The Mandate is No Big Deal. Defeating it Would Have Been

I keep reading that requiring us to do something, as opposed to requiring us to not do something, is a new step, and conservatives are sounding alarms all over the internet that freedom died as a result of the Supreme Court upholding the health care mandate, and that we’ve crossed a line into government mandated oblivion. But the health care mandate is not the first mandate. Several months ago the story of George Washington’s gun mandate was making the rounds. Other examples are in a discussion about the draft, posted by Greg Sargent, and in a post in Daily Kos about a railway case, which quotes NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel (1937):

The decree which we affirmed in that case required the railway company to treat with the representative chosen by the employees and also to refrain from entering into collective labor agreements with any one other than their true representative as ascertained in accordance with the provisions of the act.

In other words, the railway company was required to do something, and face penalties for not doing it.

With all of the power that the federal government already has, much gained with the support of right wing ideologues, the idea that this power to enforce a mandate represents a bold new step seems petty and hypocritical. The court didn’t grant any new power, it affirmed power that already exists and refused to carve out a special exception. It should have affirmed this power under the commerce clause, as argued by the administration. As a Kos commenter noted, referencing Gonzales v. Raich:

Growing pot on your patio to smoke yourself is clearly interstate commerce, but a central issue facing any effort to reform a sector that occupies 18% of our economy, well that’s just going too far.

But instead, the Supreme Court affirmed the power as falling under the power to tax. Either way, the power was there.

If freedom died, it died long before the Affordable Care Act. It was dead on or before 1942, when Roscoe Filburn was told that he couldn’t grow his own wheat for his own use because doing so interfered with interstate commerce. So don’t blame Obama.

Abuses of eminent domain and laws against personal use of home-grown medicine are examples of overreaching government that I’m all for rolling back, along with all of the Monsanto and factory-meat friendly laws which make it almost impossible for a small farmer to legally sell his product. But I don’t want to go back to the days before equal rights, national fire codes, child labor laws and environmental protection.

Unlike eminent domain abuses, invasive drug laws, and overregulation of home-made produce and meat, the Affordable Care Act won’t prevent us from doing things that we’re free to do. There are plenty of examples of over-regulation and abuses of federal power. But we didn’t suddenly become unfree last Thursday and we didn’t cross a line into new territory.

There are plenty of ways for Americans to become freer. Allowing health care companies to keep increasing the cost of health care isn’t one of them.

Reason: Yes, Mitt Romney Flip-Flopped on the Mandate

Reason.com makes a strong case that Mitt Romney did, in fact, advocate for health care reforms on a federal level. Mitt Romney Central disputes that claim, citing a 2009 Newsweek Op-Ed in which Mr. Romney wrote:

Center reforms at the state level. Open the door to state plans designed to meet the various needs of their citizens. Before imposing a one-size-fits-all federal program, let the states serve as “the laboratories of democracy.”

But after reading the back and fourth between Mitt Romney Central and those who accuse Mitt Romney of flip-flopping, I’ve concluded that while Mr. Romney would allow more flexibility to the states in administering the program, on top of it all would be a federal policy which either rewards citizens for purchasing insurance or penalizes them for not doing so. Even in the rebuttal on Romney Central, Ben Collins quotes Mitt Romney:

For the uninsured who can afford insurance but expect to be given free care at the hospital, require them to either pay for their own care or buy insurance; if they do neither, they would forgo the tax credit or lose a deduction. No more “free riders.”

and states:

What Romney is saying is that those who don’t purchase health insurance lose the opportunity to gain a “tax credit” or “deduction.”

…

Romney is not advocating a “mandate” of the type Obama used where people are fined for not purchasing insurance, and Romney is certainly not advocating a FEDERAL mandate of any kind

My problems with Mr. Collins’s argument are that it’s a false distinction between causing those who don’t purchase health insurance to “loose an opportunity to gain a ‘tax credit'” and penalizing them with a fine, it’s a dishonest use of semantics to call financial incentives to coerce people to purchase health insurance something other than a “mandate”, and imposing such a mandate is a use of congressional power even if administering that imposition is delegated to the states.

Even NRO’s Andrew McCarthy, a kinder, gentler hatemonger who usually writes about why Muslims can never be trusted, delved into this issue and admitted that “health-care extortion, by the way, is not Obama’s doing”. He only accuses President Obama of “fast-forwarding to the next logical steps.”

But the health care mandate is not a “fast forward”. It’s what’s required in order to make health care accessible to all Americans, other than a single payer system.

