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.
April 5, 2013
Latest Studies: 37 new items, including a Thomas Jefferson Institute plan for tax reform in Virginia, and a Capital Research Center review of 30 years of junk science
Notes on the Week: Ed Feulner changed the way think tanks work, the Secretary of Health and Human Services does not know what insurance is, why does ObamaCare need a marketing plan? and more
To Do: Find out if philanthropy needs more transparency
Budget & Taxation
• Pennsylvania State Budget 2013 – Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives
• Understanding the Ryan and Murray Budgets – e21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Comparing Public and Private Sector Compensation in Canada – Fraser Institute
• Tax Day 2013: No More Tax Increases Shall Pass – The Heritage Foundation
• Rich, Poor, and in Between: Who Benefits from the Mortgage Interest Deduction? – Hudson Institute
• The Case for Across-the-Board Spending Cuts – Mercatus Center
• FY-2014 Proposed State Budget – Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs
• How Is the Money Used? Federal and State Cases Distinguishing Taxes and Fees – Tax Foundation
• Tax Freedom Day 2013: April 18, Five Days Later Than Last Year – Tax Foundation
• Tax Restructuring in Virginia: A Revenue Neutral Path for Improving Our Economy – Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy
Economic Growth
• Do Volatile Firms Pay Volatile Earnings? Evidence Using Linked Worker-Firm Data – American Enterprise Institute
• Is the Information Technology Revolution Over? – American Enterprise Institute
• ALEC 2013: Jobs, Innovation, and Opportunity in the States – American Legislative Exchange Council
• Research Review: Who Creates Jobs? Start-up Firms and New Businesses – The Heritage Foundation
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
• The Structural Racism Racket: Using Anti-Racist Rhetoric To Fight Left-Wing Battles – Capital Research Center
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Cuba Sees an Opening – American Enterprise Institute
• Arms Trade Treaty: Problems with Substance and Process – The Heritage Foundation
• Four Issues Facing China – The Heritage Foundation
• LOST at Sea – National Center for Policy Analysis
Health Care
• Daring to Be Cautious?: Bigger Steps Needed for Medicare Cost-Sharing Reform – American Enterprise Institute
• Welfare Block Grants as a Guide for Medicaid Reform – Mercatus Center
• Health Care Spending in the 50 States and Select Counties – National Center for Policy Analysis
• Myths and Realities of Obamacare – Pacific Research Institute
Immigration
• ‘You Can’t Deport 11 Million People’ Statement Reflects Mistaken Image – Center for Immigration Studies
• Employment Among U.S. Citizens in States Represented by Gang of Eight – Center for Immigration Studies
• What Would It Cost to Really Check an Amnesty Application? – Center for Immigration Studies
Information Technology
• It’s Not Personal: The Dangers of Misapplied Privacy Policies to Search, Social Media and Other Web Content – Reason Foundation
Labor
• The Impact of Raising Minnesota’s Minimum Wage on Employment – Center of the American Experiment
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• The Lessons of Financial History, Reprise – American Enterprise Institute
• The Next Real Estate Bubble: Farmland – American Enterprise Institute
• Double Duty: Payments Cards as a Doorway to Greater Financial Health – Hudson Institute
National Security
• A Congressional Guide: Seven Steps to U.S. Security, Prosperity, and Freedom in Cyberspace – The Heritage Foundation
• Strengthen the Coast Guard’s Presence in the Arctic – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• 30 Years of Junk Science, from SDI to Fracking – Capital Research Center
• The Global Partnership for Oceans: Imposing “Limits to Growth” Around the World – Capital Research Center
• Nuclear Waste Management: Minimum Requirements for Reforms and Legislation – The Heritage Foundation
Philanthropy
• The Carnegie Corporation of New York: From Building Libraries to Undermining American Society – Capital Research Center
Regulation & Deregulation
• Let Them Drink Big Sodas – Hoover Institution
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Drones: Look to the Sky! – National Center for Policy Analysis
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Examining the Safety, Security, Privacy and Regulatory Issues of Integration into U.S. Airspace – National Center for Policy Analysis
Ed Feulner changed the way think tanks work. This week Ed Feulner handed off The Heritage Foundation presidency to Jim DeMint. Feulner has been President of the Heritage Foundation since 1977. His concept of publishing succinct, timely research that would actually get read by policymakers changed not just the way Heritage worked, but the way all think tanks work. Feulner built an institution that gave the Reagan administration it’s policy blueprint with the publication of Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Presidency in 1980; led the way on reforming welfare in the 1990s; built the case for missile defense, with which even the Obama administration seems to agree now; and showed the world that economic freedom leads to prosperity with its annual Index of Economic Freedom. Along the way, Feulner turned a small research shop into a permanent voice for conservative policies. For more on what Ed Feulner has helped The Heritage Foundation accomplish, you should read Lee Edwards new book, Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and The Heritage Foundation (Crown Forum, 2013). To give you a taste of the book, here is a section that explains the key Feulner innovations and the role they played very early in his presidency, especially in the work of producing Mandate for Leadership:
Many people inside and outside Heritage contributed to Mandate’s success, but one person was more responsible than any other for its extraordinary impact—Ed Feulner. It was Feulner and another young congressional aide—Paul Weyrich—who conceived the idea of a conservative think tank that would concentrate on providing timely, concise, reliable analysis to members of Congress and their staff.
