5 posts tagged “policy”
It is no secret that our lawmakers don’t read many of the bills that they sign. It really angers me that they do so on major issues, but doing it at all should upset all Americans. The public’s lack of engagement with the political process is a major concern of mine going forward, but I feel with the focus on health care lately, we should take advantage of the publics interest now. The public needs to be made aware that our elected officials sign bills into law that affect their lives frequently, oftentimes without reading them.
Do you remember the outrage over employee bonuses from the stimulus package? Well, that was in there.
The stimulus bill, for example, was 1,100 pages long and made available to Congress and the public just 13 hours before lawmakers voted on it. The bill has failed to provide the promised help to the job market, and there was outrage when it was discovered that the legislation included an amendment allowing American International Group, a bailout recipient, to give out millions in employee bonuses.
Here are a couple examples demonstrating the fact that our leaders are not reading what they sign.
» House energy and global warming bill, passed June 26, 2009. 1,200 pages. Available online 15 hours before vote.
» $789 billion stimulus bill, passed Feb. 14, 2009. 1,100 pages. Available online 13 hours before debate.
» $700 billion financial sector rescue package, passed Oct. 3, 2008. 169 pages. Available online 29 hours before vote.
» USA Patriot domestic surveillance bill, passed Oct. 23, 2001. Unavailable to the public before debate.
What really angers me is that the political parties use this tactic as a means to gain power or leverage. The Republicans did it with the Patriot Act, and now it is the Democrats who are strongly opposing transparency. While both sides are failing us spectacularly, it’s a disgrace and the fact that they don’t want the public to be able to read bills before they are passed both goes against Obama’s claims of supporting transparency in government and our leader’s civic duty.
While I don’t expect our leaders to be able to fully understand every law-simply not possible as they are written in “lawyerese”…and have you ever talked with your representative? They are unlikely to be the most intelligent person you have ever met-I think that opening them up to the public is what needs to be done. The public is likely to be apathetic at large, and the various media outlets will spin the information towards their political leanings, but the information would be out there for intelligent people to debate. That is the most important thing. We have the means to create an informed populace, and that can only benefit everyone.
Remember when Obama said this:
Mr. Obama promised that he, “…will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” Just to make sure we understood him, Mr. Obama repeated in many of his campaign speeches, “When there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing.”
Here is what he did:
The first two bills he signed were not posted on the White House website for five days (both were signed within two days of hitting his desk). In late May, Mr. Obama signed four bills in four days, the day after each arrived on his desk. You could argue that the Recovery Act/stimulus bill was an “emergency” (I wouldn’t) but Mr. Obama signed the Recovery Act less than 18 hours after the bill was finalized and well before almost any member of Congress, let alone the public , had read the Bill.
We deserve better.
This posting was automatically scheduled on 10/11/09
I can’t believe that I am even writing that sentence. There is currently a “pandemic response bill” making its way through the Massachusetts state legislature that allows authorities to forcefully quarantine citizens in the event of a health emergency, compel health providers to vaccinate citizens, authorize forceful entry into private dwellings and destruction of citizen property and impose fines on citizens for noncompliance.
Refusal to comply carries penalties of imprisonment of up to 30 days and fines of $1000 per day. Here is the bill for those that want to read it:
Here are some of the highlights:
- to require the owner or occupier of premises to permit entry into and investigation of the premises;
- to close, direct, and compel the evacuation of, or to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated any building or facility, and to allow the reopening of the building or facility when the danger has ended
- to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated, or to destroy any material;
- to restrict or prohibit assemblages of persons;
- to require a health care facility to provide services or the use of its facility, or to transfer the management and supervision of the health care facility to the department or to a local public health authority;
- to control ingress to and egress from any stricken or threatened public area, and the movement of persons and materials within the area;
- to adopt and enforce measures to provide for the safe disposal of infectious waste and human remains, provided that religious, cultural, family, and individual beliefs of the deceased person shall be followed to the extent possible when disposing of human remains, whenever that may be done without endangering the public health;
- to procure, take immediate possession from any source, store, or distribute any anti-toxins, serums, vaccines, immunizing agents, antibiotics, and other pharmaceutical agents or medical supplies located within the commonwealth as may be necessary to respond to the emergency;
- to require in-state health care providers to assist in the performance of vaccination, treatment, examination, or testing of any individual as a condition of licensure, authorization, or the ability to continue to function as a health care provider in the commonwealth;
- to waive the commonwealth's licensing requirements for health care professionals with a valid license from another state in the United States or whose professional training would otherwise qualify them for an appropriate professional license in the commonwealth;
- to allow for the dispensing of controlled substance by appropriate personnel consistent with federal statutes as necessary for the prevention or treatment of illness;
- to authorize the chief medical examiner to appoint and prescribe the duties of such emergency assistant medical examiners as may be required for the proper performance of the duties of office;
- to collect specimens and perform tests on any animal, living or deceased;
- to exercise authority under sections 95 and 96 of chapter 111;
- to care for any emerging mental health or crisis counseling needs that individuals may exhibit, with the consent of the individuals
I encourage you to read the full article as it discusses the unreasonable power grab by government, the risks of getting vaccinated, and the fact that immunity from a vaccination doesn’t last nearly as long as immunity from natural exposure. Does anyone remember a few months ago when they were saying H1N1 was not a big deal?
