In the comment thread on a past post Oliver mentioned kids googling for answers. Well… in my meanderings on the web, I know Googling isn’t the only way kids get help on homework. One way I learn is Craigslist. From time to time, I check out Craigslist to see whether new physics tutors have popped up in Chicago area. Naturally, I see all the services people are offering.
Get a load of this:
The add is currently live at Craigslist.Mind you: it doesn’t take much of effort to put something on Craigslist and perhaps this is actually a spoof, fake or possibly even an attempt to catch cheaters. But…still.
I did not the Craiglist post refers people to “coursesub.com” for more information. Here’s a screenshot from the “coursesub.com” question and answer page:
(Wayback’s archiving doesn’t seem to work for this page. webcite archive attempt also seems to come up blank.)
Based on the posted reviews, it looks like the satisfied customers tend to be college students.
If this is really happening, schools are going to need to take steps to detect and block it. I’m not sure how schools can protect against this. Perhaps schools are going to need to start blocking VPN’s from their online homework pages. Obviously, schools also need to be sure you can’t be sending pictures of an exam to someone while taking the exam. (You’d think schools would already know this.)
The ads also mention “standardized tests”. I don’t know if that means AP/SAT/ACT/MCAT/LSAT/GRE or something else, but those would be the most common “standardized tests”. I’m not sure how a fake person gets themselves admitted to standardized testing. Presumably the substitute would at least have to look plausibly like the student who hired them.
Oy.
Open thread.
FWIW: The service seems to be doing well enough to advertise for people to answer phones and convert leads to customers. https://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/crg/5967682010.html
The guy in the show “Suits” was also subbing for females for their LSAT exam. Can’t remember how that worked.
Wow.
mark
I thought you’d be amazed. The fact is, ads by people who will take exams, do your homework and so on appear regularly at Craigslist.
They usually merely give an fairly anonymous email– (someone@gmail.com, cheat_for_you@gmail.com etc.). This is the first I’ve seem that attaches what appears to be a real name, has a link to a url with a static domain name and so on. Also: it seems to be an enterprise with some history– and advertising for employees! So, it’s a step beyond “stealth”. It at least seems to be right there out in the open!
Lucia,
That does amaze me. I’m must be more naive than I’d realized. Gosh though. It’s seems so perverse. I mean, I guess I get it sort of. You want a degree, you have to take the physics, maybe you expect never to use it in your job, ok I guess. But, as you say, to cheat so .. blatantly.. My assumption would be that the risk*punishment function would far outweigh the convenience. How hard is it, really, to squeak by with a C? I’m getting a stomach ache just thinking about being in the situation. Sheesh.
Thanks Lucia.
Not to mention, the guy who cheated for you hasn’t (far as I know) done anything illegal. I’d worry that he sort of has you by the short hairs if he decides he wants to blackmail you.
mark bofill,
If the guys business model works, he won’t resort to blackmail. He’ll want you to recommend him to your friends! (Only the friends that won’t snitch on you, of course.)
It’s very barefaced.
I sort of figure “real” schools already have stuff in place to make this strategy not work– at least to the extent they can.
Presumably students can’t take phones into tests given in large lecture halls– that would eliminate people taking photo graphs. Presumably homework can be online, but tests aren’t. And so on.
When I was a teaching assistant at Illinois, the philosophy was that the school should keep up to date on cheating methods and come up with ways to thwart them. This is much better than trying to catch people and dealing with it after the fact.
Yes: it appears most of what he does is illegal. Impersonating people to take tests might be illegal because identity “theft” laws may be broad.
My daughter is in a local community college right now. Quite a step down from Mannes and studying opera, but my bank account is duly grateful. Anyway – some of her tests are online. She just had an online Algebra test not all that long ago. So – that happens too apparently.
Identity theft laws, didn’t think of that. Can one be an accomplice to somebody stealing one’s own identity? (not necessarily rhetorical but not necessarily burningly important either) It would not surprise me if this were so.
Thanks Lucia.
When daughter was in grad school at Cornell (of all places – see first Craig’s List ad above) she taught undergraduate writing courses. One would think the students were there to learn to write. How naive.
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In the late ’90s, several of her students submitted ghostwritten papers which she detected by their clarity, something the miscreants had never quite managed in the work done in class.
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I’m not sure this was a dismissal level offense at that time, but think it is now.
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Daughter told me about the amazing approach of many undergraduates at Cornell which was more or less to establish a contract with the instructor at the beginning of the term whose conditions when met would produce an A. I suppose that’s pretty reasonable, but I was never grade driven.
One other observation about Cornell in 2004, probably not unique either.
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When I was there for her graduation we walked around campus. We came to a place where there were two parking lots, one full of BMW’s, Benzes, Lexi, and a whole lot of Mazda roadsters. The other had clapped out old Toyotas, Sentras, and the like.
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She asked me “Which one is the student lot and which faculty?”
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Bingo.
RB, I think LSAT takes fingerprints and the scam would fall apart very quickly. That show just makes stuff up in service of the plot. I don’t think they have a lawyer on the show. In one episode someone is on death row, and he participates in a new trial, while still on death row. I always thought The Practice was stretching things with having every criminal aware of every aspect of law(“You have a legal duty to …), but this show just doesn’t care.
As a parent I was concerned and was looking to hire them and see what they do. I have explored other tutors out there. So far very professional except for some secrecy. Now at the time they never proposed to me to actually access and do tests. This blog is the first that I see this is what they do.
Where does it cross the line? We need tutors and collaboration. There is a line and we must all look to find it.
There do seem to be some sort of laws against people people either hiring or taking money to take standardized tests. In this 2011 NYT article some people were arrested. That couldn’t happen if there wasn’t some sort of violation of law:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/education/more-students-charged-in-long-island-sat-cheating-case.html?ref=satcollegeadmissiontest
This 2012 says the SAT was going to start requiring kids to send photos to the SAT, those photos will be printed on the admission slip for the test and the photos and scores will be sent to the kids highschools who, presumably, could check.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/education/after-cheating-scandal-sat-and-act-will-tighten-security.html
So obviously, the big testing agencies are working on ways to prevent people hiring substitutes to sit for the test.
Frank,
You contacted this particular group? Or someone else?
It looks like these guys do not tutor. Tutoring services do exist.
I’m with mark – Wow.
I suppose homework has always been subject to such deceit, and online assignments just make it easier by removing the proximity constraint. Still, the blatancy is rather shocking to me.
HaroldW,
I’m sure there has always been cheating with homework. I’m not sure the “online assignment” feature is as important as the “easy to communicate with anyone anywhere”. A student in the US who is given printed worksheets could scan them, send them to someone who worked them and sent back copies of the answers. The student would still need to copy in their own handwriting– which perhaps would result in some learning to sneak in, but not that much.
Still: obviously, giving someone your log on and having them do your homework… that’s bold. If they are not already doing so, Universities might want to look at statistics for IPs used to do homework. If students are doing their own work most should have IPs from places like “comcast”, “att” or “thisUniversity.edu” ranges. Perhaps libararies and so on. Lots of VPNs…. maybe suspicious.
OTOH– kids might want to do homework from starbucks– in which case, it migth be a VPN. So you can’t be sure it’s cheating just because the IP corresponded to a VPN.
Someone would need to contact a better IT mind than mine to find solutions for hypothetical or real cheating by students doing online homework.
In other countries this is very common. Anyone hiring an H1B takes the risk that the person they are interviewing over the phone is not the one they will be hiring.
Testing Crimes: Lucia, the article you cited mentioned “felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.” There are so many laws today that if a prosecutor wants to find a way to charge someone with a crime, where there is an element of dishonesty, it is almost certain that something with some basis for a charge can be found.
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Also, I would be very surprised if the testing companies didn’t copyright their tests. If so, it seems as if there would be an element of theft as well as copyright violations. Probably wouldn’t be hard to fit this into a RICO action also.
JD
Mr. Jung’s first reviewer was able to concoct the following sentence:
“I HAVE NEVER DID ANYTHING LIKE THIS THROUGHOUT MY THREE AND HALF YEARS IN COLLEGE, BUT I MUST SAY ITS WAS WELL WORTH IT.”
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This raises some additional questions.
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1. Did Jung write this himself as an enticement to the semi-literate?
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2. Is it possible that this sort of skill level could be unaffected by the “three and half” years in college? Maybe there was a significant improvement.
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3. How would you write a paper in this person’s behalf?
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In the early ’80s I unwittingly (well maybe witlessly) hired someone who wrote like this. I was very soon fortunate to be presented with a really good reason to let him go. I did.
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Clearly it was possible to get a master’s degree from a nearby university yet be barely literate. The school did produce some competent architectural graduates but the ability to write coherently didn’t necessarily come with the degree. So their graduates alone among the others got to write a one page description of what they saw on the top of my desk. Some were insulted, some refused, and the ones who were hired chuckled, guessed what problem I was addressing and wrote away.
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My guess is that there are plenty of people out there who cannot do what you’d expect from their credentials. If you need to hire out of this pool, you need to come up with a way to qualify them. And DO NOT leave it to HR.
j ferguson,
You wonder where he went to school.
I wonder if the people who refused to write the paragraph knew they could not do so. Oh well… presumably they didn’t want the job all that much.
I did contact them but you are correct all they propose to do is the work no tutoring. I still am not sure if they are legit. I told them I was a parent and not a student. I was willing to pay their fee to see if their work was as good as my sons own work. It took them several hours to reply by then it was not worth the money to continue my research.
below is the email I sent them:
Autumn,
I am willing to pay for your services to see the quality of the work you are able to do in comparison to my sons own work. I wish to be honest with you. I am a parent of a student. I am not a student.. This has been a debate for quite some time. When a student is taking online courses how does one verify the work done and where does it cross the line. As this was not a test or a quiz but rather a problem; my discussion partners and I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what is out there. My son would have a heart attack if he knew what I was doing. As I discussed (I think with you) I was certain there must a be a network reaching to India to “assist” students. It is not as easy as I thought it would be as I contacted several “tutors” and it is very worry some on the legitimacy of the various operations.
I also counter with how do you get things done in this life. I have built many teams and brought the best minds together to get a job done and finding those minds and resources is in my opinion more valuable than actually knowing the material. If you are accessing students accounts and doing testing for students than you are likely crossing the line. It is probably not you from a legal sense but from a moral sense it is a consideration. How far do you get to go as a tutor is a debate..
Let me know if you would like to go forward. I would like your best answers and compare them with his results. I am not placing any type of final judgment on your operation there is a need for tutoring and collaboration where that becomes wrong is for us all to come together and decide.
———————-
In the end I decided to stay away from all “tutors” and services.
Lucia,
I knew exactly where he went to school, not IIT nor Champaign. He wasn’t an immigrant nor son of immigrants . Problem was exposed when he was sent out to look at a construction problem and wrote an incomprehensible report. If he’d been the only one, I doubt if I’d have thought of the writing test, but there were others.
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It could be that the refusers knew they had problems.
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Entry level architectural employees don’t write much so weakness in this area may not be exposed for years.
Frank,
Did she ask for lots of money? I’m guessing she did.
This particular enterprise seems to have at least 7 “tutors” available. Google has found a number of “Kevin Leung” ads and somewhere or another I saw them mention a number.
I’d say he’s also trying to ramp-up in size. His ads appear on Craiglist repeatedly– and get flagged and taken down. (I’ve seem several go up and down since last night. This one is currently live:
https://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/lss/6018381248.html )
So either he, a bot or an employee are reposting regularly.
Lots of tutoring services that tutor exist. For example: this craigslist ad is probably really tutoring.
https://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/lss/6012304911.html
You can see the difference: He’s going to meet the student at a library or cafe, he list his rate, he mentions high school and middle school. He’s going to spend time explaining. He may help more than a teacher likes– or not. But he’s tutoring. Kevin Leung…. no.
j ferguson,
I’m sure it’s possible for IIT and UI students to graduate while writing poorly. But you do have to take some classes where you need to write, so they will at least get feedback and dinged. If nothing else, the liberal arts distribution requirements are sufficient to force people to do some writing.
Though…. not if you can hire someone to do it all for you!
J ferguson,
Poor writing is common among chemical engineers as well. The problem is I think partly that the skill set needed to pass the technical courses they take doesn’t include good writing. Of course, they should have been decent writers before graduating high school, but that is a different issue. I like your requirement to write a comprehensible page…. that would have saved me from a couple of not so hot hires.
A classmate at Arch school was Latvian, born in Frankfort and arrived in US in early 50s age around 10. Father was architect. They lived in Milwaukee and my guess is spoke Latvian at home and in the Latvian community they lived in.
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School required passing English. He couldn’t, although I remember his writing was understandable, just weird. Coming up on graduation with Master of Architecture, he still hadn’t passed.
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He was, and is very talented and was as technically competent as possible for a fresh graduate. There was a debate in the faculty committee who made final decision on who got degrees – not a formality because you could be held on if you didn’t meet some aspect of their unwritten standards. They gave him his degree.
I maintained a 1952 Citroen for a faculty member which is how I know the details of this. There were a couple of faculty members who were very much against granting a degree to him because they thought having a semi-literate graduate would dilute the reputation of the place.
I should add that the desktop writing test was a derivative of an Eero Saarinen hiring test. He used to ask prospective new hires to draw a horse. The test was more for fearlessness than artistry.
Getting into engine school in Mannheim, Germany in 1946 required drawing a bicycle. I’ll share the story if anyone is interested.
Lucia,
Thanks for the help. They said they would do the assignment for $200. I was unaware of their test taking service until I found you. I did not judge and admonish them but that seems so wrong. It is hard to know how much assistance you can obtain for an online course. What are the rules? I am writing the college and asking them their rules. Paying to have the work done teaches nothing except as an example to where you made mistakes. Are students allowed a tutor sitting with them when they are working on homework? I used to collaborate with other students in my class and we would work through problems together. Then on the test we were alone.
Frank,
My guess is the most common rules is the students may not share their login credentials with others and the student does not have permission to authorize someone else to login. So, for example: if I have a student, they can’t just give me their login information and the student would be violating a school rule if they let me use those credentials to log in.
For now we’ll sidestep the legal question about whether the tutor using the credentials or the student ‘authorizing’ them to do so when the school has not violates Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I suspect the correct legal answer is “we aren’t entirely sure” with “the ‘tutor’ would be at greater legal risk than the student”. But that debate could go on and on and on.
But I would recommend that having a tutor login as a student and entering any answers would be considered cheating. At. A. Minimum.
It’s worth nothing: the fact that this service is using a VPN to disguise the fact they are logging in should tell you something. At a minimum it’s considered cheating.
Apparently academic cheating is much more common and tolerated in Asian culture.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000003562650/us-exams-upended-by-asian-cheaters.html
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https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/
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I read stories of Asians furiously typing in SAT/ACT questions into phones right after the exams. Part of this is likely the immense academic pressure from parents and the remote possibility that not all Asians are in the top 10% academically.
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Why waste time cheating on test when you can just forge your resume? We caught someone with a complete forgery after a bunch of red flags came up. A lot of small business don’t check resumes, they probably do now.
During online testing at UF my daughter had to have a live video feed that checked she was in a room alone during testing. Certainly not bullet proof but a step in the direction that the problem is getting serious enough that protocols are being put in place.
I’d like to tell myself cheating doesn’t work in the long run. It catches up with you eventually and you get exposed. That feels….so right and just. Then there is reality and experiences where people who cheated benefited tremendously.
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One of the people from my daughter’s high school wrote a college essay which was straight out of the liberal sappy tell them what they want to hear genre, personally saving three legged HIV infected puppies from conservative dog eating cannibals in Haiti or some such goo. She posted it on Facebook and it was basically a total lie. Her penalty was Ivy league admission.
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During senior project time in college a bunch of us were doing work on a department VAX which only had two terminals. Naturally about 15 of us waited until the last couple days to finish it. Result was lining up 5 deep behind each terminal and waiting indefinite time periods for the people in front to finish their project before it was your turn. Waited about 5 hours. I ended up behind someone of questionable competence and he was a bit of shyster. Looking over his shoulder I decided “helping” him out was in my best interest. Eventually he just offered to let me sit in and do it. Offered accepted. Hilariously he was hired directly out of school by the FBI. Perfect. Haven’t figured out if I should feel guilty or not for that one.
Tome Scharf,
Googling around: Some students have been caught because testing centers have cameras in the monitors used by students. So cameras at testing centers seem like a very useful thing. Especially if faces of test takers are compared from test to test and/or can be compared to a studentID on file.
If you google around you can find all sorts of cheating aids for all sorts of strategies. You can also find equipment that would make useful counter measures if someone was trying to take the counter measure.
Example: Bluetooth Pen with hidden control button & spy earpiece
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Bluetooth-pen-spy-earpiece-micro-nano-magnetic-2015-MODEL-strongest-cheat-exam/261839147911?_trksid=p2141725.c100338.m3726&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20150313114020%26meid%3D17595b64480d49d0b14852c2ae0b0670%26pid%3D100338%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D30%26sd%3D261839264168
I think the idea is you use this to communicate with a confederate outside the room. They send info back to you. It seems you need your phone within 10 meters. The two ways to thwart it seem to be: 1) detect radio frequency transmissions in the room, or require kids cell phones to be turned in and stored in another room (or in a faraday cage.)
The thing with any method of implementing cheating is that it is better for those giving tests to be aware of the methods and thwart them rather than trying to deal with it after the fact.
On whether people benefit from cheating: I’m sure some do. Especially in areas where “credentialism” is rampant with the “credentials” being mostly a hurdle. (Some licensing for professions falls under this category. There are all sorts of licensing requirements for things like decorators, landscaping and so on. )
When I was a grad student in the mid-70s we were told to be very visible when proctoring exams in a large bio-science class. Walk around, watch students, discourage cheating — because the professor didn’t want to be subjected to the judicial process if a student were caught cheating. On the other hand, another bio-science professor gave take-home essay exams that we graduate students graded. He figured that any student wanting to cheat was just hurting himself in the long run.
Today online courses have opened up new avenues for cheating. Accreditors are beginning to inquire about the methods schools are using to thwart it. The threat may dampen enthusiasm for this teaching method when schools are found to be doing a poor job at it.
Gary,
Well… on the one hand maybe. On the other hand, the ‘long run’ can sometimes be a long time away. And sometimes lots of ‘short run’ gains can compensate for a lot of what might go wrong in the “long run”.
At UofI they has some light training for TA in which we learned some strategies to thwart cheating.
The policy was that it was our job and that of the professors prevent it from happening. So we were told known popular cheating methods and ideas to thwart.
One of the “biggies” for cheating was called the “power triangle”. It was used in large lecture classes especially those that had multiple choice exams. It was mostly used by Fraternities– because they had a large social network. Anyway, the method involved having a group. The “smartest” kid sits at the front point of the triangle. The next two smartest behind him on either side. The next three behind the two and so on.
The methods to thwart included assigned seats, and/or having more than one version of the same exam– questions in different order or with different distractors.
Other things we were advised to do: Don’t allow backpacks into the test room, do baseball caps (because answers would be written on the underside and they made it hard for proctors to see shifty eyes).
There are lots of things that can be done to prevent cheating– but people running tests have to want to bother. Many don’t bother to think about how to prevent cheating at all.
Tom Scharf,
While cheating is universal, I find your second link in Comment #159522 to be illustrative of why the Sailer Strategy of targeting immigration in all forms (plus political correctness) was and will continue to be a successful one for Trump.
RB,
What do you see as the takeaway message from Tom Scharf’s second link? That the writer’s account leads to the conclusion that
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That racial/cultural stereotypes exist and will continue to be exploitable politically?
Something else more complicated and nuanced?
Tom, could you explain more about what your intended takeaway was?
oliver,
My takeaway is along these lines
This is not to deny that there is a lot of cheating going on in the process for international admissions to the U.S. Or that there is student cheating here as well. After the financial malfeasance in the quite recent past, I would have thought that talk of a culture of cheating was behind us. Apparently not.
RB: “That racial/cultural stereotypes exist and will continue to be exploitable politically”
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The Left claims that it favors diversity. (which is questionable as a general proposition). However, assuming arguendo that some on the Left support diversity in reality, if Hispanics or Asians increase diversity, it must mean that in some way their cultures are different. I think that very few people would argue that the “diversity” of Asians or Hispanics goes in only one direction towards positive traits and that there are no negative aspects to either culture. If that is the case, then it is legitimate to discuss the both the positive and negative aspects of all cultures and compare cultures to each other.
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For instance, the Muslim culture/religion/ideology predisposes more people to terrorism than does the Chinese culture because terrorism committed by Muslims is much higher than that committed by Chinese people.
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In the context of examining the Chinese educational culture, it is fair to argue that the Chinese upper class students may have more sophisticated cheating mechanisms than do American upper class students. Maybe on examining the question, that will not turn out to be the case. However, on the upper end of the Chinese society, the value of education is much higher to students and parents than is the value to American students and parents. (These Chinese students spend much more time studying after school and being prepped than American students) That being the case, the temptation to cheat among the Chinese students is higher than American students which could lead to different behaviors. This article has some background with respect to the Chinese (Shanghai) educational system. http://www.cnbc.com/id/40549016
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So, again it is fair game to look at and compare both cultures as opposed to taking the snowflake, political correctness tack that cultures can’t be compared and contrasted unless it is the White male culture that is being attacked.
JD
JD Ohio (Comment #159538)
Do you mean questionable in that the Left actually favors diversity, or that the general porpostion of diversity is questionable?
One could use a similar argument to claim that southern white American culture predisposes people to (performing) lynchings. A possible fallacy here is in assuming (simple) causation merely because there is correlation.
The “fairness†of such arguments is heavily dependent on the weight of evidence behind them.
By all means compare away. But it does seem a strange juxtaposition to argue for fair viewpoints while calling people with a different viewpoint “snowflakes†AND simultaneously invoking to the “White male as victim†narrative.
Oliver: “I would assert that the “fairness†of making such arguments [potential sophistication of Chinese cheating mechanisms]is dependent on the weight of evidence behind them.”
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I agree 100% with this. However, the Left tries to shut down the discussion before it even begins. There was a large movement in Great Britain to ban Trump from traveling there because of his positions. Pam Geller who criticizes Muslim terrorists is banned from Great Britain. The Left tries to shut down argument over the way the world is by applying superficial and meaningless labels, like xenophobic to shut down debate rather than discuss the world as it is. Of course, Leftist faculty try to stifle debate by seeking the disinvitation of people like Condoleeza Rice and George Will.
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A good place to start on Muslim culture would be http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/# and its list of Muslim terrorist attacks. Is there any other religion/culture would a record that is anywhere near as bad as that of Muslims?
Oliver: “One could use a similar argument to claim that southern white American culture predisposes people to (performing) lynchings.”
This is a totally silly argument and deflection in today’s world. I don’t know of any lynchings occurring in the South for at least 60 years. Maybe, you could name some. However, from 1880 to at least 1910, my first inclination is to believe it is true. It is revealing that you go back many years to make your point and don’t even try to compare cultures as they exist today.
JD
JD,
You seem to be again taking a very monolithic view of the Other, for example, the “Left.” Some voices in the Left try to shut down discourse, in my opinion, wrongly. Other voices argue that we need to listen and discuss honestly.
The fact that I went back many years to make my point was simply to draw a parallel with a familiar topic. If you think it reveals something about me then please elaborate. If you think time has negated or mitigated the belief and social structures that once enabled lynchings, then please also say so.
If the lynching example was too remote, we can talk about now. What is the relative chance today that one will be harmed by a Muslim terrorist on U.S. soil as opposed to being shot by a white gun owner? How about being hit by a white drunk driver? What is the chance that a well connected white person will get in a school or get hired to a job on a special “recommendation” by a relative or family friend with “pull,” completely bypassing entrance exam test scores?
Does this somehow invite judgment on white Americans? Personally, I don’t buy that. I think that’s the easy answer. But, if we are going to pursue uncomfortable topics as part of a “fair and honest discussion,” why don’t we investigate all those things?
Oliver: “If the lynching example was too remote, we can talk about now. What is the relative chance today that one will be harmed by a Muslim terrorist on U.S. soil as opposed to being shot by a white gun owner?”
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This is not a fair comparison. The comparison should be what is the chance that any person will be harmed by non-muslim terrorists (the relevant category) as compared to Muslim terrorists. You are conflating crime with terrorism. The chances of being harmed by terrorism at any time are not great, but if you are harmed by terrorism, the great odds are that it will be Islamic terrorism.
On the other hand, there is a risk of tremendous harm (9/11) that may occur at any time and that affects society as a whole. (For instance, airline travel has not been the same since 9/11) My basic point is that the US as a country has the right to determine which groups of people would benefit it most. 1,000,000 Chinese or 1,000,000 Indians would benefit the US much more than 1,000,000 Muslims, many of whom have no interest in assimilating into the US or being a part of a pluralistic society. (See Pew survey of 2007 https://www.bing.com/search?q=Pew+survey+of+Muslims+2007&pc=MOZI&form=MOZLBR )
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An interesting comparison would be the rate of crime among Muslim Americans as opposed to other groups. I do know that in France 70% of the people imprisoned are Muslims. It is fine by me to compare apples to apples. I don’t know what the Muslim crime rate in the US is.
JD
JD Ohio: The latest version of the Pew survey of Muslim Americans here http://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/muslim-americans-no-signs-of-growth-in-alienation-or-support-for-extremism/
As far as I can see, it’s consistent with a picture of assimilation into American life over time along the same lines as for previous immigrant groups.
Chinese: I wonder if you would include those people in the Beijing office of the Chinese company I was working for at the time who reacted to 9/11 by dancing around & taking the day off to celebrate?
Oliver/JD,
I think it’s difficult to collect more than anectdotal evidence about whether one group cheats more than another. This isn’t the sort of thing anyone often collects statistics on. This seems to be as close as possible to a study
https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-more-than-domestic-ones-1465140141
The gist seems to be foreign students at university cheat more (or at least get caught more) than American ones. If you google you’ll find many newspapers picked up the same study around that time– so it’s the one study, not a bunch of replications.
Wow Szilard. It sounds like the guys in your Beijing office didn’t like us. Could you tell us some more about what happened?
JD
I suspect it’s low. I have no statistics.
j ferguson: It was partly because people saw it as payback for the Belgrade embassy bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade
That bombing was a huge thing in China, from what I saw, and nobody that I talked to believed for a moment that it was an accident.
I confess that I didn’t love China. If ever there was serious conflict over Taiwan or the Spratly’s or whatever, I think the enthusiasm for war would be widespread and fervent.
if you include ‘Black Muslims” there seem to be active Muslim communities in many of the urban slammers, Joliet for example.
But I think these aren’t the folks we’re worrying about.
Oliver,
My take away is only the interesting contrast that while Asians are the most academically successful, they are also the most likely to cheat. One could form a theory of causation in either direction. I think it is the higher pressure to succeed. I don’t think there is much politics here.
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It may be more correct to state international students, Chinese in particular, have a high rate of cheating.
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“Public universities in the U.S. recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, versus one report per 100 domestic students, in a Wall Street Journal analysis”
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-more-than-domestic-ones-1465140141
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“Cheating among Chinese students, especially those with poor language skills, is a huge problem,” said Beth Mitchneck, a University of Arizona professor, in an interview with the publication.”
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http://fortune.com/2016/06/06/foreign-students-cheating/
I find it tiring when people attempt to construct social rules where stereotyping has to be all positive, all negative, only allowed for certain groups, not allowed at all, certain stereotypes are banned etc.
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The human brain stereotypes as a shortcut. The reason the word “culture” even exists is that groups of people have different characteristics. One does not need to state “not all Asians cheat” and “not all black people are violent criminals” and “not all Muslims are terrorists” and “not all Trumps supporters are racists” to have an interesting discussion on group characteristics. And getting tut-tutted for even bringing it up is just denying reality.
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Asian people study hard and work hard as a group. They suck at football and basketball. Asian men are not seen as sex symbols in US culture. Oh the fainting spells!
