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.
March 15, 2013
Latest Studies: 37 new items, including a Commonwealth Foundation report on how unions cost Pennsylvania taxpayers money, and a Goldwater Institute guide for parents on school choice
Notes on the Week: The rest of the Medicaid story, 20,000 pages of Obamacare regs in one picture, race-conscious enforcer to Labor? and more
To Do: Hear Cuban dissidents discuss Raul Castro’s Reforms
Budget & Taxation
• The Budget Debate Simplified – American Enterprise Institute
• OECD Launches New Effort to Undermine Tax Competition – Cato Institute
• The Squeeze: Government Unions’ Grip on Pennsylvanians – Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives
• What the FY 2014 Budget Should Do – The Heritage Foundation
• Austerity: The Relative Effects of Tax Increases versus Spending Cuts – Mercatus Center
• Public Employee Pensions in Missouri: A Looming Crisis – Show-Me Institute
Crime, Justice & the Law
• Texas Is Still Tough on Crime, but Now More Effective – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Economic Growth
• February Employment Report: Has the Economy Seen Its Shadow? – The Heritage Foundation
• The Initial Use Requirement: HB 1250 & SB 829 – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Education
• Anticipating Innovation in Teacher Evaluation Systems – American Enterprise Institute
• The School Staffing Surge – Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice
• A Parent’s Guide to School Choice: Education Options for Arizona Families – Goldwater Institute
• Making Texas Public Education More Efficient: Taxpayer Savings Grant Program – Heartland Institute
• Universal Preschool’s Empty Promises – The Heritage Foundation
• School Vouchers: From Friedman to the Finish Line – John Locke Foundation
Family, Culture & Community
• Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It – The Heritage Foundation
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Structure and Context in US-Russian Relations at the Outset of Barack Obama’s Second Term – American Enterprise Institute
• John Quincy Adams and the American Foreign Policy in a Revolutionary Era – Foreign Policy Research Institute
• The U.S. Cannot Fix the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• ‘Not One Dime’: Health Care Law Projected to Add $6.2 Trillion to U.S. Deficit – American Enterprise Institute
• The Affordable Care Act Negatively Impacts the Supply of Labor – The Heritage Foundation
• The Affordable Care Act’s Optional Medicaid Expansion: Considerations Facing State Governments – Mercatus Center
• Three Proactive Health Insurance Reforms for Texas – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Immigration
• Poor Immigrants Use Public Benefits at a Lower Rate than Poor Native-Born Citizens – Cato Institute
International Trade/Finance
• What a Good Trans-Pacific Partnership Looks Like – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Moving Toward a Viable Multifamily Debt Market With No Ongoing Federal Guarantee – American Enterprise Institute
• No Way Out: Persistent Government Interventions in the Great Contraction – American Enterprise Institute
• The ‘Two Drunks’ Model of Financial Crises – American Enterprise Institute
• Resolving Too-Big-To-Fail Banks in the United States – Mercatus Center
National Security
• Lessons from Benghazi: Investigation Leaves Important Questions Unanswered – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism – New Lenox
Regulation & Deregulation
• Unnecessary Regulations that Increase Prescription Drug Costs – National Center for Policy Analysis
• A Tale of Two Markets: Telecommunications and Electricity – Texas Public Policy Foundation
• Texas’ Windstorm Insurance System Still Does Not Work – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Transportation and Infrastructure Policy: More State and Less Federal Control – The Heritage Foundation
Welfare
• How to Get Welfare Spending Under Control – The Heritage Foundation
• Private Choice in the Public Sector: The New Swedish Welfare Model – Timbro
Achievement is down, but staffing is up! Since 1950, employment in the nation’s K-12 public education system has grown nearly four times faster than enrollments, according to Department of Education data. Benjamin Scafidi looks in detail at this staffing surge in a new report from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice:
Nationally, states could have saved—and could continue to save—more than $24 billion annually if they had increased/decreased the employment of administrators and other non-teaching staff at the same rate as students between FY 1992 and FY 2009. […]
There are very large differences in the employment of non-teaching personnel across states. For example, whereas Vermont has only 8.8 students for every administrator or other non-teaching employee and Maine has only 9.4 students per non-teaching employee, Rhode Island has 20 students per every administrator or other non-teaching employee. Wyoming has 9.9 students per every non-teaching employee, whereas Idaho has 22.7 students per non-teaching employee. Those differences are much larger than the differences in the employment of teachers.
