Conn Carroll's blog

Did conservatives or progressives win on Tuesday? Don't listen to what they say, pay attention to what they do.

Politico reports "Climate change on the back burner?"

Climate change has slipped so far down on the agenda that at least one key committee chairman has suggested it might have to wait until after the 2010 elections.

A number of factors are conspiring against the Senate version of the bill: a Republican boycott on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a new EPA analysis that could take at least five weeks and wide-ranging disagreements among six competing Senate committee leaders who have jurisdiction.

“Some people are talking about not doing it until after the 2010 election,” Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday.

 ABC News reports Top Dems: Obama Won't Get Health Care Bill in 2009

Senior Congressional Democrats told ABC News today it is highly unlikely that a health care reform bill will be completed this year, just a week after President Barack Obama declared he was "absolutely confident" he'll be able to sign one by then.

"Getting this done by the by the end of the year is a no-go," a senior Democratic leadership aide told ABC News. Two other key Congressional Democrats also told ABC News the same thing.

 The Senate is not going to vote on health care till January 2010. The Senate is not going to vote on cap and trade till after November 2010. The left is scared and on the run. We have the initiative. We need to press them on jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

Poltico's Jonathan Martin reports: 

The surging campaign of third-party candidate Chris Daggett has turned the New Jersey governor's race into a dead-heat and left Republicans divided over the seriousness of the threat he poses to GOP nominee Chris Christie.

The Hill's Reid Wilson reports:

The House GOP conference is bitterly divided over a centrist New York Republican’s run for the House seat vacated by Army Secretary John McHugh.

Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, who backs abortion rights and has voiced support for gay rights, has drawn a challenger from the right who is running on the Conservative Party line. And though House leaders have urged conference members to donate, many have pointedly refused to back Scozzafava.

What do these two stories have in common? Everything. In both cases the local GOP establishment supported moderate, big government friendly Republicans who they thought stood a better chance of winning a general election.

In both cases the general election campaigns of these candiates are absolutely floundering.

The lesson: me-too big government GOP moderates are going to get washed away by the same anti-establishment wave that is going to remove mand Dems from office in '10.

I've been a subscriber to the Progress Report for... well longer than I remember (since 2005 at least). Produced by the Center for American Progress, the Progress Reports is the anchor email product for CAP's main blog Think Progress.

With Obama now in the White House the Progress Report has lost most of its edge and relevance with its favorite target (Pres. Bush) out of office. It used to be that I could always predict exactly what was going to be in TPR just by looking at the title. But with Obama in power, that is simply no longer the case. Take today's Progress Report titled Growing Frustration Over Lack Of Progress.

I really had no idea what it was going to be about. Obama's lack of progress on health care? On same-sex marriage? On stopping the rising oceans? On Afghanistan? On Iran? On jobs? There were so many possibilities.

Turns out it was on Israel/Palestine.

I'm sure the world's newest Nobel laureate will solve that one soon too.

A home run by National Review today on the birthers:

We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job conducted with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. We’ve seen everything under the sun blamed on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and Rosie O’Donnell has given us much mirth with her metallurgical expertise, while Andrew Sullivan has beclowned himself and tarnished the good name of The Atlantic with his investigation into the “real” parentage of Trig Palin.

It's true: Andrew Sullivan is an embarrassment to himself, The Atlantic, and to Barack Obama supporters everywhere. But the birthers are just as embarrassing to us. This NR editorial is good ... but its only a start. No matter how bad the economy will be in 2012, conservatives just do not have the luxury of tolerating birthers in our midst.

Good conservatives in the House caucus, and us on the right-o-sphere, should be pushing Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) to drop his ridiculously embarrassing birther bill. All nine co-sponsors (and it really pains me to see Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on the list) should be embarrassed into withdrawing their support as well.

It was good to see the House affirm 378-0 that Obama was born in Hawaii last night. But that is not enough. Conservatives must do a better job of confronting, rebutting, and shunning birthers. Otherwise, we're no better than Andrew Sullivan.

George Mason Associate Professor of Economics Bryan Caplan made his first trip to one of Brink Lindsey's Liberaltarian Roundtable dinners and writes at EconLog:

In any case, it is silly for liberals and libertarians to sit around offering each other "deals." Even ignoring the mistrust, there's a more fundamental problem: Neither of us can deliver what we're "offering." What does it even mean for me to tell Ezra Klein, "I'll agree to redistribution if you agree to a free market?" I might as well offer him the Brooklyn Bridge in exchange for the Fountain of Youth.

