Porkopolis

What’s in it for U.S.?: The Limited Government Case against Gay Marriage

2009-10-11T13:30:00.008-05:00

Yesterday evening, President Obama vowed repeal –again– of the Defense of Marriage Act. While many cite cultural and religious reasons to oppose gay marriage, one needs not resort to pathos and ethos-based arguments when formulating our public policy on marriage in general. A simple limited government philosophy offers the appropriate perspective.

The human condition is analog not digital. As in the non-human animal world, human sexuality is found along a spectrum of relationships. From a biological perspective and without scientific intervention, procreation in humans requires an individual male and an individual female.

Before considering the question of gay marriage, a more fundamental question should be considered: Why marriage at all? In the United States, marriage is a tri-party legal agreement. The first two parties, husband and wife, are obvious. The third party is the state/community that acknowledges a marriage. Male and female couples petition the state –and more generally, their community– to recognize their marriage. If it was just a simple relationship amongst consenting adults, the community would have no need –and more importantly no business– acknowledging the relationship.

However, marriage is a relationship that imposes responsibilities on the community and that’s why the state is involved in its recognition and definition; as in detailing that only two (not more) individuals of the opposite sex will be recognized in a marriage. Married couples get legal tax and inheritance status. Male-female couples asking the state to recognize their marriage are also asking the state to address the care of their biological children if the couples are incapable of doing so.

What does the community get in return for consideration of this ‘special’ status? It is rejuvenated –by the only relationship that can procreate: a male-female relationship– and benefits from responsibly raised children in a marriage. Because of the corrosive effects to the community of infidelity, the community acknowledges only monogamous marriages. This shared responsibility amongst all the parties (husband, wife, community) is the limited government rationale for marriage as a legal construct.

Gay couples asking the community to recognize their relationships have a responsibility to address the question: ‘In return for the community’s recognition, what will you do for the state that justifies more government?’. They may counter that some gay couples have children and that their care benefits the community. But these children are not, and can not be, the offspring of a gay marriage. They are the shared responsibility of the biological parents and the state. The existing legal constructs are sufficient to address the children’s and community’s interests.

The state/community will be a party to any marriage and therefore has every right to say what marriages it will recognize. The gay couples seeking recognition must make their case for community involvement in their relationship when the sine qua non condition of biological procreation does not exist and there are sufficient laws to deal with any children in a gay relationship. Until the argument for an expansion of government is made, the basic principle of limited government, the minimal amount laws our society needs to function, should prevail.

Meanwhile in a just, parallel universe...

2009-10-09T11:55:00.004-05:00

...the brave Iranian protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Either way, you're guaranteed 'free' healthcare

2009-09-26T06:58:00.001-05:00

Via Politico (emphasis added):

Ensign receives handwritten confirmation

This doesn't happen often enough.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

The note was a follow-up to Ensign's questioning at the markup.

Must C-TV: CSPAN hearing on Bernie Madoff SEC Investigation

2009-09-12T12:19:00.002-05:00

The Senate Banking Cmte. heard from key players in the Security & Exchange Cmsn.’s (SEC) investigation of a Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff, the recently convicted financier. David Kotz, the SEC Inspector Gen., described the agency’s failure to adequately respond to whistleblowers like investor Harry Markopolos, another witness.

9/11: Garden of Reflection

2009-09-11T09:43:00.003-05:00

The Garden of Reflection

A Little Help for New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman

2009-09-07T07:39:00.002-05:00

Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman generally has a good eye for trends. However, his recent commentary on Meet the Press berating parents' concern over the potential politicalization of the President's speech to school students was, to use his own word, stupid:

...But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid...

Two recent reports in the New York Times are worth reflecting on when considering Mr. Friedman's punditry.

The electronic ink is barely dry on the August 17, 2009 report entitled 'White House Cans Its ‘Fishy’ E-Mail Box' which detailed a reversal on a Kafkaesque policy:

The White House has apparently shut down the e-mail address it was using to track what it called “fishy” information about its efforts to overhaul the health care system.
E-mails sent to flag@whitehouse.gov now bounce back, with the reply reading, “The e-mail address you just sent a message to is no longer in service. We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck.”

