consume less of it. With tax-exempt technologies like Skype and Google Voice now available, people can switch away from a taxed phone to something cheaper more easily than ever. The more people who do that, the less revenue the phone tax would generate, defeating its very purpose.

-If a company has to share its network infrastructure with its competitors, it loses the incentive to maintain and improve that network. Why invest millions of dollars if it will help your competition just as much as yourself? Quality suffers. So does innovation. In the long run, it is innovation, not FCC intervention, that will make broadband affordable and accessible for everyone. The long-run view is just as important as the short-run view here.

-Land-based networks are expensive to build in rural areas. The cost per customer is huge compared to denser urban areas. Fortunately, that isn’t as much of a problem for wireless technologies. The FCC seems hellbent on the land-based networks since wireless networks aren’t yet advanced enough for mass-market broadband service. But they will be soon enough. And every dollar spent on old-fashioned wired networks is a dollar unavailable for improving wireless service. An unintended consequence of FCC intervention would be slower innovation.

*Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1949], p. 397.

The vote occurred with no discussion, and no hearing was even held on his nomination, although hearings have consistently been held on OSHA nominees in the past, even for far less controversial picks.

Lawyer and Second Amendment expert, David Kopel explains how Michaels wants to ban guns in and near workplaces, and could use his position at OSHA to do so, if the political climate shifts in favor of gun control. (Some businessmen in high-crime areas possess guns to protect themselves against armed robbers, and even strict local gun-control laws have generally contained exceptions to allow such businesses to defend themselves.)

The fact that such bans might undermine, rather than enhance, workplace safety would not deter Michaels, who would be happy to rely on junk science.   Michaels wants to reverse the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision limiting the use of junk science.

As the Washington Times noted, “Mr. Michaels also is an anti-gun zealot who has described ‘gun violence’ as an issue of ‘public health’ that ‘invariably demands more and stronger regulation, not less.’ As Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute explained, by way of warning, on Aug. 15: ‘That’s by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers. In addition, OSHA has authority to regulate the working conditions of various job categories associated with firearms use (security guards, hunting guides, etc.) and could in that capacity do much to bring grief to Second Amendment values.’”

As I noted in a New York Times story, Michaels’ appointment could “dramatically alter OSHA’s approach to ensuring workplace safety.” Michaels has been called “one the nation’s foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

Many business groups raised concerns about his nomination and extreme views.

Iain Murray notes that Michaels seeks to ban useful products from the workplace based on imaginary risks. One newspaper calls Michaels “virulently anti-business.”

The lopsided committee vote in favor of Michaels is probably explained by log-rolling.  As The Wall Street Journal has noted, some Republican committee members likely voted along with their Democratic colleagues to approve Michaels, in exchange for Obama’s recent nomination of an aide to the ranking Republican committee member, to sit on the board of an independent agency that is supposed to be bipartisan (the NLRB), but which Obama could conceivably have made even more partisan and liberal than it is by nominating a liberal RINO rather than a GOP aide to that post (that might have invited a filibuster, but there are only 40 Republican Senators, and it takes 41 votes to successfully filibuster a nomination).

Jupiter, of course, is about as far away from America as one can get.

But wait, there’s more:

The town code regulates items such as when garbage cans can be placed outside, noise volume, parking of boats, heights of fences, the number of tenants and landscaping. Lawns cannot be higher than eight inches in developed residential areas.

The ban, due to take effect in 2011, has not been repealed outright. But, in response to public outcry, it has been delayed:

The FDA announced it would commission a study to explore alternatives to reducing the illness vibrio vulnificus, and also do an economic analysis of how the ban would impact the oyster industry.

“Before proceeding, we will conduct an independent study to assess how post-harvest processing or other equivalent controls can be feasibly implemented in the Gulf Coast in the fastest, safest and most economical way,” according to an FDA news release.

Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

From ABC News:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

Neither the cellphone companies nor their customers, as it turns out, always act in the rational way that economists might predict. Consumers often put immediate gratification and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises above their long-term interests. The companies, meanwhile, are trying to meet the sometimes irrational expectations of investors, who want growth without too much nasty volatility, even if their profits suffer.

The article cites several unintuitive examples of customers and wireless carriers acting “irrationally”:  consumers switching to costlier plans when given the choice of a discounted or variable-priced plan; carriers charging a flat fee for data services even though they are expensive to provide; and consumers’ unwillingness to shop for lowest cost-per-minute deals.

It would seem that consumers dislike having variable monthly cell phones bills. Hansell cites the example of Sprint’s 2004 “Fair and Flexible Plan” offering. Fair and Flexible was a two-tiered pricing plan in which customers would pay a flat $35 for the first 300 minutes per month, and then $2.50 per each additional block of 50 minutes. While this plan makes sense economically, customers didn’t warm up to it, and instead signed on to plans that are more typical of today’s offerings among the Big Four: a flat-but-higher monthly fee for a bigger basket of anytime minutes, plus overage charges. Compared to a more variably-priced contract, this pricing plan doesn’t result in the lowest possible per-minute charges, but consumers have revealed a preference for consistent monthly bills over variable, usage-based pricing.

On the sellers’ side of the equation, cell phone service providers have difficulty determining their per-unit costs. Customers vary in their average monthly usage, and what’s more, usage among individuals isn’t static from month to month either. Thus, it’s hard for the companies to accurately estimate their costs-per-minute. As a result, the business strategy employed is to try to get a consistent amount of money from subscribers every month, and to have enough subscribers to cover total costs. For example, it costs very little for a wireless carrier to transmit a text message, yet the big four carriers each charge $0.20 per message. At the same time, they each offer an “unlimited texting” plan for $10-$20 per month. Again, consumers have shown a preference for consistent billing, and have signed up almost en masse for unlimited texting plans.

For whatever reason, consumers have shied away from lower-cost mobile plan options in favor of higher flat fees and plans with perks when given the choice. Whether it’s because we’re all just risk-averse and hate wildly-varying bills, or we’re drawn towards extra goodies like unlimited texting or in-network calling, the best way to discern what consumers want is to look at what they’ve chosen in the past. While critics of the cell phone industry complain that the wireless industry isn’t competitive or that wireless providers don’t compete on price, this article explores that American consumers’ preferences have guided those companies to the pricing system we have today.

How did ACORN cause the “housing bubble” and “financial collapse”?  ACORN lobbyists drafted “affordable-housing” mandates to pressure the mortgage giants to buy up more risky loans and mortgages from low-income communities, loans that banks in turn were pressured to make by the Community Reinvestment Act, explains The Wall Street Journal.

ACORN also helped spawn the mortgage crisis by promoting “liar loans.”   It has a long history of  financial fraud, vote fraud, tax evasion, waste, and mismanagement.

Lawmakers and the Obama administration have studiously ignored ACORN’s role in spawning the financial crisis, because many liberal lawmakers have long had close ties to ACORN.  ACORN is a left-wing group that launched Obama’s career as a community organizer.  (ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.)  Obama has long-standing ties to ACORN, and an ACORN affiliate received received $800,000 from Obama’s campaign.

In recent months, lawmakers distanced themselves from ACORN, and cut off its federal housing funds, after it was caught on videotape in a child prostitution promotion scandal.  (ACORN is now suing the federal government in court, to force it to resume funding ACORN.  Earlier, it sued the private citizens who exposed its role in the scandal for $2 million).

However, in the long run, ACORN is likely to continue to benefit from its close ties to liberal lawmakers and the administration.  Entities related to ACORN stand to reap millions from Obama’s financial regulation proposals and health-care reform proposals.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is busy promoting the junky, risky mortgages that fueled the housing bubble, showing that it has learned nothing from history.  One result is that the Federal Housing Administration, which is making many such loans, has gone into a “nose dive” and may need a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout, reports the Washington Post.

Obama wants to create a bureaucracy called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.” The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.  Yet Obama’s plan would empower the CFPA to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants (”GSEs”) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.

