Filed under: Domestic Policy, Education, Intelligence, Science/Technology | Tags: Albert Einstein, American Technology and Ingenuity, Unintended Consequences
This is an experiment. WordPress lets me make a slideshow. If it keeps cycling over and over, hit the pause button. That seems to allow you to click your way through, without starting the endless cycle. As I said, it’s an experiment. Sad, though.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Health Care, Liberalism, Politics | Tags: Business and Regulation, The Cost of ObamaCare, Unintended Consequences
Two stories:
Kennewick, Washington — It took Bob Bertsch 25 years to build his construction business and just one day for it all to go away. Mr. Bertsch’s Kennewick -based Ashley-Bertsch Group went on the auction block last Friday. By 4 p.m. they had sold off two dozen vehicles and trailers, tons of power tools and supplies, and even the gas-fired fireplace in the office.
Mr. Bertsch, 65, said he is down-sizing because the tax burden got too expensive to stay in business. “I am tired of carrying all the tax load,” Bertsch said. “I renew 13 licenses here every year just so I can spend money in this city.” He makes no attempt to conceal his frustration with the costs government imposes on small businesses like his. Government is killing small business. We used to have 24 employees, now all those people are in the unemployment line. He told a friend at the auction that he is selling out because the government was taking more out of his business than he was.
Los Angeles, California — George Will tells this story: In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. He was delivering huge numbers of buns, so he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant, and then the war came. As did millions of defense industry workers. Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine was fast food, which eventually included hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Carl died in 2008, but CKE Restaurants survives. It would thrive, says CEO Andy Puzder, except for the government’s comprehensive campaign against job creation
CKE has more than 3,200 restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s) with some 70,000 jobs, 21,000 directly and 49,000 with franchises. CKE’s health care advisers said that ObamaCare would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million 2010 health care costs. They guess $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. ObamaCare means fewer restaurants, fewer jobs at about 25 jobs per restaurant., and about 3,5 times that much in the community.
That’s not all — government policies are raising fuel costs which affect everything from air conditioning to the cost of supplies, and the threat that the NLRB will impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot union elections. CKE has stopped building restaurants in California because approvals and permits can take up to two years, compared to six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build is $100,000 more than in Texas — where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants.
CKE has 95 percent employee turnover in a year, not bad for this industry. Health-care benefits under their “mini-med” policies will be illegal under ObamaCare. All sorts of employers will be looking for ways to reduce numbers of employees. CKE is governed by 57 categories of regulations. The administration is quite certain that regulation has nothing to do with the dearth of jobs. In their world, that’s just what government does — set the rules to control business and the people who engage in it. That’s why they were elected, isn’t it? To tell employers how to operate their businesses so everything is fair and good.
These are not unusual stories. They are being repeated across America in multitudes of businesses, and have been for the last three years. When you have an administration where no one has ever worked in the private sector, let alone managed anything in the private sector, you have a lot of regulators who have no idea what the consequences of their regulations are. A job is a cost to an employer. When you make it cost more, there are fewer jobs.
Filed under: Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Law, Liberalism | Tags: Cataracts and Pterygia, Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs, Unintended Consequences
Liberals seldom investigate the unintended consequences of their good ideas. They do get enthusiastic about new ideas to improve the world, increase control of the bitter clinging masses, and just neglect to look at the details.
Saving the planet has ranked very high on their agenda, particularly since Obama promised to halt the rise of the oceans, so anything that promised to cut down on CO2 emissions, or energy use, seemed like a good idea right off the bat. Who would have suspected that people would get indignant over changing their lightbulbs to a different kind that would save them money in their electric bills?
Well, as usual, unintended consequences rise up. CFL bulbs — the twisty fluorescent kind— have not only gotten much more expensive, but now scientists say that they can harm the eyes. New research from the Australian National University has warned that the global trend toward using fluorescent bulbs may cause a 12 percent rise in UV-related eye diseases like cataracts and pterygia.
So does all the saving on our electricity bills, which energy secretary Steven Chu insists is good for us whether we like it or not, outweigh the cost of all the cataract operations? I have no idea what pterygia is, or what medical attention it might require.
So many liberal solutions turn out to be worse than the original.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Freedom, Law, Liberalism, Taxes | Tags: 9.1% Unemployment, Always "Unexpected", Unintended Consequences
I write frequently about unintended consequences. Michael Barone wrote recently about the frequency with which ‘the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereof keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.’The pro-Obama Media is always shocked by bad economic news. Glen Reynolds (Instapundit) has been noting similar items ever since October 2009.