Macon Phillips, director of new media at the White House, had rolled out the e-mail address in an Aug. 4 blog post, writing, “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end-of-life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

The White House maintained that it was not collecting the names of those criticizing its reform push.

But the effort got almost immediate pushback from Republican and conservative critics, many of them citing privacy concerns. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, charged that the administration was creating an enemies list, writing in a letter to President Obama, “I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.”...

On the heels of this debacle, the Department of Education deemed it appropriate to suggest a lesson plan as an accompaniment to the President's speech. As reported in the New York Times, the plan would have students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president":

...The Department of Education sent out a list of suggested classroom activities that teachers could use to accompany the speech. One among dozens suggested that teachers could have students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

Some conservatives focused on the letter-writing activity as an effort by the administration to use classrooms to build political support for the president. Department officials on Wednesday replaced that initial suggested activity with one in which students would “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term educational goals.”

The original activity, [Secretary of Education] Mr. Duncan said Sunday, “wasn’t worded quite correctly.”...

Mr. Friedman would benefit from directing his über-trend-spotting-acumen on these two reports in his own paper of record before discounting the parents' concerns.

So we're to believe that...

2009-09-04T11:01:00.001-05:00

...the vetting process with a 7 page questionaire with questions like:

13) Electronic comunications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you...

didn't catch this?:

A top environmental official of the Obama administration issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into "evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." [Ed. see: Green jobs czar signed 'truther' statement in 2004 for confirmation of petition signature.]

Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is Number 46 of the petitioners from the so-called "Truther" movement which suggests that people in the administration of President George W. Bush "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of "the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."...

Lest We Forget: Beslan 5th Anniversary

2009-09-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

As 9/11 comes upon us, we should also remember that the town of Beslan suffered an inhumane tragedy as well just 5 short years ago.

Must C TV: C-SPAN's Q&A Interviews Dr. John Garrett

2009-08-31T10:23:00.003-05:00

C-SPAN just continues to blow away the MSM with the type of programming and interviews only they can produce. Last night's broadcast (podcast available here) of the interview with Dr. John Garrett, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Virginia Hospital Center, with Brian Lamb is an example of this and brings much to the citizens that wants to educate themselves about the healthcare debate:

This week on Q&A, our guest is Dr. John Garrett of the Virginia Hospital Center. Dr. Garrett has been at the Virginia Hospital Center for 20 years. Previously he was on the faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Auburn University, and Georgetown University Medical Center. As Congress debates health care reform, we are interviewing Dr. Garrett to talk about his life in medicine, the workings of a hospital, and how government and non-government programs impact medicine.

The Strange Beast of Health-Care Technology

2009-08-19T12:03:00.002-05:00

From an essay entitled How American Health Care Killed My Father:

...One of the most widely held pieces of conventional wisdom about health care is that new technology is relentlessly driving up costs. Yet over the past 20 years, I’ve bought several generations of microwave ovens, personal computers, DVD players, GPS devices, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs. I bank mostly at ATMs, check out my own goods at self-serve supermarket scanners, and attend company meetings by videoconference. Technology has transformed much of our daily lives, in almost all cases by adding quantity, speed, and quality while lowering costs. So why is health care different?

Well, for the most part, it isn’t. Whether it’s new drugs to control previously untreatable conditions, diagnostic equipment that enhances physician productivity, or minimally invasive techniques that speed patient recovery, technology-driven innovation has been transforming care at least as greatly as it has transformed the rest of our lives.

But most health-care technologies don’t exist in the same world as other technologies. Recall the MRI my wife needed a few years ago: $1,200 for 20 minutes’ use of a then 20-year-old technology, requiring a little electricity and a little labor from a single technician and a radiologist. Why was the price so high? Most MRIs in this country are reimbursed by insurance or Medicare, and operate in the limited-competition, nontransparent world of insurance pricing. I don’t even know the price of many of the diagnostic services I’ve needed over the years—usually I’ve just gone to whatever provider my physician recommended, without asking (my personal contribution to the moral-hazard economy)...

Related:

The Slope of Hope

2009-08-19T11:05:00.001-05:00

HT: Instapundit

Fortune Magazine: 5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform

2009-08-11T11:42:00.002-05:00

A read-the-whole-thing analysis of current legislation in the House and Senate:

5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors

HT: Wizbang

Obamacare

2009-08-07T17:23:00.004-05:00

HT: NY Post

Update: Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

2009-08-03T10:22:00.002-05:00

Via the Hoover Institution (HT: Instapundit):

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose.