But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.”

Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort pay-offs from banks.

Recently, the administration got rid of the inspector general for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after making Freddie Mac run up $30 billion in losses from the Obama administration’s mortgage bailouts, which bailed out even high-income borrowers who irresponsibly mismanaged their finances.  Earlier, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered misuse of funds by a prominent Obama backer, smearing the inspector general with allegations that turned out to be false.

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

This gag order presents a particular problem for any news organization in a nation that prides itself on it’s freedom of the press.

Indeed, McCullagh says that news organizations are entitled to special limiting processes when they are subpoenaed, such as requiring “the express authorization of the attorney general.” Information gained from a subpoena issued to a news organization must also be limited in nature.

Apparently the Department of Justice isn’t at liberty to say why the subpoena was issued, although the demand request was retracted after the Electronic Frontier Foundation caught wind of the situation via an Indymedia server administrator and offered to represent the organization free-of-charge. The Attorney General’s office reportedly has no knowledge of the request. Naturally.

I wrote an article not too long ago saying that transparency is welcome symptomatic relief. But TARP itself is a disease. The only way to cure the disease of bailout programs is to abolish them. Russ Roberts said much the same thing:

[C]apitalism is a profit and loss system. The profits encourage risk-taking. The losses encourage prudence. If the taxpayer almost always eats the losses for the losers, you don’t have capitalism. You have crony capitalism.

Transparency is a good start. But the goal should be to not have government bailing out politically favored companies in the first place.

There may be violence, says Damon A. Silvers, Associate General Counsel for the AFL-CIO and Deputy Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Silvers spoke on last Friday’s panel “Labor: Wall Street, Labor Unions, and the Obama Administration: A New Paradigm for Capitol and Labor?” Speaking to the panel, he claimed economic downturns which cause people to have their wages cut, can have devastating results.

Silvers pointed to wage cuts in Brazil and spoke of the violence which ensued. He argued that when people are starving they may get violent, that the have nots will take from the haves. Quickly cautioning that this could not happen in the United States, he smirked and added, “but it may.” Not so subtly, Silvers implied that if you cut union wages there may be violence.

Another gem from the convention came from Thursday’s lead discussion “Redistribution of Wealth.” One presenter, when asked what happened to the auto industry in regards to unions, stated, “Unions missed the most basic fundamental economic role they have to play, which is to take wages out of competition. What happened was when they had a monopoly or took wages out of competition for the Big Three people competed more inefficiently…When the transplants came…the union didn’t do its job, it was an anchor to the competitive field as opposed to a help.”

Which right leaning free-market intellectuals stated this fact? None other than any Andrew Stern, the president of the SEIU! That is correct, Andy Stern blamed the collapse of the Big Three in part to the union monopoly of the UAW and called it an anchor to competition.

More characteristically, Stern also spoke of redistribution of wealth saying, “I do no support, I condemn, the redistribution of wealth — that is to say, the redistribution of wealth upwards.”

Advocating the redistribution of wealth? Cautioning of violence if wages are cut? Is this really the message top officials in the two largest labor unions want to be sending? Both Stern and Silvers knew their audience did not agree with them – Stern was sweating during his presentation – but did make an effort to speak to the constitutionally minded lawyers association.

Unfortunately, while tempered, their message was a clear endorsement of class warfare. Espousing unions as the only way for workers to get ahead in America, they chastised the Reagan era and directly blamed the demise of unions for what they claimed were lower worker wages. They ignored facts of other presenters showing that most workers’ standard of living has actually gone up in the last 30 years.

Stern should be given credit for acknowledging that the UAW monopoly helped almost destroy the American auto industry. He must acknowledge that hard work, innovation, and ingenuity are the real engine of the American economy, not collective bargaining. The monopolistic nature of unions in many industries is a liability to both workers and unions. As Stern pointed out in the context of the failure of the U.S. auto industry, unions’ inflexibility can drag down companies and work as a hindrance, not a help.