And so it was today. Unemployment climbed unexpectedly to 9.1 percent. The Obama economy unexpectedly added only 54,000 jobs — the fewest in eight months. Half of those were at McDonalds. Unexpectedly.
There is little appetite on Capitol Hill for additional stimulus spending. And the Federal Reserve plans to wrap up its most recent effort to pump money into the economy at the end of this month.
White House economist Austan Goolsbee said the burden is now on the private sector to create jobs, as the days of a government-led recovery are nearing an end.
And the government-led recovery is where? This may actually be good news. If the government gets its nose out of the economy, things might start looking up.
Obama has a way of giving with one hand, and taking away with the other. Take the discouraging climb in the unemployment rate. Obama wants to create more jobs, he speaks about it constantly, and yet he layers more costs, regulations, mandates and taxes on employers so that they are ever more reluctant to hire.
Obama shills for “green jobs” insulating homes and offering subsidies to homeowners to have their homes insulated, yet there are already many firms experienced in the business of insulating homes who don’t need a lot of new workers in a down market. “Green jobs” building wind turbines are created in China. “Green jobs” building vast solar arrays, are prevented from happening because of a possibly endangered tortoise, and lengthy litigation.
Thousands of jobs have been lost in the Gulf region, not just on idled oil rigs, but in all the supporting industries, and in the local economies. Offshore rigs have left for other countries where they are not idled by misguided regulations. At the same time, Obama supports the Brazilian oil industry and offers to buy their oil.
It is Obama’s strictures on the oil industry that have raised the price of gas at the pump. Higher gas prices weigh heavily on industry, and not only cause inflation, but cost jobs as their expense for transportation and energy go up.
ObamaCare’s main Medicare cost-reduction strategy has already proved ineffective. Accountable Care Organizations aren’t effective and don’t save money. New regulations and mandates impose greater costs on doctors and hospitals, which means that health care costs more, not less. When reimbursement to doctors and hospitals is cut, fewer doctors will see Medicare patients. If they can’t find a doctor, patients go the emergency room. Doctors who object to meddling government quit and do something else, like run for Congress. (There were 47 doctors running for office in the last election).
There are always consequences. If you raise taxes on luxuries, people stop buying luxuries and the people who create those luxuries lose their jobs, and whole industries go under. When you raise taxes or regulations on businesses, those firms take what actions they can to survive. They may lay off employees, or raise their prices, or take more of their business to somewhere where it is not so highly regulated or taxed. But Liberals are always surprised when there are bad economic effects.
American’s savings rate is too low, they say. So liberals want to eliminate the “tax expenditures” the money the government forgoes by allowing tax preferences for retirement accounts, employer paid insurance, mortgage payments. If they just cancel those, won’t the government collect lots more money?
Obama gives with one hand, and takes away with the other, creating, um, “unexpected consequences.” And they never understand. Capital will go where it is wanted, and stay where it is well treated.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Environment | Tags: Over- Regulation, Unaccountable Agencies, Unintended Consequences
It’s hard to keep up with the regulatory proposals coming from government agencies. The Foundry, a Heritage Foundation blog, is trying to keep track of the more noxious ones. Today, they are pointing out the excesses of the U.S. Department of Energy.
They already regulate the design of air conditioners, battery chargers, boilers, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, dishwashers, dryers, freezers, furnaces, heat pumps, light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets and washers. We now have washing machines that are several times more expensive and literally do not clean your clothes. Dishwashers no longer clean your dishes, and after the Volt fires in Connecticut, the regulations for battery chargers may need a second look.
The addition for today concerns a return to the shower. The Energy {Policy Conservation Act of 1992 prescribed a measly 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at 80 pounds per square inch of water pressure. This was quite a dramatic reduction in showering pleasure from the 5 gpm or even 10 gpm of previous showerheads. The Department stated that: “It has always been the Department’s view that when Congress used the term ‘any shower head’ it actually meant ‘any shower head’.”
Now they want to make it clear that the regulation applies to the total from multiple shower heads in any one shower. The department recently fined 4 showerhead makers $165,104 for failing to demonstrate compliance with the shower head mandate.
