Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
January 18, 2013
Latest Studies: 36 new items, including a Texas Public Policy Foundation report on environmental overcriminalization, and a Mercatus Center report on the pitfalls of regulating consumer credit
Notes on the Week: Everybody believes in religious freedom on National Religious Freedom Day, battle over EPA transparency is heating up, Head Start isn’t working, and more
To Do: Ponder the conservative future
Budget & Taxation
• Fiscally Illiberal: State and Local Projects Cannot Create Jobs Responsibly – Beacon Hill Institute
• Fiscal Cliff Deal Added $47 Billion in Spending – The Heritage Foundation
• Fiscal Cliff Deal Extends Wasteful Farm Subsidies – The Heritage Foundation
• The Role of GSEs in the Housing Market – The Heritage Foundation
• Illinois’ High-Tax Problem – Illinois Policy Institute
Crime, Justice & the Law
• The Newtown Tragedy: Complex Causes Require Thoughtful Analysis and Responses – The Heritage Foundation
• Courts v. Cops – Manhattan Institute
• The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: Aggressive Enforcement and Lack of Judicial Review Create Uncertain Terrain for Businesses – Manhattan Institute
Education
• Charter Schools as Nation Builders: Democracy Prep and Civic Education – American Enterprise Institute
• Head Start Impact Evaluation Report Finally Released – The Heritage Foundation
• A Wealth of Words – Manhattan Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Hagel, Kerry, and Brennan Senate Confirmation Hearings: Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom – The Heritage Foundation
• Hagel, Kerry, and Brennan Confirmation Hearings: Middle East and North Africa Issues – The Heritage Foundation
• Following the 18th Party Congress: Moving Forward Step-by-Step – Hoover Institution
• Signaling Change: New Leaders Begin the Search for Economic Reform – Hoover Institution
• The 18th Party Congress and Foreign Policy: The Dog that Did Not Bark? – Hoover Institution
• The New Central Military Commission – Hoover Institution
• The New Party Politburo Leadership – Hoover Institution
Health Care
• Serious Concerns over What’s in and Not in Proposed Insurance Exchange Legislation – Center of the American Experiment
Immigration
• Immigration Reform Needs Problem-Solving Approach, Not Comprehensive Legislation – The Heritage Foundation
International Trade/Finance
• How Economic Nationalism Bites Back – American Enterprise Institute
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Skin in the Housing Game – American Enterprise Institute
• Mortgage Regulation: Is CFPB Qualified? – The Heritage Foundation
• Remittance Rules: A Case Study of Regulatory Pitfalls – The Heritage Foundation
• Rethinking the Volcker Rule – Mercatus Center
• The Economics and Regulation of Network Branded Prepaid Cards – Mercatus Center
• The Pitfalls of Regulating Consumer Credit – Mercatus Center
National Security
• Hagel, Kerry, and Brennan Senate Confirmation Hearings: U.S. Strategic Forces – The Heritage Foundation
• Napolitano Stays On: Five Key Steps for DHS in the Next Administration – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Uranium Mining in Virginia: Environmental and Safety Considerations – Heartland Institute
• EFEPA Eliminates Corporate Welfare and Corporate Dependence – The Heritage Foundation
• Environmental Conservation Based on Individual Liberty and Economic Freedom – The Heritage Foundation
• Engulfed by Environmental Crimes: Overcriminalization on the Gulf Coast – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Regulation & Deregulation
• What Does It Mean to Say That a Gun Law Is Tough? – American Enterprise Institute
• Politics and the Poor Man’s Plate – Hoover Institution
Welfare
• Wards of the State – Hoover Institution
Everybody believes in religious freedom on National Religious Freedom Day. On Wednesday, President Obama observed National Religious Freedom Day, as Presidents usually do, by issuing a proclamation celebrating the enactment in 1786 of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That statute became a model for the free exercise of religion and establishment clauses in the First Amendment. In closing, the President advised the country: “As we observe Religious Freedom Day, let us remember the legacy of faith and independence we have inherited, and let us honor it by forever upholding our right to exercise our beliefs free from prejudice or persecution.”
Here, here! And a good start would be for the President and his administration to abandon the view that religious freedom means merely the freedom to worship privately as one chooses so long as it doesn’t interfere with the government’s priorities. Religious freedom means the ability to live one’s faith outside places of worship, too. Compelling all employers to provide their employees with insurance coverage for contraception and abortion, as the Department of Health and Human Services has done under ObamaCare, violates the religious freedom of those employers who believe contraception and abortion are wrong. Over 110 plaintiffs, represented in 43 lawsuits, have sued the Department of Health and Human Services over its contraception mandate. Those plaintiffs are simply asking the courts to uphold their rights to exercise their beliefs free from persecution by the government.
See also: The Becket fund’s website, HHS Mandate Information Central; “What Today’s ‘Proclamation on Religious Freedom Day’ Missed,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, January 16; and “The Becket Fund Fights for Religious Liberty,” The Insider, Spring 2012.