I have been a big fan of Brink's since I first bought Against the Dead Hand off of Amazon at the suggestion of Instapundit. But Bryan's reaction to his first Liberaltarian discussion is the exact same reaction I have every time I watch Brink talk about his frustration with Barack Obama on Bloggingheads. This scene from Casino pretty much sums it up:

Brink just does not get the true nature of the Democratic party. The Democratic party is not controlled by the Ezra Klein's of the world who are for taxing employee health benefits. The Democratic Party is controlled by AFSCME, SEIU, the NEA, the AFT, and the UAW,. Unions don't care about the awesome ideas of Brink and Ezra. Watch NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin admit as much in this video (skip to 21:38):

Chanin says:

Despite what some among us would like to believe [the NEA is effective] not because of our creative ideas; it is not because of the merit of our positions; it is not because we care about children; and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.

The NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of million of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them; the union that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. ...

When all is said and done, NEA affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions. And what unions do first and foremost is represent their members.

The Democratic Party, to its core, is about growing and maintaining the power of the state ... which just happens to also be the fastest growing sector of the labor movement. Big labor supplies the bodies and the money for Democratic campaigns, especially in primaries. Big labor could care less about most of Brink's proposed common ground with liberals. Civil liberties, censorship, drug policy ... big labor doesn't care about these issues. And Brink's concern with "extreme assertions of executive power"? How's that TARP justified government/union takeover of the auto industry rubbing libertarians these days?

And what about the stuff that Brink used to care about? You know, fighting off the dead hand off the state? How's that going? How is Obama doing in that area, on health care, energy, and industrial policy?

I realize Brink is taking a long view with his liberaltarian project, but big labor's control over the Democratic Party is growing under Obama, not receding. I'll grant that under Obama Brink will eventually witness policy victories on same sex marriage, decreased defense spending, and amnesty (which will only happen if it is guaranteed to swell the rolls of the SEIU).

But on every other issue that Brink cares about, the Bob Chanin's of the world are gonna whup Brink's butt every time. In other words, if Brink thinks he can change the actual policies pursued by actual Democrats in office, then, in Joe Pesci's words, "you better get your own f****ing army, pal."

Last month after the House passed Waxman-Markey with help from 8 GOP votes, Robert Stacy McCain called on conservatives to stop giving money to the NRCC: Not One Red Cent. I thought this was an over reaction at first. But then I stopped by the NRCC to see if they were actually supporting any of the 8 cap and tr8ors. I clicked on their Patriot Program and learned that "The NRCC unveiled ten incumbent Members who, because of their outstanding efforts as "Patriots," will be rewarded with participation in "Patriot Day" on June 25th." But was there a list of these "Patriots" anywhere on the NRCCs site? No. I had to resort to Google news to find out that:

Among those on the list are Reps. Dan Lungren, Ken Calvert and Brian Bilbray of California, Judy Biggert of Illinois, Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, Thad McCotter of Michigan, Erik Paulsen of Minnesota, Leonard Lance of New Jersey, Christopher Lee of New York and Dave Reichert of Washington.

Matching the two lists up we find that the NRCC's Patriot program is in fact providing comfort to two traitors: Reps. Leonard Lance (NJ-7) and Dave Reichert (WA-8).

So on second thought, yeah, by all means conservatives should definitely stop giving any money to the NRCC until Lance and Reichart are kicked out of the Patriot Program. But that is not enough. Duncan Black and I don't agree on much policy wise, but when it comes to politics,  we agree a lot. Responding to RSM, Atrios wrote: If you ever demonstrate an ability to actually raise money for these organizations, they might start caring what you think. Before? Unlikely.

But this isn't really what the netroots did. They didn't move their party to the left by throwing money at the DCCC. Quite the opposite. Instead they created their own institutions, a parallel party, that allowed them to support the candidates that they trusted. So instead of leading a boycott of the NRCC, conservatives should be raising money for candidates challenging those Dems who are vulnerable to cap and trade.

But how can we do that? The left has ActBlue which allows bloggers to get together and create fundraising pages that allow easy one-stop shopping for donating to Democratic campaigns. So where is our ActBlue? Why can't we go out and create a page allowing fired up conservatives to vent their anger at the NRCC by giving their money directly to challenger campaigns? Slatecard is retooling. So is Rightroots. Meanwhile ActBlue is enabling the nutroots to raise money for Michael Jackson Fans AGAINST Peter King.

Conservatives are fired up about Obama's spending and imminent taxing disaster. Independents aren't far behind. We need to make sure our infrastructure is in place to best harness the incipient wave of Obama anger.

First let me say I'm a huge Nate Silver fan ... athough more for his baseball writings than for his work at 538.com. He's got a sharp mind that is well applied at picking apart polls, but his partisan blinders fail him when it comes to public policy. His latest on health care is a perfect case in point, including his jumping off point which is a complete misreading of George Will's recent column on the public plan. Silver quotes Will:

Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible. Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers. Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there is no reason for it.

