Now This Is Torture

According to the May 31st Miami Herald:

Some Guantánamo detainees to get laptops

To better prepare them for life in asylum, the U.S. military is setting up a virtual computer lab for some Guantánamo captives now cleared for release.

These captives already get to order fast-food takeout from the base and have access to a phone booth for weekly calls. Now some 17 Uighur Muslims awaiting a nation to grant them asylum are about to go high-tech, with laptops and web training.

While awaiting details of President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camps by Jan. 22, commanders here have ordered 20 laptops for the captives of Camp Iguana.

"As you know, detainees are leaving this place," said Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, who oversees detainee classes, a multilingual library and now-emerging virtual computer lab. "We're getting them computer classes to prepare for their return."

(via Maggie's Farm, Jammie Wearing Fool)

QOTD

From a June 2nd Associated Press story:

Earlier in the day, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Sotomayor's life story "compelling," and said it appealed to the public.

"We have the whole package here," Reid said. "America identifies with the underdog, and you've been an underdog many times in your life, but always the top dog."

Hey, Harry--isn't Yucca Mountain also an underdog?

(via Best of the Web)

Leftist Media Bias of the Day

• New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on June 2nd (page A23):

  One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
  
  It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a "Latina woman racist," apparently unaware of his incoherence in the "Latina-woman" redundancy in this defamatory characterization.

• Sonia Sotomayor in her 2001 remarks for the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, republished by the New York Times on May 14th:

  I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Conclusion: A New York Times reporter lacking "a factual basis for his ravings" shouldn't be the "first [to] cast a stone."

(via Best of the Web)

Remembering at Princeton

This is a guest post, appropriate to the day, from regular reader Doug J.; the pics available at the link are well worth it:



Last weekend I attended my Princeton 35th Reunion. The centerpiece of Princeton Reunions is a procession of each alumni class, in chronological order, down a campus street lined by younger classes to the cheers of the younger alumni. It’s called the "P-Rade." Each class has its own uniform, and each major reunion class (the five-year multiples) has a theme.

The showstopper this year at the P-Rade was the Class of ‘44 tribute to its service during WWII and to its KIA. The class was preceded in the procession by THE US Army Band, "Pershing’s Own," by a line of WWII vehicles, and by WWII reenactors. Then, class members marched holding placards with their collective class service records. "89% served." "Army" 300-some odd. "Navy," X number. Marines, Y number. Army Air Corps. Coast Guard. OSS. Free French. Free Belgians. Canadian Royal Army. Merchant Marines. Etc.

There followed the placard "22 Died in Service." (Out of a class of maybe 600-700.) And each of the KIA was marked by a placard with his Freshman class photo, his name, his branch, and the year and place where he was killed. "Ploesti 1944." "Battle of the Bulge 1944." "CBI 1944." "Guam 1945." and so on.

It had quite an impact. BK has kindly loaded my photos of the event onto photobucket, accessible at this link. BK, thanks.

To the Class of ‘44, as to all their contemporaries, well done. And well-remembered.

Cartoon of the Day

From Tom McMahon's 4-Block World:


source: 4-Block World June 2nd

Magazine Article of D-Day

From the May 26th Time magazine:

Queen Elizabeth Snubbed! War Declared on France

France and England have fought each other in the 100 Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars and scads of less memorably named conflicts. And more recently, the French and English have treated the blood-and-tears clashes between their national rugby and soccer teams as fetishes for those battles of yore. The geysers of bile pouring forth from the London tabloids this week suggests a new chapter in Anglo-French enmity may be upon us. Call it the "Great D-Day Hissy Fit."

The casus belli in the latest cross-Channel spat is the slight dealt by the French government to Queen Elizabeth II in failing to invite her to the June 6 ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the 1944 Allied invasion at Normandy. While the Queen has attended -- and also skipped -- various previous D-Day commemorations, this year's event seems to have been given heightened allure by the planned attendance of U.S. President Barack Obama, who remains the King of Pop on the diplomatic circuit. British tabloids have gone ballistic over what they see as French President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to hog the Obama-radiated limelight. (See portraits of Queen Elizabeth.)

