Tea Party, Mosque, Palin

A friend asked me some questions, to which these are my answers.

I agree with Obama about the Ground Zero Mosque -- its builders have every right to build there, and its opponents have every Fist Amendment right to protest it.

I think our immigration laws are a joke -- they are even less enforced than our drug laws -- and it's immoral to have laws on the books you don't intend to enforce, or that you enforce only sporadically or selectively.

I think Sarah Palin is one of the most demonized people on the planet, and if you took an honest look at her, you'd agree she's a perfectly nice human being who has no business being President.

The Tea Party folks with whom I actually spend time are nothing like what's portrayed in the media -- I find them largely tolerant and extremely nice and pleasant. My alliance with the Tea Party is based on my belief that the greatest human happiness comes when people live under the just laws of an honest and limited government, and the Tea Party is the best hope we have of restraining the awesome power of the US Federal government.

When your Opponent isn't Evil Enough

I'm enjoying reading this meta-analysis of American politics, and realized we've seen this movie before -- when partisans try to frame their opponents as even worse than they already really are.

Specifically, the case of Jason Levin, who hates the Tea Party so much, and was so frustrated that they weren't acting out the racism that he knows they secretly harbor, that he advocated that progressives should make and carry racist signs while pretending to be Tea Party members.

Obama's Slow BP Cleanup - Incompetence or Malice?

So, is the Jones Act really slowing the BP clean up? Some folks want you to think it's not:

Experts agree: Jones Act has no effect on Gulf oil response

GOP's false talking point: Jones Act blocks Gulf help

Note how carefully the pro-Administration pieces are worded. Because there are 15 foreign-flagged vessels working the spill, this proves that the Jones Act "hasn't blocked anything."

No, it's only proof that it's not preventing 100% of foreign assistance. The operative question is, would we get any MORE assistance if it were waived? Put another way, why are there still state of the art oil skimming ships NOT working the spill, whose owners say they want to?

[Fox News quote]

Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used. Coast Guard Lt. Commander, Chris O’Neil, says that is because they do not meet “the operational requirements of the Unified Area Command.” One of those operational requirements is that vessels comply with the Jones Act.
"Yes, it does apply,” said ONeil,“ I have heard no discussions of waivers.”

[...] And today, the Obama White House said waivers might again be considered. “If there is the need for any type of waiver, that would obviously be granted,” said White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs. “But, we've not had that problem thus far.”

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson is not so sure about that. He’s hearing from the folks back home in Florida, where they want all the skimmer ships they can get. He sent a letter to Admiral Thad Allen today which read in part:

“Admiral, I believe the orange mousse of oil that is now in Florida’s waters is more than enough evidence that we need to take advantage of every appropriate global resource. Please advise as to whether we are taking full advantage of the offers of assistance from other countries.”

[end Fox News quote]

I do think the Obama Administration should be proactively calling these ship owners and finding out what it would take to get them on scene. If it's a misunderstanding, clear it up. If it's a waiver, get the waiver.

[ABC News quote]

Within days of the spill, unsolicited a dozen countries and international organizations offered assistance to the US. That later expanded to 17 countries, and today the State Department announced that an 18th country, Qatar, has offered containment boom.

Of those countries, the US has accepted aid so far from four nations: Mexico, Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands.

[...]

According to a State Department official the 18 countries and four organizations that have offered assistance thus far are: Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, UAE, UK, Vietnam, the European Maritime Safety Agency, the European Commission’s Monitoring and Information Center, the International Maritime Organization, the Environment Unit of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the United Nations Environment Program.

[end ABC News quote]

Maybe it's not the Jones Act at all -- maybe it's just the Administration saying "no" -- I can't tell, and I don't see the Administration clarifying it. What is clear is the Obama Administration is not doing "everything possible." I don't think it's because the economies being hurt are primarily Red State economies -- I think it's incompetence. Find me a better explanation.

Don't like these sources?  Perhaps you'd prefer Time Magazine:

[Time quote]

Fox News reported yesterday that the government was turning away foreign help in cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Is this the truth, or a partisan meme?

Shockingly, it's true. The Jones Act (or, more accurately, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920) mandates that ships working in U.S. waters must have been made in America and crewed by Americans. The administration has generally gotten around this requirement by transferring foreign technology to US ships, but the act's provisions mean that offers of Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian skimming ships have been rebuffed.
[end Time quote]

Not good enough? Try the Dutch newspaper De Standaard:

[De Standaard teaser text in translation]

"U.S. oil fighting with outdated technology"
Monday, June 7, 2010 Author: (lc)

BRUSSELS - Belgian and Dutch dredgers have technology in-house to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to fight. But the "Jones Act "forbids them to work in the U.S.