Silver then translates: "Will's argument is apparently this: The government does not need to make a profit and will have greater leverage with providers; therefore it will deliver the same service for less money. That's unfair!"

Um, no. Here is a better translation: Since a public plan will have access to a bottomless pit of government bailouts, the prices the public plan charges consumers and the rates it reimburses health care providers at will be completely unmoored from market realities. It will cost public plan participants less, but taxpayers will end up paying a much higher tab.

Nate goes on: "I'm a big believer in the profit motive in 99 percent of all cases. If the government decided to open a non-profit hamburger stand, I doubt that it would compete successfully against Five Guys." And he later concludes: "If you've been reading me for a while, you'll know that, as compared with most self-described liberals, I'm unusually sympathetic toward the notion of the profit motive and private industry; I've defended Wall Street bankers and the AIG bonuses at various points during the financial crisis, among other things." And he has. Good for him. Like I said, I'm a fan. Nate then continues:

I think the profit motive is generally well worth it in terms of the incentives it creates to cut costs, develop new products, improve customer service, and so forth. But health insurance is not like those things.

OK. Why not? Nate explains:

Now, what's supposed to happen in the free market is that another company will come in and offer Frederick a better deal: they'll offer him the same coverage for $350 a month, accepting a smaller profit, and Frederick will happily take the deal. There are at least a couple of reasons, however, why this may not be happening in the insurance industry. The first is that Frederick might not realize he's paying $400 every month for insurance. That's because if he's like the majority of Americans, he's getting his insurance through his work, and except when the HR lady gave him a shiny brochure on his first day at the office, he's probably never thought very much about what this insurance is costing him in terms of foregone salary. This is particularly so because health insurance benefits, unlike other types of income, aren't taxed, and so Fredrick is less cognizant of them if show up on his paycheck at all. Not only, then, is the free market maxim of perfect information violated, but it's violated in such a way that creates artificial profits for the insurance industry: the government is effectively subsidizing every dollar that Frederick's company is willing to spend on his insurance benefit.

The profits the insurance industry is making, of course -- profits artificially boosted by an enormous backdoor tax subsidy -- don't seem to be buying the customer much of anything in terms of improved service or cost savings. On the contrary, health care costs are rising by as much as 9-10 percent per year, without any concomitant increase in the level of service. If JetBlue were raising the cost of its fares by 10 percent per year, they'd be out of business.

So let me get this straight: the health insurance market is failing because a huge government created back door tax subsidy is distorting the market and raising costs. I agree 100%!!! And so do most conservatives. So does Nate then advocate getting rid of this costly market distorting government subsidy? Not even close. See, Barack Obama campaigned hard against exactly that policy proposal. So Nate doesn't even consider changing it. Instead we get this:

CIGNA and Aetna have a lot of money pooled together and they've been around for awhile -- but they don't have as much money, nor have they been around as long, as the federal government. It's possible, certainly, that the profit motive in the insurance industry has driven more innovation than we're giving it credit for. But that isn't my bet, and it isn't George Will's: There's no obvious reason that the government couldn't provide more for less. And if we are wrong, we would find out soon enough: if the public option can't deliver more bang for the buck than private insurers, it wouldn't gain much market share from them, and Will will have nothing to worry about.

A couple of responses:

First, nowhere in this article does Nate explain why health insurance companies are any more greedy or incompetent than car, home, or life insurance companies. If the government is such a natural player in insurance markets, why isn't Nate advocating public plans for these insurance sectors?

Second, we have a track record for government run health plan. Its called Medicare. Its huge. Way bigger than CIGNA and Aetna combined. If low administrative costs and better leverage with providers were gonna lead to lower health care costs we would have seen them in Medicare. Instead we've seen the exact opposite: Medicare’s costs have risen far more than the costs of privately purchased care.

Finally, if passed a public plan would get tons of market share regardless of whatever "bang for the buck" it delivered. If health care providers were reimbursed at Medicare rates, U.S. employers would dump 119 million Americans off their current private health plan and into the government "option".

One doesn't have to be a crazy ideologue to look at AIG, Citibank, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, General Motors, and Chrysler and then question the federal governemnt's ability to administer a public plan without funding it by constantly printing money. One does have to be a blind partisan to look at Barack Obama's long held commitment to single payer health care and not believe that the public plan is just the next step to get there.