"A diminutive egomaniac, the stain of Nazi collaboration and why the French can't forgive us for saving them in the War", was Thursday's headline in London's Daily Mail, above an article filled with denunciation of the French and their leaders as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. For good measure, the paper ran a second story titled, "What did YOUR dad do in the war, Sarkozy?" The paper's answer to its own question was to claim Sarkozy's Hungarian-born father celebrated D-Day by fleeing collaborationist Budapest for Nazi-controlled Germany to escape advancing Soviet troops. The same story also alleges that the family of Sarkozy's current wife, industrial scion Carla Bruni Sarkozy, had been pretty chummy with Mussolini.

(via reader Doug J.)

The Health of America, Part 9

Tevi Troy--former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and prior to that, staffer for Senator John Ashcroft--writes about pharmaceutical regulation in the June 1st Wall Street Journal:

The conduct of the businesses that had been responsible for almost every medical innovation from which Americans and the world had benefited for decades became intensely controversial in the 1990s. An odd inversion came into play. Since the work they did was life-saving or life-enhancing, it was not deemed by a certain liberal mindset to be of special value, worth the expense. Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces.

And not only that. Since pharmaceuticals and biologics are powerful things that can do great harm if they are misused or misapplied, the companies that made them found themselves under assault for injuries they might have caused. It was little considered that the drugs had been approved for use by a federal agency that imposed the world's most rigorous standards, and was often criticized for holding up promising treatments (especially for AIDS). Juries were convinced that companies had behaved with reckless disregard for the health of consumers, and hit them with enormous punitive damages claims. . .

The second came in response to the approval by the FDA in 1997 of direct consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The marketing explosion that followed it gave people the sense that these companies were not doing life-saving work but were rather engaged in the sale of relative trivialities, like Viagra and Rogaine, on which they had advertising dollars to burn that would be better spent on lowering the cost of drugs. And the third element of this mix was the rise of the Internet, which gave Americans a level of price transparency that they had not had before regarding cost differentials between drugs sold in the U.S. versus Canada and other Western countries. . .

A cultural shift had taken place. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, once the leading lights of American industry, had become a collective national villain.

The life sciences are among the most regulated areas of our economy, and are constantly subjected to significant policy upheaval from Washington. Because these products are so expensive to develop, the regulatory and policy whims of Washington tend to have a disproportionate impact on investment in the industry. Without investment, there is no research, and without research, there are no products. . .

Then there is the looming shadow of health reform. One of the great requirements of a systemic overhaul is controlling costs, which were $2.5 trillion last year and growing at a rate triple that of inflation. It is clear that Congress and the administration will have to cut costs in order to come close to paying for an ambitious plan. How they do so could have a devastating impact on medical innovation.

Attempts to universalize our system and pay for it with cost controls that could stifle innovation contradict their own goal, which is, presumably, better health. It also embraces the notion that you can get something for nothing--namely, that you can get innovative new discoveries and better health outcomes somehow without paying for these discoveries to come into being.

Agreed.

Chart of the Day

On Tuesday, President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers released a report on healthcare, containing this:




source: CEA Health Care Report at 7

I haven't had a chance to match this with population-by-age data from the Census Bureau, but this chart confirms that age groups most likely to be healthy are most likely to be uninsured. Which is consistent with previous observations:

The figures unsurprisingly reflect the tax code's tie between health insurance and employment--young adults acquire insurance with entry-level jobs. But it also suggests deliberate choice. Young adults are statistically healthier than other age brackets, suggesting that some may deliberately choose not to be covered. This may not be a bad bet at that age, and there's no compelling reason for the government to override an individual's decision to "gamble."

Though "choice" is a lefty soundbite, don't expect this option to survive.

