Obamacare 'beyond rescue'

It became 'beyond' rescue when it was conceived based upon a host of ludicrous misconceptions about health insurance and the health care market.  It's pace of meltdown is due to intergalactic levels of pointless complexity and interstellar levels of incompetent management.  It seems BHO didn't much care what was passed so long as he got credit for it and therefore entered the Pantheon of Democratic Saints with Roosevelt, et al.  A more shallow, insipid man has not occupied the White House in my time.  Has the best damned golf handicap of any of 'em, though.

Megan is perhaps the best outside observer of the fiasco.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Resolved: Obamacare Is Now Beyond Rescue.

How statist authoritarians use 'regulations and law' to stifle dissent

The Obami's IRS harrassment strategy having backfired - apparently some retrograde bigot noticed that Steven Miller, the head of the IRS visited the Obama White House almost 200 times more often than his predecessor visited the Bush White House- they now are trying to hobble their critics using carfully targeted regulation that has a 'disparate impact' on right leaning groups.  Much of the left's political money comes from Labor Unions or directly from Sorosville while the Tea Party right uses 501C-4 organizations that aren't tax deductible but exempt from taxation on the donations they raise.  Outraged at the effrontery of Tea Baggers criticizing The Lightbringer, the President's IRS allies have written regs that punish quite a bit of conservative political organizing by subjecting it to taxation.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Comments on proposed IRS rule targeting the Tea Party reflect fear, anger.“At the time of this writing, not one public comment on a proposed IRS rule for 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups is positive. The proposed rule, ‘Guidance for Tax-Exempt Social Welfare Organizations on Candidate-Related Political Activities’ does not impact labor unions or the Chamber of Commerce, but does impact the Tea Party and other conservative groups.”

You can see the comments — and leave one of your own — here.

Fascist is as fascist does.

In the Obama administration it's thugs all the way down

That Chicago machine training really came in handy.  HT Instapundit.com

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Geithner Threatened S&P After U.S. Downgrade.“An executive with Standard & Poor’s parent company said in a new legal filing that former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned him that the credit rating firm would be ‘looked at very carefully’ following its decision in 2011 to downgrade the credit rating of the United States.”

Reminder: In 2009, Barack Obama “joked” about auditing his enemies.

Run us off and we'll come back twice as irritating

It seems we men are out of fashion.  My ex certainly thinks so.  And we even underperfom relative to Italy in working age men in work. Italy!.  And of course we are nowhere when compared to them as lovers.  We are so screwed.

MELANIE STURM: On masculinity and the War on Poverty. “That there are dramatically fewer men willing and able to safeguard family prosperity is perhaps America’s greatest — and most unrecognized — problem. . . . Women gained all 74,000 jobs added to payrolls in December, and among the world’s seven biggest economies, America is last in the share of ‘prime age’ males working — just behind Italy. Why isn’t widespread male workless-ness a priority for policymakers, given the massive economic, fiscal and social costs?”

What do the Coal Mining and Higher Education industries have in common

This rant from a West Virginia professor agaisnt the coal industry indadvertently is used by James Taranto to paint the (rather steamed kettle) the beautiful black color it should be.  The fact that the Huffytons don't see the irony is well, ironic.

A week ago Eric Waggoner, "chair" of the English Department at West Virginia Wesleyan College, took to the Puffington Host to deliver a declamation, which began:

To hell with you.

To hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a place filled with workers who'd never had a decent shot at employment or education, and then treating the people you found here like just another material resource--suitable for exploiting and using up, and discarding when they'd outlived their usefulness. To hell with you for rigging the game so that those wages were paid in currency that was worthless everywhere but at the company store, so that all you did was let the workers hold it for a while, before they went into debt they couldn't get out of.

Waggoner writes of this rant that "it wasn't rational or cogent," but the excerpt should be sufficient to demonstrate that it was both heartfelt and historically sweeping. A native of Charleston, he evinces a genuine affection for his fellow West Virginians.

(That said, we would be remiss if we failed to note the irony that the professor himself is a representative of a predatory and lightly regulated industry that markets itself via appeals to economic insecurity, thereby inducing millions of young Americans to take on often-crushing debt.)

Read the rest of it , particularly the Froma Harrop Harromph - it reminds me of why educated dumbasses are the dumbest asses of all.

I also liked this line:

Reich is so blinded by ideology, and by prejudice against white Americans who are not part of the cognitive elite, that he fails to notice he has contradicted his very premise.

 

Well Bob had had a couple of drinks when he wrote this and he's a tiny guy so it ws probably the Lambrusco talking....

The biggest reason rich cities are poor is housing costs

Many supposedly 'rich' cities like NYC, SFO, LA and Boston are actually poorer in real terms than San Antonio or Oklahoma City largely because their housing costs are extremely high relative to incomes due to planning and other restrictions that go under the ironic name 'Smart Growth'.  What 'Smart Growth' seeks to do is restrict the supply of land for housing, forcing people into denser, multi-family environments for aesthetic and 'green' reasons. Apparently our elites disapprove of us having 'tacky' houses in 'tacky' suburbs.  They much preferred it when the tradesmen lived above their shop or in a tenement and tugged his forelock respectfully when the Wise Ones geve them unsolicited advice. 