Twenty-one “Top-Heavy States” employ fewer teachers than other non-teaching personnel. Thus, those 21 states have more administrators and other non-teaching staff on the public payroll than teachers. Virginia “leads the way” with 60,737 more administrators and other non-teaching staff than teachers in its public schools.
There are significant differences in total employment ratios across states. Vermont, Maine, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia each have fewer than six students per public school employee. That compares to more than 10 students per public school employee in Idaho, South Carolina, Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada. [“The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, Part II,” by Benjamin Scafidi, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, February 2013]
As Scafidi points out in his report from last October, math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests have been flat since 1992 while reading scores have actually declined. Graduation rates for the same period when up by half a percentage point—from 74.2 percent to 74.7 percent. It seems the investment in staff, in other words, has not produced a return in increased learning. [“The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools,” by Benjamin Scafidi, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, October 2012]
A transparency crisis? You may have heard about the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s pver failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. As Mark Tapscott notes in his column on Sunshine Week (this week), CEI isn’t the only requester having trouble getting the government to release its records: “A recent study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found a 28 percent increase in the number of FOIA suits filed during the last two years of Obama’s first term, compared to the last two years of President George W. Bush’s second term, from 562 to 720 cases.” [The Washington Examiner, March 10]
The rest of the Medicaid story: On Obamacare’s proposed Medicaid expansion, a number of governors have decided take the federal money and run, reasoning that their own taxpayers won’t see any savings if they turn down the federal money while other states accept the deal. Even so, are governors figuring the long-run costs correctly? According to a new analysis by The Heritage Foundation, a few big states that already have bloated Medicaid programs—like New York—will see savings, but nationally most will end up paying more for Medicaid in the long-run. Forty states will “see costs exceed savings when the federal match rate is lowered after the first three years.” Here, for example, is what the projections for Florida show:
For more state estimates, see “Obamacare and the Medicaid Expansion: How Does Your State Fare?” by Drew Gonshorowski, The Foundry, March 5.
And those estimates assume the federal government continues to provide the same matching rate indefinitely. What happens if it doesn’t? Will governors then start kicking people off the Medicaid rolls? Of course, by then the governors are not likely to be the same people who decided to expand the program today.
Neutrality, neutrality at all costs: By a vote of 99.8 percent to 0.2 percent, Falklanders said they wanted the Falkland Islands to remain British. In the Monday referendum, 92 percent of the islanders voted, and all but three voted in favor of continuing political union with Britain.
