A lot of the arguments over the excise tax are getting caught in a bad, and even slightly dishonest, sales job from its supporters. Sen. John Kerry's blog post defending the policy, for instance, isn't playing it straight. Saying it won't tax employees is a distinction without a difference: It will tax insurers, which will add the tax into the cost of their plans, and employers will either choose different plans or pass the cost on to employees. Similarly, saying it will affect only "3% of premiums in 2013" is designed to obscure the fact that it will hit a lot more policies in 2020. But this is one of those cases when bad arguments mask a good policy, rather than the other way around.
Health benefits should be taxed. There's no reason the system should make a dollar in employer-provided health insurance worth more than a dollar in wages. That's a straight incentive for employers to spend more and more on health insurance, which is contrary to the needs of the country right now. The excise tax begins to expose a small portion of employer-provided health-care costs to taxes. Meanwhile, someone who doesn't get employer-provided health care and buys their own insurance is getting taxed on every dollar they spend on health care.
No one defends this system in principle. They only defend it in practice. The excise tax has its opponents, but none of them say we should make food, or broadband Internet, tax free as long as it is provided by employers -- even though those things are also important! You don't even hear them demanding that the bill make non-employer-provided health care tax free. No one, in other words, is interested in expanding this system to other sectors, or even to the rest of the health-care sector. But given that this subsidy is worth about $250 billion a year, it's got a lot of defenders.
As a final note, the excise tax is a substitute for simply capping the employer tax exclusion. The swap came about because the politics of the excise tax are superficially better: Rather than taxing "workers" or "businesses," you're taxing "insurers." But insurers pass the cost along, of course. And the excise tax is more regressive than capping the exclusion. If you cap the exclusion, people get taxed at their normal marginal tax rate, which is virtually nothing for low-income workers. The excise tax, by contrast, is a flat surtax of 40 percent, no matter what your income. in this case, making the tax sound more populist also made it substantially more regressive.
KY SEN, Ron Paul's son, Dr. Rand Paul (yes, named after Ayn) is now leading...or slightly leading... in the Republican primary (incumbent Sen. Jim Bunning is retiring). The GOP establishment chose Secretary of State Trey Grayson, but Paul has pushed hard on his party's dissatisfaction with GOP leaders. (There's a bit of Mitch McConnell fatigue in his home state.) Paul is ostensibly a libertarian, but he's getting support from all the conservative establishment interest groups, including the taxpayers union he once headed. For TV producers, the Paul pa-son angle is irresistible. And the "audit the Fed" message resonates beyond the confines of the ReLOVEution. Also funky: one of those campaign-aides-posts-something-racist-and-has-to-resign angles. Grayson, again, is running a conventional NRSC campaign against Washington (jobs, Democrats, D.C.); Paul is running against Grayson as an embodiment of Washington. The primary is May 18.
[I]f it seems as though torture ever yields important and actionable intelligence more quickly than alternative methods, we’re supposed to take it for granted that this completes the necessary utilitarian analysis. And this is just absurd. How does torture affect the willingness of enemy combatants to surrender? How much does it complicate our relations with allies? How many people does it help to radicalize against the United States? How many non-radicals does it leave sufficiently disgusted that they’re less motivated to assist the U.S. in fighting radicalism in their communities? You’ll notice that torture-fans never really attempt to deal remotely seriously with any of these questions; they just babble inanities about how Fanatics Will Hate Us No Matter What. Which, of course, some will—but that’s hardly to the point, is it?
WASHINGTON POST -- Kim's government in the past two years has closed some large markets, shifted Chinese-made goods to state-run shops and ordered that only middle-aged and older women can sell goods in open-air markets, to try to limit the number of North Koreans who abandon government jobs for the private sector. But capitalism seems to have already taken root. U.N. officials estimate that half the calories consumed in North Korea come from food bought in private markets, and that nearly 80 percent of household income derives from buying and selling in the markets, according to a study last year in the Seoul Journal of Economics.(via Perry)
Private markets are flooding the country with electronics from China and elsewhere. Cheap radios, televisions, MP3 devices, DVD players, video cameras and cellphones are seeping into a semi-feudal society, where a trusted elite lives in the capital Pyongyang. Surrounding the elite is a suspect peasantry that is poor, stunted by hunger and spied upon by layers of state security.