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 prohibits even minute levels of lead in any product intended for children 12 years of age or younger. That includes millions of children’s books printed with leaded ink. Lead in ink was phased out in the late 1970s, but the CPSC deems any children’s book printed prior to 1986 to be potentially toxic and thus unfit for library circulation , the Goodwill store, or your neighbor’s garage sale.
The EPA is now hard at work increasing fleet-wide fuel efficiency standards for cars, and at the same time expanding the amount of ethanol in gasoline from 10% to 15%, (an amount damaging to the engines of all but the newest cars) which will dramatically decrease fuel efficiency. Corn-based ethanol has been shown to nearly double greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years. The spike in food prices from more ethanol will increase government spending by $1 billion a year, according to studies.
Obama policies are destroying jobs as fast as new jobs are created. Regulations accomplish nothing but unnecessary interference in peoples lives, and often simply make things worse. There are always consequences, often unintended ones, and they seldom improve anything.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, Europe, Politics | Tags: Greenwashing Doesn't Work, Ineffective and Unwise, Unintended Consequences
The European Commission on Monday announced a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
Their list of future wishfulness begins with eliminating all cars and trucks from the future cities of the European Union. They are getting desperate in their urge to eliminate any emissions from fossil fuels. They mean business. They will put new taxation on fuel to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport. No cars or trucks in cities. None. Zero. Zilch.
The European Union Commissioner for Transportation Slim Kallas. said “That means no more conventionally fueled cars in our city centres. Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behavior.” He has denied that the EU plan to cut car use by half over the next 20 years, before a total ban in 2050 will limit personal mobility or reduce Europe’s economic competitiveness.
Cutting mobility is not an option, neither is business as usual. We can break the transport system’s dependence on oil without sacrificing its efficiency and compromising mobility. It can be win-win.
A spokesman for the Association of British Drivers said “I suggest that he goes and finds himself a space in the local mental asylum.”
Christopher Monckton, Ukip’s transport spokesman said: “The EU must be living in an alternate reality, where they can spend trillions and ban people from their cars. This sort of greenwashing grandstanding adds nothing and merely highlights their grandiose ambitions.”
British councils have begun to raise the cost for parking for diesel vehicles. According to a paper prepared for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, diesel vehicles, which were thought to be more environmentally friendly, may emit too many small polluting particles which damage local air quality. Diesels now account for 1 in 4 vehicles on the roads. A motorist with a typical family diesel faces paying more than £150 a year to park outside his or her house.
Mr. Cameron made a big deal of opening a factory in Coventry to build electric-powered vans. Last week, after making only 400 vehicles in four years, the firm sacked half its workforce and went into “administration” with debts of £40 million. For every new “green” job, nearly four are lost.
Der Spiegel has a long survey on Environmentalism in Germany. Germans, it seems, are very concerned about the environment and will obey the rules, pay any price, and observe all restrictions faithfully. “Germans usually obediently go along with environmental measures, in fact they’re a model people when it comes to green living. They carefully sort their rubbish, take their bottles back to the supermarket and put their batteries in special containers. When they were told to have carbon filters fitted to their cars, they did so without complaining. And of course they’re at the forefront when it comes to attaching solar panels to their roofs or insulating their homes.”
Germans only rarely question environmental policies. The light bulb ban was one example. Most didn’t see the need to scrap conventional bulbs when the simplest way to save electricity was just to turn off the light. And Germans have been unusually stubborn about the biofuel E10 — the name refers to the 10 percent ethanol admixture. They would prefer to pay a few more cents for a liter of gas than put their car engines at risk.
Many haven’t yet fully realized that E10 is an ecological swindle. People who want to help the environment shouldn’t use it. Nine large European environmental associations recently conducted a joint study which concluded that the bottom line impact of the fuel on the environment is negative. Rainforests are being clear-cut in Brazil and Borneo to make room for sugarcane and oil palm cultivation. At the same time there’s a shortage of arable land for food production, which is leading to the threat of famine in parts of the world. Last year, the price of grain rose sharply in the global market.
A single full tank of bio-ethanol uses up as much grain as an adult can eat in a whole year. In order to cover the German requirement for biofuel, an arable area of around one million hectares would be needed. That is four times the size of the south-western German state of Saarland, which would need to be fertilized, treated with pesticides and intensively farmed. Environmental groups say that across Europe, farming for biofuels would create up to 56 million tons of additional greenhouse gases— an environmental crime they say must be stopped immediately.