Words vs. Facts

UPDATE: below

If Sotomayor's 2001 remarks were a poor choice of words unrepresentative of her judicial philosophy--as President Obama claimed--why did she say the same thing back in 1994?

Or, if he says it on Fridays, can The One--like Humpty Dumpty--turn slant to truth?

By the way, Sotomayor seems unusually partisan for a judge.

MORE:

She said versions of her "wise Latina" speech multiple times.

(via Doug Ross)

"Oceania was Always at War with Eurasia" of the Day

UPDATE: below

Remember the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"? Remember the left praising the President's support of freedom of speech and association?

Well, that was then. Now is Norm Eisen, White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, on May 29th:

[W]e will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program.

Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner is halfway right:

This is the Camel’s nose under the tent, being poked because of special circumstances. Let government restrict political expression -- i.e. lobbying of government officials regarding policy -- in one small, supposedly specialized area and not long after the specialized area starts expanding. Eventually, all political expression regarding all policy will become subject to government regulation.

I say "halfway" because Tapscott misstates the issue: The Obama Administration isn't merely regulating speech and/or petition, it's prohibiting talking to them about a particular topic. Doesn't that sound similar to what NASA's James Hansen complained Bush was doing? Or--in what would be a inversion of the law--does the First Amendment apply only to liberal government employees? In that light, I'm sure it's mere coincidence that "Government Motors" announced it will continue to lobby the Federal Government that owns it.

What's more, the White House ban is defined by the content of the communications--only petition-speech on stimulus funding is prohibited. Such "content-based" restrictions are subject to the most exacting scrutiny. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 412 (1989). But not, apparently, by the White House counsel's office--to them, we're all registered lobbyists. As Carter Wood at Shopfloor says, "In the interests of transparency the First Amendment must be sacrificed."

And you thought The One used to teach Constitutional law.

MORE:

As Liberative's bobn noted, even the Federal Reserve Board will lobby the Federal government, and they plan to use Enron's former top Washington lobbyist, Linda Robertson. She once was a Clinton Administration Treasury Department adviser; her current bio doesn't mention Enron, instead describing that position as "a lobbyist focused on tax, energy, technology, finance and corporate issues."

(via Tigerhawk)

QOTD

Jan Fleischhauer, born in 1962, has been an editor at Der Spiegel since 1989. But recently, he's become an "accidental conservative," as he details in a Spiegel excerpt from his forthcoming book:

I am part of a generation in Germany that knows no other reality than the dominance of the left. Everyone was a liberal where I grew up. This isn't entirely self-evident, because the neighborhood in which I grew up would generally be described as an exclusive residential area. My parents' friends -- and their friends, of course -- all voted for the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and later for the Green Party. . . [C]onservatives are practically nonexistent wherever decisions are made on how we look at and evaluate things.

Go to any theater, museum or open-air concert, and you'll quickly realize that ideas beyond the mindscape of the left are unwelcome there. A contemporary play that doesn't critically settle scores with the market economy? Unthinkable. An artist who, until George W. Bush left the White House, could associate anything with America other than Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the Washington's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Out of the question. Rock concerts against the left? A joke.

The left has won, across the board, and has become the happy medium. When we search for a definition of what left means, we can draw on an impressive array of theories. Leftism is a worldview, as well as a way of explaining the world and how everything is interconnected. Most of all, however, it is a feeling. A person who lives a leftist life is living with the appealing awareness of being in the right, in fact, being right all the time. In Germany, leftists are never truly called upon to justify their views. In fact, their views have become the dominant views, not within the population, which stubbornly adheres to its prejudices, but among those who set the tone and in circles where they prefer to congregate.

Of course, the left has suffered its share of defeats along the way. Liberals have lost the fight against cable television, and they were unable to prevent reunification, but in retrospect all of this recedes to the point of insignificance. The other side doesn't even know what to call itself. No one in his right mind in Germany would refer to himself as right-wing. Middle-class, perhaps, or conservative, but even those terms are used with caution. Being politically to the right is not the other side of a spectrum of opinion, but a judgment of condemnation.