[end De Standaard teaser text in translation]

A little more background on the Administration's refusal even to admit it got offers of aid, from Foreign Policy:

[Foreign Policy]

When State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley refused to tell reporters which countries have offered assistance to help respond to the BP oil spill, the State Department press corps was flabbergasted.

"As a policy matter, we're not going to identify those offers of assistance until we are able to see, you know, what we need, assess the ongoing situation. And as we accept those offers of assistance, we will inform you," Crowley said.

Reporters pointed out that the Bush administration identified assistance offers after the Katrina disaster, so what is this, a new policy? They pressed Crowley, but he refused to budge.

Then they mentioned Iran's offer of assistance, through its National Iranian Drilling Company. Crowley said there was no Iranian offer of assistance, at least in any official capacity. The reporters kept on it, asking why it was taking so long to figure out what was needed in the first place? That's the Coast Guard's decision, Crowley explained.

Late Wednesday evening, the State Department emailed reporters identifying the 13 entities that had offered the U.S. oil spill assistance. They were the governments of Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations.

"These offers include experts in various aspects of oil spill impacts, research and technical expertise, booms, chemical oil dispersants, oil pumps, skimmers, and wildlife treatment," the email read.

"While there is no need right now that the U.S. cannot meet, the U.S. Coast Guard is assessing these offers of assistance to see if there will be something which we will need in the near future."

The Obama administration has been relentless in its messaging that it is doing everything possible to aggressively respond to the oil spill. But for the record, the current message to foreign governments is: Thanks but no thanks, we've got it covered.

A State Department official, speaking on background, said that the decision not to initially release the names of offering countries came directly from the State Department leadership.

[end Foreign Policy]

I've got a dozen papers, foreign and US, quoting foreign ship owners saying the Jones Act is preventing them from helping. Maybe Murdoch owns all those foreign ships? Or all the foreign papers?

Finally there's this report that of 2,000 skimmers in the US, only 400 have been used in the Gulf, with federal rules preventing transfer of others.

If you want to label this competence, go ahead. I can't.

NRA Sellout

Lars Larson wrote:

I'm a life member of the NRA...a fact I've always been proud of. But I'm not proud of the NRA's deal with the Devil (congressional democrats) to withdraw its opposition to the DISCLOSE act...which robs Americans and institutions like the NRA of political free speech. 

I replied:

Excellent point, Lars.

In reality, the NRA is using the power of government to handicap its rivals (GOA) and is becoming a client of Big Government -- seeking out special treatment for itself.

Starting now, the NRA will be subject to pressure by lawmakers who need only threaten their special status to get them to bend.

As soon as you accept special treatment -- for yourself, for your company, for your group -- as a gift from Big Government, you're making a pact with the devil, and you're the junior partner. Now you're going to defend Big Government in order to defend your special status. You become part of the problem.

The same thing happens with Regulatory Capture and all the other ways people use the power of government for their private enrichment.

-Tom

Lincoln on Kagan

Abraham Lincoln, writing about the nomination of Salmon P. Chase for the Supreme Court:


"[W]e wish for a Chief Justice who will sustain what has been done in regard to emancipation and the legal tenders. We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known."


The cipher that is Elena Kagan is somewhat disturbing to me on that front -- we don't know what or how she thinks.


(Hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Don't Be Too Certain

A friend had an assignment to argue a side of a debate with which he does not agree.

By the time he was done, he was starting to see some of the other side's arguments as legitimate.  He jokingly said this was "scary."  I wrote back:

Not scary. If you're utterly 100% convinced of every element of your world view, you're nuts and closed-minded.

It takes intelligence and maturity to accept that our understanding is limited, contingent, and may contain elements of paradox or contradiction or balanced yet competing forces.

I think the practical case for free markets is a "preponderance of the evidence" case -- separate from the moral case for it, which is absolute, but only if you accept a Natural Rights philosophy of right and wrong.

Cheers.

Paul Ryan's comments re ObamaCare

By PAUL D. RYAN

The following are remarks made by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, about the cost of the House and Senate health-care bills at President Obama's Blair House summit on health care, Feb. 25:

Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.

Mr. President, you said health-care reform is budget reform. You're right. We agree with that. Medicare, right now, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability. That's $38 trillion in empty promises to my parents' generation, our generation, our kids' generation. Medicaid's growing at 21 percent each year. It's suffocating states' budgets. It's adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for . . .