Not everything that looks green serves the environment, says der Spiegel. German garbage doesn’t really get recycled, the plastic gets burned and they import more plastic to burn. Extreme efforts to save water is damaging the sewage systems beneath cities, and utilities are forced to pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of water through the system to keep it operating. This results in high water bills. The EU made a big deal about fine particulates, ordered people to put filters on their cars,( is that where the EPA got it?) but particulate counts are increasing. Germans don’t like CFL bulbs any more than we do.
The treasured green dreams of environmentalists, as usual, do not take account of unintended consequences. Bright ideas turn out to be not so bright. Pellet stoves required to replace fireplaces, now require filters to be added. Major environmental initiatives aren’t just ineffective — they are counterproductive. No one is calculating whether all the billions invested in protecting the environment are actually being spent wisely. The experts have no interest in shedding light on the problems because it is their livelihood. It is far worse in the EU because the European Union is not accountable to the people. Most people want to treat the environment well. The heavy hand of a poorly informed government is not the best guide. Big Government simply doesn’t work.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Health Care | Tags: How to Destroy the American Economy, Raise the Cost of Health Care, Unintended Consequences
Yes, I know that this video looks gross and uninteresting. The picture is of a badly burned hand. The story is not gross, but a story of miraculous medical innovation, fostered by the free market. Something that would disappear under ObamaCare. It is a re-post. I posted this once before and hardly anyone watched it. It is an uplifting, exciting story, please take a few moments to watch it.
ObamaCare is a collection of failed liberal ideas meant to funnel everyone eventually into single-payer, government-run health care, like, well, Britain and Canada who are desperately trying to reform their health care to be more like ours. They are trying to restore the doctor-patient relationship that has long been the basis of our current health care — the best in the world.
The impetus behind transforming our health care has supposedly been the rising costs of care, but the idea that a government takeover can make it both more excellent, more equitable, and cost less should not pass the laugh test. I can remember the 3¢ stamp and the 1¢ postcard. The government does not make things cost less. The costs of American health care which were growing so fast that we just had to “do something,” were growing largely because of government interference in the marketplace, government mandates, government regulation. The fact that HHS has issued over 1.000 waivers from ObamaCare should tell you something, if you are paying attention.
Until now, America has been the world’s leader in medical innovation, but the regulatory government with time-consuming, burdensome, regulation creates an uphill battle for innovators. The FDA has proposed a new approval pathway for medical devices that would accelerate the process, and reduce costs for medical device companies. At the same time, ObamaCare is placing new taxes on medical device makers which will discourage innovation.
At a recent hearing, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) noted that companies in European markets are able to make their products available to patients as much as two years faster and at a significantly lower cost. ObamaCare is riddled with unintended consequences that make things worse. The new tax on medical devices is supposed to raise $2.3 billion to help foot the bill for ObamaCare; but what it will actually mean is lost jobs in the industry, and higher costs for devices— such thing as stents, crutches, wheelchairs. Massachusetts is a center for the life sciences, and manufacturers are already talking about moving production overseas if they cannot pass their increased costs along to the customer.
Democrats were sure that as people found out about the health care bill it would gain broad acceptance. But its “benefits” haven’t worked out to be beneficial. Several of the mandates on insurance companies have already been implemented. No insurance plan can now limit lifetime benefits. Group plans cannot have annual benefit limits. All plans must offer coverage for dependent children under the age of 26. One year later, mandating benefits has raised the cost of providing insurance and those costs have been passed on to policy holders in the form of sharply higher premiums.
At Heritage, Brian Blase has published a one-year checkup on ObamaCare. Its unpopularity is growing, the hodgepodge of regulations and mandates have reduced competition and increased the cost of coverage. ObamaCare has already increased government control of American’s health care choices and limited consumer choice. Americans support repeal by double digit numbers, as they have consistently done since the day the bill first passed.
It is worth listening once again to Representative Paul Ryan’s impassioned speech to Congress when ObamaCare was about to be passed. He got it right.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Health Care, Liberalism | Tags: It Just Won't Work, The Medicaid Catastrophe, Unintended Consequences
More than half of all states are now suing to stop ObamaCare. Maine became the 23 state on Wednesday, and Kansas the 24th to join Florida’s multi-state lawsuit. Thirty-three Republican governors and governors-elect have signed a letter to the White House and Congress making an emphatic appeal that ObamaCare’s Medicaid provisions be repealed.