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Cultural? Genetic? Being small doesn’t help your success in physical contact sports. Aaaaagghhhh! Sacrilege, what about Linsanity! Well, what about the US beating the Chinese 60-26 at the half in the last Olympics?
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If there was an Olympic event for sock manufacturing, the Chinese would beat the US 60-13. And what about ping pong, errr, table tennis? Don’t even get me started on badminton.
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It is of course OK to negatively stereotype the Nazis under any and all social constructs. Every last single one of them was evil to the core.
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Where stereotypes are wrong, they need corrected. Where stereotypes are not statistically significant, it should be noted. Stereotyping does not need to lead to biased treatment of individuals. Asians are allowed to try out for the basketball team and still get a fair chance.
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Banning the mere discussion of stereotypes does not eliminate the problems associated with them or prevent the brain from making them, and selectively allowing only certain stereotypes based on political preferences is the worst solution of all.
I’m struck by this– not because of the nationality of the students– but by the incongruity of the teacher who– evidently– doesn’t take an obvious step to impeded this:
She says she sees clusters frequently and these are followed by evidence the group shares answers– wrong ones in fact. Presumbly the shared wrong ones stand out like sore thumbs while the right ones would not be disguised.
If this happens frequently, I can’t help wondering why Adele doesn’t break up the clusters by assigning seats during the test.
Later in the article, another professor named Stacy says she does assign seats– randomly. She also has 4 versions of the test. These have been the main known ways to break up “cluster” cheating and “power triangle” cheating. Different versions often don’t have to be complicated. Merely moving the same questions around can make cheating harder.
Oliver, JD Ohio-
For information on religious affiliation in US federal prisons, you could start here:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-prisoners-less-likely-to-be-atheists/
It’s directly dealing with atheists, but has charts and links that might answer your questions/speculations.
Of note: 8.4% of federal prisoners are Muslim, over representing by 14 times the general population.
I thought they threw people out of school (higher education) for cheating. Maybe not everywhere?
I visited my alma mater in 2015 for first time in 30 years. There was a new student union. It was medieval-tudor-rustic, looked like something at Hogwarts. From the look of it, it was likely very expensive. Student body there appears to be at least 50% Asian.
Student parking lot was full of Miatas and BMW’s same as Cornell. I asked about the student union (we hadn’t had one) and was told that the Asian students were mostly from Asia and paid full tuition and apparently expected this sort of thing.
I have no idea whether this is true.
I did visit my old Physics 117 class (wave tank one semester and particle physics second semester). lecture hall was full – half full in 1960 – almost entire class from appearance was Asian.
Jan’s alma mater, suburban Boston women’s college, struggles mightily to have a few non Asian students. Apparently gringos are no longer willing to bust their butts to get into these places.
Maybe as someone here has pithily suggested, the fear of poverty has gone from gringo culture.
as the great man is wont to say, Sad.
Oliver,
What are the odds that a young black male will be shot by another another young black male as compared to being shot by a white cop? I would submit that the media coverage over the past two years did not reflect these statistics by at least two orders of a magnitude. One could argue that since cops are the government that this problem is different and should be escalated. One could also argue that a citizen wants to be safe from all bullets, not just those from white cops, and the current political focus for public safety is incoherent.
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Fixing the social issues with black on black violence is difficult and there are no easy answers. Now in theory, fixing the imported Islamic terrorism problem is easy, just use the blunt policy tool of no Islamic immigration. Numerically the current terrorism threat is pretty minimal barring more black swan events such as 9/11, but the public needs to buy that argument, which they apparently don’t. So immigration bans are ineffective solutions to non-existent problems in my opinion, but if it makes the public feel better then maybe it’s effective in the spiritual sense. Same thing goes for body cameras on police.
The best path to status, success, and respect in China likely now includes a US education. 1.4B people feeding the US university system with a Chinese GDP trend that looks like an exponential over the past 50 years. There are many ways to go with this, and one of them is it is mostly good financially for US schools and sending back hordes of “indoctrinated” Chinese to China is probably good for the US in geopolitical terms. The next Tiananmen Square may not end so well for the government.
Tom Scharf:
Good. That occurred to me too, after listening at great length about the loss to us of their freshly educated talent.
I’m not sure that their exposure to our current fit of xenophobia will serve our interests. But maybe it will remind them of their own. Or maybe they’ve outgrown it.
On another note, I’ve wondered what they will do if they ever have a serious labor shortage and need to staff up with Filipinos.
How Sophisticated Test Scams From China Are Making Their Way Into the U.S.
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“Middle-class and wealthy Chinese parents are putting enormous pressure on their children to gain admission to prestigious U.S. colleges,†she said. “Add to that, there is a cultural disconnect—many Chinese families don’t realize how seriously Americans take these kind of infractions.â€
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“Zachary Goldberg, a spokesman for the College Board, which administers the SAT, said his organization canceled the January SAT exam at 45 test sites in China and Macau over security concerns.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/how-sophisticated-test-scams-from-china-are-making-their-way-into-the-us/474474/
Szilard (Comment #159545) wrote: “The latest version of the Pew survey of Muslim Americans … it’s consistent with a picture of assimilation into American life over time.”
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The survey seems to say very little about assimilation over time. What it does say is not encouraging. The only comparisons of native born vs. foreign born Muslims seem to be in the section laughably headed “Support for Extremism Remains Negligible”.
7% of foreign born Muslims in the U.S. support suicide bombing compared to 11% support among U.S. born Muslims. Even after correcting for the 16% support among Black Muslims (about 1/3 of the U.S. born group), it seems that support for suicide bombing is higher among those born here.
Al Qaeda is viewed favorably by 2% of immigrant Muslims and 10% of U.S. born Muslims (11% of Black Muslims). Very disturbing.
.
It also shows that U.S. Muslims are split as to whether most immigrant Muslims want to assimilate. So it seems that a large minority of immigrant Muslims do not want to assimilate. That is worrying, although it might be that is normal among immigrants.
kch (Comment #159554): “8.4% of federal prisoners are Muslim, over representing by 14 times the general population.”
But that seems to be heavily biased by prisoners getting religion after incarceration.
Tom Scharf (Comment #159551)
It might an interesting contrast to examine, but I’d think you’d need more than just anecdotes about “Asians.†To start with: What kind of “Asians� (There are a lot of different kinds of Asians out there.) What confounding factors have been considered? (And, from a more research-oriented viewpoint, what factors may not have been considered?)
Continuing the thought: are we talking about international students here or (U.S.) Asians here?
Is it just Chinese international students with bad English skills?
Lucia points out that there are ways of dealing with cheating, particularly when it is as obvious as some of the examples being given. Why does the professor think this is a “huge problem†as described?
Tom Scharf (Comment #159552)
Do you feel that all stereotypes should be allowed, and no one should object to any kind of stereotyping? Or is there a usefulness vs. offensiveness balance? If so, does it change depending on whom you’re talking to?
No one is “tu-tutting†anyone. I’ve simply asked you be clear on what you’re trying to say. You may not even have intended to stereotype (although from further statements it seems you were) and in any case you may not have meant anything as an offensive stereotype.
I’ve also stated that I think the “fairness†of potentially offensive statements (by whomever) should depend heavily on how well they are supported by evidence. You can of course dispute that principle.
If you’re trying to attract mock outrage, you need to try harder.
But back to the blog you linked earlier. One of the reasons I asked what you meant by it is this: the author seemed to be arguing that although Asians are discriminated against in school admissions, it is not as bad as it seems because Asians cheat a lot.
So how do you “try out for the basketball team,†academically speaking, and get a “fair chance†when someone looks at the resume or the exam score and say, yeah but I think there’s a high chance that this person cheated based on the fact they are Asian? (Any kind? And how would they know?)
Tom Scharf,
There is only anecdotal evidence, but in conclusion, the blogger you link to uses indirect evidence of university admissions policies, as also stated in this comment .
As addressed by a commenter he/she also says the “stereotype is accurate, although not absolute” suggesting it is not 100% but largely true.
Let’s take up the “corroborating” evidence of university admissions. While Asian-Americans are over-represented relative to their population in top universities, rightly or not, there is no evidence that admissions is based on implicit discounting for cheating. This is what a member of MIT’s admissions committee says :
Elsewhere
Ron Unz in the American Conservative described Asian-Americans as the “new Jews” which a commenter alludes to. In response , the blogger says this
So, this applies to second generation Asian-Americans (not international), growing up here in America. Also, it is not just about the “high stakes” but about “cultural values”. And surely carried over to life later.
Tom Scharf,
The College Board cancelling may be partly evidence of more cheating in Asia but it may not be. The thing is: The stakes are higher for people who both want to get into a school and want to immigrate.
I’m glad ETS is trying to do something
Analytics on voice samples could go far in detecting the hired test takers who each presumably take multiple tests.
I’m sort of wondering why they don’t go to a thumbprint taken on test day as well. Some people might not want to give thumbprints– but you could indicate tests scores along with “thumbprint verified” or “not verified” indications. Then schools could decide what they think that means. Thumbprints could be compared — which should tend to find gunmen on tests where voice recognition is not a possibility.
Oliver
US Asians count under “domestic”. The foreign do not include US Asians, but would include all foreigners including Swedes, Russians, Irish, Ethiopians and so on.
The thing is that the current demographic of “foreign” is largely but certainly not exclusively Asian. Even if it were only Asian: Asia is huge. The article doesn’t distinguish between Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Thai and so on.
Oliver, this is actually a yuge problem and it’s a problem no matter how you look at it. Obviously it’s totally unfair to ding Asian’s in general if Asian’s don’t cheat any more than anyone else. This is obvious — even from a general sort of detached “probabalistic Bayesian” view. All you’d achieve by that would be to reduce the quality of your student body or employees– which is not what anyone should wish to do.
If Asians do cheat more — especially if they cheat a lot more…. then you have a different and much more complex problem. Because from a “Bayesian” point of view, he category Asian would be informative. But it’s still going to be the case that not everyone cheats and more over, you can’t just take a set deduction applied to everyone in the category.
If you did apply a uniform “cheating penalty” for the entire ethnic group, the most likely outcome would be to admit the Asians who did cheat and consequently got ridiculously high scores and to screen out the ones who did not. (Then once the cheaters were preferentially, if you tracked students you’d probably conclude that Asians with scores of ‘X’ tended to be over-rated and…. moreover, tend to cheat. And why? Because you admitted the ones who cheat and turned away the ones who did not. Oy!)
As far as I can tell, the only cures for any “cheating” problem are:
a) Catching and identifying individual cheaters.
b) Organizing things to prevent situations where cheating is possible.
Of these (b) is the one to think about most. ( Doing (b) tends to make it possible to do (a) anyway.)
(And, of course, in context of a class, (b) should be done in way that doesn’t inhibit learning. As many know: it drives me nuts that high school students no longer seem to get their tests returned. I suspect the reason they aren’t returned is teachers want to reuse the test– which only opens the door to making cheating possible!)
Unless you catch the individual cheaters there is no way to do anything fair either to the students or to the school which is hoping to have a talented student body.
One hopes ETS figures out ways to prevent cheating at the SAT/AP etc level. Because the whole point of those tests is to create a uniform metric can partially compensate for the fact that an “A” at one school may be a “B” at another.
(Here’s an old story– 2008. In the US. Some proctors slept while administering the test!!)
https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/on-education/2008/07/11/college-board-cancels-one-schools-ap-scores-after-cheating-scandal
It is possible/probable that Chinese cheat more but the numbers are low enough that it isn’t a huge problem. It still needs addressed. There are things in Chinese culture that are just different. Openly selling pirated DVD’s and commercial software on the street. Microsoft sells almost nothing in China relatively but their computers all run Windows. It just isn’t seen as (very) wrong in a society where intellectual property belongs to everyone. It’s one big happy team China. China’s industrial espionage and outright IP theft is pervasive. Almost everyone in engineering has a story of Chinese IP theft. When I was in Malaysia you could buy movies before they were even released to theaters at 1000 look alike stalls in a mall. Cracked Photoshop, Autocad, etc. for a $1. There was no attempt to police it. I think this is beginning to change. Japan is totally different.
Lucia,
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Based on the declared religions of federal prisoners, Muslims represent ~5% of the total prisoner population, but only 1% of the population in the USA. For declared Catholics, the federal prison population (~24%) is almost exactly the same as the whole of the USA (~23%). For declared protestants (all sects) the rate of Federal incarceration is somewhat lower than the whole of the USA (~38% prisoners versus ~45% of the total population). Declared atheists are about 4% of the general population but less than 0.1% of the Federal prison population.
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According to a Pew study (2009) 41% of surveyed scientists are atheists, and 7% of surveyed scientists refused to make a declaration. It is interesting that some 21% of the population in the USA do not practice any formal religion, but most of those do not consider themselves atheists.
Muslim percentage in prison is skewed by conversion to Islam in prison mainly amongst the 37% black population. Plus: the black population % in prison is 3 times the population % in the USA.
Lucia,
I should add that ‘declared Muslims’ in Federal prisons includes African-American’s who have converted to Islam, not only Muslims from Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
RB,
Cross posted.
I don’t really buy into there is significant bias based on an assumption of Asian cheating, I haven’t really seen evidence to support it. I think it is mostly just a virtual sea of look alike strong performing candidates. There is very strong evidence east coast high end schools discriminate against Asians.
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In one of my all time favorite NYT op-eds, they ran a piece that somehow manages to state that the discrimination against Asians needs to be fixed, but by restricting only white admissions more, not anybody else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-unfair-advantage-in-admissions.html?_r=0
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“SAT scores are strongly correlated with parent income”
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I dislike that statement (I know you didn’t make it). One word: Genetics. It is dogma in the social sciences that this shall not be discussed out loud and studying it is likely to get you kicked off the reservation pronto. I note the euphemism “many factors at play”.
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I’m not a fan of “holistic” admissions. I see this is as just non-transparent intentional bias. Transparent intentional bias would be a big improvement over that. It’s a clear avenue for outside influence and corruption. It makes admissions even more tilted against the white/Asian middle class IMO because the well connected know all the ways to make themselves look more holistically desirable to an admissions office. Son, you need to spend a summer in Africa to prop up your resume.
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I think my preference would be an admissions lottery with a clear prerequisite of what it takes to get in the lottery. Perhaps giving blacks 2 spots in the lottery would make it transparent and make the SJW’s happy. When you get rejected from a holistic process with no feedback it seems mysteriously tainted.
Tom,
“There is very strong evidence east coast high end schools discriminate against Asians.”
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Well, sure.
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And they discriminate for the offspring of the very wealthy, for the offspring of alumni, for any identifiable racial or ethic group that would not be “fairly represented” if admissions were simply based on scholastic merit (grades and test scores), and against any identifiable group who would be “over-represented” if admissions were based strictly on scholastic merit. Many (most all?) colleges and universities are run by people who care more about equality of outcomes than equality of opportunity, and that is plainly evident in their admissions policies. I think the appropriate public response is drastically reducing public support for those colleges and universities… including research grants and taxpayer funded student loans.
Tom Scharf,
When their is bias and people want to conceal bias it’s very difficult to identify the reason. There was a time– the 50s for sure– when schools would just state their bias smearing the ‘out’ groups willi-nilly. Nowadays… not so much.
You can’t necessarily take statements by schools at full face value– they know which reasons are “acceptable” and which “not acceptable” and spin their statements accordingly. Sometimes people don’t even know their own biases and even convince themselves they don’t have them.
That said: other than that one blogger, I haven’t heard rumors that the reason for bias against Asian’s is suspicion they cheat as a class. If that was the suspicion, I would hope schools were coming up with way to identify which individual students cheated so the rest could be cleared.
>What is the relative chance today that one will be harmed by a Muslim terrorist on U.S. soil as opposed to being shot by a white gun owner?â€
The chance today one will be harmed by a Muslim terrorist is lower than the chance one will be harmed by a Muslim terrorist after you admit a million more Muslims.
I’m not sure if they still think this, but when I was in college people were saying SAT is not predictive of college performance according to a recent study.
It didn’t occur to me to counter, so if there is a group that scored 600 on the SAT and a group that scored 1400, you think they would do equally well in college?
Lucia,
One unspoken bias that is likely, in my view, is the perspective of the “grinders” vs the “talented”. Something along the lines of this ex-Princeton Prof’s sentiments
SteveF (Comment #159572)
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Dead-on as far as SWMBO’s alma mater. They do a lot of handwringing about it in their alum letters. Problem is that were they not to throttle by ethnicity the whole student body would be Asian. One could ask what’s wrong with that. I did, and got a nasty look from one of wife’s friends.
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I’m not so sure that hoping for equality of outcome is necessarily a bad thing in their business. you could say that offering remedial work for the folks who can’t cut it in parts of the normal curricula is a motion in that direction. I’m not certain that that is bad either.
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I’m pretty sure I could not get admitted to the place I went if I were to apply now.
MikeN,
They usually are obfuscating and saying the SAT isn’t a super great predictor of outcomes, but miraculously tend to leave out that it is still one of the best predictors along with high school grades.
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Things like drug abuse, mental breakdowns, work ethic, inability to adapt, financial stress, etc. aren’t very well correlated with SAT scores and take out plenty of people.
Re: Chinese Cheating on Tests: Here is my admittedly unscientific take on the issue of Chinese Cheating on college entrance examinations, based partially on my familiarity with my former stepdaughters’ higher end education in Beijing through age 14 and following education in high school in the US and college in the US. (currently a sophomore)
….
College admissions are a very high stakes endeavor. For instance, my step-daughter was faced with going back to China at one point when she was off the rigid track of education in China. Once you are off the prescribed track, it is impossible to go to college in China. My step-daughter threatened to commit suicide. Also, she was pushed very hard by my ex-wife, and it wasn’t unusual for my step daughter to be crying for fear of failure on her way to school in the morning. My take is that by far most Chinese don’t cheat, but that there is little shame in cheating and that many Chinese view the cheating we have been discussing here as the way many Americans would view cheating on income taxes. I believe that what would enable sophisticated cheating in China is that those doing the cheating would feel little risk that anyone would turn them in. That combined with the enormously high stakes at issue for the students leads to a situation where there is a comparatively high temptation to cheat.
JD
j ferguson,
I was hired by my college to tutor underprivileged kids who were admitted (most with a full scholarship!) and failing badly their freshman year. My experience was they they were so far from prepared for required freshman courses that most of my efforts were hopeless, and a waste of my time and the school’s money. There were a few exceptions, of course, but they didn’t need tutoring. The flunk-out rate was very high (>90%?). It was the terrible waste that bugged me, plus the fact that kids who could have benefited from those admissions spots didn’t have that chance.
A nice summary of immigration issues facing the US. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/opinion/the-immigration-debate-we-need.html?src=me&_r=0
….
There are many good points made by the Cuban refugee author. Here is one of the best:
“The immigration debate will also have to address the long-term impact on American society, raising the freighted issue of immigrant assimilation. In recent decades, there has been a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which the economic status of immigrants improves over time. In the 1970s, the typical immigrant could expect a substantial improvement relative to natives over his or her lifetime. Today, the economic progress of the typical immigrant is much more stagnant.
Part of the slowdown is related to the growth of ethnic enclaves. New immigrants who find few ethnic compatriots get value from acquiring skills that allow more social and economic exchanges, such as becoming proficient in English. But new immigrants who find a large and welcoming community of their countrymen have less need to acquire those skills; they already have a large audience that values whatever they brought with them. Put bluntly, mass migration discourages assimilation.”
JD
J ferguson,
One other thing. In activities where there is no overt discrimination (like professional golf), Asian women, and especially Korean women, are so dominant that you now find women of European heritage don’t win many tournaments, and few are even among the leaders at many tournaments. Would it be fair, or even reasonable, to discriminate against those Korean women because professional women’s golf is now “too Korean”? I don’t think so. I can’t really find any credible justification for the kind of blatant admissions discrimination practiced by competitive universities.
Hi SteveF,
It is a delight to completely agree with you re: discrimination in uni admitting. I do notice that snow flakes are not filtered out of the incoming stream at a lot of the E Coast schools, wife’s included.
Did you see the remark on this issue by Chancellor at University of Chicago, something like “If you expect to be protected from the views of people you disagree with, don’t apply here.”
RB,
He’s basically saying there is a magic secret sauce that many have that can’t be measured by standardized tests. This is probably partially true. Some people have bizarre instincts that lead to success (pet rock!), but mostly it is a combination of talent, luck, funding, risk, and timing that lead to the next big thing. Many times this is standing on the shoulders of others and is a seemingly marginal improvement from existing technology that explodes. MySpace -> Facebook. Arpanet -> Internet. AltaVista -> Google.
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It is striking how few “next big thing” guys reproduce their success on a second or third attempt. There just aren’t many Steve Jobs out there. The willingness to fail spectacularly helps.
j ferguson,
“Did you see the remark on this issue by Chancellor at University of Chicago, something like “If you expect to be protected from the views of people you disagree with, don’t apply here.â€
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I did see that. I expect he is either nearing retirement or will be soon pushed out by the faculty… I hope not, but that is my guess.
Tom Scharf,
It is a “she” but I agree that there aren’t many Steve Jobs out there. I also think it is a mistake to think one could be created by raising the right way.
As for things you can only say after you quit….Former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy recently:
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“But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.”
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Worth reading the entire thing.
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/21/the-threat-from-within/
Tom Scharf, It’s amazing how few of the preludes to the next big thing are financially successful. in addition to the ones you list, there is Sun Openlook, the Xerox Parc Mouse, the various pre-MS Word word processors, maybe CP/M, Wright Brothers, IBM 286/386,
Its the guys who figure out how to turn a great idea into a commodity that make it big.
j ferguson,
Not sure I understand the 286 reference. Intel was developing the whole family of processors starting with the 4004 chip. See for example http://www.computerworld.com/article/2535019/computer-hardware/timeline–a-brief-history-of-the-x86-microprocessor.html
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Maybe I misunderstand what you wrote.
SteveF –
I’m guessing that the reference is specifically to IBM PCs, as opposed to Intel. IBM got left behind by Compaq etc.
SteveF and HaroldW, I was thinking of how IBM invented the basic PC physical layout, the MB design, the interfaces, the whole thing. Was it the 1985 AT. Clones which were pretty much totally compatible with the older 286/386 hardware and ran the same software were available in 1986 but not a lot cheaper. I know i had a Sperry (Mitsubishi) which was a very nice machine and IIRC could be set to higher clock than standard AT, by 1989 again IIRC there were 286 components you could assemble into a pretty good clone, cost $1,200 and sell for $2,800 in Miami. Then the big guys got into it and anyone could buy a 286 for our cost of parts.
And IBM was busy with the PS2 – which i thought had great potential, better bus speed etc, but never caught on and I doubt if ever cloned.
I’d bet anything that IBM never made a lot on PC’s but i don’t know.
j ferguson,
OK. Yes, IBM never was serious about the PC… too wedded to the mainframe; they missed the train at the station, even though they were there. My guess is they found the idea of tough competition and thin margins in the PC market not very interesting.
SteveF,
The Compact Cassette model was out there. IBM could have licensed their designs. i think that Compact Cassette licensing fee was very low. Phillip’s idea was that it was better to have 5% of a billion dollar market than all of a $300,000 market. You may remember the Bell and Howell system which I think also ran at 1 7/8 ips on 1/8 inch tape and could feed cartridges to the player from a stack. It was pretty slick and of course was swamped by Phillips.
It could be that IBM thought of this but never imagined the market for pc’s would become so big. I certainly didn’t and I was in the business at the time – very interesting vacation from shortening pencils. I had no idea that a GUI would make so much difference, especially when I could beat original windows with command line and control key tricks for word processing.
Was I ever wrong.
SteveF (Comment #159567)
” Declared atheists are about 4% of the general population but less than 0.1% of the Federal prison population.”
Atheist percentage in prison is skewed by conversion to God in prison. God get me out of here?
angech,
“Atheist percentage in prison is skewed by conversion to God in prison. God get me out of here?”
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Putting your rhetorical question aside….. do you have any evidence of frequent conversions of atheists in prison? (Not rhetorical.) Usually those who self describe as atheists have given the subject considerable thought. I mean, it is not like describing yourself as an atheist is going to be socially helpful, and more often just the opposite.
Just watched Trump’s not-state-of-the-union address. Quite presidential. Very centrist. Strong and convincing calls for unity. On the other hand, I think he blew away the record for “Lenny Skutniks”.
j ferguson,
“…but never imagined the market for pc’s would become so big. ”
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Probably not. In ~1985-1986 I purchased a Commodore 64 and wrote a simple word processor in assembly language so that my wife could write and print her doctoral thesis at home. I sure recognized the advantage of personal computers by then. By the late 1980’s I was “administering” a department wide network based on a “Tandy” Unix based computer with multiple ‘dumb’ terminals wired to the Tandy computer. We jumped at the chance to buy desktop PC’s as their prices started falling. Much faster, more efficient, and more practical. You are right about the graphical user interface being very important… it transformed a “foreign-language-like” interface with a steep learning curve into an intuitive interface. Made a huge difference.
Mike M,
Yes, but did you see the camera pans over the Democrats? They hated most every word of it…. there was even some booing and shouting. Voters won’t likely be too kind about that sort of thing.
SteveF,
Yes, I noticed that. But it seemed liked they did not pan over the Democrats when Trump was getting applause for something the Dems might actually like. One time that they did, it looked like some were standing and applauding.
SteveF (Comment #159595)
do you have any evidence of frequent conversions of atheists in prison? (Not rhetorical.) No
Usually those who self describe as atheists have given the subject considerable thought.
At high school in a redneck Australian school in our final year we had 4 atheists out of 30 kids and 2 Labour party [Democrats to you] supporters when surveyed in an English class.
Very high percentage for those times though more common in Australia now.
Sadly I have given up atheism to become a Jedi and have voted Labor all of my life since changing to that persuasion at University, despite their green policies.
Great speech by Trump but a lot of sideshow gallery appearances.
Childcare, very costly and like world peace all the politicians endorse it.
Make sure seat belts are on and reach for the oxygen masks, they should be coming down any minute now.
I think this pretty well sums up my impression of the speech:
Trump tries on normal.
This speech gives one the notion he might be able to grow into this job. I’d suggest dumping the campaign toadies he’s got on staff, and replacing them with full adults. But this is a start.
His proposed military spending increase isn’t particularly huge, even in nominal dollars. It’s the fifth largest measured in those terms, but obviously you have to adjust for inflation.
http://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-proposing-one-largest-defense-increases-history
Why have the speech at all? Is this typical for incoming presidents?
I find the State of the Union annoying enough with all the applause and props.
It’s not fair to the Democrats to force them to applaud all this or shown sitting silent while the other side is applauding.
“It’s not fair to the Democrats to force them to applaud all this or shown sitting silent while the other side is applauding.”
Politics is a two party game in America.Fairness is not for sale.
Would you say this for the Republicans when Obama was doing the same?
Trump was appearing to reaching out to the Democrats like Obama reached out to the Republicans.
Let us all work together.
Sounds good.
If there was ever a “watch what I do, not what I say” case Trump just made it. The idea of trying to get rid of onerous regulations is so wonderful I don’t know where to begin.
I suppose giving EPA an enema would violate some existing regulation, but someone needs to do it. The lesser body of water rule which apparently is stayed right now seems an excellent example. under its spell, you can find the pond in your backyard federally regulated and not be allowed to build a gazebo in it without a permit. It may be that I’ll be delighted to buy SteveF dinner when Trump is still in office at the end ot this term – maybe mind you.
MikeN,
No one has to go to that speech. The chief justice does have to go to the inauguration. But no one has to be at this speech. No one.
They all go voluntarily.
No one needs to applaud, nor not. Politicians are there for the photo-op. They want that.
I loved the ladies in white. At first we thought it a reference to the Cuban ladies in white who are resistors of the regime there, but it was to the American Suffragettes.