Trolling about Health Care at NRO

Trolling at the NRO is frustrating because it takes so long for comments to appear. On the other hand, I should admit that I was wrong In an earlier post when I suggested that my comments would be replied to by excessively nasty and low-class remarks.

Charles Krauthammer wrote a post about the Affordable Care Act in which he begins re-telling the easily and repeatedly debunked lie about the 1.76 trillion cost estimate from the CBO. Then he gives the old slippery slope warning, suggesting that if the Supreme Court approves Obamacare, there won’t be any limits on federal power. Finally, he writes about Catholic organizations being forced to pay for contraception, which they’re not actually being forced to do, as an unprecedented denial of religious freedom, when actually it’s tame compared to oppression that the Supreme Court has approved of in the past.

I wrote a reply, but it probably won’t appear until tonight or tomorrow.

The 1.76 trillion figure is part of a calculation that has been taken out of context from a report (pdf) in which it’s very clearly not being used as a final estimate. One conservative lied about it and it spread through the internet at an amazing clip. Mr. Krauthammer undercut his usual low standards by repeating a lie that not only has been debunked by multiple organizations, is pretty easy for anyone to debunk on their own. The report isn’t too hard to read. The report actually says, on the first page, that the CBO’s new estimate is lower than previous estimates for the same period of time. But when not using the same time period, which is what happens each year when the CBO produces it’s ten-year projections, the cost will rise as more of the ACA is implemented. This is a well known fact but Mr. Krauthammer sounds the alarm as if he’s just uncovered a secret plot. But 1.76 trillion is false even with the new, increased estimate.

The health care mandate is in keeping with current powers of the federal government. A commenter on National Review suggested that if Obamacare passes then everyone over 18 should be mandated to purchase a gun. I don’t know if the commenter is aware that a similar mandate was passed during the presidency of George Washington. Washington’s mandate was never challenged in the Supreme Court but 1942, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can use the commerce clause to put limits on wheat production even if the production is for private use. More recently, the court overrode state law by outlawing marijuana for medicinal purposes, and Justice Antonin Scalia supported the power of the commerce clause in that case. Charles Krauthammer wants to know, if the mandate passes, is there anything the commerce clause doesn’t allow the federal government to do? George Washington’s mandate was never challenged and the two cases I just mentioned are far more overreaching than the health care mandate, so whatever the federal government can and can’t do now, it won’t change with approval of the health care mandate.

The recent accommodation for Catholic institutions means that those institutions will not directly pay for contraception. If it’s unconstitutional for Catholic organizations to be forced to pay indirectly for something they don’t believe in, than all taxes are unconstitutional because they may be used indirectly to pay for things that citizens don’t agree with, such as war, subsidies for farms which produce pork, and even Medicare, since some people don’t believe in medicine.

Mr. Krauthammer writes,

Today, it’s the Catholic Church whose free-exercise powers are under assault from this cascade of diktats sanctioned by — indeed required by — Obamacare. Tomorrow it will be the turn of other institutions of civil society that dare stand between unfettered state and atomized citizen.

But the federal government has a long history of trampling over religious beliefs when doing so supports a national agenda. One good example, also supported by conservative Justice Scalia, is the religious use of controlled substances, which the Supreme Court has determined can be disallowed. Mr. Krauthammer has access to high level archival databases. Surely has access to wikipedia.

Conservatives, including Mitt Romney, New Gingrich, and the leadership of the Heritage Foundation all supported the individual mandate before defeating the mandate became something that could used to damage the Democratic party. That’s another inconvenient fact that Mr. Krauthammer has to ignore in order to paint Democrats as Socialists for their support of Obamacare.

A nobody like I can be forgiven for acting like a passive element and mindlessly repeating lies that are bouncing around the internet. Someone with Mr. Krauthammer’s resources should know better.

Precedent vs Ideology will be important in the Health Care Decision

From TPM:

Since [ the new deal era ], the high court has overwhelmingly supported congressional authority to make economic regulations — from the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn case, which upheld laws restricting wheat production for personal consumption, to the 2005 Gonzalez v. Raich ruling, which decreed (with the help of Scalia and Kennedy) that Congress may override state laws permitting medical marijuana patients to grow cannabis for personal use. The administration will argue that both laws reflected broad exercises of Congress’s power on the scale of mandating insurance coverage.

But..