Medicaid pays health care and long-term expenses for certain categories of individuals. It costs taxpayers almost $400 billion a year without providing Medicaid recipients with a high quality of care. National spending on Medicaid has nearly quintupled over the past twenty years, and about 16 percent of the population is currently covered.
A recent study from the University of Virginia has found that Medicaid patients have worse surgical outcomes than people without insurance. In spite of this, ObamaCare relies heavily on the Medicaid program to cut the number of individuals without health insurance. So the Obama administration can claim (correctly) that more people are covered — they just can’t get any care.
Obama’s Medicaid mandates include a requirement that states maintain current program eligibility along with a required expansion that will increase national enrollment by about 20 million. States can’t afford the current program, nor can they attempt to cut costs. Most states have balanced budget amendments that prevent the kind of creative financing the federal government uses.
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels explains how ObamaCare will probably kill Indiana’s “Healthy Indiana Plan”, which relies on health savings accounts for 50,000 low-income people. The program has been hugely successful and popular, but ObamaCare mandates eliminate health savings accounts. Governor Daniels explains in the video below how ObamaCare is affecting his state.
ObamaCare has burdened states with all sorts of mandates, penalized them for not conforming, and as a solution wants to bail out the states most adversely affected by increasing the national deficit. They are unwilling to tackle the structural problems. Many doctors refuse to accept Medicaid patients now, and the situation will only get worse with the increasing shortage of doctors. Medical schools cannot keep up with the need, and the nation faces a shortage of 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years — not counting the 40 percent of physicians who say they may leave the profession.
Nancy Pelosi’s comment about having to wait until we could read the bill and figure out what is in it becomes ever more irresponsible as time goes on and we do find out what is in it.
ObamaCare rewards friends of the administration, and punishes enemies. In September, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius began granting waivers to those companies that provide low-cost plans with low annual limits on what the insurance will pay out. This followed the announcement by some employers that they would have to drop the plans because they did not meet the mandate that 85% of premium income be spent on medical expenses. By early December, HHS had granted 222 waivers covering 1,507,418 employees, more than a third of which are union members. Then she announced that companies looking for rate increases of 10% or more would have to justify the hikes to her department. Insurance regulation has traditionally been a state responsibility.
Democrats are planning to mount a vigorous defense of ObamaCare. Paid television ads, phone banks, scheduled events. They are assuming that you don’t love ObamaCare because they just didn’t do a good enough job of telling you how wonderful it is. The trouble is that they don’t even know what is in the bill themselves, and have no understanding whatsoever of the unintended consequences they have set in action.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Law, Progressivism | Tags: Now a Train to Nowhere, The Death of a City, Unintended Consequences
Detroit has become a place Hollywood directors come to for great wreckage shots. One quarter of the city’s 140 square miles are deserted.
Detroit public school students boast the nation’s worst reading scores, the products of a corruption-ridden school system that recently flirted with bankruptcy. Detroit bested Baltimore in 2009 to take the dreaded “murder capital” title. It may also be the worst place in the country to have a heart attack: prepare to wait half an hour for an ambulance.
In a town lacking essential services, what do local leaders and federal politicians have in mind for helping the city? What’s needed to hoist Detroit back to its 1950 heyday, when it was America’s fourth largest city, with more than double its current population?
Why, light rail, of course!
The Motor City is moving ahead with a plan to build a 9.3-mile light rail line that will run from downtown Detroit to the edge of the suburbs. It’ll cost an estimated $500 million. Three-quarters of the bill will be paid by federal taxpayers, with the rest picked up by a consortium of foundations and businesses.
Bet on two or three times $500 million. People in Seattle are still paying for the last vision that was to make Seattle a “world class city,” the Kingdome, though it was long since torn down. Light rail is now operational but nobody rides it. So naturally they want to expand it. They never, never learn.
I don’t always agree with the Libertarians at Reason, but they surely make some good videos.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Environment, Health Care | Tags: Bumbling Bureaucrats, Squandered Stimulus, Unintended Consequences
— 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each made to people who were dead or in prison. The Social Security Administration’s inspector general reported that $18 million went to 72,000 people who were dead. A little more than half were returned. 4.3 million more payments went to a little more than 17,000 prison inmates. The payments were part of the government’s massive Keynesian economic recovery package enacted in February 2009. Some stimulus.