It can’t be any mystery that the democrats don’t favor this guy. A very classy choice of how to show it.
MikeN,
The only way Trump gets to put the screws to Democrat Senators in all those center-right States he carried is if he bypasses the MSM, and an address to Congress is the most effective way to do that. He pitched his supreme court nominee Gorsuch, and pointed out how much he is like Scalia. I expect now a lot of those Democrats will buck their leadership and vote to confirm Gorsuch rather than have Trump campaigning for their opponent and telling voters the incumbunt is not interested in protectiong them from an over-reaching government.
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And nothing about the ‘fake news’ MSM. By not even mentioning them (after regularly calling them biased at best) he is trying to minimize their influence. I think in that he will succeed… they really are horribly biased, even compared to… say…. climate scientists.
Mike N: I look at it as pulling a page from Ronald Reagan’s book. As SteveF points out, when you talk directly to the people, you bypass the media gatekeepers.
Trump wanted to launch his agenda. This was a great way of doing it.
Carrick,
Campaign ‘toadies’ Bannon and Miller were primarily responsible for helping Trump with the content and tone of the speech he gave last night. Are those among the toadies you think he should get rid of?
SteveF: I haven’t seen any reporting on who wrote that speech. Have you?
In any case…Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka were responsible for the disasterous executive order. They are both completely morons. Trump needs better people than this.
Carrick,
see: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-speech-backstory-235552
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I understand that lots of people disagree with Miller’s political views, but he is no moron.
I’m with Carrick on Miller. Saw him on the Chuck Sunday show. No idea about Gorka.
Trump is like a box of chocolates…
I will pull my own teeth and give the media credit for not being reflexively anti-Trump in their coverage. Best line:
.
Trump is finally presidential. That is to say, “capable of delivering a boring speech full of meaningless platitudes.â€
SteveF, thanks for the link. It looks like as an organization they now understand the important of vetting things. It moves forward.
Here’s a slightly different perspective.
It suggests Ivanka (and possibly Jared) played a role in shaping the substance of the speech. That sounds right to me. Bannon got his trillion dollar (probably “go no where”) infrastructure. But much of the rest of it more strongly parallels the themes that Ivanka’s been pushing.
As to Miller—as I see it, his problem is he knows a lot less than he thinks he knows. He’s only 31 so there’s still a chance they can turn him into a heavy hitter…but he probably needs some more practical political experience, like maybe a state legislature term followed by a HOR seat. As long as he is just writing prose, he’s harmless. Putting him in a position to advise on important issues of policy or law is setting yourself up for more disasters like the travel ban EO.
Sebastian Gorka on the other hand is a running joke. Literally there are hours of reading entertainment here. Obviously you don’t want people like that on your team.
Stephen Bannon—my concern about him is that he’s mostly run a news organization aimed at a niche market. I think he wants to be viewed as an intellectual founder of a new movement, but I’m not sure if he knows what the movement should look like, let alone have the intellectual ability to pull it off. Some of the things that come out of his mouth sometimes sounds to me a bit like pseudo-intellectual garbage. I get suspicious when they can’t state what they mean plainly especially when they are talking to a general audience.
Hopefully Trump will come to trust the heavy hitters he’s brought on board, especially McMaster. Running the Executive Office is big league, you can’t commit to leaving light hitters in key positions.
As to the speech, it was certainly Trump’s best to date. I’ve seen very positive responses from CNN & WaPo… the NYT predictably not so much. I wouldn’t go as far to call it “one of the great speeches”, but= I admit I’m a tough audience.
Corrected link for Gorka
Carrick,
Miller is very young for the influence he (apparently) has with Trump, but then again, so is his daughter and son in law. My guess is that Trump has probably seen the advice of enough smart youngsters to be somewhat discriminating.
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WRT Bannon: He is a bit of an enigma. Yes, some of what he says seems a bit disconnected, but he does have experience in several fields, and is no youngster. Once again, I suspect Trump is better able to judge the quality of advice he receives than most give him credit for. Trump has surounded himself with a mix of people… ranging from heavyweights (Mattis, Tillerson) to newcomers. I don’t think this is a bad thing… good management requires that you hear from a wide range of people. I will continue to hope (and honestly expect) that Trump will make mostly prudent choices.
>Putting him in a position to advise on important issues of policy or law
is what got Trump the endorsement of Jeff Sessions, a dagger to Ted Cruz’s chances.
Carrick,
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WRT Gorka: He obviously has lots of critics. But the most vocal of those seem to me little more than the “progressive” establishment of academic ‘intellectuals’. He clearly has a much broader background of experience than most of his critics. But his key point, and one that I am strongly supportive of, is that Islam represents a real problem for the world in the 21st century.
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Yes, most Muslims would make fine neighbors, present no threat at all to the West, and are fine with ‘live-and-let-live’. But there is a significant minority which believe Sharia should be instituted everywhere… including, to start with, death to any Muslims who wish to leave Islam, killing all homosexuals, public beheadings, etc, etc. (Supported by Pew research in Muslim countries.) Some of those folks really do believe 30 virgins and eternal bliss await them if only they kill the ‘enemies of Islam’.
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Or as Sam Harris has many times noted, Islam is ‘a mother-load of really bad ideas’. Gorka at least gets this part right, even if he is far off base with other things.
SteveF:
Um … no.
Having looked over his stuff, no I wouldn’t exactly say that. And recognizing that radical Islam play a role in Middle Eastern terrorism is pretty low hanging fruit. A fifth grader could have come up with that, but it’s pretty much all he is offering.
Carrick: “And recognizing that radical Islam play a role in Middle Eastern terrorism is pretty low hanging fruit. A fifth grader could have come up with that, but it’s pretty much all he is offering.”
….
Wish that was the case. Obama wouldn’t even utter the phrase, radical Islamic Terrorism. If it had been addressed directly, maybe the Republican primaries would have turned out differently.
JD
Carrick,
” A fifth grader could have come up with that, but it’s pretty much all he is offering.”
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Well, maybe people should listen more to fifth graders.
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Most of the world’s conflict today, and certainly most of the violent conflict, is directly related to radical Islam. Reality is not required to be politically correct, contrary to the ideas of ‘progressive thinkers’. And that is why Obama’s ‘PC’ foreign policy was such an unmitigated disaster… not just for the West, but a disaster for much of the Muslim world, where violence, religious extremism, and poverty (those three are NOT at all unrelated!) combine to torment the innocent.
JD Ohio,
” If it had been addressed directly, maybe the Republican primaries would have turned out differently.”
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I expect if it (and a few other crazy PC ideas) had been addressed directly by Obama, we would have been listening to President Hillary arguing with Republican critics, and simultaneously praised as a goddess by the MSM, for the last 13 weeks. Thank you Mr. Obama for helping to avoid four horrific years of Hillary’s idiotic policies.
The question for Carrick is exactly was different in trumps speech to Congress from what he said all along. More polished perhaps, but I saw no difference on substance than his statements all along. For a lot of never trumpers they were surprised because they never really got past the emotional revulsion
David,
I do think there are substantive differences between Trump and ‘main stream’ conservatives. Of course, those differences are very small compared to the differences between Trump and main stream ‘progressives’. Trump has been pretty consistent in the things he has said he wants to change. Those changes are a lot tougher for ‘progressive’ activists to accept than conservative activists to accept. The conservative ‘never Trumpers’ like Bill Kristol are quickly becoming irrelevant… an end they very richly deserve… and probably good for the country to boot.
SteveF, My skepticism is about why the media establishment thinks this speech is so great compared to previous ones. My hypothesis is that most of it is just the immune system of any entrenched elite when confronted with a true advocate of change. It happened to Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin R. too. Maybe they realized that in a war with the Donald, they might lose too.
>death to any Muslims who wish to leave Islam,
Maybe liberals will care more about this if we can get some Muslim leaders to declare that Obama should be given the death penalty if he sets foot in their country.
MikeN,
The fact that Obama never was a practicing Muslim might make a difference. Then there is the impracticality of any leader saying they want to kill a US President…. very bad for ones long term health; it could bring on Hellfire, if not brimstone. But the truth is, in some countries where Islam is dominant all the horrible things in Sharia (beheadings, cutting off hands, stonnings, throwing people from rooftops, public floggings, etc) are actually practiced, and have broad public support. Worse yet, even where law is secular (like Turkey), many devout Muslims would like Sharia instituted. Liberals can, and I expect many will, continue to ignore this reality while simultaneously humming Kumbaya. I won’t.
Carrick, irt your “low hanging fruit”, you should recall that the previous administration spent 8 years denying that radical Islam was a problem.
And speaking of jokes, I think an honest look at Gorka shows he is not a joke, but I do wonder how funny you find the Obama joke where he has gotten away with pretending Russia somehow compromised our election? Or the Obama joke of secretly funding and helping Iran under the guise of a nuclear deal that is no deal? That Obama is such a prat. And the real joke is on those (how did he put it?) dependable gullible supporters to believe him no matter what.
JD Ohio:
How does uttering a phrase change anything?
[Well it does… but I think not in the way you’re thinking.]
When you’re President of the United States, there’s this “separation of church and state”. If you make certain statements, like “we’re going after Islam, the religion”, that puts you in a constitutional bind when your policies go under judicial review.
I don’t see how uttering the words beyond that does anything helpful. So Trump says those words. What can he do now he’s said them that he couldn’t have done if he hadn’t uttered those words “radical Islamic terrorism?”
(I can see it working the opposite, restricting to some degree what he attempts to do, if it’s seen as a violation of the First Amendment).
David Young:
Well, we live in a democracy, so Trump can’t just make any of this stuff he wants to happen, happen just by declaring it so.
If he’s going to do anything other than engage in tweet wars or channel his angry drunk uncle impression, he’s going to need to build public support for those ideas. Reagan was very good at this. Trump has shown it’s possible he can do it too. If he follows Reagan’s template, he might even succeed.
hunter:
Well, Trump spent most of eight years insisting Obama was born in Kenya, delegitimizing Obama in the process for many on the right. So let’s try not riding that high-horse.
Whether Russia “compromised the elections” is still being examined. But it is certainly worthy of being examined.
Carrick,
There is always value in speaking clearly about reality. If those who hold and act upon beliefs which are utterly inconsistent with 21st century civilization are not clearly identified as a problem, then action is inhibited. Further, stating clearly to Muslims that sharia represents a threat to 21st century civilization puts them on notice that it is in their best interest to reform their religion from within.
Carrick: “What can he do now he’s said them that he couldn’t have done if he hadn’t uttered those words “radical Islamic terrorism?—
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He can address the actual problem in a way that is not superficial. To address the root cause of a problem, you must correctly identify that cause. If, like Obama, you think that radical Islamic terrorism is not to do with Islam, but is instead about economics or politics, then you can not formulate effective policies.
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What really matters is not the words, but the thinking behind the words. But the words are indicative of the thinking, and thinking is influenced by what one is, or is not, willing to say. So being willing to publicly identify the problem correctly is a big step forward in actually dealing with the problem.
David Young,
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The significance of Trump’s speech was not just a matter of speaking style. It was far less confrontational than his campaign speeches or his inaugural address. For instance, he laid off attacks on the establishment, except for one brief reference to draining the swamp. He reached out to Democrats in a away that he has not done previously and his calls for unity and cooperation were much stronger than what was previously on display.
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Also, the style of the speech was significant. By appearing “presidential” he likely went a long way towards undermining the media narrative that he is out of control and does not know what he is doing. And he did that well enough that even the main stream media had to admit it.
Carrick,
Words aren’t action, action is action. Action matters. However words infer what one’s action might be in the future. Obama’s handling of Islamic Jihad was always to diminish its importance from “JV team” to “not an existential threat” to self banning the term “radical Islam”. This ended up accurately reflecting his future actions, which was to ignore the problem almost completely, pull out of Iraq too soon, let ISIS fester until it exploded, and then take only the most minimal action that he could get away with politically in Syria.
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Syria was/is a disaster. For Syrians, the Middle East, and Europe. Obama’s words or lack of words didn’t directly cause this. I do believe Obama openly and unwisely telegraphed his reluctance to “kinetically engage” in Iraq or take ISIS seriously. This may have played into ISIS’s battlefield strategy that was wildly successful. Everyone expected Obama to do very little in response, and they were correct.
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A bit of saber rattling also gives people the impression that you are taking their safety seriously, and not letting political correctness override national security concerns.
.
Why are people so concerned we might offend mainstream Islam with mere words that are entirely justifiable while we are dropping bombs on Muslim countries? THAT might actually make them mad. I can understand an argument that bombing Muslims angers them. There is almost no calls for ending drone attacks and an air war on ISIS et. al., but people think the words radical Islam are what matters? It’s not the words that matter, it is the incoherent thinking behind not saying them that worries people. It leads one to believe the problem isn’t being taken seriously.
Carrick: “When you’re President of the United States, there’s this “separation of church and stateâ€. If you make certain statements, like “we’re going after Islam, the religionâ€, that puts you in a constitutional bind when your policies go under judicial review.”
…
The First Amendment doesn’t protect people who kill for religious reasons. Additionally, his own administration argued that Catholic institutions that opposed birth control still had to provide it. Further, Obama had zero support for the Rule of Law as evidenced by his ridiculous use of the concept of “prosecutorial discretion” to not only not enforce immigration laws but to actively implement measures that were directly contrary to the law. The more likely reason for Obama’s inability to speak the truth was that the Democratic party believes that in bringing Muslims to the US, it is importing future Democratic voters.
….
I would add that if the First Amendment did protect Islamic Terrorism that would be a valid reason to exclude Muslims from the US. Otherwise Islamic Terrorists would have free reign to kill anyone who drew a cartoon of Muhammad.
JD
The unholy marriage of Social Justice and Environmentalism has apparently produced an offspring called the Environmental Justice program which is on the chopping block at the EPA.
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The response is 100.0% predictable. John Coequyt, a campaign director of the progressive environmental group Sierra Club:
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“To cut the Environmental Justice program at EPA is just racist,” he said. “I can’t imagine it’s an office that runs up much cost. I can’t describe it in any other terms than a move to leave those communities behind. I can’t imagine what the justification would be, other than racism.”
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http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/02/politics/epa-programs-donald-trump-budget/index.html
Tom Scharf,
“The response is 100.0% predictable.”
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Of course. Politics is all about advancing policies that you believe in. Many agencies like the EPA (and to a lesser extent, the ‘intelligence community’, State Department, IRS, etc.) have become the natural homes for bureaucrats who support specific policy agendas. For the EPA, that means explicit support for the agenda of groups like the Sierra Club. They have chosen to advance their policy agenda via bureaucracy (and the resulting quasi-legal regulatory nightmare) rather than via law.
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The drama and howls of protest will continue so long as the elected administration disagrees with the policies favored by ‘bureaucratic consensus’… which is, of course, ‘left/progressive’ in all things. Broad and deep defunding of the Federal bureaucracy is the only real answer.
Since Trump made his speech, Iraq has reformed itself and been made safe. Therefore, it is now going to be removed from the travel ban “Obama list”.
Current DC drama overshadowing this NY Times story yesterday.
RB,
That leaves us knowing exactly nothing more than we knew yesterday. Unnamed people met with other unnamed people and discussed unknown things during unspecified times at unspecified places. Curiously it can’t be confirmed or denied since nobody has a clue what it is and no evidence was provided. SSDD.
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If these people knew what was intercepted, they would have known it already for months, and still only state things in the vaguest of terms. Why the secret squirrel stuff? Exactly nobody says they have credible evidence of anything and they have all the motivation in the world to leak it if they did.
.
Until there is something there, there is nothing there.
Tom Scharf,
I agree. Unless Congress takes up the task with their subpoena powers, it is unlikely that we will discover any “smoking guns” if they do exist in the Russia story. That seems unlikely as long as Republicans control Congress.
RB,
I doubt the US congress is going to willingly open that closet door even if they believe nothing is behind it, there is little upside. If the left keeps trying to re-prosecute the election it probably works to the right’s favor at the moment anyway. This is also a classic case of understanding what the desired outcome would produce, President Pence? Does that improve things in the left’s favor? The best chance for improvements in the left’s governance is still Trump being Trump.
RB: “Current DC drama”
If all of these potentially illegal events occurred, why didn’t Obama release the information? It would have been entirely proper in potentially a redacted form.
JD
JD Ohio:
If he had, would you have believed it?
JD Ohio,
I think there are different aspects to this:
1. Russian hacking and interference.
The NBC story regarding this suggested that “they [ Obama admin] didn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn’t worth it”
2. Potential Trump campaign contacts
– Per the NY Times article (Comment #159645), this evidence was being processed and growing as Inauguration Day approached
The bigger question, in my opinion, is whether there is any compromising information regarding Trump’s links with Bayrock capital etc. It may not be possible to get to the bottom of that without Trump’s tax records.
J. Ferguson: “If he had, would you have believed it?”
….
If it was confirmed by other sources, circumstantial evidence or by actual taping. (which is what I understand has occurred in some circumstances)
On my end, I see nothing intrinsically wrong with Sessions meeting with the Russian ambassador by virtue of his role on the armed services committee. On the other hand, one can imagine many improper things that COULD happen in a meeting with a Russian Ambassador. He said that he met with about 25 ambassadors.
JD
From the NBC article: “Intelligence sources emphasize to NBC News that there is no evidence that Donald Trump collaborated behind the scenes with Putin or the Russians.”
….
This is all that I care about. If Trump wasn’t involved it isn’t that big of a deal. The US has a long history of interfering in the elections of other countries, including being complicit in the assassination of Diem in Vietnam.
JD
I agree with you JB on it being perfectly reasonable for a senator acting as an advisor to a campaign to meet with foreign ambassadors. i would hope that other senators can be found who also have met with the Russian ambassador.
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There is certainly a tendency in the press to make a big deal out of something done every day, especially if it seems novel to them, in their great innocence. Well maybe from time to time.
For the life of me after reading descriptions of Sessions’ testimony I cannot understand why he didn’t just belly-up-to-the-bar and agree that he’s had these meetings. They must, in some cases, have been on senate business and other cases to share with the ambassador what Trump administration’s approach to issues of concern to Russia might be.
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What can possibly be wrong with that?
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Unfortunately, there are a lot of children out there writing editorials who have no idea how the world works or how it has to work.
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Nuts
We are witnessing a coup attempt led by Obama. He desperately wants to hide what he did in office and prevent the exposure and dismantling of his work, good and bad.
Forgot and just realized that Obama interfered in the British Brexit election just recently by implying that if Brexit passed that the u.s. would make trading between the British and the US more difficult. The Democrats are being very hypocritical.
JD
The cynical use of McCarthyism on steroids is fascinating. Obama holdovers are fabricating leaks and feeding it to a corrupt media without compunction. My hope is that Pres. Trump simply discloses the records of the dirty deals team Obama did…directly to The American people bypassing the oligarch media. The most iron7c thing I read today is the WaLl’s tagline. It is beyond parody.
Re: j ferguson (Comment #159654)
I suspect the Sessions issue is going to fade with his recusal from a non-existent investigation, but the WaPo journalist had this update:
At this point I doubt anything the 21st century Citizen Kane publishes. But even if accurate, so what? Sessions honestly answered the question in the context asked. The investigation we desperately need however is the penetration of Islamic and Iranian interests. The lack of evidence supporting the Obama led witch hunt in comparison with what Obama did to America and our allies is insurmountable.
Jferguson, Sessions was not asked if he met with the Russians in that question, so there was nothing to own up to. The questions and questionnaire that was being referenced were about meetings dealing with the campaign, and the particular question was ‘what would you do?’
RB, WP had to put a lot of work into that phrasing to get the Venn diagram just right.
Mike N.
Apparently the comedian is not also a lawyer so the question that everyone thinks was asked was not actually asked. FWIW, there is a discussion of this in WaPo which explains this so clearly that even I understood. I would also add, that since Sessions was not asked with precision he had no obligation, even moral, to answer that he had himself been in contact with the Russians.
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At the same time, this seemed pretty plain to me.
Sessions:
Apparently this statement doesn’t rise to a level which could be successfully prosecuted as perjury because it can only be understood in the context of Franken’s question. I doubt that Franken even suspected that Sessions had met with a Russian nor was his question particularly hostile to Sessions. It didn’t seem to me an amateur attempt at a prosecutorial enquiry.
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I cannot believe there was any conspiracy with the Russians beyond simply trying to discover how much Russian conflict with US was in response to Obama’s policies and might become flexible when he retired. I would have hoped people would be asking these sorts of questions.
This Sessions-is-a-Russian Spy bit of fake news is just this week’s
Hate Of The Week, orchestrated by the only groups that are demonstrated to be actively working to delegitimize the American election.
Next week the oligarchy of lazy corrupt journalists, angry democrats, and billionaires worried about their power will fabricate in whole or in part yet another Weekly Hate to manipulate their constituents and increase readership.
So NBC is reporting that since Sessions was intimidated into recuse himself, an Obama appointee who is *still on the job* will be in charge of the “investigation”. Trump was a fool. He should have demanded the wholesale resignations of all Obama appointees in Justice, especially after it became clear there were Obama holdovers working to hurt his Presidency.
He and Sessions should have seen this coming.
The first thing Bill Clinton did in 1993 when he took office was to fire all DoJ appointees.
The democrats will *never* let this political hack who helped to cover up the Clinton corruption be replaced and will scream bloody murder if he is now removed from office.
This may very well end very badly. The democrats have back doored their way into what is in effect a “special prosecutor” under their control. The only way out of this is to appoint an actual special prosecutor to take the case, but special prosecutors have a way of becoming very loose cannons. Obama’s central achievement in all his scandals and scams was to never be maneuvered into a special prosecutor.
How effin’ stupid and rookie of team Trump and Sessions.
hunter,
Ex-Obama officials, remaining Obama holdovers, of which there are many… including those who have ‘burrowed’ into the Civil Service, most all the MSM, all the bureaucracy, and nearly all Democrats in Congress are 100% opposed to the policy changes Trump wants to establish by executive order and by law. They will use whatever means available to prevent those changes, no matter the honesty of those means. For too many ‘progressives’, ends justify means. So it has always been. So it will always be.
.
There is no way this is going to change; their opposition is complete and implacable. If Republicans in Congress, and especially the most conservative Republicans, are unwilling to stand with Trump, then neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans will accomplish the things they claim to want. The behavior over the past month of the most conservative members of the House and Senate suggests to me that they are unwilling to compromise on most issues, always making the good the enemy of the perfect. They are fools who are throwing away the chance to help the country extricate itself from 8 years of very damaging government. They may not get another.
SteveF,
8 years? Only 8 years? I’d make it more like 80. This period has seen a relentless increase in regulation some probably worthy but a lot senseless with compliance and providing proof of compliance almost certainly onerous for the regulated.
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My specific complaint is that incorrect or inapplicable imposition of most of these regulations must be contested through the processes of the regulating authority before a resort to the courts becomes available. It can often take 18 months to several years to satisfy this limitation all the time with the meter running and whatever was contemplated delayed.
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I suspect the general public has no idea about this nor maybe even some of our colleagues here.
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It dawned on me finally that Trump and his associates do understand this and that they will set about to sunset or reverse the sillier stuff and maybe get this whole regulatory beast cut down to what is really needed; and no more.
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Certainly no-one else has done it, especially not Obama.
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The affliction is a disease which has so long persisted that regimes republican and democrat alike have lost touch with the magnitude of its burden, how it greatly increases the viscosity of those who must get something done must contend.
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I first thought when Obama said “You didn’t do it” the next statement might have been “How the hell could you have in the face of all of our wonderful rgulations?”
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Surely, SteveF, you’ve wanted to do something which was made difficult or impossible maybe not so much by the regulation itself but by the process to comply with it.
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You may see me standing on a soap-box here. I regret that more people haven’t themselves confronted this.
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A lot of the worst stuff started in the Nixon administration.
Fake news from the Washington Post: “We reached all 26 members of the 2016 Armed Services Committee to see who met with Russian envoy Kislyak in 2016. Sessions was the only one.”
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Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has met with Ambassador Kislyak in her capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee. And unlike Sessions, she lied about it. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/claire-mccaskill-met-russia-envoy-twitter-235607
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And who is this mysterious “Russian envoy Kislyak”? Kislyak is the Ambassador, not an envoy. I guess that getting titles right is too difficult for the WaPo.
j ferguson: “It dawned on me finally that Trump and his associates do understand this and that they will set about to sunset or reverse the sillier stuff and maybe get this whole regulatory beast cut down to what is really needed; and no more.”
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Better late than never. The federal bureaucracy figured that out a long time ago, which is why they are working so hard to take Trump down.
J ferguson,
Yes, the growth of the ‘administrative state’ has been ongoing since FDR, with only minor blips (like Ronald Reagan). The problem stems mainly from two distinct failings: 1) laws which are too broadly written, and 2) the complete failure of Congress to rein in regulatory excess that stems from too broadly written laws. The EPA and its grotesque regulations are the poster child, but out-of-control regulations arise most everywhere, including at the state and local levels. Opening a non-retail business where I live has become an impenetrable thicket of state and local rules, ‘studies’, requirements, and approvals, along with huge cost (like infrastructure impact fees). All of which seem designed to ensure such businesses are not ever going to be opened. There is a big open area not far away from where I live which was zoned ‘light industrial’ 20+ years back… and sits completely vacant today, save for a car dealership which didn’t need the “light industrial” zoning. Local politicians openly run on “resisting too much growth” (which actually means resisting all growth via rules and regulations). Yes, they actually say that, and usually they win.
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I pointed at the last eight years of Mr Obama more because he added insult to injury: he consciously and actively broke the law to govern as he wanted via the administrative state. He tried to bypass constitutional limits on his authority wherever those limits interfered with his desired policies. Mr Obama was more destructive of the rule of law than any president in my lifetime….it was a naked unconstitutional grab of power and terribly damaging to the fabric of the nation. Restoring the rule of law is even more important than curbing destructive regulations. Actually enforcing immigration laws? Check. Actually building physical boarder barriers long ago authorised by Congress? Check. I hope this is the start of a trend.
SteveF: “the growth of the ‘administrative state’ has been ongoing since FDR, with only minor blips (like Ronald Reagan). The problem stems mainly from two distinct failings: 1) laws which are too broadly written, and 2) the complete failure of Congress to rein in regulatory excess”
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I think the biggest deregulation was brought about by the Carter Administration. But most of the Carter regulatory reductions were processed during the latter part of his term and took effect on Jan. 1, 1981. So Reagan got the credit. The federal government actually grew enormously during the Reagan Administration. The big pause in growth was under Clinton (thank you, Newt Gingrich).
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A third big factor in the growth of the administrative state has been the courts. Bureaucrats interpret laws in ways that were clearly never intended and the courts uphold the interpretation (Chevron deference). Also, groups like the NRDC sue the government and the government rolls over, thus preempting legal challenges to the new overly broad, court ordered rules.
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Hopefully, Trump will succeed in draining the regulatory swamp. But a lot of nasty, poisonous critters are fighting hard to protect their habitat.
SteveF,
Nitpick: It’s ‘letting the perfect be the enemy of the good’, not the other way around as you had it.
DeWitt,
Yes, that is the aphorism, but I didn’t say that, I said they are “always making the good the enemy of the perfect.” Not exactly the same thing. But I think the meaning was clear in any case.
Mike M.,
Carter’s deregulation (Airline Deregulation Act (1978), Staggers Rail Act (1980), and the Motor Carrier Act (1980)) eliminated industry rules which were in place only to protect incumbents and inhibit competition. These were (of course) welcome changes, and did help the economy greatly in the years after their passage.
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Reagan wanted (with less than great success) to reduce the kinds of government regulation which add cost and burden to businesses with little or no economic benefit, like most EPA regulations. The situation has only grown progressively worse since Reagan, with at least some of Obama’s EPA rules already blocked by federal courts as apparent violations of existing statutes. I completely agree that the Courts have for along time allowed bureaucrats (via Chevron) to bypass Congress and flout the clear intent of laws by allowing agency “interpretations” which are blatantly contrary to the original purpose of those laws.