In the business of opinions, where I earn my money, there is practically nothing but leftists, and anyone who is not is well-advised to keep it to himself. One reason for the cultural dominance of the left may be that the other side has nothing to say or leftist ideas are so convincing that everything else pales by comparison. But I would hazard to guess that many are to the left because others are.

Man's tendency to assimilate, though well-documented in experimental psychology, is a trait routinely underestimated in everyday life. What we call conviction is often nothing but adaptation in an environment of opinions. Opportunism is an ugly word that doesn't apply here, because it assumes that we adopt opinions for purely calculated reasons. Let's call it social instinct instead. No one wants to be the only person in an office who isn't asked to join the group for lunch. . .

Members of this social class are critical of the market economy, and yet are unable to specify an alternative. In their view, the current economic crisis is a gift from God, because it provides perfect fodder for all kinds of prejudices and practically eliminates the need for argument. All it takes is to mention words like "Deutsche Bank" or "Wall Street" in any discussion in which someone has dared to voice a cautious objection, and everyone standing around will quickly nod their heads in agreement, causing the troublemaker to withdraw, while mumbling apologies. In secret, however, they hope that this crisis of capitalism will not progress too far, because their own prosperity depends on capitalism and because, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to demonstrate that a comfortable retirement was not possible under good old Karl Marx.

I missed the connection at some point. I don't know when it happened. There wasn't a specific day or incident that turned me off to the left. I cannot even claim that I consciously distanced myself. It just happened. Suddenly I no longer found it amusing to listen to constant jokes about the physiognomy of (former Chancellor Helmut) Kohl. I realized that I was relieved when my sons converted the puppet theater my father-in-law and I had built for them into a parking garage. When the discussion turned to the uselessness of marriage and family, I was the one who was secretly rooting for every married couple, hoping it would last as long as possible. Once, at a party, I even dared to put in a good word for nuclear energy during a conversation about climate change. It immediately put a damper on the evening. . .

I have since learned to go on the offensive with my conservatism. In fact, sometimes I even have the courage to address prejudices head-on. We recently invited a couple we have known for a long time, but with whom we had fallen somewhat out of touch, over to our house. He became a law professor at a university in eastern Germany not too long ago, and she promotes golf courses. The conversation quickly turned to the last Michael Moore film, and our friend suddenly claimed that the film could not be shown throughout the entire Midwest of the United States. He made it sound as if Moore were some French auteur filmmaker who was finally holding up a mirror to the Americans, which they couldn't abide.

I had a pretty clear idea of how the conversation would continue, and I knew that I would be upset with myself afterwards, once again, because I hadn't challenged him decisively enough. "To make it brief, because we'll get to this point anyway," I heard myself saying: "No, I don't believe that the CIA was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and yes, we liked living in America." He was quiet, we drank our tea, and the two said their goodbyes before long. I was shocked by what I had said, but also a little proud of myself.

Read the whole thing.

(via Assistant Village Idiot via neo-neocon)

Lessons of Depressions

Not only are we doomed, but British economist/writer (and now Harvard prof) Niall Ferguson says Obama--and his advisors, and academia and the media--aren't helping, in the May 29th Financial Times:

Credit for averting a second Great Depression should principally go to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, whose knowledge of the early 1930s banking crisis is second to none, and whose double dose of near-zero short-term rates and quantitative easing -- a doubling of the Fed’s balance sheet since September -- has averted a pandemic of bank failures. No doubt, too, the $787bn stimulus package is also boosting US GDP this quarter.