It was Feulner who brought Phil Truluck with him from the Republican Study Committee in the House and asked him to build a new kind of research department committed to rapid and succinct response. Truluck soon became the foundation’s chief operating officer, its COO, forming with Feulner a unique, long-lasting partnership in Washington’s think tank world.
It was Feulner who hired veteran public relations man Hugh Newton to fashion a proactive communications department that would work with all sectors of the mass media—left, right, and center—not just with those on the right, as most conservative organizations were wont to do.
It was Feulner who exponentially expanded the direct-mail fundraising started by his predecessor Frank Walton: by the end of 1980, there were some 120,000 Heritage donors (called “members” by the foundation). The expended membership gave Heritage a financial independence that assured policy independence. If any individual, foundation, or corporation threatened to withdraw its support if Heritage did not amend a position on a particular issue, Heritage could and did reply, “We’re not for sale.”
It was Feulner who instructed personnel whiz Willa Johnson to form a national network of conservative groups and individuals—the Resource Bank. “We wanted Heritage,” he explains, “to identify conservative policy experts on and off the campus and connect them to the Washington policy community.” Many of the experts served as the authors and editors of Mandate for Leadership.
Mandate was a true reflection of The Heritage Foundation—principled and pragmatic, innovative and conservative, optimistic and realistic—just like the Foundation’s president.
But who was Ed Feulner? Who had shaped him? What had shaped him? How did he come to be president of what the liberal New Republic called “the most important think tank in the nation’s capital”?
The federal government has a marketing plan for ObamaCare. Why would it need one of those? Wasn’t ObamaCare passed in order to help out the 48 million uninsured people who were clamoring for coverage? Why would ObamaCare need to be marketed to those folks? It appears the Department of Health and Human Services is just now figuring out that the reason many people chose to forgo health insurance was not that they couldn’t afford it. Rather, they just decided it wasn’t a good deal for them. ObamaCare hasn’t fixed that deal; it has made it worse by piling on even more implicit subsidies from the young to the old. Digging into the HHS marketing plan, Investor’s Business Daily reports:
The biggest market segment identified by HHS, in fact, is what it describes as “healthy and young,” who make up 48% of the uninsured population.
They have “a low motivation to enroll” because they are in “excellent to very good health” and so “take health for granted.”
Plus, as the HHS has apparently just discovered, most of them say that cost is the main reason they don’t have coverage.
Then there are the “passive and unengaged,” which make up 15% of the uninsured and also have a “low motivation to enroll” because they “live for today.” They also cite cost as a key factor.
The problem, of course, is that ObamaCare will make insurance vastly more expensive for many of those who fall into these groups by larding on new benefit mandates and placing limits on premium-lowering deductions and co-pays. It will also introduce insurance market rules that force the young and healthy to subsidize premiums for those older and sicker. [Investor’s Business Daily, April 3]
For the proponents of ObamaCare, the implicit subsidies from young to old are not a bug, they’re a feature. And they’re a feature that can work only if everyone has to buy health insurance. Remember, that was the point of ObamaCare’s individual mandate; and the argument that the insurance market wouldn’t work without it also featured prominently in the defense of the provision before the Supreme Court. It appears though that the penalties are just too small and the enforcement too weak to be able to induce compliance, as Joe Antos and Michael Strain pointed out last year. [The American, July 17, 2012] If it is true that the mandate isn’t going to work, what hope does a marketing plan have?