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But I think that is just another manifestation of the Supreme Court’s long dominant ‘progressive’ view that you can interpret both the Constitution and existing laws in as Orwellian a fashion as is politically convenient. The only way to stop the continuing damage of the Chevron ruling is for Congress to pass a law instructing the Supreme Court to defer to Congress’s original intent rather than some bizarre interpretation by a regulatory agency.
It’s exactly these type of pointless DC knife fights that got us Trump to start with. The people in DC, the media, and partisans really care about this and nobody else. You get sucked into the DC vortex and nobody ever returns.
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Instead of doing something useful, everyone is looking for Russian spies with secret pen cameras around every corner. Burn the place down and setup a secret government tent camp in Idaho and start over. I think I’d rather have the Politburo and Pravda compared to this sometimes.
Dewitt
I suspect both aphorisms exist. And the saying is true in both directions– depending on context.
Sometimes, the drive for perfection results in people having… nothing. Or nothing good. Because the scope just keeps rising before anything is “released” because nothing is perfect.
Sometimes the willingness to settle for “good enough” means no effort is taken to improve things. And so no “R&D” at all a– nothing ever improves. That’s also bad.
We visited Havana a month ago. While there someone remarked that Raul Castro (the guy who’s running the place right now) had said that the problem with the Cuban economy was not so much the embargo but the very large and corrupt bureaucracy.
So we aren’t the only ones. And in our case we don’t need it to suck up college graduates who would otherwise be unemployed. Well, maybe those who would otherwise be unemployable – there’s a distinction there.
This is probably a perverted suspicion but here it is. Congress, being mostly comprised of lawyers, creates legislation enabling regulation devised to encourage litigation, and hence increase employment of attorneys.
ps. Bravo Stevef, it is just so.
Tom,
“Burn the place down and setup a secret government tent camp in Idaho and start over.”
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Almost sounds like Atlas Shrugged. 😉
j ferguson,
I don’t think Congress intends to make work for lawyers. The difficulty in politics is the same as in large businesses that are no longer privately owned. Lots of ideas sound like “nice” ideas. And they are– provided you are getting someone else to pay for them or do them.
As a trivial example:
My house is a Tudor . We have nice big windows in the front. A very dear friend of mine who always has “ideas” looked at it and said she thought it would be oh.. oh… so charming and wonderful to have flower boxes under all windows on the front… in pairs. So this would be at least 8 on the upper level and 4 on the lower. (We have tall paired casement windows.)
Charming… sure. Provided the flowers remain alive, flowering and unwilted To ensure that would likely require someone to water the flowers fairly regularly– likely at least twice a week and in the summer possibly every day.
The task would be “easy” in the sense that even a child could do it, but if you were a business owner and hired someone to do it, you would realize that the time to carry water to each window, crank open each window and pour water into a planter at least 1 minute for each thing you have to crank open, lean over, pour, check water distribution, crank closed. That’s at least 12*1 minutes = 12 minutes. Minimum.
And if you don’t do this during July: dead flowers. Which are not charming.
And that’s the ongoing cost/effort– not the cost of buying the things, installing, up keep, buying flowers for the planters.
If the homeowner love to do this: great. But still… once you have them, 12 minutes a day for this task. (And that’s, of course, on tops of ordinary things like cooking, loading the dishwasher, doing laundry and so on.)
Of course someone who likes the idea but doesn’t want to devote that time might go for fake flowers — which might be fine. But you still need to periodically check to be sure they don’t blow out…. And so on.
Nevertheless: the fact is, a person who just has “ideas” might quite likely decree the charm is worth it. And as long as the cost and effort is dropped on someone else, they are very likely to think it’s a great idea. And be puzzled someone didn’t take it up. (My friend was puzzled…. Her mother always had a cleaning lady , gardener, lawn service… and she has a cleaning lady. So, yeah. Puzzle away! )
Government is similar: Even if Congress critters have to dicker over the budget, the fact is that money doesn’t come out of their pockets. Unless someone is “dinged” for over spending, people spending other people’s money tend to overspend.
But we have crossed a threshold without actually noticing it: the losers of the last election are actively fabricating excuses and making moves to overturn the election results and to impose their will on us. We need to look at the implications of this on going slow motion coup and consider what the options are. If the oligarchy wins they will make certain the Administrative state is ascendant for as long as they can get away with it. That means more based suppression and censorship. More ignoring of Congress. More universities breeding intolerant illiberal poorly educated indoctrinated violent cry bullies. And the wasting of even more money on wasteful climate policies.
… tent camp in Idaho ++++++
Going to New Zealand on Tuesday. Here’s one really encouraging sign: New Zealand’s leading newspaper has only 3 mentions of Trump on its front page and one of those is on Ivanka’s dress. Sounds like paradise. Maybe I will stay. Perhaps my new rule should be if New Zealand doesn’t cover a Trump story, it’s not worth reading about in America.
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Immigration crisis in New Zealand!
A third of Kiwis deported from Australia in the last two years have reoffended — police figures
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11811643
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Shut down the border!
Tom, watch out for photo speed traps. North of Masterton. +10 k will get you an $85us fine
Tom,
“Shut down the border!”
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What border? Can’t fence the ocean. It is a very strange story; I can hardly find a difference between most Aussies and most Kiwis…. OK maybe the accent is a little different, but that is about it. There may be more to the story than what is in that publication.
When we visited Oz in 2013, influx of kiwis was something like 2,000/month
Attraction was you could earn $200,000/year driving trucks in Queensland at the mines
Maybe a lot of those jobs have gone away.
Subject to correction,of course
The lovely Mrs. hunter and a friend is visiting a an acquaintance in Christchurch for the next week, before going to Aukland and then shifting to Sydney. The one thing that is clear in both countries is that they have no problem with strong immigration laws, and no problem strongly enforcing them. Plus her reports via What App and the photos is that it is very beautiful.
….sorry about the grammatical…..
Lucia,
“I don’t think Congress intends to make work for lawyers. The difficulty in politics is the same as in large businesses that are no longer privately owned. Lots of ideas sound like “nice†ideas. And they are– provided you are getting someone else to pay for them or do them.”
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Yes. The issue is “Kumbaya” versus cruel reality.
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The disconnect is always the same: ‘don’t tax me, don’t tax he, tax that guy behind the tree’. I will forget, for now, all the ‘free lunch’ references, but this the entire problem with mindless ‘progressivism’. All costs are transferred to…. well, to nobody. Stupid, childish, mindless… even infantile are very fair descriptions.
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Can ‘progressives’ ever get past this? Hell no! They are incapable of rational analysis. ‘Fairness’ springs directly from their lint filled navels, and is their only objective focus. Indeed their entire reason for existence.
MikeM, I suspect they were careful with their phrasing.
They found out that their first story was wrong and McCaskill met.
So they changed it to met in 2016. Then they probably discovered other Senators met in 2016. So now it’s 2016 members of Armed Services with meetings in 2016.
I post to another site which has a space for a byline. Mine is “Just because you didn’t get the bill, doesn’t mean the lunch was free.”
Lucia, you might remember my story of the relative who lived on what used to be I-5. She would plant plastic tulips around the front steps in mid March. They required no maintenance and she enjoyed talking to the people who rang the doorbell wanting to know how she’d managed to get them to come up so early.
MikeN,
“So now it’s 2016 members of Armed Services with meetings in 2016..”
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And if need be, ‘… all 2016 members of the Armed Services Committee with meetings in 2016… who ‘happen to be named Jeff’, or even ‘happen to be named Jeff sessions’ (just in case if there is another member named ‘Jeff’). It is 100% evil, stupid, corrupt, and shameless. AKA, worm majority leader Chuck Schumer.
MikeN,
They were always consistent with the phrasing. At the time of publication , the article said this:
SteveF (Comment #159687)
The arguments above are really lacking in credibility. Progressives typically are willing to pay taxes for public expenditures because that’s the idea: the members of society support each other by sharing the costs for shared benefits. The individual goals themselves can and should be debated, but the concept of the public good is none of: stupid, childish, mindless, or even infantile. The incessant name calling, on the other hand, might more fairly described with those terms.
Re: “Incapable of rational analysis…”
Well, if you have rational analyses of your own to back up some of your assertions, then by all means please feel free to share.
Oliver: The individual goals themselves can and should be debated, but the concept of the public good is none of: stupid, childish, mindless, or even infantile.
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The basic difference between conservative-libertarian fiscal policy and progressive policy is the later’s lack of concern or awareness of the inherent corruptibility of government. There is every incentive for politicians to buy off the votes of each of the special interests. But by the time you are done the common good is in the toilet. And talk about fairness, what about the effect on the honest, quiet, hardworking non-lobbyist-represented individual? First, they miss out on the special goodies and then have their countries economy erode due to crapitalism.
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The progressives believe corporations are the only corrupting influence on government probably because they are an easy propaganda scapegoat since they are not relatable like personalities are. A minority special interest can always have a sad or inspiring anecdotal story to represent and ennoble their cause.
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Non-progressives see progressives as stupid, childish, mindless, or even infantile because they do not seem sophisticated enough to see further through the natural dynamics of corruption to realize that this problem got solved 226 years ago by Madison et al with a government limited to enumerated powers, checks and balances and co-equal competing branches of government, along with federalism. Progressives have much less appreciation for what they see as a crumbly old documents in museums.
RB I still have suspicions that that’s how their research went, but you are correct about the phrasing being constant.
Oliver,
The argument is as much about what should be paid for by the public as who among the public should pay. If everyone is ‘entitled’ to health care, college education, housing, etc. as a matter of ‘fairness’, then the only way to pay for all that is to increase tax rates to confiscatory levels, and/or borrow until debt becomes unsustainable.
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Sure, many democrats favor higher taxes, but most of all they favor higher taxes on people who don’t vote for or contribute to Democrats. When the Democrats in congress come out broadly and vocally for treating carried interest income as normal income, for taxing employer paid non-taxable benefits like health insurance, for limiting class action suits and the size of payments to liability lawyers, they will gain a bit of credibility…. till then, not so much.
It seems like we could use a lexicon to help comprehend the intensity and actions of the slow motion coup we are watching. Here is an initial effort, off the top of my head:
Major Media = Ministry of Truth
Bezos = Ernest Blofeld
Soros = Gold Finger
Zuckerberg = Baron Harkonnen
Google = The Borg
Sen. Schumer = The Joker
Clearly in need of some fleshing out.
Oliver,
The big four “progressive” dominated areas in the US, Education, Silicon Valley, Media and Hollywood talk the big “progressive” talk but walk the most ruthless tax avoidance and selfish financial models they can achieve within the law, that they shape as much as possible…. all while calling on the rest of us to pay more and more.
SteveF, bureaucratic corruption can take at least two forms. The first is money corruption, the kind that Raul Castro was referring to. Another is corruption by agenda. This is what I ran into on a project many years ago in Wisconsin that was stalled by two guys in their department of nautural resources (LC because I may have name wrong). They came out to look at the project site, determined that a corner of it was a wetland and then took a very long time to process the paperwork. This was in ’70s before the discovery of compensation or remediation. the project was an addition to the local wastewater plant. The addition could run by gravity (it’s true, it does run downhill) if we could use this bit of wetland, otherwise we would have had to pump, using energy forever.
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We proposed increasing the wetland area in another part of the property to compensate for the amount we were reducing. That was not acceptable. After a long lunch with these guys I was able to get them to agree that they saw their bureaucratic purpose as preventing development, all development. They might have made us pump, but for the intercession of one of the senators.
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I would call this corruption by agenda.
Oliver: “Progressives typically are willing to pay taxes for public expenditures”.
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But public expenditures are only part of the costs of the progressive agenda. Typically progressives refuse to think about other costs, such as the cost of complying with excessive regulation and unfunded mandates (like the minimum wage and health insurance). They cheerfully imposes costs (including taxes) on business in the belief that they are taxing the “rich”, and ignore the facts that most business owners are not rich and that the costs are often paid for by suppressing wages, if not employment. Stupid, childish, mindless indeed, although I would not so far as to call it infantile.
Mike M.
I was going to argue with SteveF about progressives’ willingness to pay higher taxes which I think is true of most of my progressive friends many of whom find their tax obligations laughable in the face of their financial situations, but…
There is no denying that the unfunded cost of programs and the hidden cost of regulation is where the problem lies. I wonder if anyone has ever realistically estimated the costs of each of these programs. When we had our 10 person business in Miami in the early ’90s, I think a person-day or two per month was spent on government documentation having nothing to do with taxes, which we would have considered a legitimate interest of the government. I can’t remember the specifics but partner felt that a lot of it should have been none of their business.
Not all of them. I know progressives who are willing for taxes to be high but want plenty of tax breaks that permit them specifically to avoid paying those taxes. Or, another way: I know some who want a complicated tax system often promoting breaks that will let them avoid paying taxes by doing things they themselves consider “good”.
Mind you: progressives aren’t the only ones who want tax breaks for things they consider “good”. Lots of people like tax breaks. But many progressives certainly do want tax breaks– and often want specific ones that permit themselves can avoid paying taxes– while being what they consider ‘good’.
MikeN,
At the time of publication, they still had 6 people who hadn’t responded. If any of them had met the ambassador, that would have had a similar effect on this point as McCaskill’s meeting in earlier years. I think Sessions would have generated much less controversy if he had not concealed his meeting. Why he did so is a mystery.
There have been similar sentiments expressed by the former ambassador to Russia.
j Ferguson,
Yes, and the money corruption is actually easier to eliminate. In Brazil, where corruption is rampant, a former president wrote an newspaper editorial titled “All just flour in the same sack?”, where he noted that all corruption is not the same. The government of president Lula (an avowed socialist) was corrupting the structure of Brazilian government in an effort to ensure future control of elections and public policy. Which sounds a lot to me like the effect of a corrupt ‘administrative state’ where the policy goals of the permanent bureaucracy usurps the will of the voters, with the dedicated environmentalists who staff the EPA being the perfect example.
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My encounters with EPA staffers were much like yours… they really didn’t like that businesses were allowed by law to emit chemical compounds to the air, and searched for ways to hammer companies for even minimal infractions. If a company emitted 25% of the allowed level for 364 days, but 125% of the allowed level for one day, then the hammer would come down. The hostility was essentially philosophical/political.
Lucia, healthcare has a perfect example of a `good` tax break, employer provided group health plans. At the close of WWII congress felt it a good time to rein in corporate tax avoidance by specifying non-cash employment compensation is all taxable and must be accounted for. But, they realized that a few types were `good` and needed to be encouraged to continue, like group health insurance. This is where we trace the roots of employment based, rather than individual based, health insurance. This became such a problem by 1965 that Medicare and Medicaid were invented. More recently laws were passed requiring employee to be able to pay for continued coverage after leaving employment. All this mess of regulation and market corruption stems from doing `good`.
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RB: “That makes no sense to me at all.â€
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RB, give us one or two scenarios of potential skulduggery involved. Because the only reason for deception by omission here I can see was the worry that it would be twisted and exaggerated in political gamesmanship. Imagine that.
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RB, Flynn didn’t deny the contact, but the content of the conversation that they discussed sanctions. If he had told Pence about it, he would still be there(unless that was a pretext for firing him). Sessions didn’t conceal anything. It was an instant answer to something that wasn’t asked. I haven’t seen the full transcript if there is a followup; he ducked the question that was asked.
RB: “And yet there was something about their contacts with Kislyak that caused both Flynn and Sessions to conceal them”
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Two outright lies. Flynn never concealed his conversation with Kislyak; the issue is whether he lied about what they discussed. Even that is not clear since there seems to be an issue as to whether they actually discussed sanctions or if Kislyak raised the issue and Flynn put him off. Sessions was never asked about meeting with Kislyak. He was asked about communication between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. He said he did not know of any, which appears to be true.
MikeN,
The article linked to above says
I don’t know whether the concealed part of “them” referred to “contacts” or the “something about their contacts” but there were aspects of both that were concealed, “deception by omission” whatever. And Ron Graf, sorry, I am not going to speculate. If you think it is gamesmanship, fine. The WSJ thinks it is the “Jim Carrey cover-up” from Dumb and Dumber.
Hi SteveF,
We needed an EPA permit to build a new industrial project in East Texas. Hydrocarbon emissions were the concern and we would be painting railroad tank cars.
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Fair enough.
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After all sorts of convulsions I’d calculated the total hydrocarbons which would be coming into the plant. I had assumed that they would all get loose – unlikely- but the error was on side of Gaia. I then showed that even if all of them escaped we would be well below the maximum emissions allowed, and not only that but fell beneath the de minimus threshold.
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the site had been what was called a cattle finishing yard where the beef herd is fed corn to fatten them up for market. I had asked if I got a credit for displacing all this flatulence. No way. The regs taketh, but giveth not.
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I had shown all of the calculations in excrutiating detail. This was the only submittal element which was anything other boilerplate.
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We waited and waited. And waited some more.
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Finally I went down to Austin where the EPA region six office was located and found the fellow who was responsible for the review of our submittal.
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He simply didn’t believe my numbers. He said something like, “Why should I believe you?” There is still, 30 years later a crease on my tongue from this encounter.
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He was going to run out the clock on our submittal. The plant was needed to make required modifications to a whole lot of railroad tank cars pursuant to HM144 (God, I can still remember).
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Again, a senator came to the rescue and we were granted our permit that very day. I was present for the phone conversation between the Region 6 EPA director and the Senator. I couldn’t hear what he said, but her face got crimson.
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Imagine. The guy chose not to believe me even though I’d given him the most complete thing I’ve probably ever done.
j ferguson, your experience sounds a lot like Obama on the Keystone XL pipeline. Saying “no” initiates actions to mitigate the objection or work on alternatives. Just staying silent runs out the clock making it as expensive and inefficient as possible. OTOH, I could be attributing too much intelligence to simple neglectful government administration.
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RB, could you have any trouble speculating on why wire-tapping the press would be done or IRS targeting of conservative organizations or fabricating a cover story to deny an incident was a terrorist attack on 9/11? I could. And I think those incidents called for independent investigation but President Obama called them “fake scandals”. Do you believe Obama served the country well in invoking “executive privilege” and using all means possible to obstruct congressional oversight? Do you think any conservatives lawmakers are remembering this now when Dems are calling for instant resignations for any alleged breach of full transparency?
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If I were a geopolitical American adversary, let’s say Russia, my goal would be to weaken and destabilize the country by subverting their governing principles by enticing leaders to disregard their laws and constitution, entice the press to suspend journalistic ethics in favor of advancing ideological causes, like having open borders and little vetting of immigrants fleeing terrorist housing countries.
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Many of us see there was no greater enemy to American interests than the former president. There is really nothing a Russian agent or stooge could do to damage us more broadly than Obama did. OTOH, President Trump can do great harm as well and that is yet to be seen, but there is no scenario that it would be the result of Russian collusion.
Re: Environmental Wetland Regulation & My Family
My father bought 40 acres of land in the middle of nowhere [at that time] in Northern Collier County (Naples) Fla. in the 1960s. In the early 70s he bought 30 more adjoining acres. In the late 80s when he was about 72 years old, we commenced trying to sell the land (after Collier County had grown up around my father’s land.) Around the mid-to late 70s, the Federal Government (Army Corps of Engineers) asserted jurisdiction over the land. In his whole life my father never even stepped on the land. (He looked at it purely as an investment and there was no easy road access to it, and after 1967 we never lived in Florida.)
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In the past portions of the land did support Cypress Trees, but because of adjacent developments and other changes, the land came to be dominated by Melaluca trees, which grew closely together and many of which were 60 feet high and are considered to be weed trees in Florida. The Corps of Engineers asserted jurisdiction over 90% of my parents land, which meant that they could not build on that land. Theoretically, my parents got increased densities on the remaining land that wasn’t “wetlands” but that wasn’t practical. Should also note that for at least 95% of the year, there was no standing water on the land and it wasn’t even mucky.
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In the 12 years it took to sell the land (even though Collier County is highly desirable and wealthy, we received zero offers to sell during the first 11 years the property was on the market even though a 6 lane highway was scheduled to be built through it), many absurdities and unfair practices became evident. First, if the “wetland” was so valuable the Feds should have bought it. Second, there was no river system attached to my parents land (it was isolated), so the idea that the Corps would have jurisdiction over the land for defense purposes is ludicrous. Third, the only way my parents could do anything with the land was to submit a detailed construction plan costing at least $50,000. Of course, my parents had zero ability to do that. Additionally, if a plan was submitted, there was no guarantee that it would be accepted. It would be very possible that an entirely new development plan would have to be submitted again at a high cost. Fourth, one person was responsible for mapping the land in Lee and Collier County and if he sprained an ankle (did happen) everyone’s projects were delayed by 2 months.
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Eventually my parents were able to sell the land (to a religious themed school on adjacent property) and make a good profit (just lucky they survived), but it is incredible that the Federal Government can assert jurisdiction over the land by fiat. The environmentalists claim that landowners are fairly treated by “wetland” laws, but in actuality, single individual landowners are helpless (unless their son is a lawyer) once the Feds assert jurisdiction. Further, the self-defense justification for taking the land and giving the Corps jurisdiction, is an obvious lie. (Compare it to the current Sessions dispute) Third, what competence does the Corps of Engineers have in what are essentially local zoning matters? Fourth, when environmentalists discuss wetlands they typically show pictures in the nature of ponds and ducks. They never show the many essentially dry lands (including prairie potholes), that the Feds consider to be “wetlands.”
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The unfair treatment of my parents (who were paying taxes on land they couldn’t use) is basically what motivated me to post on environmental matters.
JD
JD,
I didn’t have first hand experience with a story like your parents’. Doesn’t what happened to them amount to a taking? And without compensation? Has this been tested in the courts?
J Ferguson: “Taking”
Without reading the cases, I will go by memory. I believe the courts have held that their has to be a taking of all, or nearly all of the property. The Corps is clever in that it says you can get increased density on the land that is not regulated — then it can argue that you have some significant value remaining in your land. Also, most courts would hold that you would have to submit a request for a permit and an [expensive] plan, and be officially denied before your claim would be ripe for a judicial determination. Then if you challenged it in court, you would be in for a 10-15-year fight.
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So, in practice your land is basically taken, but unless you are willing to pay a lawyer and fight for 10 or 15 years, you have no practical remedy. I think this is precisely what the environmentalists want. 98% control over a landowners property, and the ability to tell the public (who will not look closely at these matters) that no one’s land is being taken.
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Again, what is astounding is that the environmentalists have hijacked national defense and are gaining control over land on the clearly false pretense of national defense, which isn’t remotely involved in cases like the one involving my father. And, as bad as this was 15 years ago, Obama in his last year of office was trying to make it worse.
JD
RB,
Check quick! There may be a Russkie under your bed!
It is beyond annoying that someone is posing as well informed about this Russian diversion and still thinks that Flynn or Sessions lied or hid anything of any importance, much less anything that had todo with integrity.
Do you recall how stupid you felt the hard core birthers were?
You are part of a much much larger group than the hard core birthers ever were and are acting even dumber than the dumbest of the hardcore birthers ever did.
The one thing progressives are very good at is effectively legislating through regulations and the court system. They know that being able to tie up something forever in regulatory delays and costs is the same as banning it. Against development? Slip in something in the endangered species act or get a friendly jurisdiction to halt things until regulatory review is complete. Then run out the clock and make the opposition pay, pay, and pay again. To make matters worse the taxpayer is paying for the government side of things. The bureaucrats think it is free or they are doing heroic work defending the public good. The cost per mile for a subway tunnel is a good example of the US system gone wrong.
As a general comment, I am not against the environment, but I could be fairly accused of being against environmentalists. I used to love nature documentaries and watched them all the time. I can’t stand to watch them anymore for two reasons. One is that they tend to focus a lot on “heroic” environmentalists who get all kinds of pointless face time, the second and more important reason is that they can’t go ten minutes without some stern lecture from very serious people on human evilness and how we are ruining the world, queue picture of poor lonely penguin on ice flow.
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It’s so bad that when someone attempts to do some good work, they are castigated by the usual suspects for not being sufficiently demeaning to the human race.
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The BBC’s Planet Earth II did not help the natural world
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/01/bbc-planet-earth-not-help-natural-world
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“These programmes are pure entertainment, brilliantly executed but ultimately a significant contributor to the planet-wide extinction of wildlife we’re presiding over.”
JD, thanks for the detail on ‘takings’ Death by Process. Yikes, but again it’s one of the hazards of life in these united states which seems unknown to many of the people who support legislation which does things like this.
The Supreme Court ruled against land owners at Lake Tahoe, who were forbidden from development. They argued that since the land wasn’t taken, just restricted, even if it was indefinitely, it didn’t require payment by the government.
Tom Scharf,
“They know that being able to tie up something forever in regulatory delays and costs is the same as banning it.”
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Of course. Justice delayed is justice denied. There was a couple in my area who owned an old house on about 3 hectares in the ‘middle of nowhere’. No public water, no public waste system, and no possibility of those. They wanted to remove the old house and build a new larger house. The local authorities blocked the change based on ‘environmental concerns’ about waste water. After burning through about $100K in legal fees, they gave up, sold the property and moved to another state. Would they have ultimately won? Probably. But in fact they were bound to lose no matter what, because the cost of winning would have bankrupted them.
@hunter
Does anyone else here believe in this paranoid conspiracy theory?
MikeN
Can you provide a case citation for the Lake Tahoe owners?
Steve F — Citation for Tahoe owners See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-Sierra_Preservation_Council,_Inc._v._Tahoe_Regional_Planning_Agency
Haven’t read it.
JD
bugs,
The justice department serves at the pleasure of the President. Of course Obama was aware of the efforts to listen in on Trump and his associates, whether he explicitly “ordered it” or not. Of course Obama holdover officials are actively working to thwart Trump’s actions, leak embarrassing documents to the press, etc. Of course Obama officials were pleased that the IRS targeted political groups opposed to Obama, and made sure all incriminating evidence on multiple computer hard drives and backup tapes was… ahem… ‘lost’. Your naïveté is showing. Or it could be willful blindness.
Thanks JD.
The Court refused ‘takings’ compensation because the two moratoriums on building lasted only 8 months, and then some years later,24 months. So the ruling was actually narrow and based not on a permanent blocking of construction but only one of 24 (or 8) months. I have to believe a permanent ban on construction would have been considered a ‘taking’.
MikeN,
You should read more carefully. The actual case was nothing like what you suggested.
SteveF,
This business with Obama’s guys tapping Trump’s campaign lines is quite a trap. Wouldn’t you think that if they’d honestly thought the campaign was somehow involved with the Russians, they’d have been duty-bound to do it? It then comes to the Obama gang saying they absolutely didn’t tap the lines while at the same time not putting the Russian nonsense to bed.
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A classic “you cannot have it both ways”
Bugs, who believes skeptics are in an Exxon Koch brothers paid conspiracy is pretending like he doesn’t read the newspapers. Thanks for demonstrating why you are a pitiful troll, bugsy.
Obama presided on the greatest expansion of the surveillance state in American history and lied about it. Let’s not forget that under Obama not only the meta data but actual recordings were kept on American citizens without warrants. Obama used espionage laws against journalists 7 times at least. Obama’s advisors bragged about corrupting the press to sell the Iran fiasco. Tapping a deplorable candidate like Trump would be nothing for the surveillance state President.
Bugs,
Yes, there are elements in the government that are seeking to overturn the will of the people. Fortunately, I think (maybe just hope) that the deep state here is still in nascent form and that Trump will be able to defeat it.
Since the question of a slow motion palace coup attempt has come up, has anyone seen anything reliable on just what happened with Christie? When he was replaced by Pence as head of the transition team, I did not think much of it since that made sense once Pence went from candidate to V.P. elect. I did not realize at the time that Christie was not just reassigned, but appears to have been exiled, along with his close allies. Also, I have seen a report that most of the work his team did pre-election was deep-sixed.