But the stimulus package only accounts for a part of the massive deficit the US federal government is projected to run this year. Borrowing is forecast to be $1,840bn -- equivalent to around half of all federal outlays and 13 per cent of GDP. A deficit this size has not been seen in the US since the second world war. A further $10,000bn will need to be borrowed in the decade ahead, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even if the White House’s over-optimistic growth forecasts are correct, that will still take the gross federal debt above 100 per cent of GDP by 2017. And this ignores the vast off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the bond market is quailing. For only on Planet Econ-101 (the standard macroeconomics course drummed into every US undergraduate) could such a tidal wave of debt issuance exert "no upward pressure on interest rates". . .

The policy mistake has already been made -- to adopt the fiscal policy of a world war to fight a recession. In the absence of credible commitments to end the chronic US structural deficit, there will be further upward pressure on interest rates, despite the glut of global savings. It was Keynes who noted that "even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist". Today the long-dead economist is Keynes, and it is professors of economics, not practical men, who are in thrall to his ideas.

See also Jonah Goldberg:

It seems to me that all of the new New Deal talk fails to grasp that the extent to which nostalgia drives our assumptions of "what works." Even if you give the most charitable reading of the New Deal and the postwar period, the simple fact remains that those times aren't like these times.

(via The Corner)

We're Doomed

When large sectors of our economy are being guided into corporate "Obama-care" by babble, not business, as detailed in this May 31st New York Times article:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention.

As MaxedOutMama says, "It's all being done on the basis of theorized social costs, rather than with a view to eventually creating a viable domestic auto company." In other words, disregarding the lessons learned in college economics courses except those in Marxist econ. And see Megan McArdle:

GM's main problems are:

1) A terrible, bloated cost structure
2) A terrible, bloated bureaucracy
3) A bunch of meh car lines

Which of these is the government going to solve? That terrible, bloated cost structure supports a bloated union whose jobs are the entire rationale for the government intervention. Leaning on the parts suppliers just risks UAW jobs further down the supply chain. Maybe we can take it out of the budget for copy paper and pencils.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.

Which sets up Jonah Goldberg's modest suggestion:

We're ponying up $50 billion, but the total costs might be closer to $100 billion in the long run. And all we get is the same car company we always had.

So, I'm wondering: How much would it cost to just build a car company from scratch? I'm sure the start-up costs would be high. But the new company wouldn't have to bow and scrape to the UAW and could probably just buy GM's best plants at fire-sale prices.

Chart of the Day

From Nobou Tanaka--the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency--in a May 26th presentation to the G8 Energy Ministerial Meeting:


source: Impact of the Financial and Economic Crisis on Global Energy Investment at 4

(via TigerHawk)

QOTD

RLC at Viewpoint:

The last eight years were characterized by a viciousness that may have been unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, and though Republicans have, I honestly believe, treated President Obama with much greater respect than Democrats treated President Bush, it remains the case that with the advent of blogs, cable TV, and talk radio civility seems to have become an anachronism.

Some people, perhaps, might think that it's only those who suffer most from the kind of eye-gouging that occurs daily in the blogosphere and on the airwaves who call for civility. Civility, in this view, is the plea of those who hold to what Nietzsche called slave morality, the attempt by the weak to mitigate the harshness of their masters by foisting a moral system on them that would constrain their will to power. In other words, pleas for civility are the recourse of society's losers who don't want the strong to be all the time beating them up, but who are otherwise powerless to prevent it.

I think, though, that the opposite is true. Civility is a mark of strength. Calmness and courtesy are indicators of confidence in one's positions. Lies, insults, and rudeness are red flags hoisted by people who subliminally recognize that their arguments are inherently weak. The flimsiness of a point of view can often be measured by the level of shrillness and meanness with which it's presented. If one's ideas are compelling then he has nothing to fear by extending courtesy and respect to the other side. . .

It's hard to treat people with respect and dignity, of course, when they refuse the same courtesy to others, and it's easy to succumb to the temptation to call one's opponents names when they behave in ways that make the name appropriate. It's not always wrong, after all, to call a stupid idea stupid or to call a despicable human being despicable. Sometimes, when stakes are high and the battle hot some rhetoric and behavior are warranted which would not be otherwise, but incendiary language should be used sparingly and judiciously, never gratuitously. If it's deemed appropriate to use a pejorative in our discourse the reason for it should be explained, and it should not simply be employed as a pinch-hitter for an argument.