.... 1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.

3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).

Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.

More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).

Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States...

Realted: Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

Dayton Daily News: Ohio treasurer gives bank contract, gets political fund-raiser

2009-07-29T13:09:00.002-05:00

The email-bag had a link to this story on a very 'convenient coincidence'. Some people as just lucky:

Ohio treasurer gives bank contract, gets political fund-raiser

By Laura A. Bischoff, Staff Writer
12:47 PM Tuesday, July 28, 2009

COLUMBUS — Just a week after winning a new contract from Ohio Treasurer Kevin Boyce, Key Bank officials are hosting a $500-a ticket political fund-raiser for him in Cleveland on Tuesday, July 28.

Although the state has processed its own checks for more than 100 years, Boyce hired Key Bank to handle roughly 485,000 checks per month.

The contract is worth more than $160,000 a year but taxpayers will save at least $83,000 a year because the state expects to earn more interest off the checks, which will be deposited more quickly, and other in-house costs will be cut, according to Mike Culp, Boyce’s chief of staff. Two state employees who currently process checks will be assigned other work, he said.

Banks were invited to bid July 1, their responses were due July 15 and Key Bank got the work July 20.

“This could be the right decision but it’s clouded by this fundraiser and it’s clouded by how quickly this happened,” said Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action, a non-partisan good government organization.

Political contributions had nothing to do with the contract, Culp said.

“What motivated the treasurer’s office was that it’s a cheaper, more secure, and more technologically-advanced way to process warrants,” he said in an e-mail. Currently, when the state issues a check to pay for something, it gets processed by the banks and sent back to the state as a printed image. Electronic images of checks will replace printed images.

Key Bank lobbyist Erskine Cade, who is co-hosting the fund-raiser at the Key Bank Tower in downtown Cleveland, agreed and said he didn’t even know about the new contract...

ScienceDaily: Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’

2009-07-27T14:40:00.002-05:00

Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter':

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’...

Congressman John Conyers is Stuck on Stupid

2009-07-27T13:32:00.003-05:00

You can't make this stuff up.

As noted by Representative Conyers in the following video:

"What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

HT: Wizbang

"Doing More With Less"

2009-07-25T13:55:00.005-05:00

Former Cincinnati native and now The Naked Cowboy runs for Mayor of New York City:

Before one discounts his chances, remember that a community organizer had the audacity to hope that he would one day become president.

Talk of the Nation Science Friday: Decoding the Science of Decision Making

2009-07-25T11:48:00.002-05:00

Decoding the Science of Decision Making (with Audio):

For decades researchers ranging from economists to psychologists to neuroscientists have tried to understand how people make decisions, both mundane and major. Guest host Paul Raeburn and guests look at what happens in the mind of "the decider" when there's a choice to be made.

Guests:

Michael J. Frank, assistant professor, Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition, Brown University, Providence, R.I.

Jennifer S. Lerner, professor, Harvard Kennedy School, director, Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Colin Camerer, professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

Obama vs. Obama

2009-07-19T12:31:00.002-05:00

HT: Wizbang

Going 'Galt' May Be Hard-wired Into Our Psychology

2009-07-10T14:03:00.005-05:00

Instapundit recently posted this email from a reader:

Interesting article, and somewhat parallels my experience. I’ve “gone Galt” myself, taking 6 weeks leave without pay. Business is very slow, we’ve already got too many people wasting away on overhead. SinceI don’t need the money (right now), I volunteered to take some time off in the hope that someone else won’t get laid off.

The one positive in all this is that I think that (at my marginal tax rate) I’ve denied the (state and federal) government some $4,000 in income taxes.

Here's an economics research paper that may give some insight into the 'Going Galt' phenonmenon (emphasis added):

A Behavioral Laffer Curve: Emergence of a SocialNorm of Fairness in a Real Effort Experiment

Abstract

This paper demonstrates, through a controlled experiment, that the “Laffer curve” phenomenon does not always reflect a conventional income - leisure trade-off. Whether out of reason or out of emotion, taxpayers may also be willing to punish intentionally unfair tax setters by working less than they would under the same exogenous circumstances...