Your health secrets will soon belong to the government. There’s a provision in ObamaCare (Section 2716) that forbids the government from requiring doctors to ask their patients if they own a gun. Unfortunately, that’s just about the only privacy protection in the bill, explains Betsey McCaughey:
Section 1311 of the law says that “qualified” insurance plans can pay only those health care providers who follow whatever regulations the Secretary of Health and Human Services imposes to improve “quality.”
That could be everything in medicine.
It could mean telling cardiologists when it is appropriate to use a bypass vs. a stent, or requiring all physicians to ask patients whether they use marijuana. The Secretary will have control over what your doctor does and what is included in your medical record even if you are in a plan you paid for yourself.
Worse still, your medical record will become part of a national electronic database.
The Hitech Act of 2009 and the Obama health law impose penalties on doctors and hospitals beginning in 2015 who do not use electronic medical records, moving the nation toward a unified database where your health history will be stored in one file. [Investor’s Business Daily, January 15]
Missing work: Proportionally fewer people are working today than in 2000, and the reason is that it is much easier today to get paid for not working, says economist Richard Vedder, who points to food stamps as one example:
From 2000 to 2007, the number of beneficiaries rose from 17.1 million to 26.3 million, according to the Department of Agriculture. That number has leaped to 47.5 million in October 2012. The average benefit per person jumped in 2009 from $102 to $125 per month.
The poor economy does not explain recent increases:
Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously. Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline. Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000. In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day.
Vedder also observes that 3.6 million more people receive Social Security disability than in 2000 (despite the fact the number of relatively dangerous jobs has declined); and 6 million more people receive Pell Grants to go to college instead of work than in 2000. When their Pell Grants run out, some of those recipients may end up joining the 115,000 janitors and cleaners in the work force who are also college graduates. Meanwhile, of course, unemployment benefits have been continuously extended over the past four years. Vedder calculates that if the labor force participation rate today were the same as it was in 2000, the economy would about 5 percent bigger. [Wall Street Journal, January 15]
More than 10 rounds could come in handy for self defense. The point of the Second Amendment isn’t just to allow people to hunt; it’s to allow people to defend themselves. Government limits on magazine sizes, proposed by President Obama this week, arbitrarily interfere with that right, observes Jacob Sullom:
The Glock 17, one of the most popular handguns in America, comes with a 17-round magazine. One of the most popular rifles, the AR-15 (a style made by several manufacturers), comes with a 30-round magazine.
Measured by what people actually buy and use, magazines that hold more than 10 rounds are hardly outliers. In fact, there are tens (if not hundreds) of millions already in circulation, which is one reason new limits cannot reasonably be expected to have much of an impact on people determined to commit mass murder.
Another reason is that changing magazines takes one to three seconds, which will rarely make a difference in assaults on unarmed people. The gunman in Connecticut, for example, reportedly fired about 150 rounds, so he must have switched his 30-round magazines at least four times […] .
If magazines holding more than 10 rounds are not useful for self-defense and defense of others, shouldn’t the same limit be imposed on police officers and bodyguards (including the Secret Service agents who protect the president)? And if the additional rounds do provide more protection against armed assailants, it hardly makes sense to cite the threat of such attacks as a reason to deny law-abiding citizens that extra measure of safety. [Reason, January 16]
A carbon tax would be costly. Trying to raise revenue with a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton will cost the average family of four $1,900 per year in 2016 and lead to average losses of $1,400 per year through 2035. So says the Energy Information Administration, which finds also that such a tax would: “raise the family-of-four energy bill by more than $500 per year (not counting the cost of gasoline); cause gasoline prices to increase by up to $0.50 gallon, or by 10 percent on an average gallon price; and lead to an aggregate loss of more than 1 million jobs by 2016 alone.” [David Kreutzer and Nicolas Loris, “Carbon Tax Would Raise Unemployment, Not Swap Revenue,” The Heritage Foundation, January 8]
The battle over transparency at the Environmental Protection Agency is heating up. The Environmental Protection Agency’s latest response to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s effort to obtain Administrator Lisa Jackson’s e-mails to outside groups about coal policy could by summed up: Richard Windsor? Who is that?
“Richard Windsor” is the alias that Jackson is reported to have used on a private account to discuss official business. CEI’s Christopher Horner reported in November he had been told of such an account by two high-level EPA officials. That information was divulged after CEI went to court to force the agency to comply with a May 2012 FOIA request for all of the administrator’s e-mails concerning coal policy.
This week, in response to an order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the EPA released 2,100 e-mails out of 12,000 it has promised to release in four tranches. The release consisted entirely of mass mailings and Google alerts. The name “Richard Windsor” does not appear anywhere in these e-mails, but in a cover letter to Horner, the EPA says:
[T]he Administrator uses one secondary official government email account to conduct EPA business. This official account was established for practical purposes, and its contents are maintained in accordance with federal recordkeeping guidelines and are searched in response to FOIA requests. In keeping with past practice, the name on this @epa.gov account has been redacted pursuant to Exemption 6 Personal Privacy and marked Administrator in order to preserve the ongoing utility of the email account and to clearly identify the records as being to or from the Administrator.