(via Hatless in Hattiesburg)

As Received

This is making the rounds on email:

It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to choose one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.

The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government under President Obama and the State of California under Governor Arnold are doing business today.

QOTD

Compare Judge Soytomayor's take on judicial objectivity with that of Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the Supreme Court in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 22 U.S. 738, 866 (1824):

Judicial power, as contradistinguished from the power of the laws, has no existence. Courts are the mere instrument of the laws, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by the law; and when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exercised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or in other words, to the will of the law.

(via Bench Memos)

Headline of the Day

This May 29th FOX News headline is the first time North Korea got it right:

N. Korea Defiantly Fires 6th Missile, Slams U.N.

(via Best of the Web)

"Oceana Was Always At War With Eurasia" of the Day

For all the left's decrying the previous Administration's supposed "war on science" and boasting of being a "reality-based community," they never really meant it. The soundbites merely provided the progressive chorus an alternative phraseology for "we hate Bush."

Further proof comes in Jonathan Cohn's recent New Republic critique of "The bean counters who could kill health care reform":

[I]f you talk to senior staff in the administration or on Capitol Hill, you'll detect anxiety over one tiny agency--an agency that helped kill health care reform in 1994 and has the power to do so again.

That agency is the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which is just now weighing in on the debate. When Congress writes a bill, the CBO is the agency that determines how much implementing it will likely cost. And that's no small matter. For every extra dollar in new expenditures that the CBO projects, Congress must find a new dollar in revenue--or learn to live with a new dollar in deficits. Back in 1994, the CBO decided that paying for universal health insurance under the Clinton plan would cost more than the administration thought it would. That forced Bill Clinton and his allies to propose additional regulations on insurance prices, incurring a political liability that helped seal the plan's fate.

The CBO hasn't rendered an official verdict on health care reform this time around, because, officially, there's still no plan on which to render a final verdict. But the CBO began producing preliminary projections about three weeks ago, based on rough proposals that congressional staff have submitted. And, according to several sources familiar with the estimates, the news isn't quite what Obama and his allies were hoping to hear.

The good news for reformers is the CBO's determination that expanding health-insurance coverage would cost a lot less than many outside experts had predicted. Instead of a politically daunting $1.5 trillion, the CBO figures the price tag will be closer to $1 trillion, at least under certain parameters. But the reason for the lower estimate is a bit unsettling. Even with a requirement that everybody obtain insurance--a so-called individual mandate--the CBO assumes a that between a quarter and a third of the uninsured still woulnd't have coverage. That would leave the country short of universal coverage, the goal Obama and his allies have repeatedly cited.

Other preliminary judgments from the CBO are causing more consternation. To help defray the cost of expanding coverage--and to help make medical care more affordable generally--reformers have proposed creating electronic medical records, studying which treatments work best, and taking other steps that would make the business of health care more efficient while cutting down on unnecessary medical treatments. The CBO is less optimistic these moves will save money. What's more, the CBO may determine that, for accounting purposes, the money individuals spend on health insurance--or, at least, some portion of it--should count as part of the public revenue stream. That would give critics more grounds for labeling the Democrats' plan a costly expansion of government. . .

Nobody disputes that there is room for honest intellectual agreement; plenty of smart people dispute claims about savings that reform will generate. But it's an open question whether the CBO takes skepticism too far--and whether such a super-strict reading of the evidence really serves the public interest.

As Nick Schulz observes on the American Enterprise blog, "Real Detectives Have to Worry About That Little Thing Called Evidence":

Cohn’s argument is notable for two reasons. First, the New Republic has long pummelled supply-side economists who wanted the government’s green-eyeshade guys to take a "dynamic scoring" approach to tax cuts. Now that The New Republic wants universal health care, they’d like a little of that dynamic scoring voodoo, too.