In the past year, the elites in Pyongyang have been granted authorized access to mobile phones -- the number is soon expected to reach 120,000. In the border regions with China, unauthorized mobile phone use has also increased among the trading classes. And unlike most of the mobile phones in Pyongyang, the illegal phones are set up to make international calls. Chinese telecom companies have built relay towers near the border, providing strong mobile signals in many nearby North Korean towns. Those phones have become a new source of real-time reporting to the outside world on events inside North Korea, as networks of informants call in news to Web sites such as the Seoul-based Daily NK and the Buddhist aid group Good Friends.
Affordable electronics are also cracking open the government's decades-old seal on incoming information. Imported radios -- and televisions in border areas -- are enabling a substantial proportion of the North Korean populations to tune in to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, according to an unpublished survey of newly arrived defectors in South Korea. It found that two-thirds of them listened regularly to foreign broadcasts.
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.But remember, things would somehow be better if we got rid of all the greedy insurance companies and had Medicare For All!
More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman.
BAGHDAD — Iraqis on Friday reacted with disbelief, anger and bitter resignation to news that criminal charges in the United States had been dismissed against Blackwater Worldwide security guards who opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.The accused have their own rights, and the court concluded they were violated by government officials offering immunity for testimony.
[..] The attack, at Nisour Square, left 17 Iraqis dead and 27 wounded. Many of the victims were riding inside cars or buses at a busy traffic circle when a Blackwater convoy escorting American diplomats rolled through and began firing machine guns, grenade launchers and a sniper rifle.
The Blackwater guards said they believed they had come under small-arms fire from insurgents. But investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault.
The incident calcified anti-American sentiment in Iraq and elsewhere, raised Iraqi concerns about the extent of its sovereignty because Blackwater guards had immunity from local prosecutors and reopened a debate about American dependence on private security contractors in the Iraq war.
For all I know that was the right legal call. It was stunning to hear that the first U.S. agents to interview the Blackwater guards offered them immunity: not only were they from the State Department, not the Justice Department, but they were from the division of State that oversees the contract Blackwater held. Whether they intended to sabotage a prosecution is unknown, but that’s exactly what they effectively did.The resulting dismissal is tragic but apparently necessary according to the standard that no one is obligated to testify against themselves.
Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.Stop. Fucking. Panicking.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
This was the decade of the viral video, thanks in part to You Tube’s founding in 2005. Watch video of the funniest, saddest, craziest viral videos, well, ever.
Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.
[..] Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.
Republicans only have one arrow in their quiver—the ideology of small government—and when faced with a problem that can’t be solved with a small government approach, they can’t adapt.
Growing up Jewish, I was very bitter about Christmas. And for everyone saying, “Well, you have Hanukah!” No. Hanukah is not the same. You don’t even get off of school for Hanukah, and it’s mostly about your parents giving you a present to shut you up so you won’t complain about being Jewish during Christmas and possibly convert later in life. There are hardly any Hanukah songs, and the ones we’ve got sound sort of like death hymns. If you’re lucky, you get, like, one non-denominational snowman decoration hung up, but he’s usually wearing a red and green scarf. Even Frosty loves Jesus, and he doesn’t even have a soul. Or legs.A digger adds:
I remember having a major crisis when I realized that Santa was only going to visit the Christian boys and girls. That seemed wholly unfair; why should they get free presents just because of their religion? Isn’t that discriminatory? So I asked my parents about the whole Santa Claus thing. They confided that there was no Santa, but I shouldn’t tell my Christian friends.
That is the moment that I realized I had the power to hold something over the other children at school, torture them mercilessly, and kill their childhood by revealing that there really wasn’t a Santa. It was the ultimate retort in any situation. You don’t want to play four square with me? Well, fuck you, there’s no Santa, it’s just your parents.
You say you sat on Santa Claus’s lap at the mall? Nope, that was just an unemployed fat guy in a red suit. Oh, your precious Santa Claus is going to come down the chimney and bring you lots of wonderful presents for being such a good girl? Think about the logistics of that. How is he going to come to every house in the whole world in one night? Even if he skips my house, he’s still got like a billion more to go. As fat as that guy is, I feel like running around so much after sitting on his chunky ass all year is just a recipe for a heart attack. Or is that what you wanted for Christmas, Sally? A big, smelly Santa corpse of your very own?
Inevitably, these conversations ended in tears as I watched my classmate’s sweet naiveté die, but at least I felt better about myself.
No wonder people hate the Jews. Pass the latkes!
My Brother-in-laws family is very religious. Their son told my son there is no SANTA. My son then told their son there is no GOD. I guess we are even.