This response, says Horner, “signals the agency has gone bunker” and “intends to in essence pretend [the Windsor account] does not exist.” [CEI New Release, January 14]
See also: CEI’s timeline on the scandal at http://cei.org/richard-windsor.
This is not our Founding Father’s federalism. Right about now would be a good time to put an end to “cooperative federalism,” muses Mario Loyola regarding the prospect of federal money for states to conduct background checks on gun purchasers:
Washington should pay for, implement, and be accountable for its own policies. Let the president see how much money he can get out of Congress to implement a background-check program. Meantime, states should make it clear that they will refuse to comply with any cooperative federal-state gun-control program. Quite apart from violating the Second Amendment, such programs — whether the subject matter is gun control or health insurance — are deeply corrosive to the Constitution’s federal structure. And conservatives need to start focusing much more systematically on the dangers of “cooperative federalism.” [National Review, January 14]
Indeed. We’ll have more on this theme in a non-gun-control context in the upcoming issue of The Insider. Stay tuned.
Head Start isn’t working. The federal Head Start program spends $8 billion per year trying to help disadvantaged pre-school children become better prepared for grade school. According to a recent report from the government itself, however, the program has almost no measurable impact on school readiness.
The report, released just before Christmas (it had been completed in October), provides the findings of a congressionally-mandated study that tracked 5,000 pre-school children through the third grade. The study compared kids who enrolled in Head Start at age 3 and at age 4 to their peers who did not participate in the program.
It assessed the children on cognitive abilities like math and readings skills, as well as whether they had behavioral problems like hyperactivity or aggressiveness, or had conflicts with teachers or their peers. The report also assessed whether children in the program had better health results than their peers not in the program, and whether the program had an effect on the level and quality of a parent’s engagement with their children. Here’s the nutshell from the report itself:
[T]here were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children. [“Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study, Final Report,” Department of Health and Human Services, October 2012]
In total, the study assessed 45 measures for third graders, and found two positive and one negative impacts for children who participated in Head Start as 3-year-olds; and four positive and four negative impacts for children who participated as 4-year-olds. [For a rundown of the results, see Lindsey Burke and David B. Muhlhausen, “Head Start Impact Evaluation Report Finally Released,” The Heritage Foundation, January 10, 2013.]
Regulators v. innovation: Regulations are supposed to protect consumers, but sometimes it seems like the regulators’ real motivation is to prevent anyone from gaining a competitive advantage by trying a new idea. Cindy Vong’s “spa fish” therapy seems to be a case in point. Vong, represented by the Goldwater Institute, is in court this week challenging the Arizona Board of Cosmetology’s determination that she cannot continue offering this unique service. Darcy Olsen of the Goldwater Institute explains:
The therapy historically has been used to treat psoriasis patients in the Middle East and Asia. Patients dip their feet into baths of tiny, toothless Garra Rufa fish that nibble off dry skin, and voila. […]
“We consider the fish being a tool,” said the Board, and “every tool that comes in contact with a client in Arizona needs to be disinfected or thrown away.” Since you can’t scrub a living fish with Clorox, the board shuttered Vong’s business.
No doubt the treatment isn’t for everyone, but neither are chemical peels or spandex, and they’re not illegal. Like millions of bureaucratic decisions, this one was marked by absurdities. By definition, you can’t sterilize fish. Instead of letting the industry self-regulate, granting Vong an experimental waiver, or working to craft reasonable guidelines for the treatment, the board chose the most destructive path, trampling on Vong’s right to make an honest living and sending workers into the unemployment lines. [Goldwater Institute, January 15]
In its lawsuit, the Goldwater Institute argues that the cosmetology regulators are abridging Vong’s constitutional right to earn an honest living.
• Ponder the challenges facing conservatism at the National Review Institute Summit. Lots of other smart conservatives will be on hand to share their ideas. The cost includes political stars like Rep. Paul Ryan, Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Scott Walker, and Mia Love; and also some of your favorite think tankers, like Jim DeMint of The Heritage Foundation, Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, John Hood of the John Locke Foundation, and Heather Higgins of Independent Women’s Voice. The Summit begins January 25 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• Find out how government policies deepened and prolonged the Great Recession. Casey Mulligan will talk about his new book The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy at The Heritage Foundation at noon on January 23.
• Hear Os Guiness talk about his new book, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. The Tocqueville Forum will host Guiness at its Mortara Center in Washington, D.C.. The talk begins at 6 p.m.
• Make a video answering the question: What is the proper role of government in society. Then submit it to the Institute for Humane Studies Summer Seminar Video Contest. The deadline is February 15.
• Apply for The Young Conservative Leaders Fellowship, “a unique six-month program that will train young professional conservatives on the philosophical foundations of political conservatism,” sponsored by the Young Conservatives Coalition. Anyone under 40 can apply. Applications are due March 1.
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