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Of course, if you think that Trump is petty, unstable, and incompetent, then you have a ready made explanation. But I don’t believe that. So what happened? Maybe Christie was colluding with establishment interests to give them maximum control in the new administration? It may be a long time before we get the story.
Deep state? OK……
hunter:
I wish you would tone this down a bit.
Carrick, why not point out cynical bs for what it is? Bugs faces no constraints.
hunter, um no, you are not actually pointing out anything.
It appears to me you’re using insults as a method to stop discourse that you apparently can’t address in a rational manner.
j ferguson:
There is still a credibility issue with the whole story too (unless we decide we’re referring to the FISA warrant issued last fall that everybody already knew about).
Trump seems to have gotten his report from FoxNews coverage of a Breitbart article which was quoting some verbal remarks made by Mark Levin. source
So once again, the head of the world’s largest intelligence gathering apparatus is relying on talk radio hosts to tell him what the truth is.
Definitely something that makes one say “hmmmm”.
Mike M: The NYPost says Trump was disgusted by Christie’s allowing Bridget “Bridgegate” Kelly (you can’t make this stuff up) to take the fall for him.
It’s still possible that Bridgegate could bring Christie down, so maybe Trump felt it was too big of a risk to include somebody with so many question marks in his administration.
I don’t see it as an unreasonable decision given the uncertainties surrounding Christie last fall.
(Based on news reports, Christie apparently still thinks he’ll end up getting an appointment. At the moment, that appears to me to be wishful thinking.)
Carrick,
The problems with FISA court proceedings are 1) they are ‘non-adversarial’ (nobody present to argue that a requested ‘wiretap’ is not actually needed), and 2) can easily lead to political abuse (leaking information gained via FISA for political purposes), which is exactly what we have seen happen here. If Trump is getting his information from news reports rather than through the justice department, then that suggests people at the justice department are not providing Trump with information. I don’t think this is a good thing.
Carrick,
I agree about Christie. There is a small chance (10% I guess) that the traffic disruption was not actually Christie’s idea, but if he didn’t know about it, then he should have. So he is either evil or incompetent, with evil seeming far more likely. I think his political career is over.
It’s also possible that Trump is not getting this information from Justice because it doesn’t exist.
Team Obama claims, with a straight face, that they never interfered with ongoing investigations. Yet we see the IRS suppression of the tea party and Mr. Obama lying about when he knew. We see Mr. Obama repeatedly state during the various investigations of Hillary that she only made minor mistakes and nothing would come of it. We got to watch Holder excused on fast and furious by way of Executive Privilege. None of those could have happened without direct WH involvement determining the outcome of ongoing investigations.
I’d extend Christie’s character to possibly evil AND incompetent. If he didn’t know about it in advance doesn’t relieve him of the burden that the folks who did, thought he’d approve of it. This clearly reveals what they thought of his character. And they knew him.
Or, another variation on ridding the “turbulent priest.”
Why else would they have done it than for him?
Bridgegate might well have been a factor in dumping Christie, but does not make sense as an explanation for the broader purge. A little digging shows that Christie had many lobbyists on the team, who were purged by Pence (I had forgotten that), along with many other long time insiders. And it seems that many of Christie’s early recommendations for key staff positions were such people. So it seems that he was trying to move the Trump administration towards business-as-usual.
SteveF: I think it’s more likely that Trump is just using an unreliable source, which we know from similar slip-ups he’s prone to do (most famously the supposed video of a plane landing in Tehran, and the money getting off-loaded).
For starts, I just don’t see anyway for FISA documents to be kept hidden from the President or his staff. I’m sure there’s at least one FISA document–the warrant for monitoring traffic between Trump’s server and Russian bank servers. (We probably can infer that Trump has done business with these banks, but probably not much more from the presence of traffic.)
I believe this monitoring is on-going, but the reports I have seen suggest the traffic is innocuous.
Secondly, Breitbart and Levin suggest that Obama’s administration filed a FISA request in June to monitor communications between Trump and his advisors, and they report that request was denied.
But I don’t see any way that request even would have been made. The law is pretty clear–the FISA warrants relate to communication with foreign operatives. No way that communications between Trump and his staff could ever have qualified, and it seems extremely unlikely that the Justice Department would waste their time on this.
There are serious problems with Mark Levin’s theories, and I doubt that Mark Levin cares. He’s just doing the verbal version of clickbait—namely sensationalized claims intended to draw audience. (Yes, CNN does this too.)
Carrick, I don’t think the ‘plane landing in Tehran’ was Trump using bad sources. He just made it up. This is what Scott Adams has been saying about how Trump uses visual imagery. So rather than talk about paying a ransom he speaks of a plane landing, offloading cash. Perhaps it’s the same bad sources, but I do remember a news report about Iran holding the prisoners until the money was airborne, which Trump converts to his use. I noticed it during the debates where he says it was so much money it could fill the stage or this whole arena. I was expecting the factcheckers to go after him for that, but I guess no one felt like doing math.
Carrick,
Trump can insist (with the Justice department) on seeing the original FISA requests, the FISA approval, all FBI wiretap requests, and all data generated via wiretaps and electronic intercepts. It is my understanding that he is also free to declassify any and all of this, in whole or partially redacted. I expect this will happen soon. The delay is more likely due to a desire to identify those at Justice (and maybe elsewhere) who should be prosecuted for leaking classified documents to the MSM.
SteveF, I remembered the case only from when it was argued, and my understanding was it was a permanent moratorium.
There was a 24 month moratorium, followed immediately by an 8 month moratorium, then there were separate regional plans in 1984 and 1987, that were blocked by Federal courts. The majority said only the two moratoriums were at issue and the blocks later were not caused by the regional plan, while the dissent disagreed.
The dissent says that the landowners still haven’t built, which was then 20 years after the moratorium. Reading it now, it’s possible I misunderstood it at the time, because it could be interpreted that the legal issue is the same today. The dissent tends to treat it as a 6 year moratorium and not permanent.
MikeM, I suspected that Christie’s endorsement of Trump was the Establishment hedging their bets, making sure they could stay in charge even if Trump won.
Despite that, it looks like they just weren’t happy with the work Christie had done, putting in lots of his own people. Also, Christie prosecuted Jared Kushner’s dad. Christie was reportedly Trump’s pick for VP, but Kushner pushed him to stay overnight and have dinner with Pence.
Carrick, I think the FISA warrants is what he is talking about. A later warrant that did not have Trump’s name on it was approved by FISA. The details are not known.
People seem to be ignoring that Trump is doing this in response to the Russian allegations. Putting Obama team on the defensive, and distracting away from that story. It is also a warning shot, that Trump could release many more things that hurt Obama.
It’s amazing to me that Trump seems (seems, mind you) to rely on stories referenced to anonymous sources (Mark Levin’s sources) when he excoriates the news media for doing it.
Can someone here point to any source not originating with Mark Levin which alleges that Obama ‘directed’ the origination of a FISA request?
MikeN and SteveF,
What I don’t understand is why a court would hold that even a temporary moratorium was not a taking. The owners still have to pay property taxes, but they don’t have control of their land. Rent should be owed.
DeWitt,
It is a purely political decision by the court (just like Kelo v New London). I agree that some compensation would be reasonable, but the Constitution addresses permanent takings.
SteveF,
The Constitution says nothing about length of time.
I don’t see a difference between, say, forcible temporary quartering of soldiers in private houses, banned by the Third Amendment except in times of war and then only by specific legislation, and temporarily restricting how one can use their land. But then, I’m neither a progressive nor a lawyer.
Kelo v New London was about the possible misuse of eminent domain to transfer property between private individuals. Of course, the progressives on the Court sided with the government, not the individual.
Of course that’s not to mention the irony of the Corps of Engineers, who drained vast amounts of swamp land in the past, being put in charge of wet lands protection. They’re also likely responsible for the defective levees in New Orleans that caused the flooding during Katrina.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/decade-after-katrina-pointing-finger-more-firmly-at-army-corps.html?_r=0
DeWitt,
Although I am against the many substantial burdens that the government and environmental regulations impose on landowners such as my parents., I realize there is another side to the story. The government does many things that temporarily burden landowners. And if every temporary Burden was compensated, the government could not function. For instance, when roads are repaired, ditches may have to be temporarily excavated and dirt dumped on private property.
On the other hand, when the burdens imposed are substantial , I was thinking myself that the government should be charged rent. For instance, if the government asserts jurisdiction over 60% of someone’s land for Wetlands purposes, I think the government should be charged rent.
JD
Re: MikeN
That seems unlikely. It seems to assume that Obama is orchestrating this, is under threat and will ask his peeps to back off in response. Most of everything that Trump does can be viewed from the model of how a narcissist would behave. According to this narcissism researcher playing the victim is part of the narcissist’s behavior. According to him, there is no distraction strategy either. Everything that is done is in service of boosting the ego. Scott Adams however thinks this is all 3D chess. Maybe, given that Adams has similar narcissistic characteristics.
JD,
I think the rent idea is marvelous. Certainly the logic behind wetlands preservation is that it serves the common good. so maybe the imposition on individual citizens should be shared all around. And then maybe this would slow down these sorts of ideas a bit.
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Suppose they started to regulate the dearth of flowerboxes which Lucia decided weren’t such a hot idea and she was forced to put them up and take care of the growies for the benefit of passers by?
Did you ever read Douglas’ opinion on the efficacy of taking real estate under eminent domain and then turning it over to a developer so that he could have a big enough property to do something significant, Carl Sandberg Village in Chicago as an example? (gasp, one sentence?) I think enabling this sort of thing by not finding that it violated Constitution property rights was the prelude to a lot of evil done during the Urban Renewal madness. I suppose I shouldn’t see it that way because it created work for architects… but I do.
DeWitt, according to the case, there is a general presumption that along with the property ownership you can expect a certain amount of reasonable regulation. Short term regulations like the time to get a permit would not be takings under this standard. The possibility was raised that a government could just get around a ban on permanent moratorium by engaging in a rolling temporary moratorium. Both opinions reference another case where the temporary regulation was less than two years, yet was considered a taking.
RB, with a week remaining in his term, Obama changed the order of succession at the Justice Department so that if the AG recuses decisions would be made by the DC attorney, one of his guys who has worked with Eric Holder for decades. Someone on Trump’s team noticed and restored the order of succession, perhaps because of Sally Yates’s stunt on the immigration order.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/did-the-obama-administration-try-stacking-the-deck-against-trump-at-the-justice-department/article/2007085
MikeN,
Even if that were true, I don’t see any way Obama can be threatened by Trump. Besides, acting a certain way so that Trump won’t do something is a foolish strategy.
Is this how people speak by default? The denials coming from Obama spokesmen are really lawyerly.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration is that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation…” is a tautology.
True, and that’s a way of allowing for the possibility of an investigation while disclaiming that it was initiated by them.
Trump’s statement ““I don’t know Putin, have no deals in Russia” is also similarly lawyerly.
Andy McCarthy has been talking about this surveillance for months.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/445504/obama-camp-disingenuous-denials-fisa-surveillance-trump
>a way of allowing for the possibility of an investigation while disclaiming that it was initiated by them.
Then they should have said so. They are leaving in the idea that White House interfered with a non-independent investigation, which is what an investigation becomes if interfered.
Even if they did interfere, they are not under oath, so I would expect them to issue a complete denial, not making sure they have every detail correct.
RB,
Trump was telling everyone he would dismantle everything Obama had done. The justice department was run (and remains mostly run!) by people dedicated to Obama and his policies. Orders do not have to be sent by email from the Whitehouse to take political advantage of a FISA warrant. Yes, Obama is far too smart to ever leave any hard evidence (note how all computer records related to the IRS targeting conservative groups ‘were suprisingly lost’). I think you are hopelessly naive about Mr Obama and his posse. So, after the FISA data started flowing, do you think the White house never heard another word?
Trump not implementing the Clinton rule of firing all political appointees at DoJ immediately upon taking office may cost him the Presidency.
According to Andy McCarthy, it is technically the FISA court that orders surveillance.
James Clapper has issued a thorough denial that there was no wiretapping.
MikeN
You are making the classic logical mistake
A=>B does not mean !A=>!B, it only means !B=>!A
SteveF
And you guys seem to imply that Obama will keep his people in check because of Trump’s veiled threat. That sounds bizarre.
Please… Mr. Obama’s entire political run up to the Presidency was based on digging up enough mud to destroy opponents. The more secret the better. He did it for The Illinois senate and the US senate. We know he interfered with the IRS and tea party groups. He interfered with Fast & Furious. The interesting question now is of his team left enough loose ends to compromise Obama’s sanctimony.
MikeN (Comment #159767)
“James Clapper has issued a thorough denial that there was no wiretapping.”
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“The passage of more than three years hasn’t cooled the insistence in certain quarters that Clapper face charges for an admittedly false statement to Congress in March 2013, when he responded,
“No, sir” and “not wittingly†to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting “any type of data at all†on millions of Americans.About three months after making that claim, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the answer was untruthful and that the NSA was in fact collecting in bulk domestic call records, along with various internet communications.To his critics, Clapper lied under oath.”
RB, I don’t follow your logic. I get the basic rules. I frequently use in global warming discussion that A->B means ~B -> ~A, thus no global warming because B did not happen.
If the White House interferes, it is not an independent investigation.
Just strange wording. They should have(and intended to) just said White House didn’t interfere with investigations.
If you trace it back, the first person to report this was Louise Mensch in Heat Street which was then picked up by BBC and the Guardian last year. We don’t know how true this is.
Angech, to answer that question truthfully would have been leaking classified information. Clapper offered to answer in closed session, and was denied. Ron Wyden asked that question deliberately.
MikeN:
Yes, that’s for the program that we’re discussing here. But there are pretty strict limitations on that program that would prevent it from ever being used to legally intercept communications between Trump and his associates, not directly, and not indirectly.
j ferguson:
I’ve not been able to find anything. I think this is actually just speculation on Mark Levin’s part, combined with some obvious troll-baiting on his part.
angech:
With the irony being his critics are disinterested in the truth themselves. Just trying to stir the kettle, is what it’s all about.
The Sessions and Other Disputes:
….
As expected the Democrats intend to wage an unremitting war against Trump. Sessions made a mistake, but it was Mickey Mouse mistake. Yet the Democrats are trying to turn it into a big deal.
….
There are undoubtedly many undiscovered cockroaches in Obama’s administration. I think some of them will eventually come out during the vicious disputes that are bound to occur. I for one don’t believe that Clinton’s loss of the emails was unintentional or that EPA email and text mail loss were innocent. There are probably people deep within the bureaucracy who know what happened, and who were afraid to speak while Obama was in office. I don’t think that will be the case now. I am sure that Obama and Clinton tried to cover their tracks, but I don’t think there is a foolproof way to cover all of their tracks.
After the Trump people start serious digging (which they will), I wouldn’t be surprised if serious Obama administration improprieties are discovered.
JD
Sessions: I’ve been doing my best to not chase down every last screeching melodrama the press has latched onto, but finally actually read the evidence of the suggested malfeasance here. Talk about weak tea. As far as I can tell he answered these questions correctly. The Senate majority leader asked him to resign over this?
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This is why I just can’t take anything in DC seriously for the moment. They have simply lost their minds.
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Somebody please setup up a private Twitter virtual sandbox Trump can go play in without hurting anybody.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
Its pretty simple.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy
Mosher, thanks for the links. Here is a pertinent quote from the second link:
….
“the Congress, on a bipartisan basis in 2008, enacted a new, highly diluted Fisa law – the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) – that legalized much of the Bush warrantless NSA program.
Under the FAA, which was just renewed last December for another five years, no warrants are needed for the NSA to eavesdrop on a wide array of calls, emails and online chats involving US citizens. Individualized warrants are required only when the target of the surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance.
As a result, under the FAA, the NSA frequently eavesdrops on Americans’ calls and reads their emails without any individualized warrants – exactly that which NSA defenders, including Obama, are trying to make Americans believe does not take place.”
….
By the way, I hope your health is better.
JD
This whole issue will be sorted out. So far there is no evidence of collusion of Trump with the Russians. There is evidence that the Obama administration was listening in on Trump campaign communications. There are at least 7 news stories on it. That’s a far bigger problem than Russian influence. Obama himself spent a lot of money trying to influence an Israeli election. The whole thing is just another attempt to delegitimize the Trump administration. Hypocrisy is rife here of course. The Obama administration also tapped reporters communications frequently often with little or no evidence to justify it. The New Jerk Times of course said little about it and attempted to obscure it from view.
Mr. Obama also intervened on the Brexit vote. He got the head of the IRS to lie under oath to Congress. He lied about Iran, and had his people manipulate the press to help sell his lies. And the press seems Okey Dokey with doing what Obama wants. If there was one shred of evidence that team Trump had done anything at all bad with Russia we would have heard it. They were tapping him after all, according to multiple sources. We are watching Obama and others in the midst of attempting a coup.
If I was to call the Russian Ambassador on the phone, I would assume that the calls would be monitored by one or more American security agencies. No matter who was in power. I would be surprised if the call wasn’t monitored.
Bugs,
Thanks for underscoring the falseness of the Russian narrative. I didn’t know you had it in you to admit that a major obsession of a disturbing number of people is groundless.
Due to lack of information in previous post I am unable to formulate a reply.
Lucia
Your blog has now been downgraded in my bookmarks from Science to Opinion.
It’s a shame. I used to find it informative. Now it is US politics.
David Young:
David, is the primary source for any of these stories other than Mark Levin?
Seth,
I said several years ago that I am on a haitus from blogging– for reasons that initially had to do with life. I post from time to time and comments are here for discussion. So, yes it’s currently opinion.
My blogging status may or may not change back– but not for the sake of the rank in your bookmarks.
In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus
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To which it seems can be added ‘and politics’… certainly politics in 2017. There is altogether too much acting in bad faith, which leads to zero-sum agreement at best, or no agreement at worst.
SteveF,
I think we’re currently seeing a lot of acting in bad faith from all sides. With luck, this will pass.
lucia, “With luck this too shall pass.” Thank you for words of wisdom.
I don’t give politicians a lot of credit, but I do expect if they were formulating and executing nefarious plans to rig the US election they wouldn’t do it by calling the Russian Embassy or openly discussing it using their own phones with Russian operatives, envoys, etc. I also expect the KGB would be a bit skeptical that US politicians would cooperate with them in good faith. I’m getting the feeling that the next time Red Dawn is broadcast the NYT and CNN will think it is real a la The War of the Worlds.
Tom Scharf, Written like an a honest man. It’s clear that you don’t have experience with crooks. The ones who get caught generally think they cannot be caught and accordingly don’t take appropriate care. This would include the guys at place SWMBO worked at who were later convicted of racketeering who used to discuss their schemes in the conference room within earshot of spouse.
Another example is a website which provides encryption services for those who think they need them. It never occurred to friends who use it regularly, and probably don’t need to, that the proprietors of that site might be the very folks who i assume they don’t want to read their communications.
So while seriously doubting that the Trump folks had anything other than the most worthy interests in discussing things with the Russians, it is perfectly possible that they never thought that they would be recorded. Except maybe Sessions.
j ferguson
What was that name again?…. Oh. Yeah. Blag o je vich. And his predecessor Ryan.
Really, politicians seem to be especially careless because often it doesn’t even occur to them the law doesn’t apply to them. Or doesn’t mean what it means. And so on.
No doubt stupidity and arrogance are always a possibility. This is just one of those conspiracies that require a group of people to be simultaneously master plotters and inept fools. My take is Putin was just working to discredit HRC as he expected her to win just like the rest of the world. Russian wins by fomenting discontent in the US and if that was their goal, spectacular success.
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I wasn’t referring to Illinois politicians, ha ha. I think they call their politician retirement home the penitentiary there. I hope the KGB is smarter than that or I’d lose respect for them too. If they had anything real, one would expect it would have been dumped pre-election or in the lame duck period. Waiting doesn’t seem to make sense as once Trump is in power things can get a lot harder. The master plotters and their secret minions will take out all the evidence.
One of the really neat things about living in Miami for 14 years was marveling at the audacity/stupidity of local corruption.
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A county commissioner who oversaw the art in public places program installed several large sculptures in his front yard. They were easily identified by the Herald, the local newspaper employer of both Dave Barry and Carl Hiassen, as the work of artists who had sold other work to the program. There was an investigation and it turned out that he hadn’t paid for them and in fact it had never occurred to him.
another time, top politicians in town were buying label-less but very nice suits and dresses at very low prices from a guy who worked out of a motel room. County Manager wore one of the suits to a public event where the guy who owned the shop it had been stolen from recognized it, it was not a ready to wear but bespoke. Amazing that it fit Sergio but it did.
So the scheme became known but our wonderful state’s attorney, Janet Reno, declined to prosecute.
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I understand that Illinois license plates are collectibles because unlike plates from other states, they are made by governors.
j ferguson,
LOL!
I think the latest Trump unsupported claim may well signal the beginning of the end for his presidency. I understand he was reaming out his staff a few hours prior to his tweet on this matter. He appears to be in the process of losing party support and once that is gone I think he will be also – although it will be an interesting scenario that plays out in how all this will transpire and perhaps set some precedents for future Presidents. I think Trump will be very capable of self destructing to help matters along.
As a libertarian who has never voted for a Democrat, I am surprised that conservative Republican party supporters would not be looking forward to getting Pence into the presidency. It should be rather obvious now that Trump’s narcissism will be a great hindrance to a conservative agenda or even in maintaining a congressional majority next election cycle.
In my view Obama was a huckster and a prevaricator, and much like Bill Clinton who had similar traits, he had a personality, again like Bill Clinton, that politically overcame the problems these traits might have caused. On the other hand, an out-of-control Trump has a personality that is a great distance from a winning one.
Kenneth, self destruct, it is. Except for the “you can keep your doctor and your existing policy” you must have seen a lot that I was blind to.
“latest Trump…the beginning of the end…”
As I said when Jonah Goldberg wrote that the Trump bubble has burst after what he said about McCain, it is more credible if we hear it from someone inside the bubble.
FISA is not criminal investigations, but national security, so Trump can “interfere” all he wants.
Jferguson,
They may be. But I suspect they would also like a little bit of continuity and time to get a few things done. Pence would not necessarily want all of Trump’s cabinet, head of departments and so on. And he might not be as aggressive about getting the ball rolling on wiping out regulations.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some Republican’s who don’t like Trump want him in for somewhere between 9 months and a year– enough time to get Gorush appointed, some regulations out, etc. Then he can go. . .
Lucia, I agree but Kenneth said it first, not me.
I think Trump’ll be gone a lot sooner. He gives loose cannons a good name. One of the problems with his charge that Obama ordered phone tappings is that if he did, it will be very hard to get definitive proof no matter what the truth might be.
.
Despite what some people may think, Obama is pretty smart. It is unimaginable to me that he could get caught with something like this if he did it, which I strongly doubt.
The reason why Trump’s visit to the white house seems likely to me to be curtailed is that the cooler heads will have now seen amply demonstrated that the guy has no self-control and a very thing skin.
Do you think they want to take a chance that he could cause a real catastrophe let alone swamp (as they say) repub chances in 2018?
I doubt that he’s susceptible to a regency, like the one George III enjoyed in his waning years. His son-in-law may be pretty sharp, but certainly unfamiliar with how to get things done in DC.
Here’s how this is going to end. The intelligence community is going to conclude that Trump cannot be trusted with really secret stuff. The gateway initially will be McMaster (whose book I continue to recommend). McMaster will get everything, and then dole it out to Trump as the situation requires. This will work for a while because Trump likes his briefings brief.
But presidents make the decisions so soon enough something will come along that requires that the president be given the whole enchilada in order to inform the decision and the Intel guys will REALLY not want to. So they’ll go to a couple of the senior senators, McCain for example. They’ll explain the situation that our national security cannot be in the hands of someone they cannot trust.
Trump will announce that Melania had not idea what his being president was going to mean to their marriage, and he’ll turn the reins over to Pence and fade away.
Trump got elected. The intelligence community does not get a veto option. I would fully support firing every last single one of them who can’t do their job or sending them all to the Arctic circle with a snorkel mask to count Ruskie subs. Their history as of late has been nothing but counter productive. Letting Snowden download their servers, Iraq, ISIS, just making this election worse as they run their own agenda which is God knows what.
.
Trump isn’t going away. I have no idea why this latest episode is any different than the last 50 “disqualifying” events.
Kenneth & j ferguson, you guys are far kookier than Trump could ever hope to be. Thanks for The laughs. And since neither of you seem to actually care to read the things he actually says, I wonder if maybe you should team up for a fantasy political thriller?
“It should be rather obvious now that Trump’s narcissism will be a great hindrance to a conservative agenda ”
Narcissism is an essential part of all leaders, not a hindrance, Democrats are a hindrance.
“One of the problems with his charge that Obama ordered phone tappings is that if he did, it will be very hard to get definitive proof no matter what the truth might be.”
People in power stuff up all the time, look at Lance Armstrong, look at the Russians Olympics, look at NOAA. The difference is in being in control. Now he is out it is a lot easier for whistle blowers. Two problems, the Security agencies still will not like you and fake news, that is, is the information reliable, or just someone yanking your chain.
“Bugs (Comment #159784) If I was to call the Russian Ambassador on the phone, I would assume that the calls would be monitored by one or more American security agencies. No matter who was in power. I would be surprised if the call wasn’t monitored”
Exactly.
The leaks suggest the big end if town is not happy.
I did not think Trump would be allowed to last a month and said how happy I would be if he did.
For all his faults, and he probably has nearly as many as the average blogger here, his narcissism, his tweeting, he keeps the ball rolling and getting the job that needs to be done, done. Forget your grey suits, your Pences, the real changes are the men and attitudes he is putting in place. 10 such women and men and another 3 months the changes will be so great that when he is removed the wave of change will still go in for years.
Too much to hope for, even another month, please.
hunter, i appreciate what you are saying, but I do read everything he says that I can find, also the tweets. That is how I came to think he is deranged.
Tom Scharf, what’s different now is that he’s president.
K Fritsch: “I think the latest Trump unsupported claim may well signal the beginning of the end for his presidency.”
….
I can think of all sorts of alternative ways that this could end both positively and negatively for Trump. However, for now, I am not assuming that Trump’s claim of bugging is false. Obama gave a very Clintonian answer when he said that he didn’t interfere with investigations. He didn’t say it wasn’t bugged. It being Trump, no one knows whether there is any evidence for his accusation. However, it certainly wouldn’t be beyond the pale for Obama, Comey or Loretta Lynch to do this either directly or circuitously.
Some support for Trump here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-former-british-lawmaker-at-the-heart-of-the-trump-wiretap-allegations/2017/03/06/9d8c6b94-027c-11e7-9d14-9724d48f5666_story.html?utm_term=.e2835260f622
…..
In tweets on Monday, Mensch emphasized that her reporting does not back up Trump’s wiretapping claim, even though the White House cited her article to justify the allegation. She stressed that her reporting refers to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant and does not mention anything about wiretapping. [A distinction without a difference to me]….
…..
“In her report, published Nov. 7, Mensch said the FBI was granted a FISA court warrant in October “giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.â€
She cited “two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community†as evidence for those claims.
Mensch, who is based in New York, said her sources contacted her because of her outspoken backing for the intelligence community. She has, for instance, called Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents, “a loathsome traitor.â€
[FBI Director Comey asked Justice officials to refute Trump’s unproven wiretapping claim]
“They gave me one of the most closely guarded secrets in intelligence,†she said, referring to her sources. Speaking to the Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper, she added: “People are speculating why someone trusted me with that. Nobody met me in a darkened alley in a fedora, but they saw me as someone who has political experience and is their friend. I am a pro-national security partisan. I don’t have divided loyalties.â€
JD
j ferguson,
I am still expecting that dinner.
Kenneth: “I think the latest Trump unsupported claim may well signal the beginning of the end for his presidency.”