Insurance 101: Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, doesn’t understand what health insurance is:
At a White House briefing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance today is so skimpy it can’t be compared to the comprehensive coverage available under the law. “Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”
She’s got it backwards, explains Megan McArdle:
[I]t’s the catastrophe which makes insurance a good deal. You wouldn’t get much value from buying “grocery insurance”. At best, you’d be paying an extra administrative fee to route your routine expenses through an insurer, rather than paying them directly. At worst, you’ll end up with bills skyrocketing as all sorts of perverse incentives appear. After all, if the insurer is paying all your grocery claims, why not load up on filet mignon instead of ground turkey?
But insurers try very hard never to sell insurance for less than the cost of your expected claims. If you expect to buy $10,000 worth of groceries next year, it will not charge you less than that for a “grocery policy”. And if we all drive up the costs of grocery insurance by consuming more, the insurer can do one of two things: raise everyone’s “insurance premiums” to cover a filet mignon budget, or create a list of “approved groceries” that it will cover, and start hassling anyone who tries to file an excessively expensive claim. [The Daily Beast, March 27]
Sebelius is confused on this point probably because the actual insurance function of “health insurance” was subsumed into a pre-payment system a long time ago, thanks to the unlimited subsidies in the tax code for employer-provided “health insurance.” We’ve been consuming the medical equivalent of filet mignon for so long that people reflexively associate that with the idea of insurance.
The war on labels is a war on rational thought. Bowing to the pressure group No Labels, the Associated Press has decided its reporting will no longer use labels to describe people. That means, for example, that while violating immigration law may be described as an illegal action, the person taking such an action cannot be described as an illegal immigrant. As Jonah Goldberg notes, if we all followed this rule, we would find it awfully difficult to communicate:
But if consistency is the AP’s lodestar, what are we to say about “criminal defendants”? Or, for that matter, what to do about jaywalkers, plagiarists, or pedophiles? If a schizophrenic must be called a person “diagnosed with schizophrenia,” shall we now refer to everyone as someone whom someone else has described as something? Where does that end? […]
Activists and others in favor of banning “illegal immigrant” say the term tarnishes all immigrants. As Sergio Martinez, a 25-year-old resident of Detroit and a noncitizen, told the Michigan news site MLive, “I definitely felt like it was very derogatory and created a stigma for immigrants.”
Well, maybe not for immigrants so much as for illegal immigrants, which is sort of the point, right? […]
For some reason, a lot of people insist that the “illegal” in “illegal immigration” is in effect an unfair slander. But we live in a country where illegal and immoral only occasionally overlap in the popular mind. How immoral it is to immigrate illegally to the country is debatable, but that it’s illegal to do so isn’t debatable, it’s axiomatic. [National Review, April 5]
And as Michelle Malkin points out, if those defending the new AP guidance were really consistent they would have to cease the bias of identifying leftwing writers as journalists while calling conservative writers rightwing columnists. [Twitchy, April 4] That isn’t going to happen.
A belated hurrah for William J. Casey: We’re guilty, like most, of overlooking the 100th anniversary of the late William Casey’s birth on March 13. As Paul Kengor reports, the good folks at the Young America’s Foundation didn’t forget and put on a good program to celebrate Casey and his public service—especially his key role in President Ronald Reagan’s victory over communism. The featured speaker was Herb Meyer, who was special assistant to Casey and vice chair of the National Intelligence Council. Kengor distills Meyer’s tribute:
[P]rior to the Reagan administration, all previous presidents had approached the Cold War from the perspective that they should not lose. They acted primarily defensively. So long as the Cold War balance/competition was not appreciably worse for the United States after a president’s tenure, the president was generally satisfied with the outcome of his performance and the global status quo. Reagan and Casey changed all of that, and did so with great courage, creativity, confidence, and panache. The difference with Reagan at the White House and Casey at the CIA is that they played not to lose but to win.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey went on offense.
