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.”

He makes some excellent points about the pointlessness of taxing telephone usage to subsidize broadband services and the fact that it is innovation not intervention that will propagate and push new technologies while decreasing costs to consumers.  As Mr. Young notes, land-based internet is neither cost effective nor as advanced as wireless broadband technology, which as he also notes is not yet ready for mass markets. This made me wonder about the reasons behind the tech-lag in the US–why isn’t our country ready for nation-wide wireless broadband? It also reminded me of a great EconTalk podcast I heard recently that suggested some possible answers.

The cause of wireless underdevelopment according to Michael Heller, author of Gridlock Economy, is that there are too many owners invested in the resource of radio frequencies; there are many owners of small slivers of spectrum which leaves the entire resource “underused”. So, creating a new technology that would allow one to transmit across the country would require the utilization of all these small licensed slivers of spectrum which is simply too expensive for most companies to attempt. This leads to his concept of the “tragedy of the anticommons” where, rather than a resource becoming overused through a lack of property ownership, too many owners of a resource lead to its underutilization. At first this idea of the tragedy of the anticommons might lead one to believe Heller is suggesting we socialize radio waves for the maximum benefit, but on the contrary, Heller suggests that policy change so that ownership of frequencies resembles more closely real property rights with licenses having wider application and being much more transferable.

If government truly wants Americans to have greater access to cheaper broadband solution, they ought to stop interfering with frequency owners’ right to utilize their property as they see fit. This would, presumably, result in the advancement of nation-wide wireless broadband services. This would not only result in a newer more cost-effective communication technology, but would also force competing technologies to lower their prices.

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.

For example, a police officer who retires with a $105,000 salary after 25 years of service can end up making more in retirement, after 29 years, than he or she did while working.

But that’s not all. Public employee pensions are a ticking time bomb that could bring fiscal catastrophe to the state.

New Jersey’s public employee pensions are under funded by billions of dollars which means there is going to be huge political pressure applied by Public Employees and Retirees to yet again increase taxes on the residents of New Jersey. However, that will simply be a stall tactic. The math will not work over the long term. There are too many employees and retirees in the current pension plans, the benefits are too generous, and there are too few tax payers with enough income to support these pensions. The New Jersey Pension Plans are under funded by roughly $50 billion (some studies and assumptions put the real liability at substantially higher levels). Therefore, on average, every NJ taxpayer will be required to pay more than $20,000to continue these pension benefits in addition to current tax rates. For each day that passes in which these plans are not modified, that tax burden will grow.

New Jersey, California, and Michigan may be egregious cases, but there’s no reason to believe that this situation could not repeat itself in even more states.

For more on public sector unions, see here.

Charles Huang

Web and Media Associate

Competitive Enterprise Institute

chuang@cei.org

http://www.cei.org

http://www.openmarket.org

202-331-1010

“If government spending for public works is financed by taxing the citizens or borrowing from them, the citizens’ power to spend and invest is curtailed to the same extent as that of the public treasury expands. No additional jobs are created.”

-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1949], p. 776.

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.

What makes this case particularly interesting is that Tower doesn’t oppose the development plan per se; rather, it wants to build a hotel “in such a way that enhances and accommodates the convention center.” The problem is that the development authority’s master plan includes the construction of a similar hotel, but on the city’s terms and with public support. Given that a government-commissioned study of the development plan admits that the convention center will almost certainly lose money in the long-term, and that Nashville Metro is already more than $2 billion in debt, one might expect that an offer to lessen the public finance burden while achieving virtually the same ends would be a welcome act.

Unfortunately, local officials don’t see it this way. Earlier this year, the Metro Council refused to adopt a proposed financial accountability amendment to the ordinance authorizing the Music City Center development project. The amendment would have required the council to set a maximum public financing limit and mandate council approval of the financing mechanism. And just a few weeks ago, a Metro commission rejected a proposal to allow referendums on major public capital investments, which likely would have led to a vote on the convention center project.

Fundamentally, this case comes down to the almost-universal inability of municipal bureaucrats to understand that economic development can, does, and will occur without them waving their magic wands.