Wishful thinking.
You’ve been wrong 100 times in a row, but this time, you are certain you are right.
Hi SteveF, when you get it you can be sure we will all have earned it.
JD Ohio:
It may not be false (theoretically Obama could have bugged Trump), but what Trump tweeted is almost certainly made up nonsense.
Think about it—if you had credible information about this, would you (a) roll it out from the White House for maximum effect (maybe in an evening address to the nation) or would you (b) send out a flurry of tweets at 6 AM before moving on to castigating Arnold Schwarzenegger?
The idea that Trump based his tweets on credible sources isn’t close to plausible. It was so upsetting to him that he played golf afterwards…Come on guys, let’s keep this real.
Carrick: “Think about it—if you had credible information about this, would you (a) roll it out from the White House for maximum effect (maybe in an evening address to the nation) or would you (b) send out a flurry of tweets at 6 AM before moving on to castigating Arnold Schwarzenegger?”
….
Unfortunately, if you are Trump you tweet. (Twitter to me has always been stupid, and I have never even visited the site — although I have seen summaries of tweets.) Someone commented today that he has no impulse control, which appears to be true.
JD
JFerguson, I have an unnamed source of the definition of prevarication which is what I had in mind in using this term to describe an Obama trait.
“Prevarication is when someone tells a lie, especially in a sneaky way. … While the noun prevarication is mostly just a fancy way to say “lie,” it can also mean skirting around the truth, being vague about the truth, or even delaying giving someone an answer, especially to avoid telling them the whole truth.”
This definition could fit just about any politician but some are more obvious than others. Bill Clinton selling snake oil was very obvious but evidently with a winning personality, at least for the political benefits. Obama was less obvious but as opposed to Bill Clinton’s good old boy approach he came across as very intellectual. I think also there was some white guilt that helped Obama. With Trump and every time he opens his mouth I think snake oil and snake and in my mind that is what will limit his ability to sell his snake oil – and even if it were good conservative Republican snake oil.
Jferguson, I would recommend googling Obama prevarications and you can decide what part of the derived list has some partisan biases and what part is legitimate. If you think Obama is free of such weaknesses – outside the really big lies on Obamacare – than Obama is perhaps a better salesman than I first perceived.
By the way I predict that Trump’s undoing if it comes will be by his own hand and timing.
What Mensch first reported was later covered by the BBC (and the Guardian). More here
Trump’s team is happy to run with the disinformation campaign in any case.
The FISA can still allow them to listen in on citizens contacting foreign intelligence though.
JD Ohio:
You tweet about it and your staff doesn’t know anything about it. About something this … earth shattering.
I’d say, no. If the information was available from a credible source it would have been handled with much more finesse than this. It could theoretically turn out to be true, but I’d say clearly that’d be due more to coincidence than the quality of the information Trump was basing his tweets on.
RB, I’m not sure Mensch’s description of the first FISA request is totally credible. It sounds like it would be a total non-starter in the FISA court. To be clear: I’m sure there was an over-broad FISA request, I just doubt the details being reported are accurate.
Carrick,
Perhaps – and we may not know unless there is a Congressional investigation.
Trump has a nearly 90% favorability (Gallup) among Republicans. It seems unlikely that there will be any serious investigation under such circumstances.
Carrick: “I’d say, no. If the information was available from a credible source it would have been handled with much more finesse than this.”
….
Trump rarely shows finesse. What I think happened is that there was some slivers of evidence and Trump jumped the gun as he is prone to do. It may turn out that Trump was lucky and that there is more evidence to support his tweets. If there is not, he is legitimately wounded.
JD
At least this time, there seems to be evidence for “Trump lighting the dumpster fire to distract”
And for the desired effect, you need to do no more than scroll up.
If true, the story about Comey calling Trump a liar is not right. Comey didn’t say there was no wiretapping, but that Obama didn’t order wiretapping.
If you say ‘Obama tapped my phones.’, it is true even if done by lower levels.
Kenneth,
Free of such weaknesses is a very high hurdle. I don’t think you could make it in politics and be perfectly clean. I suspect that you have spend a lot of time in “What if” land in order to conspire with your colleagues to invent a program and sell it. There’s a concept in law ‘acting against self interest’ I suspect that it may be beaten into people who follow the law, like Obama, never to do this. It’s what makes so many of the guys we see never ever admit that there might be another way to look at something. So instead it’s sell, sell, sell and you figure out the downsides and risks.
Methinks that Trump and (some of) his supporters are on the same page.
“You’ve been wrong 100 times in a row, but this time, you are certain you are right.”
“Kenneth & j ferguson, you guys are far kookier than Trump could ever hope to be.”
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/04/if-trump-tower-was-wiretapped-trump-can-declassify-that-right-now/
This would appear to put the ball in Trump’s court.
JD Ohio:
Yes so I think we agree then.
I think the slivers come from Mark Levin, and are speculative in origin. So Trump is going to be somewhat fortunate if this turns out to have any meat in it at all.
Unlike some of his other libelous tweets, this one may cost him dearly.
MikeN:
Don’t agree. Trump made the statement:
If Obama was not in the decision chain, there is no way that he could be held responsible for the action.
If he’s not responsible for the action, he “didn’t do it”, no matter how ambiguously you would like to parse the phrase “tapp my phones”.
Many call 911 Bush’s fault. He had nothing to do with it.Bush waned that FNMA & the other tributaries into the mortgage ocean needed urgent reform, was ignored and got saddled with it. Its part of the job. Team Obama created a pervasive wiretap state. The most invasive ever in our history. Obama owns it warts and all, no matter how carefully his team parses the denials. And the track record of Trump having legitimate points when he makes his claims is pretty good.
“If Obama was not in the decision chain, there is no way that he could be held responsible for the action.”
.
“Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”
Seth, I would also welcome more posts on climate issues. Steve McIntyre tweeted an updated chart of models vs. observations that was interesting. It showed that models were still running way too warm. It seems to me that’s a very important issue. Unfortunately, I don’t have time myself to do any of the work. 🙂
Carrick, We would have to see the daily intelligence briefs Obama was given to know his level of knowledge and thus complicity. Andy McCarthy has a good piece pointing how this Russian “hacking” narrative has collapsed now that people are starting to ask “How did the government know all this information about private US persons and their private conversations?”
Tom Scharf recommends the construction of a private twitter sandbox for Trump. I suspect if he found his tweets jammed, he’d explode.
“The Buck Stops Here”.
A President is ultimately responsible for what happens on their watch.
“a private twitter sandbox for Trump”
How about not overreacting to Trump tweets? Just keep calm and carry on.
So on a non-political, tangentially climate related topic:
Last fall I installed on my home’s very low pitched roof the current state of the art in commercial flat roofing, TPO (thermoplastic olefin). It took about 5 months of research to find an improved replacement for the old modified roof that had seen a few too many hail storms and was leaking at the seams. I paid extra and had two full inches of a closed cell commercial grade insulation (ISO board), Rvalue 12 affixed to my roof, with the TPO membrane glued on top of that. Since TPO comes in 10′ wide X 100′ long rolls, it means there are very few seams. And they are literally heat welded together. And this roofing system is highly wind resistant, which is nice here close to the Texas Gulf Coast.
The TPO color is brilliant white- you needs sunglasses to walk on it on a sunny day. The roof does not get uncomfortably hot even in August (walking on my neighbor’s roof when they installed the same) Ours was installed in September, towards the end of the AC season, but we still saw our bills drop dramatically.
The pleasant surprise was that since we have no significant attic, the roofing insulation also holds the heat in the house. Our highest electricity bill so far this year has been $24 in a 2500 sf house without insulated windows. Our gas bill in January was about $35.
So I cut down the big elm that was putting roots under the west end of the house, since I really don’t need the shade so much, it had been leaned towards the house a bit in Ike, and I want this expensive roof to last.
Then today I was thinking about solar and realized something:I
have a 3800 sf roof oriented so as to have a lot of exposures to the south and west. The combination of low bills and favorable sunlight angles led me to call are reputable local solar contractor for a review of solar options. My only request was that they not send a young climate crusader to tell me I am saving the world by buying a solar power system. That would too annoying. I think we could make some nice money on this. Why not take advantage of the tax laws and forced high prices paid for solar produced power? I have been paying for those subsidies for many years now in taxes and rates anyway.
So we will soon hear the solar pitch and maybe take advantage of it….
David Young, again this seems like a stretch—knowledge doesn’t imply responsibility. The FBI is supposed to be able to operate without the inteference of the executive office. The president shouldn’t be ordering investigations or interfering with them.
With respect to the Russian hacking narrative collapsing…it hasn’t collapsed at all, regardless of what FoxNews wants to claim.
There are people on the right who’ve decided to dispute the existence of a robust Russian cyberwarfare group, which has been involved in numerous hacking attacks both in the US and other countries.
There’s no doubt this unit exists, nor that the unit was involved in the DNC hack in some capacity. The only questions are how deep is government involvement in the DNC hacks (as opposed to hacks by private citizens not working under the direction of the Russian government), and how far up the chain the authorization goes.
I still think this hack was in retaliation to perceived State Department interference with Russian elections in 2011. In which case, it happened, and the Russian govenrment was involved at the highest level.
hunter:
No, that saying refers to accountability not responsibility.
You’re accountable as president for what happens on your watch, but you’re only responsible for things you oversee yourself.
This comes straight from analyzing the meaning of the words:
If you are responsible, that means “having an obligation to do something, or having control over or care for someone, as part of one’s job or role.”
If you are accountable, you are answerable for the outcome of an act, even if you had no personal control over that act.
Carrick,
There is literally no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to change the outcome of the American election. None.
There is nothing to collapse. It is a popular illusion, like the birther movement was attractive.
Wikileaks was scrupulously transparent about the prior hacks they were involved with. There is no evidence available to us here this leak was different than what Assange said it is: an internal leak.
this has nothing to do with the Russians being bad guys and good hackers. This has to do with a President and his team who really hated the idea of unworthy deplorable taking office. The same President whose advisors bragged about how they fabricated a phony media buzz about his Iran deal to avoid honestly debating it and silence informed critics.
Carrick, Read Andy’s piece and then judge my assertion. In any case, the whole narrative smells because Obama said virtually nothing about it before the election and would have said nothing if Hillary won. He apparently thought it was not important. The question is what about the feloneous leaks revealing the contents of conversations of American citizens? If these leaks are “real,” then surely it should disturb anyone who believes in civil liberties.
Yes hunter, the whole Iran deal still has secret side agreements. Why would that be the case?
RB, just as I said above. It’s a distraction from the Sessions story. Andy McCarthy points out the contradiction, if there is no surveillance, then the story of the FBI investigating Trump, he’s a Russian agent, falls apart.
Carrick, we agree on the responsibility part, but nevertheless Trump can blame Obama for everything done by his administration.
Could I remind people that only a very short time before the election there was a story from the FBI about possible Hillary emails on a laptop that probably put the final bullet in her bid for the presidency. Where was Obama when that happened?
Bugs,
Mostly in Washington DC with breaks for golf.
Not sure what point you intended to make.
FWIW: too many rhetorical questions above. (It’s not just Bugs.)
Hunter I don’t think Trump colluded with the Russians, but it’s still possible some of his associates did. And the problem with your assertion is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence “. (And sorry but let’s stay focused on the current situation and not replay every supposed wrong the Republicans and Fox News can come up with. As you say, “The buck stops here”.)
and it remains certain there were foreign nationals who were working to change th outcome of this election. The degree of Russian government involvement is unknown and no amount of rhetoric is going to turn unknown into zero. This remains an issue that needs investigated.
Having spent Something like $20 million stopping Hillary from getting elected, Republicans seem to have suddenly lost their appetite for investigation.
Hunter,
go for the solar. I think a couple of the other people who read here have done it and been happy with the results. There is a very good article in QST, the ham magazine about an installation with a lot of detail and more to their point, what was involved in curing rf problems it caused.
You want to make sure installer has done jobs on roofs like yours and is very (VERY) aware of reliable method for handling the roof penetrations required to support them. I would also want to talk about setting them up so they can be cleaned.
I don’t have them, we rent. I do have a lot of second-hand experience from people who used them on boats to reduce genset running.
I hope you’ll let us know what you do and how this works out. and especially if you can get them without a harangue from a young tree-hugger, although maybe there aren’t any in east texas.
MikeN (Comment #159852): “It’s a distraction from the Sessions story.”
No, It’s a distraction from the Sessions non-story.
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Carrick (Comment #159855): “I don’t think Trump colluded with the Russians, but it’s still possible some of his associates did. … absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
.
So what was the objective of this supposed collusion? Real question. The hacking of DNC emails (by persons unknown (who may have had a connection to Russia) happened long before Trump was nominated and in no way required assistance from or coordination with the Trump campaign. So as far as I can tell, the accusation is that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to do absolutely nothing. There is even less here than there was with the birther “controversy”.
When it comes to accusations, absence of evidence most certainly IS evidence of absence.
MikeN,
There are still multiple possibilities:
1. Distraction
2. Trump is in a state of paranoia that he may have been tapped too, but is now less sure after the FBI etc denials.
3. A narcissist does not light a dumpster fire to distract, he is the dumpster fire.
hunter,
one other thing. the supports for the panels assuming they are on your new roof will doubtless be bolted to the underlying roof structure, and through your nice new membrane. If it were me, i would not want them supported on the membrane/insulation board but on the structural roof itself. There are a number of ways this could be done, one with cylinder inserts where the bolts penetrate which are big enough to not cause problems with roof itself, another is to cut out membrane, install a block to carry the load and then repair the membrane around the block. Obviously you want the fewest possible pad/supports, but enough to handle the hurricane loads i remember you get down there from time to time.
It’s probably obvious but there is a real risk of a leaky installation. When you are interviewing it would be good to talk about this. I would shy away from anyone who doesn’t understand the issue. It might be even better if an experienced roofer is involved, even if you hire him separately to make sure the water stays outside your house. And by all means know exactly how the penetrations are going to be handled before you turn anyone loose.
Carrick,
For a POTUS, accountability is all that matters. Responsibility vs. accountability is a distinction without a difference at that level.
Certainly the US has the capabilities to hack just as the Russians do and probably with better skills. The hacks can avoid being made public and thus we do not know the activities covered despite the revelations of wikileaks. I would image that the congressional reactions to the Russian hacking and its attempt to influence politics in the US is pretty much hypocritical.
https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/
Partisan politics with a two party system appears to mean defending the indefensible when your party’s leaders are under attack and offending the other party’s leaders without substantial evidence. I think this is a sad part of our 2 party system and prevents accountability from the politicians and governments role in these matters in general.
The IRS bias against conservative organizations in obtaining tax status was more an issue of big government bureaucratic agencies taking arbitrary actions without – as it turns out -any accountability than it was from any given elected official.
The CIA and other security agencies have secret missions which allows unaccountable mischief and arbitrary actions and arbitrary leaking as it turns out.
At some point we have to point a finger at the system of government and its lack of accountability and get away from the partisan biases of blaming the other party’s politicians.
When those clinging to the Russian UFO story start with the “only focus on the issue st hand, not what Obama did”, I wonder if they have gone from obsession to delusion? Obama rode the”blame it on Bush” horse into his second term. A tell someone is pushing b.s. is when they strip am event or statement out of its context and insist they have to control the terms if the discussion.
j ferguson thanks for the great advice the roof is a huge concern. I will certainly have my roofer earn some extra money reviewing the install if we get to that point.
Hunter,
You probably have some sort of guarantee on what’s there now. You might want to call the guys who did it to see if you can hire them to seal-up whatever is done lest your warranty die with the solar panel installation.
I did a project in Cleveland, TX and was there for a rain that produced 14 inches in 24 hours. it’s dead flat in that area and we had a terrible time getting the water to do someplace else.
j ferguson, that’s a great idea. That roof, between reduced insurance cost and utilities is making a difference. I don’t want to kill a golden goose. Cleveland, Tx. sadly has been going downhill and is now a very rough area dominated by meth, kush, oxycodon and the criminals who traffic it. We used to go there frequently, especially double lake. No more. Your rain experience there is high but in no way unprecedented. When we hear of Californians worried about 3 or 4 inches over a couple of days we just smile.
I see our uber competent intelligence community just had its servers dumped again by WikiLeaks. The IC needs to shape up. By results it isn’t obvious who they are working for lately. I’m prepared to give them a fairly long leash usually but they are straining on that leash.
Kenneth, I’m not so sure that Russian hackers might not be better than ours. I’m involved, tangentially, in a project where the research is done in Russia. Cost is one reason, but the need for very high intelligence is more important. There are plenty of really bright people here, and probably everywhere, but what they do for a living seems to vary with country. And this affects whether you can get the horsepower for what you want to do if you are in a country where the brightest lights are focused on something else.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445522/russian-election-hacking-fbi-not-investigating-trump-campaign
Well worth careful reading.
DeWitt:
I don’t think that’s close to true:
If the president orders something illegal, he has much greater legal exposure than if somebody does something illegal on his watch, which he failed to stop.
David Young, the word I have for that story is “overcooked”.
The basic fact is there are issues to be concerned with. There are ways to parse the facts to make look like it’s not an issue, but I can’t imagine anybody would parse them that way unless they had a conservative agenda.
Has Wikileaks ever posted a fake document. The latest with details about stealing malware and using it to get the Russians blamed is very convenient…
Am I right that the Podesta leaks had no e-mails from Hillary?
They were predicting a big data dump to come that never appeared. Are they still holding Hillary e-mails?
MikeM:
I think you’d have to find whether collusion occurred first. Then you try and assign motive.
I’m not sure how that makes a difference. The theory is (for various reasons), the Russians were trying to prevent Clinton from becoming president. It’s possible (and I’ve seen it claimed) that Trump’s campaign was also compromised by hackers.
In that case, you can look at the selective release of adverse information about Clinton as “putting their thumb on the scales”. I think that is a reasonable intepretation, and is one that firmly puts the Russian government involved in the hacking and selective release of adverse information.
MikeN:
If I remember right, they have posted multiple versions of what was supposed to be a unique document. Hackers sometimes edit the contents of the documents they steal to make them more salacious. The same document from different hacks can end up looking different, for that (amoung other) reasons.
Carrick, it isn’t necessarily illegal. Despite the FISA courts, both Bush and Obama had the position that the President under the Constitution has the authority to engage in warrantless wiretapping with no oversight from the courts.
“selective release of adverse information”
This is what the regular press does.
Andrew
MikeN:
do you have a source for this?
Carrick, Russia being so afraid of the mighty Hillary that they decided to”hack the election” is crazy. Russia loved Obama and Hillary. Russia them to sell authorize the sake of a significant amount of enriched uranium. The Obama/Clinton line in the Syrian sand was a joke. Russia walked in and took Crimea and Eastern Ukraine with no big problem. Obama/Clinton let Venezuela go strong to Russia, etc. The Russian UFO stealing the democrat victory idea is, as Bones would put it: It’s dead, Jim. This has been your Bush flew to Paris in an SR71 to cut a deal with the Ayatollah in Iran October surprise of 1980. Sober up and move on to the next lefty hate session arranged for your political catharsis.
JFerguson
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/legal-memos-released-on-bush-era-justification-for-warrantless-wiretapping/2014/09/05/91b86c52-356d-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html?utm_term=.1029e663da44
MikeN,
Your link ends with
Sounds like the warrantless program was phased out and replaced by FISA.
> Trump’s campaign was also compromised by hackers.
I think that’s the best explanation for the communications with Russian banks, that was written up as secret contacts.
Both DNC and RNC had the same hack attempts, but RNC got lucky.
Thanks MikeN. Bingo.
Under Obama, after the USA Freedom Act of June 2, 2015, it appears that what still remains is collection of metadata, but not the content of the phone calls.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/180/end-warrantless-wiretaps/
Carrick,
If someone in the executive branch behaves illegally without a direct order from the President and the President does nothing about it when he finds out, then the President is effectively an accessory after the fact. Compare and contrast Nixon/Watergate with Reagan/Iran-Contra. Accountability becomes responsibility.
Re: MikeN
I don’t know if they have posted a fake document, but they have excluded Russia-unfavorable documents.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/wikileaks-syria-russia-bank-email-missing
I can’t get excited about the DNC or RNC email server being hacked. Email hacking is a fact of life. Anything important should have been encrypted. For plain text emails, no one should put anything in an email that they wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the NYT or broadcast on the 24 hour cable news channels. Emails are not a secure form of communication.
It’s also my understanding that the security on the DNC server was not very good.
It doesn’t really matter who hacked the servers or whether it was an internal leak. We meddle in other countries elections. We should expect other countries, particularly those who are not friendly, to meddle in ours.
I’m reminded of the casino scene in Casablanca:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMIyDf3gBoY
MikeN – the Podesta dump did contain some emails from Hillary. Not many, but some.
Carrick, You will notice however that since the Trump tweet, mainstream media have been saying that there is no evidence of an Obama admin. Federal investigation of Trump or his alleged Russian connections. However, previous media reports in the New York Times and the BBC reported that such an investigation did indeed exist. This is McCarthy’s point. He didn’t say there was nothing to worry about I don’t think.
I do agree that there is something to worry about with Russian involvement in our domestic politics. Obama as the President at the time should have been working to prevent it. It’s just another indication that Obama and his administration were liars and incompetent.
BTW, Obama did bug a lot of people he didn’t like or trust, e.g., Angelica Merkel and James Rosen. Would you be surprised if Obama’s administration bugged the political opposition? Ask the Tea Party people about polarization of the IRS.
David Young,, since Trump tweeted, virtually nobody including Spicer has defended it, the Republicans in Congress are walking back on it, and Trump’s administration even seems to be trying to walk back from “Obama wire taped Trump” to “this needs to be looked at”.
I don’t have any problem with this being investigated.. but it would take about three days for the Whitehouse to do it… they have full access to all of the documents. And Trump has the authorization to release the details of anything they find.
My guess they already have looked and there’s no there, there. Certainly it’s not the sort of thing that needs any help from Congress to confirm or contradict.
Chris Cillizza’s take. (He’s been a frequent vocal critic of HRC.)
hunter:
Yes it is, so good thing I didn’t say (or tweet!) it.
It doesn’t require a complex analysis to work out that having a Russiaphile like Trump in the presidency is very much more in their interests than an active foe like HRC.
I think you really just don’t want this to be, and that’s enough for you to decide it isn’t so. There’s no arguing with that sort of reasoning…so any last word to you.
DeWItt:
Invasions are a fact of life too. That doesn’t mean that when they happen, you ignore them. 😉
If Russia interfered with our elections (yes I know we do it too), that’s an act that merits a proportional response.
[Of course it could be argued that the hacking of the DNC was a proportional response to US inteference in the 2011 Russian elections.]
Carrick,
You’re missing the point. Reacting to a hack, unlike an invasion, is nearly pointless. Unlike on TV, there’s really not much you can do. Whinging about being hacked is less than pointless.
You want to prevent being hacked with the best security you can buy. The DNC didn’t do that. Even with the best security and constant monitoring, you still might get hacked. So don’t put embarrassing stuff in your plain text emails. The DNC didn’t do that either.
The superficial humor of the hacked emails is that they proved the DNC and MSM were in fact 100% in the tank for Hillary…. exactly as their critics claimed. The deeper (and darker) humor is that about half the country seems to think it was OK for the DNC and the MSM to be pulling for Hillary ehind the scenes, even while bald faced lying about that fact in public.
.
Most of the public does not believe the what MSM or politicians say. That could not be more richly deserved.
Carrick, if you were trying for humor keep your day job. Russia didn’t make Hillary lose. Russia didn’t change one vote. Russia got everything they wanted from Hillary and Obama. And then some.
The DNC reaction to the hack/leak was notable: they declined to cooperate with the FBI and refused to let FBI forensic experts directly examine the hacked equipment. I think they knew it was an internal leak and lied about like they lied about their plans for Bernie or their not completely controlling the legacy media.
Russia got everything they wanted from Hillary and Obama. And then some.
.
This is the central point that the MSM seems to miss, which is why they deserve zero credibility. If the theory is that Putin wanted Trump to win this only proves the MSM was completely wrong that unstable Trump is liable to start a war with Russia. If that were true wouldn’t the person who is the target of the US arsenal be concerned? Of course he would. This is a classic case of the DNC/MSM being caught in a contradictory talking points separated only by weeks.
The security breaches that were exposed today started under Obama’s Administration. The press release was today- the leaks/thefts were months ago, apparently.
Team Obama has been involved with some of the biggest intel failures since Pearl Harbor: Leak after leak, misreadings of the facts, bad policy bets, etc. etc. etc. And the team he has left behind demonstrates why it happened- they care nothing for their legal obligation and moral duty to safeguard American security. If something can help their cause they leak it, knowing that they will likely not be held accountable. Obama’s favorite vote when he was a Senator was “present”. As President, he seems to have repeated that position, albeit with plenty of time for golf.
Now the CIA- and America- is exposed to hackers, terrorists, state actors, thieves, political intrigue. Thanks, Barak!
But Trump was not precise enough in his tweet and is the bad guy.
I was really wondering what he was supposed to be doing. According to the Obama haters here he is pulling all the strings. Yet a story that was hugely damaging to Clinton gets released under his watch just before the election.
Bugs, and to make up for it Mr. Obama, who declared the election fair and untainted the day after, has sat by silently while his left overs and fellow democrats have worked themselves into a frenzy to undermine the election. The only group seeking to undermine this election are democrats.
Bugs,
I don’t think anyone — not even Obama haters– think he was pulling every single string in the world or even his administration. The theories that
(a) he is responsible or involved in a huge amount of stuff done by his administration and
(b) he was unable to prevent information damaging to Clinton from being released just before the election are aren’t “either/or”.
Both could be true. Thank you for elaborating the point you intended to make with your rhetorical question. As usual with points advanced by rhetorical questions: It a far from brilliant point which can easily be shown to be flawed.
>refused to let FBI forensic experts directly examine the hacked equipment.
I think that’s a reasonable course of action for a political party, worried about secrets getting out via the investigation.
RB, the link doesn’t say they were wiretapping before, but rather that they were collecting lots of metadata and the changes stop that.
hunter:
Sorry but it isn’t very difficult to understand why Russia would favor Trump:
Clinton favored strong sanctions against Russia. Trump favored closer relations and was willing to wave off Russia’s military incursions against their neighbors.
It’s a sign of not being very bright when you are forced to use petty insults instead of reasoned arguments.
DeWitt:
That’s certainly not the position of the US government, nor any other government I’m aware of. Hacking causes economic damage. It can the loss of strategic advantages created through significant economic invesment.
It can be viewed as an act of war. It certainly can’t be ignored.
Unless it’s China hacking OPM data. That pretty much got ignored, as far as I could tell.
Carrick: Trump favored closer relations and was willing to wave off Russia’s military incursions against their neighbors.
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Who is Trump favoring Russia invade? I think you may be confused with the giving an adversary a fresh start, kind of like a “reset,” with a change in overall geopolitical goals.
mark bofill: I recognize you can’t view every breach as government sponsored.
China cracks down on the hackers.
Russia recruits them.
Ron, you’ve flipped your argument.
Before it was no difference between Trump and HRC, now it’s a justification for why it’s okay for Trump to be more “pro-Russia”.
My point was Trump as president would be a better outcome for Russia. Your argument is supporting that point.
Why do you say Hillary is a Russia ‘foe’? She did the reset button. Sure Russia sees lots of pro-Russia stuff coming from Trump, ad can prefer him to Hillary for that reason, but did they see anything bad from Hillary?
Putin’s interests are to create loss of faith in American institutions, to create chaos so that Russia is left alone to pursue its geopolitical goals. This includes Ukraine, other former Soviet republics, Sweden etc. There was also the Hillary animus from her SoS days. Plus
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
The institutions themselves often do this.
Andrew
Thanks Carrick, I hadn’t run across that.