Despite the favorable precedents, progressives have a nagging fear that the five Republican-appointed justices will hand down a partisan decision on the scale of Bush v. Gore, to deliver a blow to President Obama. After that unprecedented 2000 ruling, some liberals take little comfort in scholars’ view that political pressure doesn’t usually carry the day in the chamber, that the high court’s longstanding tendency is to make gradual, not radical, shifts in jurisprudence on core Constitutional questions.

A Supreme Court decision in favor of the health care mandate would reflect a century of precedent. A decision against it would reflect the same philosophy that resulted in the 2000 decision to stop Florida from recounting its own votes, which is that federal power over states’ rights can only be used to enforce conservative ideology.

Any Result Proves Keynesianism has Failed

I like this. This comes from Noahpinion, and I found the link on Brad Delong’s blog:

John Taylor thinks that our economic recovery has been terrible, and continues to be terrible. He chalks this up to the failure of “Keynesian” policies. I think it would be interesting to see him argue with Tyler Cowen, who says that we are having a good, strong recovery, and that this is evidence of the failure of “Keynesian” macro

An Overt Display of Dishonesty

A while ago I expressed my concern about the cross-the-board spending cuts that are scheduled to kick in if a budget deal can’t be reached. As Republicans get ready to brazenly renege on a deal that they never really intended to keep, I find myself even more concerned.

But I was off on one point. I thought the most significant factors were that Democrats don’t feel strongly enough about cutting military spending and that Republicans are willing to sacrifice the military in order to cut vital services for the poor and middle class. As it turns out, the most significant factors are that Democrats don’t feel strongly enough about cutting military spending and Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about keeping their promises.

I felt that Republicans would be more willing to let the cross-the-board cuts kick in than Democrats would because Democrats are more afraid of being branded as the party who weakened our national defenses than Republicans are afraid of being branded as the party who allowed people to die because they couldn’t afford shelter, food, or health care. What I didn’t realize is Republicans felt they could get whatever they want simply by lying.

Apparently the Republicans feel they can earn points by overtly behaving like charlatans, as long as the only people they’re lying to are Democrats. I hope they’re wrong. I hope that the Right wing base won’t actually cheer such a public act of chicanery because if it does, we will be at the brink of having a one-party government ruled by maniacs with the support of middle class citizens convinced that the reason they can’t get ahead is the poor have too much of their money. I don’t see such a future as being good for anyone but the ruling class.

Lying about Employment with Charts and Numbers

In response to Mitt Romney’s boldface lie that Obama is a “job destroyer”, Greg Sargent has been calling on Romney to explain himself. The truth is, as soon as the stimulus took effect, the hemorrhaging of jobs that occurred as a result of deregulation and lack of oversight started to turn around, and jobs have been created; not destroyed. How can so many people be fooled when the numbers are readily available and how can pathological lier like Mitt Romney be hailed as the Republican candidate most likely to beat Obama?

Take a look at these two charts:

Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over

Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over

Both are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One was pointed to in a Hot Air article to suggest that Obama’s policies, specifically health care reform, destroyed jobs (The article is titled “ObamaCare, the Job Destroyer”). The other is similar to a chart in Paul Krugman’s blog demonstrating that Obama has created jobs.

How can two charts about employment data look so different? Because only the second chart, “Employment Level”, shows whether jobs have been created or destroyed after the President’s fiscal policies took effect.

The other chart represents a problem and is concerning, but it does not indicate what Hot Air wants you to believe and does not undermine the fact that after the stimulus passed, the job decline turned around and our economy created over two million new jobs.

What the first chart, titled “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate”, shows is the percentage of U.S. population who are either employed or looking for work. Employed or looking for work means you’re part of the labor force. How does a person fail to be counted as employed and also fail to be counted as looking for work? Certainly, when someone gets fed up after weeks of not finding a job and becomes discouraged, that person drops out of the labor force. Like I said, it’s concerning. But also people who stay in school rather than finding a job, stay at home parents, and retirees are not in the labor force.

The baby boomers are retiring, and that’s having a real effect on labor force participation, as are discouraged workers.

To get a feel for the meaning of employment level vs labor participation, and whether a drop in labor force participation makes Obama a “job destroyer”, imagine a group of 10 people. 8 are working, and 2 are looking for jobs. One new job appears and one of the job-seekers snatches it up. The other gets discouraged and stops looking. Has employment improved or have jobs been destroyed?

When someone says that Obama is a Job Destroyer, they are mistaken or lying. And you cannot trust any news source or presidential candidate that promotes such a fallacy.