Our political system is only now perhaps emerging from a foolish policy of lowering credit standards to encourage universal home ownership.  We’re now about to lower credit standards for health and energy investments.  In effect, the problems of subprime mortgages are now being universalized.  But, as in the subprime case, we’re assured that these moves will actually lower the national debt! Does reality have any relevancy?

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.

Yet, an article in the Washington Times today quotes Roger Middleton, a piracy specialist at the London-based Chatham House: “the international community was still ’solidly against’ armed guards aboard vessels at sea” and goes on to note that “American ships have taken a different line from the rest of the international community.”  Remember when Ross Perot sent his own team to Iran to rescue his employees.  Americans aren’t immune to self-defense and rarely are as concerned as the “international community” about the root causes that have driven these poor individuals to resort to piracy.

Perhaps, America hasn’t gone quite as crazy as we think.

More cash/Fewer Clunkers

Via the Von Mises blog:  According to the consumer pricing index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the price of used cars rose 3.4% in October thanks to the government’s cash-for-clunkers that spirited away a large portion of the used-car inventory. So, for those of us who chose not to buy a new “greener” car last month, and who want to purchase a dirty old used car, we have a smaller pool from which to select. Fewer goods results in increased demand and increased prices. Thanks a lot Big Government. You helped rich folks knock off a few grand on their brand new cars that cost tens of thousands of dollars and left those working on a much smaller budget potentially priced out of the used-car market, with no car to get to work or shuttle around kids, and left without a bailout to stand on.

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.

Socialism had three major failings. The first is what economists study most closely. It is the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, because of the rejection of prices and money as a medium of exchange. Whether you support socialist ideals or not, it is literally impossible to achieve. Do away with prices and currency, and they will emerge in a different form. They are part of human society.

The second aspect of socialism intrigues philosophers: socialism genuinely sought to change human nature itself. People as they currently are are in no shape to realize Marx’s vision of communist society. So part of the communist program was to actively mold and change people so that vision could one day become a reality.

Before Marx came along, Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia were also written about societies with a fundamentally changed human nature. More, knowing his ideal to be impossible, coined the word “utopia,” which literally means “no place.” His book is a pleasant dream (for a collectivist at least), but More knew it was one that could ever come true. We are they way we are. And we’re stuck that way, for better or worse.

This leads us to the third aspect of socialism, which most concerns Trotsky. This is, for me, the most remarkable part, and the most chilling. It is the sheer violence that accompanied Marxism-Leninism everywhere it was tried. And I mean everywhere. Every single country to adopt communism had a checkered human rights record. No exceptions. Not one had anything resembling freedom of speech or press, or due process, or property rights.

Most historians now estimate that communist governments killed around 100,000,000 people. Mostly their own citizens. At no other point in human history have governments been so murderous of their own people. No other ideology has had consequences so bloody as Marxism and its variants.

One reason for the violence is that it allowed the governments to maintain power; resistance is less likely when the prevailing climate is of fear. Another is that human nature is stubborn. If it is to be changed, force is required. But, of course, the basic tenets of humanity are immutable. We are who we are.

Communist leaders, including Trotsky, were simply chilling. Many of them come off as sadists. They seemed to actually enjoy bloodshed. Revel in it. Yet Trotsky still has his admirers today. They need to answer for why they look up to someone who would even have thoughts like the following, let alone give voice to such brutish impulses in public speeches:

“The strength of the French Revolution,” he shouted to a group of revolutionary sailors, “was in the machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city.” And have it they did. Once in power, Trotsky advocated show trials and the execution of political prisoners; he suppressed other socialist parties and independent trade unions; he pushed for the censorship of art that did not support the revolution; and he created the institutions of repression that were later turned against him and his followers.

About three-fourths of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds can’t join the military, largely due to these problems, says a report from Mission: Readiness, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. It’s one reason President Obama is dithering over whether he should order an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. Today we have just 1.4 million people in the active military, whereas in 1944 we had over 2 million serving in France alone, out of a U.S. population less than half its current size.

Read my Forbes article to find out how our public education system is a serious threat to national defense.

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] government can spend or invest only what it takes away from its citizens… its additional spending and investment curtails the citizens’ spending and investment to the full extent of its quantity.”

-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1949], p. 744.