I’m surprised Putin hasn’t rounded up some scapegoats. Possibly he doesn’t care enough to bother.
Sure. Sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble, regardless of the actual facts. It was my impression that this was the sort of thing DeWitt was alluding to.
Carrick,
Your UFOolgy-like obsession on this leaves you highly resistant to critical thinking. The Russian-stole-the-election conspiracy theory doesn’t stand up under reasonable critical thinking. And ignoring the Iranian elephant in the room is sort of funny.
Here is an excellent essay that hits hard on both sides of this, and points out the delusional nature of much of the hysteria being orchestrated right now.
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/03/07/we-learn-about-american-politics/
RB,
Let’s see, Putin murders or imprisons his political enemies, confiscates territory, and invades other countries. Trump writes odd tweets. I guess that makes the two exactly the “same kind of people”, at least in the minds of the derranged left.
Leaks and hacks are a fact of life, nothing new and partisan finger pointing changes none of that blame-wise. Governments do it and are never called to account for it.
The leaks of the DNC could well be considered as hurting Hillary’s candidacy but only because to begin with she was a weak candidate and had a weak message and was not particularly personality-wise very attractive. Given the character of her opponent with all his very well known weaknesses and his eventual very low poll ratings once becoming president, says volumes about HC and the Democrat message. Leaks have certainly kept the current administration vis a vis Russian contacts off their game, but that probably says more about their game plan or a lack thereof.
I am disappointed that the Wikileaks revelations about the CIAs hacking tactics has not gotten more attention and discussion with regards to the problems associated with these activities vis a vis civil liberties and secret and unaccountable government actions. It appears that on the left and right there is more concern about the leaks and the revelation of activities that they evidently think need to be kept from the public. Russian hacks and leaks are bad but those of the US are OK providing we do not know about them.
Kenneth, the latest wikileaks is a massive complex is due that is going to take some time to even begin to digest. It is one thing to leak Podesta’s impersonation of Machiavelli. It is another to leak national ways and means of our deepest Intel and cyber-defense. Like all things there are limits where wikileaks morphs from acceptable to unacceptable.
This is interesting: Someone mock debate with a woman actor playing Hillary and a man playing Trump. Then checked out audience reactions:
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html
lucia, hi that link is blocked.
Hmm… I edited to remove the query string. The link works for me.
Interesting. Some people say that Trump actually wants Hollywood’s approval because he feels that he’s been in showbiz for a long time just like them.
There were those articles which said Trump’s language was more feminine than Clinton’s.
Why the deception?
…..
I was reading the NYTs summary of Trump officials ducking the question of whether Obama had wiretapped Trump and was thinking that Trump had gone way off the reservation. (Spicer refusing to answer question because it was above his pay grade) Still think he may have. However….
…..
Then I read an article where someone says yes, Obama’s administration collected private emails but it didn’t wiretap as alleged by Trump. See http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/news/gen-politics/fact-checking-trump-defenses-his-wiretapping-claim/7tDnB3yHE3L28hL9dj2b5N/
“Chaffetz [Rep. Utah] said he is not aware of evidence backing up Trump’s claims, but noted that the Obama administration is “notorious†for similar behavior. None of the incidents he mentioned, however, are parallel to Trump’s accusations of illegal wiretapping ordered by Obama.
The Justice Department’s 2013 investigation of Rosen, a journalist at Fox News, was authorized by a court order and included scanning his emails. Rosen himself clarified on Fox News that he was not wiretapped.”
…..
Seriously, reading private emails isn’t “parallel” to wiretapping. Totally loony and stupid.
JD
That duplication hasn’t really flipped things. The guy still sounds more feminine. Doesn’t sound grating though.
SteveF, Putin killed innocent people to get elected(false flag apartment bombing blamed on Chechens, anyone who asks gets killed). Trump to get elected turned innocent people into killers(Cruz Sr). They’re the same.
Careful parsing of what Clapper said- not as forceful a denial as it appears:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445588/james-clapper-trump-statements-reveal-omission
I hope others realize that people who do/did deceptive things as part of their job in the intelligence community are not likely to come out and proclaim what it is/was they actually did or were/are aware of.
Andrew
Carrick,
An act of war? Puhleeze. At worst it’s fairly normal espionage and the usual propaganda ploys that most nations use.
Better security is the answer, not offensive actions like sanctions.
MikeN,
Interesting reaction. I found the guy doing “Hillary” very annoying. Very, very, very annoying. And not because I found him feminine.
lucia,
Wow, it was as I thought: I don’t like Hillary because I don’t like her style or agenda, gender irrelevant. And Trump’s style, gender aside, was more winning. Actually maybe a little easier to hear coming from a woman?
DeWitt, my favorite example of goverment-sponsored hacking is the Stuxnet computer worm used to disable a large number of Iranian centrifuges back in 2009.
Somehow I don’t think that example fits into your “at worst it’s fairly normal espionage and the usual propaganda ploys that most nations use.”
Using hacking to disseminate information harmful to one candidate to affect the outcome of an election similarly is not a “propaganda ploy”.
Nor is, as I mentioned, stealing strategic technologies that other countries have spent billions of dollars developing.
Puhleeze, indeed.
The Putin profile I linked to above includes several examples of how Russians have used hacking as a weapon. It is now known in military circles as the Gerasimov doctrine.
Carrick, the leaks from Podesta”s computer were accurate. The NYT was praised across the country for publishing the stolen and leaked “Pentagon Papers”. I was told time and again that publishing accurate information, even if stolen, was extremely important. But notice that climate true believers argue the leak. And now the pushers of the fantasy that Russia stole the docs so they can be ignored. And we are the “d€n!er$”.
Lucia, I found the debate clip to be surprising in that I thought there would be more of a difference from the actual debate. If most went to the event expecting the woman to sound ridiculous as Trump, my theory is Trump mainly lost the original debate due to the handicap of negative branding by the 90% negative media. One does not realize the power of their innate bias. If I had not seen the original debate and did not know who debated I would not be able to tell which was the male or the female articulation or demeanor.
Talk about reversals. The Trump family were getting to know the Cruz’s over dinner yesterday. Newsmax reminds the reader (I had to chuckle):
.
Bygones…
hunter,
Publishing accurate information (say, the UEA email trove) is useful to the extent that it shows malfeasance. The pentagon papers did show malfeasance in execution/evaluation of the war effort in Vietnam, and so were useful. Dito the disclosure of malfesance by the DNC and the MSM in Podesta’s emails. I am still looking for any evidence of malfesance in all of the recent leaks about Trump administration officials.
SteveF, Their crime apparently is to displease the administrative state and those profiting from it by not only winning but having the audacity to actually move the Trump agenda forward.
Stuxnet is the kind of thing that makes me give the IC a long leash. Awesome. Might be the Israelis though mostly. This was really well done until it was exposed. From someone who has written firmware for a lot of industrial systems, this was one of the things that makes the IC look intelligent.
.
It drives me crazy when the media exposes these things, but it mostly occurs after it has been already exposed to the people that matter. One exception to this is when the NYT reported the NSA was listening to OBL’s satellite phone calls, then he stopped using them.
Carrick,
There’s hacking and then there’s sabotage. STUXNET was sabotage, which most, I think, would consider an act of war, justified or not. Similarly, invading the electrical grid control system and blacking out a large area of a country would also be sabotage. Hacking email servers, which was the original subject, is not in the same class. The recent Wikileaks trove shows that the CIA has also invested in creating hacking tools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-cia-hacking.html?_r=0
Better security is still the answer.
DeWitt
Actually, it’s all hacking, or “cyber attacks” if you prefer, if they are orchestrated by a government, but it’s all on a continuum actually.
Cyber attacks can go from mostly innocuous (propaganda) to extreme examples like this which crippled a defense related effort. The most severe ones that people can imagine would be a cyberattack on a nuclear power plant, though attacks that shut down the internet would be felt by many.
If it was a hacking orchestrated by a government intended to affect the outcome of an election, it certainly is a serious cyber attack, and one that would normally require a reciprocal response.
NATO recognizes severe cyberattacks as acts of war and authorizes conventional weapons as a form of response. Probably the threshold where you’d see a military response is scenario specific.
There’s no real news to the CIA hacking tools by the way. The main things experts say is that the CIA toolset is designed for “spearfishing” (targeting of individuals), and couldn’t really be used for broad scale spying on society.
The biggest outcome of this, assuming Wikileaks releases the entire toolbox, is hostile actors will have access to it. This means our society is made more vunlerable as a result of this release of information.
Carrick, I agree with you on this. We are more vulnerable in many ways. Bad actors will run with is and tweak it for thieving. Pirates will seek ways yo hit more organizations. A significant amount of the software was designed to intercept Intel from terrorists and other violent or dangerous persons. The abuse side if this by government is an obvious problem as well.
Lucia, I think it depends on which excerpt. Watching this, my reaction is similar to yours, though still not as grating as Hillary. Then again in the debates she was under orders to keep it in check. I watch The Circus, and I get reminded all over again when I see her speeches. I think Trump could have run ads of her speeches, overlaid with ‘Do you want to hear this for four years? You can make it stop on Election Day.’
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/03/the-great-debate-experiment.php
DeWitt: “There’s hacking and then there’s sabotage.”
Carrick: “it’s all hacking, or “cyber attacks†if you prefer, if they are orchestrated by a government, but it’s all on a continuum actually”.
.
More sophistry from Carrick. That there is a continuum does not mean that there are not useful distinctions and meaningful boundaries within that continuum. Diplomacy is war by other means. Does that mean that there is no difference between war and diplomacy? Of course not. Someone above claimed that there is no difference between murder and slander (perhaps being sarcastic). Both lie on a continuum of nasty activities damaging to others, but they are very different.
.
Spying and bombing are part of a continuum of activities orchestrated by governments. One will likely start a war, and the other won’t. Hacking to obtain information is akin to spying. Hacking to commit sabotage is akin to bombing. They are very different.
Mike M.,
+1
I was going use a comparison between Nerf guns and 50 caliber machine guns. They’re on a continuum too.
There is also the fact that we still don’t know who orchestrated the DNC email release. The idea that it was Russia is just an assertion that could have been designed to tar Trump. It could also have been an internal leak a la Snowden or some script kiddie. I still see no reason to get excited.
MikeN,
I think it’s the same video at both links. I’ll hunt for more.
That ‘Nerf N-Strike Elite Rhino-Fire Blaster’ is a mean looking piece of ordnance.
Mike N,
Voting for Trump on order not to be exposed to 4years of Hillaryspeak is pretty good. I voted for Nixon in 1968 to prevent 4 years of Hubert.
JFerguson, he was that bad? It’s strange watching the old speeches. Reagan’s convention speech in 1980 is horrible, because someone thought it was a good idea to have bullhorns.
MikeN,
My recollection is that Humphry had a high pitched grating voice. But more grating was the sanctimonious certainty his policies were absolutely right. When the base on the left manages to get the nomination for one of their own, they don’t usually win. Obama was the only exception in my lifetime. I am pulling for someone like Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren to lead them ever further into the wilderness.
Scott Brown nearly destroyed her, using her Harvard position against her. The unions had to work overtime to force things like ‘Hard Hats for Warren.’
Re: Clinton — Trump sexual role reversals.
…..
It is almost certain now that there will be 10 studies showing that Clinton was the victim of sexist discrimination. From the Left’s perspective, anything that shows lack of discrimination where a “minority” performs not as well as a white (male) person has to be wrong.
….
About 20 years ago a Black man studied why Black students didn’t do as well as whites in the wealthy Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. (In the 60s, it was the richest city in the US — nowhere near that now) See http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm Some of the Black students stated that the reason for the lagging Black performance was that the White students worked harder. Of course, that conclusion was attacked by many who could not believe that it could possibly be true in some circumstances.
JD
MikeN,
Warren beat Scott by 7.5%; it wasn’t that close. Of course, Warren clearly underperformed based on voter registration and Mass voting history. Most places in the country I think she would lose by historic (Walter Mondale like) margins. I am pulling for her; nobody in her party better represents where the base wants to go…. bring on the slaughter.
MikeN,
SteveF has Humphrey down cold. But there was more. once he got rolling he could talk interminably. My fear in 1968 with his possible accession to the presidency was that once started, he would never shut up. he was also sanctimonious. He was very bright as well; probably financially crooked. His estate in Minnesota was thought to have been a gift of Dwayne Andreas, ADM.
SteveF, it was thought to be too close to call right up to Election Day. Then nearly every close race swung towards Democrats, getting some unexpected wins in ND and Wisc.
j ferguson,
There is a long running common thread of ‘progressive’ politicians enriching themselves via the sale of influence/access/favora. The Clinton are the most glaring example. My guess is that this is no coincidence. After all, very few ‘progressive’ politicians have had much of a career outside politics, and fewer yet in any field beyond law.
Mike N,
Warren will hold that seat for life if she wishes… heck, her embalmed body may be able to hold that seat after she dies. Mass is not going to ever throw her out.
…Always and never are seldom true…..
MikeN,
Her staff would need to install a voice synthesizer if she is embalmed but still in the Senate.
hunter,
In this case, never is very, very close to correct. I lived in Mass for a long time.
The idea of the Trump tweets reflecting distraction strategy is looking less likely as more reports come in.
The narcissist theory of ego gratification seems to fit better.
RB,
Perhaps, but now propaganda outlets like the NYT have started running stories about a complete lack of investigation into Trump’s purported coniving with Russia. This after months of saying he was ‘possibly’ the subject of investigation! They can’t have it both ways: if Trump was really thought to be coordinating with the Russians to steal the election, then why would they not be investigating him? It would be a breach of duty to not. If he was not really suspected of conniving with the Russians, then why have the Democrat propaganda outlets been harping on this since his election? (Not rhetorical questions.) I think a more serious issue is the stream of leaks to the Democrat propaganda outlets…. good grief, the content of a conversation between the Aussie PM and Trump is clearly classified information. That disclosure is a felony, and should be prosecuted.
SteveF,
I don’t know whether there is an ongoing investigation of Trump associates, forget Trump. Ex-IC/nat-sec folks are saying that this is the case. We’ll have to wait and see if there is any concrete evidence.
BTW, there are leaks of all kinds – from IC community, from Obama holdovers and palace intrigue. For instance, there was an article about ‘knives out for Priebus’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if their source for the whole thing was Bannon.
RB,
Leaking of classified information is a felony. Some may think felonious behavior is justified, but they should still be sitting in prison…. feeling righteous.
SteveF
Good points. If nothing else, it appears Trump has now been cleared of the insinuations that he was colluding with the Russians!
Oddly, Trump accusing Obama and his administration of tapping his phone may have been the only practical way to end the rumors he had been under investigation for that. Because now to clear Obama of that accusation, they had to clear Trump’s name from the “suspected” list!
RB
By “forget Trump”, do you mean you too agree that Trump wasn’t a suspect being investigated? (Real question.)
I’m not worried if “associates” are being investigated. The word “associates” seems to be used to describe people with extremely tenuous connections to Trump. Given how that word is used, it’s not unlikely that many in Hollywood, business, politics, law, academia and all sorts of enterprises have “associates” who might deserve being investigated.
Lucia,
When I say Trump associates, I mean people associated with his campaign e.g., Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort. I don’t agree that Trump isn’t a suspect being investigated – I just don’t know. Perhaps investigation is being focused currently on people that reports say had contacts with Russian intelligence.
RB,
I Trump really is the target of investigations, why all the immediate (and very clear) denials that Trump was the target of investigation? real question.
RB, your mental gymnastics are impressive yet transparent. Blaming Bannon for the Orwellian hates that Trump has been subjected to by democrats and lefty media makes you look silly and contrived. There never was anything there. It was a UFO story. The only people who have worked to undermine this election are the same people who ridiculed then candidate Trump for stating he would accept Or question the election based on the specifics. First the losers demanded recounts. That failed. Then there was lobbying and pressuring the Electoral College. That failed. Then there was the Russians hacked the election.. But Mr. Obama stated after the election that it was a fair and honest election. That failed as well. Now we are watching you and many others who don’t see the pattern fall for the “Trump…or someone near him…is colluding with the Russians and was under wiretap and investigation. …errr not wiretap. …errr intercept and investigation. And certainly Obama has nothing to do with it, he was just President. And it wasn’t actually an investigation and besides Bannon is a mean guy. That is your thought process, condensed. Look! In the sky! It’s a UFO! Admit it. You’ve been manipulated big time. Blame those who jerked you around.
Lucia, it’s not there anymore, but his original post about Nancy Pelosi, said “I hear by call for a second investigation…” Liberal media jumped on the spelling error.
Could it have been deliberate by Trump to get the coverage?
SteveF,
As people have posted above, the denial statements were very targeted. They said Trump’s phones were not wiretapped and neither was his campaign’s. It could very well mean that no Trump person communication was intercepted. On the other hand, it doesn’t preclude the possibility that Russian intelligence was wiretapped and Trump camp communication was intercepted as a result. Maybe there is nothing or maybe nothing will come out short of a Congressional investigation.
RB,
I get it. You don’t know if he is being investigated.
That said: if Trump is being investigated, then, presumably, his accusation that he was being wiretapped by “Obama” (meaning the administration) is substantively true. You can nit-pick about whether “Obama” is different from the “Obama administration”, which is true. But really…. I don’t think anyone thought Obama placed the wires himself. And once we recognize that language is colloquial, the meaning can be merely “Obama administration”.
If it is true that the Obama administration was tapping and/or investigating Trump, all sorts of people should not be saying that he was not tapped or investigated. I actually think we have a right to know whether the Obama administration was investigating Trump .
Given the denials my impression is the answer to “Was Trump being investigated” seems to be “Absolutely not”. Ergo: He is not suspected.
BTW, one of the earlier reports said that Trump camp had communication with Russians in European cities. Nothing about intercepted communication.
RB,
There is no there, there.
The NYT rewrotei ts January 20, 2017 headline to continue their death march. Rolling Stone is warning fellow journalists and lefty’s that they are heading off a cliff. you are arguing in effect that the remains found at Roswell might have been UFO parts and so the investigation must continue.
RB, nothing in your post or the article contradicts the distraction possibility. That he was happy about it the next morning doesn’t mean it wasn’t a distraction strategy. That he realized he had gone too far doesn’t mean it wasn’t a distraction strategy. That he was unfamiliar with the details of how to get a warrant doesn’t mean it wasn’t a distraction strategy.
No one is talking much about Jeff Sessions right now, except for SNL opening skit.
lucia (Comment #159962): “Oddly, Trump accusing Obama and his administration of tapping his phone may have been the only practical way to end the rumors he had been under investigation for that.”
.
Whad’ya know, Trump actually knew what he was doing. Funny how that keeps happening,
RB,
Want to wager on that? I say absolutely nothing will come of any Congressional investigation…. no forced resignations of Trump administration staff, no firings of Trump staff, no impeachment, nothing. Oh say, $200 donated to the charity of the other’s choice. What say you?
Lucia,
I think the reports suggest direct investigation of foreign intelligence who came into contact with the Trump camp. One could investigate foreign intelligence or a FISA investigation into those who came into contact with foreign intelligence. Without evidence of direct links to Trump, it seems that you cannot call Trump a suspect. The approach would be to see where the investigation goes, assuming the preceding was true.
Hunter, NYT didn’t rewrite the headline. The headline in the printed paper is different from the online one, and has been so since publication. At the time it said ‘scrutinized’. Andy McCarthy has withdrawn his article about it.
SteveF,
Sorry, not willing to wager because I’m not sure there is an investigation or evidence of collusion.
Twitter currently recommends I follow Jake Tapper, Ezra Klein, Joe Scarborough
The distraction…..like the commission paid to Podesta’s family for “arranging” the approval of Obama/Clinton enriched Uranium sale. Or the distraction from the Iranian influence on American policy. Or the distraction from the DoJ getting lawsuit settlements and spending the money/offering cut rate settlements for “donations” to orgs favored by Obama. Or the incredible, destructive and dangerous leaks of American intel under Obama. Or distract from….the many friendly things Obama did to help Russia.
RB,
“One” of the “reports” discussed hookers peeing on mattresses. There didn’t seem to be any thing to that story. Someone needs to explain why a particular report is worth my consideration before I worry about it.
RB, the NYT is still lying about Trump, no matter the headline.
And you are still buying it.
RB
This would be
(a) not Trump himself.
(b) not even remotely “associates” of Trump.
Even if this “report” “suggested” this, I don’t see how it should affect anyone’s opinion of Trump or his “associates”.
Of course, perhaps if one investigates one might eventually find evidence linking something to Trump– if that even exists. But really…. If that’s the “report”…. it’s about like the “hookers peeing” level of story.
RB,
There is, however, plenty of evidence of politically motivated felonious disclosure of classified information. I doubt the leakers will be caught and prosecuted, and also doubt the leaks will stop until all the holdovers are gone and many upper level bureaucrats (with obvious animosity toward Trump) are ‘reassigned’ to career-end closets. Trump can’t fire them, but he can certainly make sure they no longer have access to much information.
Lucia,
None of the reports need to concern you unless proven.
The report about meetings in Europe has been disproven by one of the named people showing his passport, that he had never been to the city in question.
Trump’s twitter feed, strategic or random?
Mar 2
reacts to Jeff Sessions story with 4 part tweet, that Dems are trying to save face for losing the election, overplaying their hand, lost grip on reality, and real story is leaks of classified material.
Mar 3
Complains Dems are not doing their jobs by approving his cabinet.
Pic of Trump as commander in chief
Tweets pics of Pelosi and Schumer meeting with Russians, sandwiched around pic of Trump at a school talking about education
Mar 4
Blames Obama for Sessions meeting
Says Obama tapped his wires
Russian Ambassador that met with Sessions visited White House 22 times
Remaining tweets about Obama wiretapping Bad(or sick) guy!
Arnold’s low ratings on Apprentice
Mar 5
DNC would not allow FBI to see their hacked server
Mentions Obama’s telling Putin he would have more flexibility after the election
Rallies around the country supporting him
Mar 6
job creating
jobs
bringing back the JOBS!
JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!
jobs
MikeN, so Trump should stop everything and do what deranged Letty’s demand or should he push the agenda he promised to advance and lead the nation he was elected to serve? It seems he is leaning heavily towards the latter.
MikeN,
Maybe it’s strategy, a couple of days ago there was a 1:1 correspondence with Fox and Friends.
RB
Many you are mentioning need not concern even if proven. For example: The correct response to “proof” that someone nefarious “contacted” someone in the Trump campaign should be be “yawn”.
I have zero doubt that nefarious people contacted people ever single campaign. Nefarious people often hope to schmooze up to well placed individuals and so contact campaigns. I’d be surprised if there were zero contacts any presidential — or even senatorial — campaign and any number of nefarious individuals. If the fact of “contact” is proven, my reaction is “yawn”.
You have to show quite a bit more than “contact”. That the rumors of this ilk … well.. really.
RB #159882, the new FISA law eliminated warrantless wiretapping, but the President declared in a signing statement that he nevertheless considers it Constitutional to wiretap without a warrant for national security.
Kenneth, you said the latest tweets were the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency. I notice you said ‘signal’. Do you think these tweets will directly cause the beginning of the end, or are they merely a symptom of the real cause?
Anybody want to discuss the ineptitude and unaccountability of the CIA as revealed by Wikileaks?
> would you (a) roll it out from the White House for maximum effect (maybe in an evening address to the nation) or would you (b) send out a flurry of tweets at 6 AM before moving on to castigating Arnold Schwarzenegger?
I think like Nixon, Trump thinks this is how politics is done, and not a major scandal(despite calling it that in the Tweet). So for him it’s just a game and he’s having fun attacking Obama after what they are doing to Sessions.
Hmmm…were there contacts between foreign officials and Clinton or her campaign staff? Or even associates? [Rhetorical question…my answer, yes there were.]
Was there was a FISA warrant sought for those? [Rhetorical question. My answer: we’ll likely never know. But it seems unlikely to me. Because politics. HRC had politically-like-minded allies in power at the time, including an ally-in-chief.]
Lucia,
I agree that it has to be about more than “contact”. The main issue is whether there was collusion and whether there is evidence to prove it.
Kenneth,
The general quality of ‘intellegence’ from the CIA over several decades suggests to me that they are a much less than very competent organization. The recent leaks of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders suggests that at least one high level person at CIA is a felon who should be sitting in prison. A purge of the organization’s leadership, and demotion of many to harmless positions seems long overdue. If anyone at the CIA was worth a pinch of…. well, they would be working to identify and refer to the justice department those felons. I won’t hold my breath waiting.
RB,
Basically: you keep bringing up hypotheticals for which there is no evidence in ways that sound like you are insinuating there is something there. But, at least for now, there is nothing there.
Yes, of course if sometime in the future, some evidence of something appears, then there will be some evidence of something. But for now: Bupkiss. I’m mystified by your evident desire to post things like RB (Comment #159975) . I mean… really, these at most deserve “yawn”.
RB,
You could have comfotably presided over the Salem witch trials. The normal presumption is innocence absent evidence of guilt. You have it exactky backwards, presuming guilt in the absence of ironclad evidence of innocence, which is, happily for both you and prosecutors of witches, an impossibility.
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I’m almost tempted to think you share with the NYT a visceral disgust that Trump is President. You should get over it; but I doubt you will. Nor will the Times.
The story about the banks communicating with servers in Trump Tower is strange. Most everyone should conclude that it is evidence that Trump was hacked, yet media reports turned it into evidence of Trump campaign talking to the Russians.
On the WIKI leaks CIA stuff. Do we know that it was hacked, or maybe someone walked out the door with it? Maybe it doesn’t make a difference.
At a place I knew everything which was proposed to leave the building was inspected. Two guys and they were very thorough. Very.
In these days of 128 gig micro-sd’s this would probably be more difficult.
MikeN (#159997) –
What aspects of the communications (or servers) suggest hacking? I haven’t heard any details, just vague terms like “communication”, and computer traffic can be from all sorts of activities.
In my misspent younger years I studied UFO believers, trying to understand how such a broad spectrum of people could believe utter crap. What significant numbers of Americans have become are very similar to UFO believers, falling for any excuse to believe utter crap.
jferguson, like most leaks the CIA stuff wikileaks has was stolen.
Trojan horses, anyone?
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #159990)
“Anybody want to discuss the ineptitude and unaccountability of the CIA as revealed by Wikileaks?”
Layers of an onion.
Information is going to get out and hurt from time to time in a non Communist style of government.
What you do not see is how many attempts have been made and how little does get out most of the time.
They will learn and react to the recent episodes professionally.
The problem is that to beat the bad guys you often have to become as bad as the bad guys, but if you do it really well you will no longer have a democracy.
The current team probably have the hawkish attitude, all security teams, do modified a little by the recent Democrat influence on policy. Recent and ongoing leaks and attacks suggest they are not happy with Trump but if, if, he survives they will probably grow to like him.
As an aside If I was president of a country as large and with as many enemies as USA I would be hoping that my own security services did tap all my and my associates communications with or without “authority”. Naive and ignorant to expect anything less. Would I give details if in charge ? Only in extreme circumstances to protect him.
angech +
I still think this (the current wikkileak exploit) could be beneficial to our security folks. Before, they couldn’t be sure about other guys’ means and methods, now they may see some they will recognize which could provide information not otherwise easily obtained. And this is without getting into probability that some of this stuff is, in effect, bugged.
Maybe we are too quick to assume that our government is staffed by idiots. some, for sure, but not everyone.
If wikileaks has been played, so much the better. I could see where an AI or group of AIs acting as super admins, equipped with backdoors on the spyware, and running on ultrafast ultrahigh bandwidth systems with massive access to the web could do quite a bit. The news now is that the DNC leaks investigation is closing in on some Pakistani brothers who who were computer techs with free run of a lot of the dnc and dems in the House.
I should add, that if these things are Trojan Horses, they will need to be pretty subtle if they are not to be detected by the smartest of the other guys.