What 'Smart' growth actually achieves is swingeing housing inflation and the eventual pauperization of the working and middle classes whose children, rather than move back into the oh so fashionable rat warrens their grandparents fled, leave 'smart' paradise for friendlier (but tacky!) climes.   Here is the Demographia annual global housing affordability survey.  It is a handy guide to which cities really care about their people.  It is astounding how cruel so called 'enlightened elites' can be.

The good news is that Smart Growth has been in a bit of retreat lately, along with a whole bunch of other green party tricks that 'seemed like the right thing to do back when we were all drunk with power'.  Florida and New Zealand have both rescinded their land supply restrictions and are explicitly seeking to increase the supply and affordability of housing. In the UK, pressure to make more land available for development is disconcerting both major parties. Imagine that:  politicians who work for the people, not the bien pensants.

If you want  your kids to be able to live in your town so you can pay them back for all the trouble they caused you, make damned sure that anything called 'smart growth' is strangled in its crib.  Or if you're thinking more clearly, that the people who advocate it are strangled in theirs.

Sage advice

I wish someone had given it to me.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles roll ed into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was. The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’ The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed.. ‘Now,’ said the professor as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things—-your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions—-and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else—-the small stuff. ‘If you put the sand into the jar first,’ he continued, ‘there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn. Take care of the golf balls first—-the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand. One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, ‘I’m glad you asked.’ The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

Once again: minwage hikes screw the young, particularly the poor minority young

Good chart makes the point if you're interested in learning. If you just need a min wage stick to politick with.....not so much. 



The way to read the chart is that the black lines were the pre-Minwage hike employment trend adnf the red lines the post minwage trend.  In six of seven instances increasing the minwage lead to declines or sharply lower growth in employment.  But it's just minority kids and either they don't vote or the left already has 90% so screw 'em.

Good government liberalism dies if people don't trust the government's honesty and impartiality

And according to Glenn Reynolds the IRS and NSA scandals destroy that trust.  'Course it doesn't bother me, because 'good government' types simply lull the marks into a false sense of security that more feral power addicts like the Obami exploit. 

At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, "On a scale of 1-10 ... how damaging is the current IRS scandal?"
His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it "awful," and said that it has done "tremendous damage."

I think that's right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn't the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it's much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.
As I warned President Obama back in 2009 after he "joked" about having his enemies audited, the IRS depends on trust:

Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn't possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can't audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.

Since then, of course, the new "weaponized IRS" has, in fact, come to be seen as illegitimate by many more Americans. I suspect that, over time, this loss of moral legitimacy will cause many to base their tax strategies on what they think they can get away with, not on what they're entitled to. And when they hear of someone being audited, many Americans will ask not "what did he do wrong?" but "who in government did he offend?"

Fear and loathe large concentrations of power.

A nice guy leaves the Senate.

And in the land of gasbags and egomaniacs he may be the last one.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-17/tom-coburn-leaves-a-lonely-place-lonelier.html?alcmpid=view

Euros say "frack this green shit" as economic chaos and decline follow their insipid statism like dung beetles follow a wildebeest herd.

Hey, if you don't like my metaphors get your own.

But it is funny how actions that were once necessary to save the world are chucked out the nearest window as soon as important people's jobs are threatened.

But that's the nature of religion: you believe....until you don't.

A place where the little people are getting a better shake

Companies like Uber and AirBnB are empowering the 'little' people to share and profit from assets they own like cars and homes while providing lower cost services to others.  Services that undercut both Big Business and Big Government.

Clearly doing God's work.

Here is another example of why New York is the least free state and one of the poorest

Pols want to ban tackle football for under 14s.  I really don't understand where this obsession with domination and control comes from. Just keep it bottled up in the stupid poor state.

Poverty fell steadily for decades. Until precisely the year the Federal Government decided to eradicate it.

At that point, with the magic money machine gushing forth poverty became too profitable for too many to, you know, eliminate.

The other thing that happened in 1965 of course was a massive reform to the nation's immigration laws.  Immigration that was low and primarily European before grew by leaps and bounds and became culturally more distant.  Think of US policy towards the poor as a pushmepullyou that enriched a certain class of wonky bureaucrats and imported a lot more voters for the wonky bureaucrats.


To one degree or another all state power is a racket but Fed rackets are the Insane Clown Posse of rackets, shorn of resource constraints and therefore by definition, rationality. Because any unconstrained activity or goal is by definition insane.

Another reason why NY is among the poorest of the states.

Wolf of Wall Street won award for 'best tax break' - in New York, natch.  Isn't like the Poverty state:  pass money to rich celebrities while taxing it's own citizens until the pips squeak.  Attaboy Yorkies.