— The centerpiece of President Obama’s health care plan was a lifeline for those whose medical conditions made them uninsurable. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan started this summer, but there is no rush to join. California has the money for about 20,000 people, but has received only 450 applications. Wisconsin has received 200 applications, but has room for 8,000. Government economists projected in April that 375,000 would gain coverage this year, and wondered if that would be enough. Premiums may be too high, and rules require that people be uninsured for at least 6 months. A requirement that they provide documentation to prove that they’ve been turned down by an insurer may be a problem. Where the federal government runs the program directly, the plan doesn’t provide coverage for prescription drugs until people have met a $2,500 deductible. How do you keep a $5 billion program going if nobody signs up?
— Charging up your electric car can take 15-18 hours or more to charge a full-battery car like the Nissan LEAF through a regular wall socket. GM has come up with a charging system for the Volt— that will cost only $490. The car can plug into any old 120 volt wall socket and be fully charged in only 10 hours. For those who opt for the wall charger at $490, installation will cost around $1,475, for a car that goes just 25 to 50 miles on an electric charge. This might bring the time required to recharge down to four hours. So if nobody but Leonardo Di Caprio buys one and the government has to buy vast quantities to avoid terminal embarrassment about the Volt and all those battery factories — what will be the government costs for all the electricity to recharge the batteries every day? That should send the meters spinning.
— In the wake of ClimateGate, an overhaul was needed to win back public trust. In November of 2009, an archive of some 1,000 emails sent and received by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was leaked to the blogosphere. Was it evidence of malpractice among the scientists on both sides of the Atlantic? Had scientists tried to suppress views critical of their work? Allegations were serious and could not be just brushed aside. The government quickly set up inquiries by the University of East Anglia, the Royal Society and essentially asked the scientists if they did anything wrong, and recommended some modest changes in the way things were done and put the same people back in charge, which has produced some very outraged complaint from highly respected sources. On this side of the pond, the University of Pennsylvania was asked to investigate Michael Mann. The University apparently asked him if there was any problem with his work, and he said no, so there you are. The Attorney General of Virginia is suing, and demanding information. Don’t question us, we’re scientists?
— We are not alone in our folly. The world’s largest wind farm opened off the Kent coast last week. The most important and shocking aspect of this vast project according to Christopher Booker is that over the coming years the Brits will be giving the wind farm’s Swedish owners a total of £1.2 billion in subsidies. That same sum, invested now in a single nuclear power station could yield 13 times more electricity, with much greater reliability. It is an array of 100 three-megawatt turbines, each the height of Blackpool Tower, which will have the “capacity” to produce 300 MW of electricity, enough to power 200,000 homes. The key word again is “capacity.” That means what the turbine could produce if the wind blew at the perfect speed constantly, which, sorry, doesn’t happen, and is useful only for impressing gullible government bureaucrats.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Health Care, Law | Tags: Disastrous Results, Not Understanding Incentives, Unintended Consequences
Democrats don’t get incentives. It’s poorly understood incentives that lead to unintended consequences which are the nasty results that completely screw up a policy that was going to change everything for the better.
The Obama administration has set into play some dreadful dynamics with its 2000+ page health care reform bill. They meant so well, and were so delighted that they had passed a bill that they were unable to pass for over a hundred years. Turns out there were some real reasons why it had never passed.
Obama promised that consumers would be able to keep their coverage if they were happy with what they had. The result is an avalanche of bad news for those consumers.
— 840,000 Midwesterners will lose their policies. The Principal Group has announced its plan to drop health insurance policies from its range of products. The Iowa-based company provided coverage to about 840,000 people who receive their insurance from their employer. Principal is just the latest in a long list of insurers to drop coverage.
— 30,000 McDonald’s hourly workers are at risk of losing their coverage. The plans can’t meet the requirements of new regulations that HHS is writing to implement ObamaCare. Because McDonald’s has relatively high employee turnover, it spends more on signing people up and on other administrative costs than the new rules will allow. (85% medical care and 15% administrative costs).
“There is not any issuer of limited benefit coverage that could meet the…standards,” said Neil Trautwein, vice president of the National Retail Federation. Millions more policies are at risk at such companies as Blockbuster, Disney, CVS, Staples and Home Depot.