That is the part that really bothers me. We were told, and still are by the CDC, that H1N1 isn’t much worse than normal influenza strains. There is some growing evidence that this may not be the case as deaths are up: Swine Flu Kills 625 Last Week. I wish that there could be some consensus on the matter. I believe that there will be a lot of sick people, and that there will be a lot of deaths, but that the deaths are merely the result of scale. I am all for voluntary immunization for those that want it, but I am very leery of forced immunization.
Recently, I posted some information about how companies use High Frequency Trading techniques as a way to reap profits by acting as a middleman of sorts. They are able to get between orders being placed in nanoseconds, affecting the price that you and I and mutual funds pay. Through the wonders of croneyism in our society amongst those in power, there are no laws against this practice. Here is a review:
HFT computers can detect large buy orders for a stock, the kind of buy orders mutual funds make, even when the funds try to disguise them. The HTF system can then purchase that stock before the mutual fund’s order is executed. The fund ends up paying more per share, and the HTF traders pocket the difference.
This isn’t illegal; it’s akin to cutting into a long line at the supermarket. And it’s just as infuriating. "It just ticks off mutual fund managers who feel their stock moves against them every time they show up," says Al Berkeley, chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems, a trading service designed to help institutions and brokers outsmart HFT systems that try to detect their orders.
How much does all of this cost mutual funds in higher stock prices, or lower prices when they sell? It’s not clear, but one study by the Tabb Group estimates that high-frequency traders made about $21 billion in profits last year — much of that at the expense of mutual funds.
Wall Street’s High-Tech War on Investors
As unfair as that sounds, there is an even more blatant abuse of the financial system called flash orders. Flash orders are essentially the very quick display of trading orders to a select few group of insiders. In an effort for small, upstart exchanges to compete with established ones like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq, they offer these flash orders to large customers in the hope that they big customers will split the fees with the small exchange. A primer:
Smaller exchanges have to pass along big orders to the big exchanges if it looks like they can’t fill them. To avoid this loss, they "flash" these orders to big customers for less than half a second. The hope is that big players will help fill the order, splitting the fees with the small exchange.
But this also gives the insider an advance look at a trading price you and I never see. Mind you, it’s a half-second advantage; you and I couldn’t do anything with it anyway. But those with HFT systems can.
Wall Street’s High-Tech War on Investors
What’s more, is that the HFT systems are so fast and powerful that they can
search the market every few milliseconds and have the ability to sense the
supply and demand for a given stock. They can then use this information to
purchase the stock with a limited supply and sell it for a quick profit. Here
is how it works in graphical form:
When it came out, and the SEC offered lip service to the issue, all of the
exchanges said that they would stop providing them soon. I would advise people
not to hold their breath. There is a lot of money and lobbying in this sector,
and money trumps reason in our country in almost all instances.
If the only way we compared the two systems – U.S. versus Canada – was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.
Yet, the debate rages on. Indeed, it has reached a fever pitch since President Barack Obama took office, with Americans either dreading or hoping for the dawn of a single-payer health care system. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, while proponents laud that very same Canadian system as the answer to all of America’s health care problems…
As America comes to grips with the reality that changes are desperately needed within its health care infrastructure, it might prove useful to first debunk some myths about the Canadian system.
Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada’s taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent.
Myth: Canada’s health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn’t when everybody is covered.
Source: Denver Post
Not so incidentally, single-payer systems run by the U.S. government can approach Canadian efficiency. Medicare and Social Security run at less than 3% overhead.
Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.
Ten percent of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada’s. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.
What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.
Myth: Canada’s government decides who gets health care and when they get it.
While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.
I am the last person to ever defend Canada on anything. In fact, for some unknown and unwarranted reason, I hate Canada. Go ahead and blame South Park if you want, but that isn't the case. I will be the first to say that the healthcare system is better than what we have in the United States. It CERTAINLY isn't perfect, but I am saying that it is better than what we currently have.
For some perspective, it's important to understand that I hate the medical industry. I loathe going to the Dr. unless I am about ready to keel over. I had an interesting discussion recently with a friend in Thailand (originally from the U.S.) where we discussed this issue rather heatedly. I came to be of the opinion that unless you have to deal with the medical industry in a serious capacity (ie. some life-saving/changing/etc. surgery), then you can't truly see how broken our system is. I think that once you have that perspective, you can then toss aside any preconceptions you may have and begin to truly wrap your head around the issues at hand.
Congress has balked at the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Under this plan, the Treasury would have bought the "troubled assets" of financial institutions in an attempt to avoid economic meltdown.
This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.
The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.
Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.
This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.
Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets.
The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.
Jeffrey A. Miron is a senior lecturer of economics at Harvard, and he makes a very good point in mentioning that bankruptcy is the answer rather than an ill-concieved bailout:
The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.
Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.
Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.
Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street's hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.
The costs of the bailout, moreover, are almost certainly being understated. The administration's claim is that many mortgage assets are merely illiquid, not truly worthless, implying taxpayers will recoup much of their $700 billion.
If these assets are worth something, however, private parties should want to buy them, and they would do so if the owners would accept fair market value. Far more likely is that current owners have brushed under the rug how little their assets are worth.
The bailout has more problems. The final legislation will probably include numerous side conditions and special dealings that reward Washington lobbyists and their clients.
Anticipation of the bailout will engender strategic behavior by Wall Street institutions as they shuffle their assets and position their balance sheets to maximize their take. The bailout will open the door to further federal meddling in financial markets.
So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.
The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.