As Herb Meyer says, this was an altogether different psychological and tactical dynamic that literally changed everything. For Reagan and Casey, this translated into a deliberate decision to actually attempt to win the Cold War, and their definition of winning the Cold War meant that the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
Reagan and Casey came to an open agreement on that point in a critical executive-level NSPG meeting just 10 days into the start of the Reagan presidency. There, at the White House, on January 30, 1981, the new CIA director and new president informed their principals that the United States had a historic opportunity to do serious damage to the Soviet Union. It was at that meeting that the subject of a covert, strategic offensive against the USSR was first brought up. It was decided that the Reagan administration should launch a concerted effort to play on Soviet vulnerabilities. While the details remained to be hammered out, the initial commitment was made on that January 30, just days into the Reagan presidency.
Thereafter, Casey sought to transform what the CIA had been doing. He and Meyer launched a systematic campaign to identify Soviet economic weaknesses, rather than focusing on and monitoring Soviet (alleged) strengths — as the CIA had been doing. They began conducting Soviet vulnerability assessments, looking for areas where the USSR could be hurt and ultimately undermined. […]
Herb Meyer concludes: “Bill Casey wasn’t just a little smarter or a little tougher than anybody else you could put in at the CIA. Bill Casey was a crystal-ball in a pin-striped suit…. He was one of a kind. And we were very lucky to have had him then, when we needed him the most.” [The American Spectator, April 5]
Priorities! Somebody has spotted bats in Georgia, which means delays in the construction of roads that might save human lives; but bats aren’t worth protecting when they’re torn up by wind turbines. James Rust reports:
Currently $459 million in Georgia road projects are delayed up to one and one-half years. The cost of studies is between $80,000 and $120,000 per project and the total for the 104 projects in the next three years may be $8 million. […]
There is no question lives are saved by improved traffic flow on four-lane roads versus two-lane roads with potential for head-on collisions. Using EPA standards for reduced air pollution due to more efficient automobile operations, the potential for lives saved may be in the hundreds. The delay of possibly one and one-half years for bat habitat studies will cost Georgians lives.
But it turns out bats are worth sacrificing aplenty in order to fight global warming with proliferating wind farms:
Besides being minced by turbine blade rotations, bats are subject to deaths by other means as explained by the August 26, 2008 Scientific American article “On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats.” Bats are killed by pressure pulses causing burst blood vessels in their lungs. As nocturnal creatures, bats are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines because wind turbine operations are frequently late at night when demand for electricity is at its lowest. […]
In Indiana, the origin of Indiana bats, thousands of bats perish annually due to wind farms in Benton County where no standards to protect bat habitats are enforced. Additional wind farms are strewn all over the Midwest due to its favorable wind speeds. Consequently, millions of bats die yearly due to wind farm operations. Apparently the U. S. Government’s enthusiasm for promoting renewable energy resources allows ignoring the fate of animals listed by the Endangered Species Act. [Heartland Institute, April 1]
Do millenials have the wrong idea about marriage? Julia Shaw thinks so:
Only 21 percent of millennials (those ages 18-29) are married, and the median age for marriage is the highest in generations: almost 27 for women and 29 for men. By comparison, 29 percent of Generation X, 42 percent of Boomers, and 54 percent of the Silent Generation (born 1928 through 1945) were married by that age, according to a 2010 Pew Research Survey.
According to Pew, 60 percent of unmarried men and women want to tie the knot. But they just aren’t in any hurry. Marriage these days signals that you’ve figured out how to be a grown-up. You’ve played the field, backpacked Europe, and held a bartending gig to supplement an unpaid internship. You’ve “arrived,” having finished school, settled into a career path, bought a condo, figured out who you are, and found your soul mate. The fairytale wedding is your gateway into adult life. But in my experience, this idea about marriage as the end of the road is pretty misguided and means couples are missing out on a lot of the fun.
I’m a married millennial. I walked down the aisle at 23. My husband, David, was 25. We hadn’t arrived. I had a job; he, a job offer and a year left in law school. But we couldn’t buy a house or even replace the car when it died a few months into our marriage. We lived in a small basement apartment, furnished with secondhand Ikea. We did not have Internet (checking email required a trip to the local coffee shop) or reliable heat.