— 22,000 New England seniors are losing the coverage they have. Harvard Pilgrim announced this week that it is getting out of the market for Medicare Advantage in response to the massive cuts in this popular program. This dumps seniors back into fee-for-service Medicare, where they may have a hard time finding a physician who will see them.
— Individual child only policies are vanishing. Children must be insured on their parents’ policies, but parents who could not afford health insurance often bought child-only policies for their kids. (Parents do that). Ans such policies under the new rules are no longer available.
— Retiree policies are in jeopardy, and many smaller companies may shut down as they conclude, like nHealth in Virginia, that it is not possible to navigate the maze of new regulations and succeed.
— Current estimates project a shortage of 63,000 doctors by 2015, with a continuing worsening of shortages through 2025 as an additional 36 million enter Medicare.
This is the inevitable result of ObamaCare. And there is far more wreckage to come. Regulations and rules are made by regulators who have little or no understanding of business and how it works, and regard profit as a dirty word. If you do not understand that without profit, there is no business, you’re not apt to make sensible regulations.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Environment, Law | Tags: Squandered Spending, Unintended Consequences, Unworkable Policies
I am deeply troubled by the policies of the Obama administration. Not because I disagree with them, although I do, but because I believe that they will not work, and that the money appropriated is completely wasted. Policies have been enacted based on ideology, because they want it. But no one has really investigated the evidence. They simply believe that it will work because they want it to work.
— We have the recent example of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wanting to regulate dust on farms. I have always suspected that the ardent environmentalists that populate the EPA are city people, unfamiliar with the environment they want to regulate.
— The EPA set up a program to make sure that any contractors who worked on a building or disturbed an area of wall larger than a few feet square, would be required to be certified for working on any home built before 1978. Participants will be trained in how to identify lead paint (commercially available kits are inaccurate between 48 and 72% of the time). Classes cost around $225 each.
Fines for non-certified work range up to $37,500 per occurrence. In many areas, the EPA could not find people to teach the classes, but the end of the year was the deadline to get certified. Contractors are having a hard time getting into classes. Rebecca Morley, executive director of the nonprofit National Center for Healthy Housing said contractors have had plenty of warning. “Countless children have already suffered the consequences of lead exposure due to delays in finalizing the rule. Any delay at this point is unnecessary and will only harm children for years to come.” Thus spake the voice of a clueless non-profit Nanny. Contractors are required to keep records of a renovation project for 3 years to prove that their work was performed according to EPA rules. Contractors say their costs will go up by thousands of dollars.
— The program known as “Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is designed to promote energy efficiency in American homes involves a government loan that remains with the home, transferring to a future owner if the home is sold. Unfortunately PACE financing is a first lien on the property. If the home lands in foreclosure, mortgage lenders do not have first call on repayment. Unacceptable to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Federal regulations prohibit mortgages that are subordinate to other loans, so no mortgage. Ooops!
— A report released by the special inspector general for the TARP bailout program, Neil Barofsky, said Treasury didn’t show why the cuts [closing auto dealerships] were “either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the sake of the nation’s economic recovery. Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses.” These decisions resulted in “potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls — all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.”
Chrysler quickly closed 789 dealers, and GM promised to cut dealer ranks by 1,454 by October 2010. Responding to protests, Congress insisted on arbitration, GM reinstated more than 660 dealers, Chrysler reinstated 80.
— The Bureau of Labor Statistics , responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs, placed a notice in the Federal Register. It said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of green jobs:” they asked that readers send in definitions. The Department of Labor, at the same time had hundreds of millions to dispense for “green jobs’ and no idea what a green job actually is. The Recovery Act contains more than $80 billion in clean energy funding to promote economic recovery and develop green energy jobs.
There a constant of policies not clearly thought through, of unintended consequences, of policy based on fantasy rather than fact, and of mathematically illiterate consideration of costs. Policies should be based on careful consideration to see if they will work before they are passed into law. This has not been the case. Policies were drummed up in haste to get the bill passed as quickly as possible with the attitude that it can be fixed later. But when the unintended consequences result in lost jobs, raised costs that citizens can’t afford, destroyed savings and lost hope — it really isn’t amenable to casual “Oh we’ll fix it later” rhetoric.
Is it any wonder that ordinary people are heading for Tea Party rallies, and making themselves heard at town halls, and cannot wait to vote in November?