Now, you're right to frame the debate on cost and health inflation. And in September, when you spoke to us in the well of the House, you basically said—and I totally agree with this—I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future.

Since the Congressional Budget Office can't score your bill, because it doesn't have sufficient detail, but it tracks very similar to the Senate bill, I want to unpack the Senate score a little bit.

And if you take a look at the CBO analysis—analysis from your chief actuary—I think it's very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health-care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.

Now let me go through why I say that. The majority leader said the bill scores as reducing the deficit $131 billion over the next 10 years. First, a little bit about CBO. I work with them every single day—very good people, great professionals. They do their jobs well. But their job is to score what is placed in front of them. And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is full of gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors.

Now, what's the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That's $2.3 trillion.Now, what do I mean when I say that? Well, first off, the bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.

[The Senate bill] does [a] couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits.

It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act. That's the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets.

The Senate Budget Committee chairman [Kent Conrad] said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.

Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does [is treat] Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program.

. . . [A]ccording to the chief actuary of Medicare . . . as much as 20 percent of Medicare's providers will either go out of business or will have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Millions of seniors . . . who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage that they now enjoy.

You can't say that you're using this money to either extend Medicare solvency and also offset the cost of this new program. That's double counting.

And so when you take a look at all of this; when you strip out the double-counting and what I would call these gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.

. . . [P]robably the most cynical gimmick in this bill is something that we all probably agree on. We don't think we should cut doctors [annual federal reimbursements] 21 percent next year. We've stopped those cuts from occurring every year for the last seven years.

We all call this, here in Washington, the doc fix. Well, the doc fix, according to your numbers, costs $371 billion. It was in the first iteration of all of these bills, but because it was a big price tag and it made the score look bad, made it look like a deficit . . . that provision was taken out, and it's been going on in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. And so when you take a look at all of this, it just doesn't add up.

. . . I'll finish with the cost curve. Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up?

Well, if you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we're bending it up. He's claiming that we're going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have.

And so, when you take a look at this, it's really deeper than the deficits or the budget gimmicks or the actuarial analysis. There really is a difference between us.

. . . [W]e've been talking about how much we agree on different issues, but there really is a difference between us. And it's basically this. We don't think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control. And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference.

Now, we've offered lots of ideas all last year, all this year. Because we agree the status quo is unsustainable. It's got to get fixed.

It's bankrupting families. It's bankrupting our government. It's hurting families with pre-existing conditions. We all want to fix this.

But we don't think that this is the . . . the solution. And all of the analysis we get proves that point.

Now, I'll just simply say this. . . . [W]e are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I've got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you're not listening to them.

So what we simply want to do is start over, work on a clean-sheeted paper, move through these issues, step by step, and fix them, and bring down health-care costs and not raise them. And that's basically the point.

Dorchester 2010

Going to Dorchester 2010 today -- right after I guest-host for Jayne Carroll on AM-1360 KUIK -- wow, what a day this is shaping up to be.

Mug Shot

This has some personal significance:
http://www.daviesscojail.org/InmateList/InmateView.aspx?ID=2093189

Not sure I want to blog about it right now.  I do want to save the link.

Risk, cognitive bias, and the role of government

Humans are terrible at estimating risk.  Bad enough that I'd be willing to call it an area of potential market failure -- i.e. people will underestimate the risks they face, under-prepare for them, and then be over-impacted by them. 

Take my world view from about 1986, when I felt everyone should be accountable for all their decisions without exception, and it was morally acceptable for me to contemplate a worker (a) choosing not to be insured under WC, (b) getting injured on the job, and (c) impoverishing himself and his family.  So sacred was his choice that I was willing to see any negative outcome unfold.  As long as he'd chosen his actions, I was okay with his fall.

Now, reading Cialdini and numerous other sources on the horrific list of cognitive biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) to which the human mind is susceptible, I'm much more willing to embrace at least some "coercive" rules such as mandatory workers' comp insurance. 

The big risk here, for me, is that as soon as I empower someone -- almost always the government -- to use coercion to "fix" the cognitive errors of the population at large, the concept (or illusion) of individual autonomy  and "consent of the governed" can break down, and the legitimacy of the government can break down. 

Doubly so because the government is no less susceptible to error, being made up of humans, and while I can easily correct my personal errors by changing my behavior, it's very hard for me to either change or opt out of the erroneous coercive mandates of a nanny state.

The graceful way forward may be to use cognitive bias in our favor, by allowing people to "opt out" of certain things if it matters to them a lot, while making the default choice be the one that has greater social protection.  For example I'm in favor of making everyone an organ donor by default, while allowing anyone who really cares strongly to opt out.