Moreover, it is interesting that the reality-based Obama crowd, which promised to roll back the "Republican War on Science" is now arguing against what Cohn calls "a super-strict reading of the evidence."

See also Ezra Klein at American Prospect.

The Corner's Mark Krikorian quips, doesn't this signal "that the Democrats. . . have launched a 'war on math'?"

Tort Reform -- Past Its Time

Last month we wrote about tort reform in New Zealand (Reasons to Love New Zealand, Part III: Tort Reform), which concluded that "the reason that the US will never adopt the New Zealand system, because too many lawyers make too much money from the current system; the power rests not with the people but with the tort attorneys." Is that really true?

To the extent that 'special interests' drive the agenda of lawmakers, it seems so. But, what if we could cast aside the tort bar objections and adopt tort reform in the United States? What would happen? Ted Frank argues that it would be the real economic stimulus we need.

The direct costs to the United States of tort litigation are $252 billion a year, 1.8 percent of GNP, twice that of a typical industrialized nation. But the indirect costs caused by excessive litigation far outweigh the direct costs of paying attorneys and the occasional jackpot justice verdict. Businesses incur nonlegal expenses to comply with the tort system, from document management systems, to executive time lost in depositions and pretrial preparation, to activities foregone because of legal risk. Businesses and individuals change their behavior in inefficient ways because of the misaligned incentives of the tort system.

With the expansion of employment litigation, every hire of an employee (and every decision not to hire) is a potential lawsuit. Employers are rational economic actors and factor in these additional costs by reducing wages and substituting more capital for labor in their capital-labor mix. Fear of liability causes doctors to engage in defensive medicine, manufacturers to refrain from innovation, and pharmaceutical companies to cut back on R&D.

Economists have studied all of these effects. As I discussed in recent testimony on Capitol Hill, if one takes conservative estimates from these economic studies and adds it all up, the total cost to the economy from excessive litigation can be estimated to be between $600 billion and $900 billion a year, the vast majority of which is simply wealth destruction. That is between 4 and 6 percent of GNP, a tort tax of between $8,000 and $12,000 a year for an average family of four.

In other words, without spending a dime of taxpayer money, comprehensive tort reform could do more for the economy every year than the entire stimulus package would. In fact, we could still come out ahead if the government spent half of the increased tax receipts on bailing out the trial lawyers who would lose income from real tort reform.

He underscores important points which echo my beliefs:

• Our nation’s tort system is the most expensive in the world. Yet there is no evidence that it provides benefits superior to those of other nations.
  
• The total cost to the economy from excessive litigation is an estimated $900 billion a year.
  
• Fear of liability causes doctors to engage in defensive medicine, manufacturers to refrain from innovation, and pharmaceutical companies to cut back on R&D.
  
• ...we have a litigation brain drain: many of the best and brightest college graduates choose to become attorneys rather than join professions where people produce or invent things rather than work to promote or prevent wealth transfers.

How many times have you heard people say "thank God for that class action suit it really saved my bacon"? I sure have not, but I do have a stack of coupons I will never use sitting in my desk drawer. In the comments on our article on New Zealand, TrialDog argues that class action torts provide a societal benefit:

Now, there are reasons why class action cases are important. Suppose your internet provider is charging some small $1 fee fraudulently. On a grand scale, they make millions off the scam. No individual can do anything about it. A class action lawyer can. Thus, the class action suit provides a great social benefit. Can such cases be abused? Sure, especially when the government gets involved as they did in smoking cases. Can the lawyers be overpaid? Yes.

Not to pick on TrialDog who is a regular reader; this perspective underscores the typical tort bar argument -- they provide a service to the community. In the same comments, I argued benefit to the consumer in this case is de minimus, while the benefit to the attorney is presumably moderate to very great. I argue further now that in the case of fraudulent charges by service provider, we have criminal laws that can be enforced.