The President of the United States has often been called the leader of the free world, but in response to this particular expression of self-determination, the Obama administration shrugged. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland explained that the vote doesn’t change the administration’s position that Argentina and Great Britain should reach a negotiated settlement:
The residents have clearly expressed their preference for a continued relationship with the United Kingdom. That said, we obviously recognize that there are competing claims. Our formal position has not changed. We recognize the de facto UK administration of the islands, but we take no position on sovereignty claims. [Agence France Press, March 13]
Right:
The U.S. military uses and benefits from bases on Britain’s overseas territories, including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia on Cyprus, Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic, and Gibraltar. Some of these overseas territories, such as Gibraltar, are controversial, but the U.S. uses them and supports British claims to them. It appears that because the U.S. military does not use the Falkland Islands, the U.S. applies a different standard to them. [“The United States Should Recognize British Sovereignty Over the Falkland Islands,” by Luke Coffey, Theodore R. Bromund, and Nile Gardiner, March 4]
Losing limitedness: The annual budget from House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan isn’t quite the limited-government standard that it used to be, says Dan Mitchell, who notes the good and the bad of this year’s edition:
[F]ederal spending grows by an average of 3.4 percent annually, and that modest bit of fiscal discipline is enough to reduce the burden of government spending to 19.1 percent of economic output by 2023. […] [T]op tax rates would be reduced to 25 percent and many forms of double taxation, like the death tax and capital gains tax, presumably would be reduced or eliminated. […]
But:
[T]he budget assumes that the federal tax burden should remain at about 19 percent of [gross domestic product], higher than the long-run average of 18 percent of GDP and—for all intents and purposes—permanently enshrining Obama’s fiscal cliff victory. […]
Two years ago, [Ryan] put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 2.8 percent per year. Last year, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 3.1 percent per year. Now, spending will climb 3.4 percent per year. [Cato Institute, March 12]
Separation of powers gives consumer freedom a reprieve. On Monday, a New York State trial court overturned New York City’s ban on large-size sodas that was set to go into effect on Tuesday. The court ruled not that consumers have a right to choose their own soda size, but that the rules were arbitrary and capricious and that the city’s Department of Health had no authority to issue the rules under existing law. The department was, in effect, writing new law, a power reserved for legislatures and city councils. As Walter Olson explains, this separation-of-powers ruling nevertheless contains “the germ of a much-needed rebuke to some actors in the public-health movement”
The New York City Health Department was asserting a breathtakingly broad definition of its powers, on the grounds that successive city charters give it sweeping authority to address all matters relating to health. Under the interpretation advanced by Bloomberg’s lawyers, this vague charter language would empower the department to issue pretty much whatever diktats it pleases for New Yorkers to obey on any topic somehow related to advancing health. (They did concede that the department could not take actions that were otherwise unconstitutional–say, suspending freedom of the press or quartering troops in civilian homes during peacetime.)
Against this, Judge Tingling reasoned (as have judges in other cases) that the charter language could not have been meant to grant the department an absolute and monarch-like authority over a subject populace; natural and reasonable limits must be read into it. What are the natural and reasonable limits to the authority of a public health agency? Looking at cases where the agency’s authority to act had been upheld, the judge noted instances of emergencies, particularly those relating to epidemics of contagious or communicable diseases. Those are indeed the traditional functions at the core of a public health agency; saving us from voluntarily assumed dietary choices that may very gradually undermine our health is not among them. [Commentary, March 13]
20,000 pages of Obamacare regulations in one picture: The Department of Health and Human Services released 828 pages of ObamaCare regulations on Monday, bringing the total Obamacare regulations written so far to 20,000 pages. Sen. Mitch McConnell has produced a picture of what those pages look like stacked in one pile:
As then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi correctly stated back in 2010, Congress had to pass the law in order for anybody to find out what was in it. And we’re all still finding out.
Obama’s man for Labor led race-conscious Civil Rights Division, says Inspector General. The Justice Department division headed by Thomas Perez, President Obama’s putative choice to be the next Secretary of Labor, appears to have been guided by the idea that civil rights laws protect only minorities—i.e., not white people. Perez is currently the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. A 300-page report by the department’s Office of Inspector General, released this week, contains evidence supporting the accusations of former Voting Section chief Christopher Coates and department lawyer J. Christian Adams. Following the department’s decision to dismiss a case against the Black Panthers for intimidating white voters in Philadelphia, Coates and Adams charged that their colleagues were not interested in enforcing civil rights laws in a race-neutral manner. Previously Coates’s Voting Section had sued and won a judgment against black Noxubee County election officials for violating the rights of white voters. The IG report notes the response to this case within the department:
Coates and other career attorneys told the OIG that they were aware of comments by some Voting Section attorneys indicating that the Noxubee case should have never been brought because White citizens were not historical victims of discrimination or could fend for themselves. Indeed, two career Voting Section attorneys told us that, even if the Department had infinite resources, they still would not have supported the filing of the Noxubee case because it was contrary to the purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which was to ensure that minorities who had historically been the victims of discrimination could exercise the right to vote. […]
Many of those individuals told the OIG that they believed that the reason the voting rights laws were enacted was to protect historic victims of discrimination and therefore the Section should prioritize its resources accordingly. Additionally, some of these individuals, including one current manager, admitted to us that, while they believed that the text of the Voting Rights Act is race-neutral and applied to all races, they did not believe the Voting Section should pursue cases on behalf of White victims.