Today liberals are anything but

Well known Brit lefty points out the obvious: liberalism is an intolerant movement behaving as if it were a state religion.  How else can you explain the incredible press bias on O'care or AGW? These programs have become liberal dieties.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/new-intolerance-will-we-regret-pushing-christians-out-public-life

85% of NYC Civil Forfeitures have no crime attached

NYC behaves more like an extortionate city gang than a municipality.  But of course extortionate gang is a good description of our criminal justice system all across America. Fear your government because they're not on your side.  At all.  Details at the link.

http://gothamist.com/2014/01/14/nypd_civil_forfeiture.php

Airbnb, New York and decline

This article is a great summary of the Airbnb story.  It also highlights the difficulties that innovation has in overcoming inertia in rigged markets like New York.  The behavior described in the article is one reason why New York is one of the poorest states in the nation in real terms. They won't stop innovation, they'll just punish New Yorkers and visitors who want to take advantage of its benefits, to the detriment of the standard of living and quality of life in New York.  Decline is an attitude of hostility to the new and the better.  And New York has it in spades.

But by far Airbnb's most significant obstacle has come from those who want to protect the status quo—hotel companies and governments collecting lucrative occupancy taxes that they say Airbnb and its hosts avoid paying. New York is Airbnb's most lucrative market, and the company's battle with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is no doubt being watched closely by his peers across the country.

The city's 30-day minimum for apartment rentals is "a very gray law," Mr. Chesky says. The law was intended to crack down on slumlords who run illegal hotels in apartments. But since half of Airbnb's New York bookings involve entire apartments, they technically run afoul of the law. The law's passage four years ago brought out some 500 Airbnb supporters as protesters at City Hall, and the company met with city officials, most of whom had never heard of the company, Mr. Chesky says. "They met with us and said 'We've worked on this for four or five years, we're not rewriting the law and going through another four or five years.' That's when I realized we probably had a problem."

Four months ago, Mr. Schneiderman subpoenaed data on all of Airbnb's 15,000 New York hosts. In pursuing Airbnb, the attorney general may be protecting New York's 14.75% occupancy and sales tax, but he's also not disappointing the city's 30,000-plus unionized hotel workers.

Mr. Chesky insists that he has the same "endgame" as Mr. Schneiderman, and that the company is happy to cooperate with any investigation. But he adds that what happened in New York "didn't feel like an investigation, it felt like a fishing expedition."

The typical way things have played out with the New York AG's office in recent years is for companies to become the target of loudly trumpeted lawsuits that are then quietly abandoned when the company agrees to pay a substantial settlement. "We're trying to work toward a resolution," Mr. Chesky notes. "That's probably all I can say." Airbnb quickly filed a motion with the New York Supreme Court to block Mr. Schneiderman. The outcome is pending.

Airbnb argues that rather than taking away income from the city, its users bring a significant amount of business by encouraging visits by tourists who might not be willing or able to afford the city's daunting hotel rates. Mr. Chesky says that "62% of hosts in New York depend on Airbnb to pay their rent or mortgage."

The sharing economy is still so new, Mr. Chesky says, that his company is lobbying cities around the world to account for it. Sometimes Airbnb loses: Berlin passed a law that, beginning this year, requires a permit for short-term rentals, or hosts are forced to pay a stiff fine. The law won't kill Airbnb in Berlin, but it will impede the free-flowing nature of the business.

'We're not against regulation, we want fair regulation," Mr. Chesky says. "We're trying to help take this from an activity that existed under the table with Craigslist and bring it out of the shadows. We want to work with cities to streamline the process for hosts to pay occupancy taxes," he says. "People ask, 'Why don't you just pay the tax?' Well, it turns out that in cities like New York, you can't just pay the tax, you can't just send them a briefcase of money, you have to change the laws first. Onerous licensing and permitting are designed for large corporations"—not for Airbnb users

.

The Obamacare Klown Kar Klique

Ezra Klein who writes Wonkblog for WAPO intrigues me:  he clearly knows that his Kevin Bacon spin:  "All will be well" shouted at ever higher decibel levels isn't true.  I mean he's not stupid.  But I also recall that he's a founder of Journolist, the partisan Klown Kar Klique for liberal journalists to get their stories straight before they unanimously pounced.  Journolist was exposed and 'disbanded' but the Klown Kar Klique rides again, shilling for the latest leftist Orthodoxy:  the rube goldberg contraption commonly known as Obamacare.

James Taranto has more here.

With crucial basic climate values swinging wildly how can the science be settled?

Watts up with That identifies a massive change in the assumed energy absorption of greenhouse gases.  Nasa, who generates these numbers presumably on the basis of empirical research has revised downward their absorptive ability from .9W to .6W.  Here's the key graf:

Note that somehow, between 2009 and the present, it was decided (presumably based on CERES measurements) that the Net Absorbed value (which is the extra energy absorbed that would result from increased GHG’s) would go DOWN from 0.9 w/square meter to 0.6w/square meter – an decrease of one third of the 2009 value.

So the key underlying energy budget assumption for greenhouse gas incremental heat absorption goes down by a third with nobody noticing?  It's like you changing your savings rate by a third and expecting the same amount of money to be in the bank at the end of the year.

Science settled?  Only because they hide the massive ongoing fluctuations in the underlying data and assumptions.  They're like ducks, serene on the surface but paddling like hell to get back to some rational shore so that they can justify their apocalyptic projections and keep the gravy train going.  The problem is that the fucking climate isn't cooperating.

Read the whole thing here.