France's ruling party says it plans to present a bill to parliament next month, which would ban the wearing of full Islamic veils in all public places. The party says the move should be seen as "a law of liberation."A redditor comments:
As a French/American dual citizen, I have a possibly different perspective on this.I tentatively agree.
If this were the United States, I would be very much against this law, for entirely libertarian reasons. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and while there are always various groups trying to claim that their particular immigrant culture is somehow more "American" than someone else's (witness anti-Hispanic sentiment, for example, or the number of people that think that English ought to be legislated as the national language, or whatever) for the most part the concensus that thankfully eventually emerges is that unless you're Native American, you can stuff it -- your particular culture has no particular monopoly on what it means to be American, and no amount of whining will change that.
France, on the other hand, is not America. Unlike the United States, it is not a country of immigrants. There is such a thing, fair or not, as "French culture", and without making any sort of value judgment here, full-veil mandating sects of Islam do not qualify.
France has been relatively willing, despite not being founded on the principles the US was founded on, to welcome immigrants from other countries. Much of this perhaps was not altruistic, but rather fallout from France's ill-advised forays into colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Certainly much of France's muslim population are in France now because they fought for France in the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s and were forced to abandon their homes essentially because they chose the wrong side in that war -- something that France has been terrible about recognizing, frankly.
But I guess what I'm saying is that ultimately, the sort of "cultural chauvinism" that we have great disdain for here in the United States -- which this law would be an example of, in my opinion -- is a bit different in France (and in the rest of Europe, too). European nations have histories dating back millenia, they didn't develop their cultural heritage by melting together the traditions of myriad peoples over the last 250 years. That mixed character is precisely what makes the United States great, but the whole world is not the US.
Ultimately, if France decides that it wants to draw the line somewhere, if they decide that they want to be a secular society and that they don't like the symbolism they feel the veil represents, why shouldn't they ban it?
It's their country, after all -- and "they", unlike Americans, are a well-defined group.
After months in which the Senate health care bill was held up over efforts to find some form in which she would agree to sign on to it, Sen. Snowe (R-ME) now says she will oppose it because it is being "rushed."There are cogent reasons to oppose the Senate's health bill. Being "rushed" stopped being one back in September-October.
On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. The image is a false color composite, showing the sky similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.
Fact: if the NSA were to detect the presence of a malicious worm or destructive virus on a U.S. Internet server targeted at a bank, perhaps stealing money from that bank, it could do nothing but warn the bank. The bank, most likely, does not have the capacity to deal with the worm itself; the NSA does not have the legal authority to employ methods to screen out the bad code, even though it has the technological capability. You can employ any type of thought of experiment you want here. Entities like utility companies and banks often rely on overtaxed communications networks to assess their performance; those communications networks are extraordinarily vulnerable because they rely on vulnerable machines -- machines that are old and were built with technology that, in many instances, originated elsewhere. The backbone of the Internet itself is very fragile; the VeriSign corporation, which essentially runs the Net, deals with thousands of attacks per day, some of them harmless, some of them dangerous, some of them from state actors (like China), others from well-funded and savvy techno-terrorists.
This is a tech problem and a law problem. Congress is trying to come up with ways to designate certain types of corporations that are responsible for large segments of some major activity -- power generation, money transferring, information sharing -- as, essentially, too big to fail -- or be shut down -- by cyber intruders. The idea, in essence, would be to require these entities to submit to a cyber audit. In the event of a major attack, the government (actually, the Department of Homeland Security, using NSA technology) would have the authority to quarantine the problem until it was removed. As you might imagine, this approach raises hackles with a lot of people. The corporations resist the idea of government intrusion. Their CFOs don't see the risk, so they're not interested in spending money to preemptively solve the problem. Civil libertarians properly ask about oversight; who's going to watch the watchers? Technologists wonder whether there aren't other ways to protect the nation's information grid from systemic threats.
(cont.)
My 7 year old son was on the computer last night, as I worked on dinner. When he quit and went upstairs, I jumped on to finish an article I had started earlier. I clicked on my history and I see:Radley adds:
“Google search….Big Boobs”
He checked out a few pages. Then I see:
“Google search….Really Big Boobs”
I was a seven-year-old boy once. That progression totally makes sense.Where oh where was Google when I was seven?
[..] The good news is, the kid’s probably headed for a long, healthy life.
The College Football Playoff Act of 2009 would ban promoting, marketing or advertising a "national championship game" unless the game is part of a single-elimination playoff tournament like the National Football League playoffs. The bill threatens to hold college football's governing body in violation of Federal Trade Commission truth-in-advertising provisions.
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