Update: I had the first chart labeled incorrectly, and incorrectly referred to the second chart in the text when I was talking about the first chart. I had mislabeled it “(Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level” instead of “Civilian labor force participation rate”

A Day in the Life of a Video Post about the Occupy Movement

I recently came across a video that was first posted back in October. It’s titled “A Day in the Life of an Occupy Wall St. Participant” by Matt, in Portland Oregon. This post is so full of misinformation I wish I could be surprised about it’s many thousands of facebook likes and comments of approval. Unfortunately, accurate information is less important than sarcastic rhetoric.

In the video, Matt describes Dakota, Marin, and Simon, a group of young, mindless, consumers, as they plan for a day of protesting while purchasing and using products sold by big corporations. Matt says that they are hypocrites for being compulsive consumers while protesting the evils of “corporate greed” and asks, “If you really wanted to change the system, wouldn’t you want to boycott these evil corporations?”

Well, no. Generally, what the occupiers hoped to accomplish was financial regulations to prevent the kind of investments which create great risk to people not making those investments. The target of the protest were primarily financial institutions, hence “Occupy Wall Street”. Since most of companies that Matt lists in his video aren’t financial institutions, the Occupy movement, though diverse, wasn’t generally targeting those corporations. As it turns out, many of the protesters did put their money where their mouths where, and closed accounts at large financial banks and moved them to local banks and credit unions. But even if they were protesting Verizon, Dell, and Cisco, boycotting isn’t the only way to voice displeasure and sometimes isn’t event he best. A massive boycott of dozens of major corporations would cause an even greater financial crisis than the one we’re recovering from now. That would be hypocritical.

Thus, Matt uses the activities of his three characters (I don’t know if he completely made them up ) to describe the entire movement as a bunch of “Self righteous, morally indignant hypocrites”, even though their activities, real or not, don’t demonstrate hypocrisy (thoughtlessness and consumerism, perhaps).

Towards the end of the video, Matt starts to sound a little bit like a liberal. He chastises his three characters for not giving money to homeless people, then he talks about Chinese slave laborers and Vietnamese children who make all the products that we mindlessly purchase. He actually says, “It’s your consumerism that’s driving the social inequality that you’re out protesting”.

So true. Interesting that the occupy movement was started by an anti-consumerist organization called
Adbusters (according to Wikipedia). Perhaps Matt and the occupiers have more in common than he realizes.

Matt doesn’t seem like a really bad guy, and I won’t chastise him for not telling us if Dakota, Marin, and Simon are real people, amalgams of stories he’s heard or read about, or just three dopes he dreamed up. He wasn’t expecting his little video to go viral.

The problem isn’t Matt, so much, as all the people who took this little story seriously, despite all of its irrelevancy, and hailed it as proof that the occupiers were all just a bunch of hypocrites.

Fact Checkers are Under Assault. As They Should Be.

Glenn Kessler, AKA The Fact Checker, bemoaned that “Fact checkers are under assault!” and defended his colleagues at Politifact in Politifact’s decision to give Democrats the Lie of the Year award for saying Republicans voted to end Medicare. Mr. Kessler makes a good argument but I don’t buy it.

According to Politifact’s Bill Adair (via CBS News), the house “voted to protect Medicare on people who are 55 or older, but to privatize it and restructure it in a dramatic way for people who are younger”. Saying they voted to protect Medicare is less accurate than saying they voted to end it. All they did was vote not to “restructure it in a dramatic way” for people 55 and over. For the rest of us, Medicare would be a new program with an old name. The old program will have ended.

Politifact is trying too hard to seem fair and balanced. Five of their finalists for lie of the year were things that right wingers said and five were things that left wingers said. What are the chances of such an even split? Almost nil. But in order to seem unbiased, they came up with a list of five each. One of the items on the list was something Debbie Wasserman said but immediately retracted and admitted was a mistake, on the same day she said it. Politifact explains:

At PolitiFact, we do not typically fact-check statements that are quickly retracted by the speaker. However, we made an exception in this case because we expect voter identification laws and other election-process issues to remain a significant and divisive issue in the 2012 election.

That doesn’t ring true to me. Wasserman’s mistake was saying “… literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow” when describing Republican tactics to restrict voters. She shouldn’t have said “Literally” but was ( pretty obviously, I think ) just exaggerating for effect, not to actually mislead. That’s supported by her immediate retraction. Just because Politifact feels that voter identification will be an important issue doesn’t give them the right to call Wasserman a liar.

Another item on that list is, of course, the one that got the prize. That statement is at best debatable, since the program will still have the same name. But it’s not a lie to say that something has “ended” when, as Igor Volsky says, “everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years” has been eliminated.