Marriage wasn’t something we did after we’d grown up—it was how we have grown up and grown together. We’ve endured the hardships of typical millennials: job searches, job losses, family deaths, family conflict, financial fears, and career concerns. The stability, companionship, and intimacy of marriage enabled us to overcome our challenges and develop as individuals and a couple. We learned how to be strong for one another, to comfort, to counsel, and to share our joys and not just our problems. [Slate, April 1]
The federal tentacles are reaching further into the classroom. Education Week reports:
The U.S. Department of Education has created a technical-review process for the two state consortia that are designing assessments for the common standards.
The technical review will focus on two aspects of the work the assessment consortia are doing: item design and validation. This is in contrast to the program-review process that the department began when the two consortia first received federal Race to the Top funding in 2010. That monitors how the states are progressing with the work they outlined in their original applications. [Education Week, April 1]
What does that mean, Neal McCluskey?
[W]ith very limited information available, it is hard to know what the review will ultimately encompass. But assume it doesn’t examine actual questions at all. Still, it will have the money-supplying federal government judging the technical merits of something that we are incessantly told only nutty people would think could become federally controlled. [Cato Institute, April 3]
The diminution of the college degree: These days, you might need a college degree just to run the cash machine at a McDonalds. Paul Bedard of Washington Whispers this week noticed an ad for a cashier position at McDonalds that listed a bachelor’s degree as a job requirement. According to Bedard, McDonalds later informed him that a bachelor’s degree is not really required for the position. [Washington Examiner, April 4]
Still, if McDonalds thought there weren’t bachelor’s degree holders who would apply, it probably wouldn’t have listed the job that way. This story is but one more datum supporting the thesis that government subsidies have transformed higher education into mere screening device for employers. Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe cover this ground in their recent paper, “Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities” [Center for College Affordability and Productivity, January 2013]. They write:
[C]ollege is really more of a screening device that helps separate the sharp, disciplined applicants from the dullards and slackers. If the college from which students graduates has a selective admissions policy, the employer is doubly reassured that the college graduate is sharp, and thus is willing to pay an even larger wage premium. Harvard graduates, on average, make a good deal more than graduates of, say, the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The college degree is a signal to employers, and one that they aggressively utilize.
From the employer’s perspective, the best thing about relying on diplomas to help narrow the pool of job applicants is that the potential employee bears the bulk of the search-related costs—he or she pays for the college training. […]
To us, that screening device function is the main factor in allowing colleges to raise their prices (tuition fees) dramatically over time. With the passage of time and the deterioration in the quality of the skill levels of high-school graduates, employers have bid up the college/high-school earnings differential, allowing the schools to raise prices more and still leave college a good personal investment for those who successfully complete higher education programs.
Because almost everyone has a bachelor’s degree, it has ceased to become something special; but because almost everyone has one, the degree has become more essential than ever to the person trying to become employable. Higher education is now a kind of arms race in credentialing that wastes a lot of resources.
• Find out if philanthropy needs more transparency. The Heritage Foundation will host author John Tyler of the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation at noon on April 11.
• Hear whether the Dodd-Frank regulations are constitutional. The Cato Institute will host a Capitol Hill briefing featuring featuring Rep. Scott Garrett, Chairman of the Congressional Constitution Caucus, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, House Financial Services Committee. The briefing will be held in 2203 Rayburn House Office Building a 1 p.m. on April 9.
• Learn about the charitable deduction in American political thought. The Hudson Institute will host a panel featuring Stanley Katz of Princeton University, Rob Reich of Stanford University, and Alex Reid, of Morgan Lewis’s Tax Practice. The discussion will begin at noon on April 16.
• Sharpen your messaging skills. The Centennial Institute will hold a persuasion bootcamp for conservatives. William Kristol and Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard will speak. The event will be held at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs on May 3.
• Don’t forget to register for Resource Bank 2013, which is April 25 - 26 in Orlando, Florida. It’s your best opportunity every year to share ideas and know-how with hundreds of think tank heads, scholars, and activists for liberty from around the world. Did we mention new Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint will be there?
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