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Wednesday, 17 June 2009 21:45 |
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There are two pieces worth reading in the June 17, 2009, Wall Street Journal, on the Obama/Democrat health care proposal. An editorial looks at Pres. Obama's claim that the Democratic Party's reform plan is essential to the competitiveness of American business. The editors argue that the Democrat plan adds burdens that impede a worker's ability to move to a better job, that discourage hiring new workers, and that discourage starting new businesses: It's certainly true that the U.S. employer-based insurance system can dampen entrepreneurial spirits. There's the "job lock" phenomenon, in which employees fear leaving a less productive job because they're afraid to lose their health benefits. Another problem is that insurance costs more for small groups than the large risk pools that big corporations assemble, meaning that it's harder to form new businesses that can offer policies. But all this is really an argument for developing the individual health insurance market, where policies would follow workers, not jobs.... This is where the real competitiveness argument is precisely the opposite of the one pitched by Messrs. Obama and Schmidt. Consider the European welfare states, where costly entitlements and regulations make it extremely expensive to hire new workers. The nearby table lays out the tax wedge, the share of labor costs that never reaches employees but instead goes straight to government. In Germany, France and Italy, the tax wedge hovers around 50%, in part to pay for state-provided health care. By contrast, the U.S. tax wedge was around 30% in 2008, according to the OECD. In other words, the costs of providing insurance would merely be converted into a larger wedge, which would itself eat into compensation. This is why Europe has tended to have higher unemployment and slower economic growth over the past 30 years.
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. takes a tongue-in-cheek look back at the current debate from the year 2070, imagining that a Great Awakening in the year 2009 led to real reform, lower costs, and improved service: And, lo, it proved true, as 100 million intelligent, well-educated employees of Corporate America were allowed to see for the first time what "tax free" health insurance was really costing them. They saw how it distorted their behavior and caused them to allocate far more of their incomes to the medical-industrial complex than they would have chosen for themselves. Eyes newly opened, they demanded cheaper insurance options, covering fewer services (cancer wigs, family counseling, in-vitro fertilization), and opted for plans with higher deductibles and co-pays in return for much lower monthly rates. Because consumers were now spending their "own" money on health care, doctors and hospitals found it necessary to publish and even advertise their prices. A hospital that specialized in heart surgery, performing thousands of procedures a year, found it had both the highest quality and lowest cost -- and now marketed itself as such. Ditto specialists in cancer, diabetes and other conditions.
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Tuesday, 16 June 2009 23:52 |
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A June 16, 2009, Wall Street Journal editorial praises Tennessee's move to reduce the influence of special interest lawyer's groups over the selection of judges: ...Under a new plan approved by the legislature on Friday, the lawyers who have dominated judicial selection are getting put back in their place. The extraordinary influence of the bar is a hallmark of the judicial selection method used by more than two dozen states. Sometimes called the Missouri Plan for its state of origin, a slate of potential nominees is chosen by a judicial nominating commission and presented to the Governor for a pick. Designed to reduce the pull of politics on judges, the plan instead gave power to lawyers who sat on the commissions and pushed state courts to the left. Under Tennessee's old version of this plan, commissioners were chosen from lists submitted by various legal special interests including the Tennessee trial lawyers association, the district attorneys general conference and the Tennessee bar association. Under the new system, all 17 members of the Judicial Selection Commission would be picked directly by elected officials, rather than by the lawyers groups. The change should reduce the power of a professional guild to control state jurisprudence and reintroduce accountability through elected officials.... The Tennessee plan that was supposed to prevent the tawdry appearance of litigants and special interests involved in electing judges instead ended up with them selecting the judges behind closed doors. The state's reforms will open the commission's meetings to the public and are a good first step toward bringing transparency and accountability to those judging the judges.
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Tuesday, 16 June 2009 12:19 |
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The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that nearly half the 1.27 million people killed annually in traffic accidents are pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, according to a story in the June 16, 2009, Wall Street Journal. ...traffic safety laws aren't keeping pace with economic development. Only 15% of the 178 countries surveyed for the report have a comprehensive set of laws to prevent drunk driving, set speed limits in urban areas and increase the use of seat belts, child restraints and motorcycle helmets, the WHO said. The agency also noted that enforcement of some laws is often low.... While traffic death rates in many developed countries have stabilized or declined in recent years, they are rising in many other parts of the world, the WHO said. More than 90% of traffic deaths occur in developing countries, even though those countries have fewer than half of the world's vehicles. In some Southeast Asian countries, about 80% of those killed are people walking, bicycling or on motorized two-wheel vehicles, the WHO said. Around the world, 584,000 pedestrians and cyclists are killed in traffic accidents a year, or 46% of the total, the WHO said.
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Monday, 15 June 2009 23:47 |
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In the June 15, 2009, a Wall Street Journal editorial asks whether Pres. Obama will stand in support of those challenging Iran's apparently fraudulent elections: The election was a sham thrice over. Though elected by popular vote, Iran's president is subservient to an unelected Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The four candidates whose names made it on the presidential ballot this year were pre-screened by an unelected Guardian Council composed mostly of Islamic clerics, which also disqualified more than 400 others. What's remarkable is that these leaders still felt the need to rig the results. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by a two-to-one reported margin over principal challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi despite having driven the Iranian economy into a ditch. As the Associated Press reported, election authorities were miraculously able to count millions of paper ballots almost immediately after the polls closed to hand Mr. Ahmadinejad his supposed victory. In previous elections, the vote count had come more slowly and with regional delays. "What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext," writes Laura Secor in the New Yorker.... Mr. Obama has the opportunity to lend the protestors the considerable weight of U.S. moral support, just as he has the opportunity to show the regime there are consequences for stealing elections. One such consequence would be for the President to remove his opposition to various bills in Congress, sponsored by Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman and others, that sanction companies that sell gasoline to Iran. An estimated 40% of Iran's domestic gasoline consumption comes from foreign sources. In Iran today, a sham election has been met with an open revolt. This takes great courage. The world's free nations need the courage to do better than respond with the sham policy of making nice with an illegitimate regime.
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Monday, 15 June 2009 23:41 |
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In the June 15, 2009, issue of the Wall Street Journal, Edward Kosner reviews the book 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan: ...Mr. Kaplan, a magazine writer and columnist for Slate, makes an intriguing case that 1959 was an authentic annus mirabilis. It was the year, as Mr. Kaplan's handy timeline reminds us, that Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Berry Gordy started Motown records in Detroit, Allen Ginsberg recited "Howl" at Columbia, the Pioneer spacecraft blasted off, the dirtiest version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published, Toyota and Datsun (now Nissan) made their American debuts and Ford mercy-killed the Edsel, the microchip was introduced, the first U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened, Martin Luther King went to India to study nonviolence, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and Searle sought approval to sell the first birth-control pill, Enovid. In sum, a year "when the world as we now know it began to take form."... Mr. Kaplan rhapsodizes about the liberating consequences of the social, cultural, political and technological changes that burst forth 50 years ago. He readily acknowledges, though, that radical movements spun off into nihilism, sexual freedom devastated families, the New Frontier led to Vietnam, drugs doomed many musicians, jazz noodled off onto the margins, and artists of all sorts conflated liberty with license. And, for all the wonders integral to 21st-century life, it's hard to argue that we're happier today than in good old, prehistoric 1959.
Councilor Eagleton was born in 1959. Annus mirabilis indeed! |
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