None of the right wing lies were such flimsy candidates as Wasserman’s statement or even the Medicare characterization, but obviously Politifact didn’t want to seem biased by including fewer left wing lies than right wing lies.

And since a right wing lie was the winner last year, it was obviously time honor the left. And that’s the truth.

Vote “Democrat” to Support Small Business and Create Jobs

Republicans want us to think that greater profits for the rich will lead to more jobs and a better standard of living for anyone willing to work. Like most good lies, the hype about low taxes and deregulation is based in some truth.

A small business owner, like the owner of my local feed store, might hire more help if he had more money available. The feed store owner has a couple of people working for him but often works the register or loads and unloads stock in his warehouse. The store doesn’t need any new employees, but if the owner hired someone new he could avoid the grunt work and get home a little earlier. It wouldn’t be a good business decision, but it might be a good personal decision.

Now consider Walmart. If the lines were shorter the customers would be in better moods and the work would be more pleasant for the cashiers. I’m usually in a pretty bad mood by the time I get to the register. But in a large corporation, the people at the top don’t feel the pain of the workers on the floor. Walmart isn’t going to hire more cashiers until the cost of doing so would be outweighed by the increase in customer purchases. It doesn’t matter how angry the customers are as long as they continue to stand in line, and it doesn’t matter how much money Walmart has in the vault. Walmart already enough money to hire more people.

In fact, more money in the vaults of big business is just as likely to result in fewer jobs. At my local McDonald’s, the owner recently purchased new cash registers. They are easier to operate, require less training, and make it easier for the manager to fire workers if he sees fit. A big business owner that suddenly finds extra money available is more likely to invest in automation or overseas facilities than extra labor. A while ago, McDonald’s corporation was testing the idea of long-distance drive-through operators. The person talking to you through that little speaker might be far far away. This would allow fewer people to handle more orders, or allow your order to be taken by lower paid workers in third-world countries. But this kind of change requires investment in research and capital. This is what McDonald’s spends all that extra profit on. Not on American jobs.

There is something that would encourage big and small business to create more jobs: More customer spending. Walmart will hire more workers when the the shelves empty out too fast or the checkout lines get so long that people choose to leave without buying anything. The feed store owner will also hire more help when he has more customers than he can handle.

So, the formula for creating jobs is: Tax breaks for small businesses more customers with more money to spend. That is the Obama jobs plan. Republicans are against this plan because it means higher taxes for billionaires and higher taxes for the kinds of corporations that use capital spending to replace workers with technology or replace Americans with low-paid workers in third-world countries.

Republicans have done a good job convincing Americans that Obama’s fiscal policy has failed us. Indeed, we’re still suffering from the economic malaise that began during the last years of the Bush administration. But Obama’s policies stopped the hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs and held the U.S. economy steady as turmoil overtook the rest of the world. Imagine a doctor gives you medicine which makes you sicker, then you go to a different doctor who gives you different medicine. You immediately stop getting sicker but don’t recover at the rate you were hoping for. Do you go back to the original medicine? Republicans suggest that the appropriate response to disappointment with rate of our nation’s recovery is to return to the kind of deregulation and tax-cuts for the wealthy that caused the economic down-turn.

One of the biggest Republican complaints is that the high corporate tax rate in the US is holding down the economy. But the the OECD has been tracking corporate tax rates around the world, and the data reveals that those countries that have held strongest during the world wide economic downturn, including the U.S.A. and Germany, have higher corporate tax rates than most countries that are in serious trouble, including Iceland, Ireland and Greece. Along with the dismal performance of our economy after the Bush tax cuts (as reported by Slate and several other sources), there is plenty of evidence to suggest that tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for large corporations are not what our economy needs to recover.

Republicans are correct in saying that we can’t keep blaming Bush for the current state of the economy. But that doesn’t mean we should forget that deregulation caused the economic downturn and tax cuts for the wealthy did not help. Job-saving programs and constraints on recklessness have saved jobs and kept the U.S. economy strong despite challenges throughout the world. If there is an argument to be had about president Obama’s policies, it is an argument about whether he gave away too much to his political opponents or achieved the best possible compromises considering his level of support. Either way, the answer is the same. The president needs more support to pass job-creating legislation that is currently being blocked by Republicans.

Don’t be fooled by lies about tax cuts for the rich and deregulation. Support legislation that cuts taxes for small business and creates jobs for Americans. Vote for the those who support honest and sensible economic policy in 2011. Vote for the President and his supporters in 2012.