And regarding efforts to remove Coates as head of the Voting Section, the report notes:
Attorney General Holder told us that he understood from what others told him that Coates was a divisive and controversial person in the Voting Section and that one concern about Coates was that he “wanted to expand the use of the power of the Civil Rights Division in such a way that it would take us into areas that, though justified, would come at a cost of that which the Department traditionally had done, at the cost of people [that the] Civil Rights Division had traditionally protected.”
The OIG report describes these conflicts in Perez’s Civil Rights Division as “deep ideological polarization” that “fueled disputes and mistrust that harmed the functioning of the Voting Section.” [“A Review of the Operations of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division,” Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, March 2013]
When the patient spends his own money: Fixing health care could be as simple as making consumers see real prices. That’s what happens when physicians stop taking insurance and accept only direct payment from their patients. More and more doctors are turning to that model, as Jim Epstein reports, and their experience shows that bypassing third-party payers leads to lower prices:
Dr. [Ryan] Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, charges for his services according to an online price list that’s as straightforward as a restaurant menu. A drained abscess runs $30, a pap smear, $40, a 30-minute house call, $100. Strep cultures, glucose tolerance tests, and pregnancy tests are on the house. Neuhofel doesn’t accept insurance. He even barters on occasion with cash-strapped locals. One patient pays with fresh eggs and another with homemade cheese and goat’s milk.
“Direct primary care,” which is the industry term for Neuhofel’s business model, does away with the bureaucratic hassle of insurance, which translates into much lower prices. “What people don’t realize is that most doctors employ an army of people for coding, billing, and gathering payment,” says Neuhofel. “That means you have to charge $200 to remove an ingrown toenail.” Neuhofel charges $50. […]
This model is growing in popularity. Leading practitioners of direct primary care include Seattle, Washington-based Qliance, which has raised venture capital funding from Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, and comedian (and Reason Foundation Trustee) Drew Carey; MedLion, which is about to expand its business to five states; and AMG Medical Group, which operates several offices in New York City. Popular health care blogger Dr. Rob Lamberts has written at length about his decision to dump his traditional practice in favor of this model. […]
When she was operating a traditional practice, [Dr. Lisa] Davidson witnessed firsthand how our “payment plans for routine expenses” drive up prices and block innovation. She recalls that one insurance company paid $118 for a routine PSA test. Now that her patients pay the bill directly the cost is $18. Insurance used to pay $128 for a bag of IV fluid. Now Davidson doesn’t bother passing on the cost of IV bags because they run $1.50 each. [Reason, March 13]
• Learn what life in Raul Castro’s Cuba is like. The Cato Institute will host a discussion featuring dissident Cuban bloggers Yoani Sanchez and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. The event begins March 19 at 12:30 p.m.
• Commemorate the 30th anniversary of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative speech. The Heritage Foundation and the George C. Marshall Institute will host a mini conference on March 19 beginning at 10 a.m. at The Heritage Foundation.
• Find out if the philanthropic sector has become too polite to be effective. The Hudson Institute will host an event called “Is Philanthropy Killing Itself with Kindness?” on March 25 beginning at noon.
• Hear out how the Pentagon can become more efficient by shrinking bureaucracy, reducing overhead, and eliminating excess infrastructure. The American Enterprise Institute will host a panel discussion on March 21 beginning at 9 a.m.
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