Reacting to David Leonhardt's NYT article on the current deficit, The Atlantic's Megan McArdle writes:

Meanwhile, Republican scientists who presumably spent the last eight years locked in a vault in the basement of Heritage run out into the metaphorical street screaming that they have just made a shocking, horrible, and totally unexpected new discovery: budget deficits will make the economy melt down into a pool of manufacturing-depleted sludge, and also, cause rabies.

First of all, I think Megan would like our basement. It has a smoking lounge and everything. More substantively though, let's move on to Megan's bottom line:

The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we'd find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries.

Megan might be surprised to learn that this is exactly what our basement scientists have been saying both before and after Bush left office. On February 25, 2008 Heritage's JD Foster wrote:

At the end of 2007, the debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 36.8 percent. The latest OMB fore­casts show budget deficits through 2013, but they are sufficiently small relative to the size of the economy that the debt-to-GDP ratio falls to 33.4 per­cent by 2013. Similarly, the CBO forecasts a 33.2 percent debt-to-GDP ratio in 2013. The average of the two forecasts for 2013 is 31.6 percent, or 4.3 per­centage points below the 2007 level. The Laubach study suggests, therefore, that the expected progress on reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio over the next few years is putting downward pressure on long-term interest rates equivalent to 15 to 20 basis points. Together, the Engin and Hubbard study and the Laubach study suggest a tentative, developing consensus about the general magnitude of the effects of deficit financing on real interest rates. The studies appear to suggest that, for deficits and debt levels in the ranges seen in recent years and projected in the medium term, the effects on real interest rates are in the expected direction, consis­tent across episodes and across estimating meth­odologies, and very slight--measured in terms of a handful of basis points.

Now fast forward to January 30, 2009:

At the end of 2008, the ratio of federal debt to GDP was about 44.9 percent. Under the assumptions here about new issuance and using the CBO forecasts for nominal GDP, debt at the end of 2009 will be about 57.9 percent, an increase of 13 percentage points in just a single year. By the end of 2010, the debt-to-GDP ratio will have reached 67.9 percent for a two-year increase of 23 percentage points.…

Using just the consensus estimates, the projected increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio for 2009 alone will raise interest rates by between 0.39 and 0.65 percentage points. In today's terms, the average mortgage rate at the end of January was about 5.33 percent on a conforming loan mortgage. At the end of 2009, if nothing else occurs, this rate would be between 5.75 and 6 percent. Using the consensus estimates, by the end of 2010 interest rates will be up another 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points, for a total increase due to the government debt bubble of 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points. That would mean that today's mortgage rate of 5.33 percent would be between 6 percent and 6.4 percent. Such increases in interest rates would significantly weaken the economy further and delay for many months any hope of significant recovery.

In other words, debt-to-GDP ratio's in the 30s: no big deal. But debt-to-GDP ratio's in the 60s: big problem. As Jonah Goldberg has said, just because I drive 65 mph in a 55 mph zone doesn't mean I can't want to see a guy going 130 mph throw in jail.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Desperate to prevent medical costs from engulfing the federal budget, the [Medicare]'s central planners decided last week to deny payment for a new version of one of life's most unpleasant routine procedures, the colonoscopy. This is a preview of how health care will be rationed when Democrats get their way.

At issue are "virtual colonoscopies," or CT scans of the abdomen. Colon cancer is the second leading cause of U.S. cancer death but one of the most preventable. Found early, the cure rate is 93%, but only 8% at later stages. Virtual colonoscopies are likely to boost screenings because they are quicker, more comfortable and significantly cheaper than the standard "optical" procedure, which involves anesthesia and threading an endoscope through the lower intestine.

Virtual colonoscopies are endorsed by the American Cancer Society and covered by a growing number of private insurers including Cigna and UnitedHealthcare. The problem for Medicare is that if cancerous lesions are found using a scan, then patients must follow up with a traditional colonoscopy anyway. Costs would be lower if everyone simply took the invasive route, where doctors can remove polyps on the spot. As Medicare noted in its ruling, "If there is a relatively high referral rate [for traditional colonoscopy], the utility of an intermediate test such as CT colonography is limited." In other words, duplication would be too pricey.

This is precisely the sort of complexity that the Democrats would prefer to ignore as they try to restructure health care. Led by budget chief Peter Orszag, the White House believes that comparative effectiveness research, which examines clinical evidence to determine what "works best," will let them cut wasteful or ineffective treatments and thus contain health spending.

If you read this blog you already know that Sen. Arlen Specter has announced he will be finally switching parties to become a Democrat. Good riddance. Specter voted for every ounce of terrible new spending under Bush and he has been an equally worthless speed bump to Obama's spend-a-thon.

The contrast between the geriatric Washington big government/big business/big labor Specter and Pat Toomey couldn't be greater. This is great news for the GOP's 2010 chances.