Other than put a bunch of attorneys to work in another profession (which most of them clearly are capable of adapting to) what are the downsides of tort reform? The only one that I can think of is it will never happen. I just don't see anyone going to Washington on that bandwagon. No matter how truthful or beneficial tort reform might be... the road to Washington is well lit only for bleeding hearts.

QOTD

Andy Borowitz on May 26th:

One day after North Korea launched a successful test of a nuclear weapon, President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with "the strongest possible adjectives."

In remarks to reporters at the White House, Mr. Obama said that North Korea should fear the "full force and might of the United States' arsenal of adjectives" and called the missile test "reckless, reprehensible, objectionable, senseless, egregious and condemnable."

Standing at the President's side, Vice President Joseph Biden weighed in with some tough adjectives of his own, branding North Korean President Kim Jong-Il "totally wack and illin'."

Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test "supercilious and jejune," leading some in diplomatic circles to worry that the U.S. might be running out of appropriate adjectives with which to craft its response.

But President Obama attempted to calm those fears, saying that the United States was prepared to "scour the thesaurus" to come up with additional adjectives and was "prepared to use adverbs" if necessary.

Just don't expect verbs--indeed, Slate's Fred Kaplan imagines virtue in inaction.

The Economist Cautions Obama

Against "stifl[ing] America’s dynamism" by over-regulating the market (May 28th edition at 13):

[T]he Democrats’ present zeal for government activism often goes well beyond addressing market failures. The president and Congress seem to believe that they can surgically intervene in the economy but overlook the unintended consequences. They are willing to demonise business when doing so furthers their aims. In one breath Mr Obama praises a bank that wrote down its claims on Chrysler and in the next lashes out at investors who, as was their right, did not.

Members of his team believe that tougher rules for business are necessary to cool voter anger that would otherwise result in even more vindictive measures. But rather than tamping down the backlash, they may only feed it. They aggravate that risk by outsourcing rule-writing to Congress, as with the fiscal stimulus and carbon emissions and, soon, health care. Congress is much more likely than the executive branch to let special interests or demagoguery shape the outcome.

Too often, the result is overkill. Last December the Federal Reserve approved sweeping new rules on credit cards. Congress said it was not enough, and passed its own law which takes effect sooner and is even more restrictive. Some provisions restrain genuinely odious practices, such as charging interest on already-paid balances, but others prevent banks from tailoring interest rates to customers’ changing risks.

The approach to energy is worse. Under a mammoth carbon-emissions bill now working its way through Congress, 85% of valuable permits to emit carbon dioxide (which might all have been auctioned) will be given away free. This creates a huge new pot of favours for government to hand out, and new incentives for businesses to lobby. It will be costlier to fight climate change, while harder to avoid political favour-trading.

Mr Obama’s people seem sincere when they say they want to rid the government of its stakes in banks and carmakers as soon as possible. But in the meantime they are introducing new rules, such as limits on performance-related pay at banks, that could do more harm than good (see article). Nor can they resist using that ownership to push goals unrelated to the firms’ welfare, such as pressing banks to relent on foreclosures or carmakers to make alternative-fuel cars for which there is no obvious demand. On top of that, they are passing more stringent fuel-economy standards that favour light trucks over cars. A far less distorting (and transparent) way to cut carbon emissions and raise fuel economy would be a carbon tax--but almost no one in Washington has the courage to propose one.

These mistakes matter because, for all Mr Obama’s oratory, it will be very hard to reverse course in future. Regulations and interventions spawn constituencies that will fight any paring of their benefits. The federal government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the big mortgage agencies, in the interest of raising home-ownership. But long after that goal was met, the housing lobby barred almost all efforts to rein them in. Only massive taxpayer bail-outs have prevented their collapse.

America’s free-market capitalism has always been a model for the rest of the world. By all means fix its flaws, Mr Obama; but do not take its dynamism for granted.

Agreed--this is the danger of over-reacting in a fashion that would further impoverish us.