...1. Introduction

The quest for American independence grew as issues like taxation without representation in the British government angered the local population of the former British colonies. When the British decided to tax the colonists to pay a share of their expensive war against the French and Indians, the colonists were angry and rallied behind the phrase, “No Taxation without Representation”. The British were then forced to remove (1764-1767) most of the unfair taxes (tax on sugar, Stamp Act, Townsend Act) that they had been trying to enforce unilaterally. Two centuries later, the same scenario repeated in California as property taxes went out of control. Taxpayers were losing their home because they could not pay their property taxes, yet the government maintained the burden. California taxpayers stood up and passed Proposition 13 (1978) that reduced property taxes by about 57%. The tax revolt that swept the country had a worldwide impact.

Since then, tax revolts have been closely associated with the name of Arthur Laffer who forcefully defended as a simple rule of public finance that there is a unique optimal tax rate which maximizes revenue collection. If the tax level is set below this level, raising taxes (more specifically, marginal tax rates) will increase tax revenue. However, if the tax level is set above this level, then raising taxes will decrease tax revenue. This proposition, now called the “Laffer curve”, had considerable influence on fiscal doctrine, and fuelled the “supply side economics” argument that a tax cut would actually increase tax revenue if the government is operating on the right side of the curve.

The Laffer curve was based on conventional economic analysis: tax revenues are obviously zero if the tax rate is zero, and are still zero if the tax rate is equal to one, as rational agents would withdraw from the market to evade tax or consume untaxed leisure. However, our paper demonstrates that the Laffer curve phenomenon does not always reflect a conventional income - leisure trade-off. Consistent with the history of tax revolts, we demonstrate the existence of a “behavioral Laffer curve” that will arise as a reaction to the perceived unfairness of taxation by a Leviathan government. Whether out of reason or out of emotion, taxpayers are willing to “punish” tax setters who intentionally violated the social norm of fair taxation by working less than they would under the same exogenous circumstances. We further point out that the behavioral Laffer curve peaks at a substantially lower tax rate than the conventional Laffer curve...

This Is What Goes for Transparency at the EPA

2009-07-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

WSJ: The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic by Kim Strassel:

The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.

Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.

So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest...

Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

2009-06-24T18:46:00.003-05:00

From a 2005 aritcle in the New York Times Magazine, The Quality Cure? (emphasis added):

...Virtually every would-be reformer, Democrat and Republican alike, starts with the presumption that the major problem in health care is high costs. This is understandable: America now spends 15 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. That's a higher percentage than any country has ever spent in the history of the planet, and the figure is increasing. The United States spends more on health care than on automobiles; we spend more on health care than China spends on tea; in fact, as Cutler likes to point out, we spend more on health than the Chinese spend, per capita, on everything. And health care threatens (far more than Social Security) to consume the federal government. Medicare, the health-care program for retirees, and Medicaid, which provides basic services for the poor, already account for one-fifth of the federal budget, and their share could double in a generation.

Curbing such growth has been the aim of every reformer, and according to Cutler, it is the reason reform has failed. The Clinton team proposed to pay for universal coverage by limiting increases in spending (partly through mandatory caps). But limiting spending also meant limiting service. The proposed legislation was never put to a vote.

Managed care was next at trying to contain costs. It succeeded for a while, until it became clear that Americans did not want health-maintenance organizations to limit their choices any more than they wanted the government to. Since then, reform has languished. The Medicare drug bill is suggestive of why. The Republican Congress promised restraint but then passed a hugely expensive law that barred Medicare from using its clout to negotiate prices with drug companies. The pattern has been failed efforts to control costs, followed by a void of new ideas.

Cutler's approach is radically different. He says that most health-care spending is actually good. Spending has been rising, he says, because it delivers positive, and measurable, economic value, and because it can do more things that Americans want. Therefore, Cutler says, we should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, he wants to pay more wisely -- to encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful...

The National Debt Road Trip

2009-06-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

Senator Coburn's Report: 100 Stilumus Projects: A Second Opinion

2009-06-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

A real tear-jerker: 100 Stilumus Projects: A Second Opinion

(HT: Michelle Malkin)