As an example, dumb though it is, in 1990, we wrote a VMS script which ran a spooler which accepted CAD plots from either AutoCAD or Intergraph and sent them to a CalComp electrostatic plotter. it ran fine as a script and helped us sell a couple of these plotters. Then one of the crazies in the office suggested that we compile it and add a little routine that would look to see if it was on a domain and then UUCP (IIRC) the name of the domain to our system once a month.
We got a couple of these notes every month for about a year. Then we started getting a bunch from the west coast. Apparently someone, probably a CalComp guy, had seen and liked it and the company had started sharing it to others who needed to plot from both CAD systems.
So I supposed that if I could think of this, others could.
And further, it raises the question of why people believe some of the stuff they read and totally reject other things.
Lucia:
Actually, there’re reports that at least one associate of Trump who met with Russian intelligence: Paul Manafort.
This story is from February 14.
MikeN:
Actually no.
The passport just shows your entry and extra countries. The states in the Schengen Agreement you can travel freely in with out showing a passport for entry or exit to neighboring Schengen area countries, so you won’t end up with any marking on your passport for visiting these countries.
The only markings you get are for leaving and existing the Schengen area.
Or course anybody who travels to Europe very much knows this. So that makes it an odd document to offer as proof.
Carrick, MikeN —
Carrick, while you’re correct about passport stamps within Schengen areas, the report was wrong.
I’m not up on this sort of story, but a quick google found this article stating that Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen did not meet in Prague as alleged; he was in California, far outside Schengen.
A passport can’t prove that a person didn’t visit Prague specifically. But Cohen’s apparently shows that he was in the US at the time.
IT service company owned by Pakistani brothers now under criminal investigation:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-01/house-democrats-delayed-dismissal-it-staff-hackers-because-they-were-muslim-american
Their clients in government appear to have been exclusively either dnc staffers or Congressional democrats. And they had admin access to many systems.
Apparently the Awan brothers were highly connected politically, and finally got caught operating a server out of the House of Representatives. And this seems to have possible explosive implications for a lot of what has been used to manipulate so many Americans into believing the Russia-stole-the-election fantasy.
This is not going to go away.
Here is a more in depth report, showing who the brothers worked for and raising lots of questions about phantom employees, excessive pay and unchecked access to sensitive equipment at both DNC headquarters and the Congressional offices democrats in the Capitol itself.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/01/pakistani-suspects-in-house-it-probe-received-4-million-from-dem-reps/
Carrick, look at how long ago Manafort was removed from the Trump organization.
https://www.google.com/webhp?nord=1#nord=1&q=manafort+removed&*
August 19, 2016.
Carrick
RB said “direct investigation of foreign intelligence who “. Assuming the foreigners in question were Russians, this would be investigation of the Russians.
hunter—the issue under investigation is whether there was collusion during the elections between Russian intelligence and Trump associates, so Manafort is relevant.
HaroldW—I was just pointing out that MikeN wasn’t correct about the passport proving he wasn’t there (unless of course, he wasn’t in Europe at all at the time). Anyway, as far as I remember, we just saw the front cover. I don’t believe anybody was given access to the inside of the passport…have you seen otherwise.
Anyway it appears it was a different Michael Cohen, and our crack press made the wrong association.
Lucia—I just wanted to point out that there are putative intelligence links. This isn’t just some witch hunt.
It’s not surprising, but the investigation of the links between (actually I thought it was multiple) Russian banks & Trump’s server is still open. Whether anybody in the FBI is actively working the case is anybody’s guess.
But there is smoke, a fair amount of it. It all may amount to nothing though (my guess is Manafort is dirty, and possibly Flynn too.)
SteveF,
You could have just said “Witchhunt!”.
On November 10 , you argued that Christie was perhaps guilty of bad judgement in choosing staff, but possibly not aware of the traffic disruption.
On March 5 you said that the traffic disruption was very likely to have been Christie’s idea.
No new evidence over that period except that Christie was sidelined by the Trump administration for a chief of staff role and his transition team’s work was discarded. My argument then was that Christie was not prosecuted because there was no evidence to prosecute him. It appears that you now think that there is a circumstantial case. Regardless, if there is no evidence of a prosecutable nature, there is no case.
Flynn wrote an op-ed to ask for an extradition to Turkey in November last year, which raised eyebrows since he also has a consulting group.
NYT 11/20:
Flynn has now admitted that he was working as a paid foreign agent for Turkey. This is no surprise for those who were paying attention last year.
Right now, there are reports of a circumstantial nature of contacts with Russian intelligence that merit investigation. If there is no concrete evidence of collusion, there is no case.
RB,
Sure, absolutely no new information available about Christie: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/02/bridgegate_misconduct_complaint_vs_christie_can_pr.html
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/sarc
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That Trump completely distanced himself from Christie is additional new information.
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I will note that you continue to ignore the one obvious and clear crime that has taken place: someone (or multiple people) are guilty of disclosing to Democrat propaganda outlets like the NYT classified information about Trump, designed to cause him political damage. If there is any formal investigation needed, it is there.
RB,
“You could have just said “Witchhunt!â€.”
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Yes, but that wouldn’t point out your ‘guilty-til-proven-innocent’ approach to Trump.
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The claims that Trump colluded with Russians to influence the election are as silly as claims Hillary operated a child pornography ring out of a pizza shop basement. The difference is the NYT has been pushing this rubbish about Trump and Russians for months.
SteveF,
The real show is going to be the apparent Pakastani deep penetration of the democrat party. And there is actually evidence to support this scandal, unlike RB’s witch hunt.
RB,
Manafort was someone well known for his views on Russia long before he was removed from the Trump campaign.
Trump with Manafort, unlike Obama with Jarret, took action when questions were raised.
And from speaking with someone I have known for quite some time and who is very well informed, what Obama did in Turkey is largely unknown here but has caused deep and lasting problems in the region.
SteveF:
Or Trump’s guilty even if proven innocent approach to virtually everybody else.
The irony runs deep here in complaining about his treatment.
Carrick,
Not sure you wrote exactly what you intended to. Am I mistaken?
Carrick,
OK, now I understand what you wrote. My confusion was the posessive ‘Trump’s’, which I initially took as an informal contraction (Trump is = Trump’s). Sorry.
Carrick,
Trump is (of course) something of a loose cannon, and clearly does respond to attacks inappropriately. That being said, the MSM has villified him mostly because they disagree with his policies. Remember that George Bush the younger was called a racist, as was Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, and Mitt Romney. Anyone who opposes the “progressive policies’ the MSM supports is going to be attacked (and unfairly IMO). Trump overreacts when attacked, but he is not wrong about the unfair coverage he has gotten.
Harold, I don’t remember the details, but the story made it look like evidence of Russian mole because there were regular data going from a computer on Trump’s networks to a bank. You are right it is not definitive evidence of hacking, but it would be my first guess after specific software. If memory serves, the source was from a third party that has access to data at ISP level that is a bit secretive about it.
Thanks MikeN. FIrst time I’ve heard any details. I’ll see if I can find anything else when I get to a computer.
Another story that is being hyped now is Roger Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks via Private Twitter. Doesn’t seem to matter that Stone admitted contacts on Showtime’s The Circus last year.
Not sure how well this will work from a phone, but…
CNN reports (http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/politics/fbi-investigation-continues-into-odd-computer-link-between-russian-bank-and-trump-organization/index.html) what sounds like DNS lookups of the server in Trump Tower.
Edit: h/t https://www.palmerreport.com/politics/russian-bank-accessed-trump-tower-russian-email-server-2800-times-during-campaign/1857/
So it’s not even packets from the Trump server to the bank, but DNS lookups by the bank. That doesn’t immediately mean hacking like I thought, though the tech guys noticed this while suspecting malware.
Kenneth: “Anybody want to discuss the ineptitude and unaccountability of the CIA as revealed by Wikileaks?”
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Ken, as a non-isolationist libertarian I have struggled with this question for many years, as have many individual federal legislators and executives. On the one hand we want security and advance information of malevolent actors in the world. On the other, a central secret police is a danger to democracy. For example I believe there is strong evidence that the Kennedy fired CIA director, Allen Dulles, led JFK’s assassination plot. I realize for those who have not studied the issue that they believe “there is no evidence” of a conspiracy. According to a Gallop poll in 2013 30% of Americans believed Oswald was the lone gunman. I know there are many theories. I believe most include CIA involvement at some level.
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So, should we start a petition to get rid of the CIA? Well, looking at the days before the federal government felt it was their business to spy in other than war times we can see now that it left the USA vulnerable to bad actors, foreign and domestic. Technically, the FBI is in charge of counter-espionage but they really did not catch anyone until they got help from British intelligence after the start of WWII. The void in the 1920s and 30s was filled by the JP Morgan/Rockefeller international intel gathering and groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. Their purpose was to create a bull-work against the spread of Soviet communism. Wall Street lawyer, William J. Donovan, became the central coordinator. After the fall of France the head of British intelligence, Stuart Menzies, recommended through Churchill to FDR to start a new agency to be led by Donovan. FDR met with Donovan who pitched a plan formed with the help of none other than Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. The new federal agency would be named The Coordinator of Intelligence.
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After Pearl Harbor the COI became the OSS, which after the war became the CIA, with it’s full mission outlined in Truman’s National Security Act.
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Do we want to go back to the days where private interests have no competition for personal, on the ground, human intel or foreign intrigues? Perhaps. I do think that the other 16 agencies could pull up the slack. There is a lot more non-face-to-face international communication today than in 1947 to be able to focus on just identifying and targeting bad actors.
“Climate science is the Hillary Clinton of the sciences.” Scott Adams
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That gave me a chuckle. Preachy? Check. Hecktoring? Check. Arrogant, obnoxious? Check, check. Borderline competent? Check. Overconfident? Double check.
SteveF:
He also attacks unprovoked and in an inappropriate manner—for example, Obama & Kenya that he clung onto for six years.
You could even in fact say Trump himself goes on witch hunts from time to time.
Tough to defend a guy who does that (as I see it, it’s the price he pays for his own behavior).
Obviously the mainstream media has it in for Trump. Fortunately for him, they are totally inept. Much of what the media (and I certainly include Fox News here) is a joke these days. Really very frustrating times, because we need a competent press.
MikeN:
Using Trump’s server for DNS lookup from Russia is quite bizarre, but I still think there’s nothing there. I suspect the FBI opened the case, figured that out, but it’s my understanding they don’t close these cases for a couple of years (hypothetically, something else could come up).
Monitoring the packets from & too a foreign server is a far cry from “wire tapping” of course. I wouldn’t expect Mark Levin nor Donald Trump to understand that though.
Can’t tell who they intend to make fun of.
http://www.hillarybeattrump.org/
This is hilarious.
http://www.hillarybeattrump.org/home/2017/3/10/loyal-readers-wish-andy-borowitz-would-abandon-crazy-premise-of-trump-presidency-its-just-too-unrealistic
Carrick,
“… we need a competent press.”
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Sure, and we just do not have the horses in place for a competent press. The problem is that the press (including both broadcast and cable news) can’t stop themselves from advocating for their own political views. This corrupts and distorts everything they ‘report on’. Like in climate science, the fog of bias is so thick that the ‘press’ is blinded, and so mainly incapable of critical analysis.
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I read today Nate Silver’s (fivethirtyeight blog) most recent installment of how the press and the pundits got the election so wrong. The piece was thoughtful, erudite, carefully argued, and completely wrong. The press and pundits got it terribly wrong mostly because they were not even close to dispassionate observers; they were actively campaigning for Clinton. Advocates for a cause, or for a candidate, are very rarely capable of critical reasoning. The good news is that people will pay ever less attention to the MSM; people usually recognize gross incompetance when they see it.
MikeN, interesting. Sort of. I noticed not one like or tweet, which seems about right.
Re: SteveF (Comment #160018)
I note your first piece of new evidence is a previously overturned judge’s ruling on a case that a prosecutor said couldn’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt (leading to Christie’s lawyer skipping the hearing). This is followed by a declaration about how those who don’t share your worldview have an “guilty until proven innocent” approach.
I get it. It’s the cult of Donald Trump in action.
Edit: I see SteveF beat me to the punch here.
For those media critics out there, here is a big heaping helpful spoonful to fill you up on confirmation bias from Nate Silver:
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There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/
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I also note the WP app now starts with “Democracy dies in darkness”, gag. I’m not sure I’m going to agree that the media is covering themselves in glory as defenders of democracy lately, only defenders of their idea of what the outcomes of democracy should be.
It’s kind of interesting that Muslim ban 2.0 generated almost no coverage relatively. This reinforces Silver’s group think assertion and what I like to call the media hive mind. I suppose since there were few protests it possibly wasn’t as newsworthy. These things are self reinforcing though.
Carrick: “we need a competent press.”
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Couldn’t agree with you more. Sometimes I wonder if government funded press would actually be better than what we have now. Obviously this is crazy but that’s how bad I think it has gotten. Perverted incentives, institutional bias, etc. I would take NPR over the NYT from what I have seen the last year. The BBC is worse than the WP, NYT because of government funding?
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Based on the number of articles the media has written about themselves lately they have gotten the message and are working through the stages of grief. They will likely take some actions to try to retrofit the situation, that is until the next situation comes up that is just too important to allow “false balance” to possibly change the outcome. Let’s call that hypothetical situation the next election, ha ha.
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The bottom line is that Trump voters are simply not their customers in most cases, and that is causing problems.
Tom Scharf, WP is claiming it has nothing to do with Trump and they have used this slogan in the past, and this is just a ramp up from before as they are producing more web material.
The Young Turks had a video complaining about Nate Silver’s confirmation bias. What’s interesting is they produced it while the election was ongoing, and detailed how Nate was getting things wrong. Nate previously used polls, and polls had Trump winning the primaries, but all the people he hangs with say that parties matter, so Nate overruled his models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP7fxNdAs5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNsqyjjDOPs
After the Patriots won the Super Bowl, someone tweeted He’s called Nate Silver because his picks come in second.
News story about Trump is interfering with the FBI to get them to rebut charges of Russian involvement. Now media is doing it for him.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-09/trump-s-run-of-dumb-luck
RB,
‘I get it. It’s the cult of Donald Trump in action.’
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Nah, folks like you wouldn’t know reality if it jumped up and bit them in the butt. Pretty sad. Brace youself for at least 4 unhappy years, and maybe 8. Get over it…. Hillary lost.
“Government funding” and “free press” are mutually exclusive. NPR is just as corrupt as NYT, except they have better production values. What is desperately needed is a media that will apply critical thinking and skepticism, combined with a healthy detachment. Instead we have Bezos channeling his inner Citizen Kane and the NYT acting like Pravda for the left, etc.
Carrick and Tom, The press has always been very partisan in the English speaking world. It was worse in the 19th Century. Our generation growing up in the 1960’s saw the construction of a “4th estate” doctrine that has no basis in our system of government or in our traditions. It is indeed very humorous to watch the myth being destroyed by the obvious excesses of our current biased media.
It’s not so much that they are partisan Democrats as that they are politically correct and socially very left wing.
Truth is a very scarce commodity that takes huge effort to sort out. That is best done with a vociferous debate and a variety of points of view. The “4th estate” is simply a new priesthood that impedes that process by trying to control who gets credibility to speak.
BTW, previous Presidents also ridiculed and tried to manipulate the press. FDR was a master at the art.
What perhaps causes heartburn for the elites is that Trump is doing openly what FDR and lots of previous presidents did behind the scenes with regard to the press.
David Young “The press has always been very partisan in the English speaking world. It was worse in the 19th Century. … the 1960’s saw the construction of a “4th estate†doctrine … It’s not so much that they are partisan Democrats as that they are politically correct and socially very left wing … best done with a vociferous debate and a variety of points of view.”
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All true. Individual newspapers in the 19th century were very partisan, but every city had multiple papers and individuals often read multiple papers. So the press as a whole was not so biased. People got the variety of views needed for a debate. In the 20th century, the press consolidated and then appointed itself the arbiter of the truth . Now, with a generation of “journalists” who have grown up with that self-aggrandizing attitude, the intellectual monoculture of the press has become a big problem. Fortunately, the internet is taking us back to the 19th century in some important ways.
MikeN,
Interesting videos from The Young Turks. Thanks. I am guessing Nate Silver is displeased.
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TYT are correct Nate’s problem is the same as the MSM’s: they live inside a bubble where blatant political corruption as practiced by the Clintons is A-OK. But that bubble is self-reinforcing because they are advocates for politicans like Hillary; unless they get past their advocacy, they are likely to remain always inside the bubble, and will continue to get things very wrong.
At least Nate Silver is aware of the liberal media bubble and recognizes that it is a problem. He did manage to peak outside the bubble in interpreting the polls and seeing that it was quite possible that Trump would win. Unfortunately, he seems to think that because of that, he is not inside the bubble. Whereas on most things, he is as firmly ensconced in the bubble as any other journalist.
Why do media outlets now breathlessly cover Trump SNL skits as front page news? Perhaps because Daily Show is now no longer cool enough? A lot of this is just mean spirited cheap shots. Pretty clear they only respect the office of President when their guy is in there. Parody is fine but one sided parody is just partisan.
David Young—As I see it, commercial press have to be partisan to survive. They all have an audience, and they have to please that audience. Bias is inherent in a free market press.
One of my favorite commentaries relating to this was by the then New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent (his position was created as people may recall after the Jason Blair fiasco). Link here.
Here’s a snippet:
(The problems they deal with are the same for virtually any other market, liberal or conservative.)
I love that “your eyes closed” line… I’ve stolen it a few times myself. Okrent discusses the realities of the newspaper business about as well as anybody could expect.
But… my issue wasn’t with bias, it was with competency, and it wasn’t reserved for the left-wing press. Whether our politics are from the right or left, we need to be well informed. And by well informed, of course, I don’t mean “mis-informed.”
Both sides of the news business provide a disservice to their audience when they provide them with false information that is well received instead of accurate information is much more difficult to accurate portray without an audience revolt. Note I also am not equating “well received” with “warm and fuzzy puppy stories”. People like drama, and the newspapers provide them a steady stream of that. They don’t want warm and fuzzy, they want stories that contain dark elements, especially if it’s about their political opposition.
The hard stories to have accepted by the audience are the ones that conflict with the narratives people tell themselves. Nobody on the right wants to hear just how dysfunctional the Republican Congress has been for the last six years. Nobody on the left wants to delve into the messes that Obama has created, or the multitude of lives he has cost with his political calculations.
Unfortunately I think there is no hope for this sort of competency from our press. But I don’t want a media controlled by the government…then we’re really screwed, since the government can start just pushing the private journalists out of business or outright banning them from broadcasting (as is happening in Russia).
Thanks, Carrick
Interesting comment Carrick. I agree about the chance of a competent press (very low), but I think the fundamental problem is that people have become regionally more homogeneous (in a political sense), so newspapers have an audience which is less tolerant of reporting of facts contrary to cherished beliefs. Combine that with a loss of newpapers in smaller towns and cities, and the surviving papers are mostly in larger cities…. always more ‘progressive/left” than the country as a whole. So those papers have ever greater motivation to bias their coverage… and the rest of the country sees that bias. Just about every story in the NYT is tilted to confirm the beliefs of the average NYT reader…. which offends the sensibilities of conservatives.
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With the growth of cable TV and internet news, the geographical selection toward biased coverage is replaced by an even stronger self-selection bias… eg “if CNN is going to bias every story, then I’ll get my news from Fox News” (or the reverse). Fox News doesn’t beat CNN and MSNBC in ratings because of better programming or better coverage, but because conservatives have fewer options.
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The troubling part is that the resulting biased coverage everywhere makes accomodation of different political views ever less likely, and extreme political polarization ever more likely. And that shows in the growing polarization in Congress. I wish I could see an easy solution, but I can’t. If news organizations were to consciously include coverage from different points of view, that might help, but they are unlikely to do so…. their belief is that other points of view are just ‘wrong’ and do not merit being heard. I note, with alarm, how conservatives are simply not allowed to speak on many college campuses, is a symptom of the problem. It is a conundrum.
Carrick: “commercial press have to be partisan to survive. They all have an audience, and they have to please that audience”.
True.
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Carrick: “Bias is inherent in a free market press”.
Wrong. Bias is inherent in human beings. Bias in individual outlets is unavoidable. That has nothing to do with a free market. A free market is an antidote to bias, by allowing a range of voices to be heard.
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One big problem with the main stream media is that there is a lack of diversity and an intellectual monoculture that is amplified by a narrow range of ownership. The media are privately owned, but it is not really a free market. Another big problem is the self satisfaction and self importance of journalists. They have declared themselves the arbiters of truth and scream bloody murder when criticized. Overwhelmingly, they pretend to be unbiased; one refreshing counterexample does not change that.
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There is indeed a huge competence problem. But that is a symptom, not the root cause. Monoculture, monopoly, and self satisfaction inevitable lead to a lack of competency. It makes it easy to be lazy. In a truly competitive market, fake news would get called out, energetic reporting would reveal lazy reporting for what it is, and the lazy, careless, and dishonest would either have to up their game or fail.
SteveF —thanks for the great comments.
Mike M:
I’m not sure how being a free market makes it an “antidote to bias” since a free market (definitionally?) caters to the interest of the market that it is serving. Could you provide a more detailed argument for your view?
I don’t entirely agree here:
Regardless of ownership, if a newspaper does a better job of meeting the needs of the market it is serving it will do better than one which is catering to the whims of the owner. I’d suggest if there is a relationship between ideology and ownership, it’s that liberal owners would be more likely to buy newspapers that serve liberal markets (and vice versus). But generally it’s the editors who drive the content, not the owner. If the owner “meddles” too much, the paper doesn’t meet the needs and expectation of the market, and the paper suffers.
Well I should say that simply because there is bias in the audience doesn’t mean that the newspaper can’t provide more balanced news. So we agree mostly on this part: Part of the competency problem is in the training… journalism schools at most universities are jokes.
I have rubbed elbows with probably dozens of journalists (and hung out with them at conferences in bars, their favorite spot..especially during happy hour), and the ones I’ve met do seem interested in talking to people from a wide-range of views (otherwise they wouldn’t talk to me), so I’m not sure how much of this is mono-culture on the part of the journalists.
From my experience, the journalists who write the stories have a wider range of views than the editors permit them to express..the editors seem understandably more interested in keeping the newspaper afloat than in providing a service to the community.
Above, I wrote: “A free market is an antidote to bias, by allowing a range of voices to be heard.”
I meant to write: A free market is an antidote to *systematic* bias, by allowing a range of voices to be heard.
That is, although individual outlets will always be biased, in a true free market they will not all be biased in the same way.
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Carrick wrote: “if a newspaper does a better job of meeting the needs of the market it is serving it will do better than one which is catering to the whims of the owner.”
That is only the case in a genuinely competitive market. We haven’t had that for several decades. But it might be re-emerging thanks to the internet, combined with the MSM self-destructing.
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Poor training in journalism schools is not the problem. Journalists used to get all their training on the job. Monoculture is the problem. But journalism schools are probably contributors to the monoculture by acting as gatekeepers and centers of indoctrination.
I once again suggest reading Bernard Goldberg’s book Bias. Goldberg was an insider at CBS News for a long time.
https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0060520841
IMO, his second book on the subject,Arrogance, isn’t as good.
>his second book on the subject,Arrogance, isn’t as good.
Isn’t that usually the case?
I tend to agree with MikeM, the problem is a monoculture where a uniformity of cultural point of view makes it impossible to understand the “deplorables” or to overcome prejudice. It’s very similar actually to the 19th century when racism was such a culturally dominant idea that journalism had trouble seeing outside this cultural meme. It also had pseudo-scientific support in the form of social Darwinism.
I’m not sure however, that “free markets” will do much to address this problem. The solution is already on the scene in the form of the internet and its diversity of points of view.
MikeM thanks for your comments. I think in the absence of meeting the expectations of the audience, a newspaper will suffer economically compared to how it would do if it meets their expectations. This remains true even for a monopolistic industry.
Job training gives you a very different sort of experience than can be gleaned by academic training. Job training tends to build in biases, good academic training can teach you methods for avoiding it. If journalism as an academic pursuit weren’t such a joke, I do think the journalists would operate better “in the wild”.
DeWitt–thanks for the book recommendation. I put it on my “to read” list on Amazon.
Carrick, if modern education teaches students to avoid bias, why are students across America becoming intolerant of opinions to the point of violence and are being enabled if not encouraged to do so by many of their professors?
Carrick: “in the absence of meeting the expectations of the audience, a newspaper will suffer economically … This remains true even for a monopolistic industry.”
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Ever hear of Comcast? If not, try a search on “Comcast customer service”. Once you scroll down past the company links …
Monopolies lead to poor performance and lowered expectations. That is the case even when there is limited competition (satellite TV vs. cable) or when many people are willing to do without (newspapers). Competition raises expectations, since the best becomes the standard for everyone else. A poor monopoly newspaper might suffer economically, but to nowhere near the same extent that it would if it had competition from a good newspaper.
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David Young: “I’m not sure however, that “free markets†will do much to address this problem. The solution is already on the scene in the form of the internet and its diversity of points of view.”
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I carelessly used “free market” as a synonym for “competitive marketplace”. That need not always involve the exchange of money; i.e., the “marketplace of ideas”. I agree with David’s second sentence.
MikeM,
If a monopoly is bad enough people do search for alternatives. Comcast was why we installed an antenna. Or neighbor got dish.
Eventually, AT&T moved in to the neighborhood.
Lucia: “If a monopoly is bad enough people do search for alternatives. Comcast was why we installed an antenna.”
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Of course. Comcast was why I got a dish. When asked how I like it, my reply is that the best thing about it is that it is not Comcast. But Comcast continues to have tens of millions of dissatisfied customers, since the competition is not so great. After all, they only have to be a better than Comcast. Over time, the bar will gradually rise. Similarly, it will take time for the internet to cure (or kill) the main stream media.
I think Comcast actually has gotten somewhat better over the past few years. They were ‘deplorable’, but now just ‘poor’. They will no doubt gradually get better as competition increases. There is a huge hurdle for competitors…. they need to build a lot of very expensive infrastructure (eg, string/bury fiber optic cables) to be strong competition. Newcomers would also need to do things like guarantee minimum up and download speeds to differentiate themselves from Comcast (which never does this: Average download speed 20+ megabits. Minimum speed: ~0 when their load is high… heck, sometimes incomming email messages are delayed for an hour or more!). Faced with real competition, Comcast would likely lower rates somewhat to hold market share, or start offering guaranteed upload and download rates… making the competitor’s infrastructure investment a risky bet. Dominant incumbents do have advantages.
Re: Mike M. (Comment #160066)
Monopolies can lead to poor performance because there is a lack of incentives to do better. However, “free” competition doesn’t guarantee the opposite, i.e., good performance or service. In some cases, no “free competitor” might be willing to get into a particular market due to lack of incentives or significant barriers. SteveF points out a good example, which is the significant cost of burying enough fiber-optic cable to do battle with Comcast. Even given the proverbial green light to do so, companies have not chosen to do so in many areas.
Lucia, if you think Comcast is bad, you should try Time-Warner. They used to raise prices without notifying you; they really earned the reputation of having the worst service of any company in the US. (Maybe the new owner Spectrum, will be better.) I dumped Time Warner and my new provider has a ridiculous $12 administrative charge so that it can hide its real cost, but it is still better than the old Time Warner. I did see several days ago where Youtube is apparently going to sell a TV service for $35 a month, including Disney & Espn. If it comes out, it will kill the cable companies with respect to television programming.
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For any of you still using landlines, I recently got Ooma for $5 a month, and it is way better than what used to be my $40 a month landline. It was very easy to install. (Disclosure — I have no relationship with Ooma.) I just use my landline for spam calls and to find my cell phone when I misplace it. Ooma is perfect for that and the few times I use it for calls it works well also.
JD
The more common outcome with high cost of entry and large players is an oligarchy of mediocrity. We had it in Detroit. We seem to have it in our two parties. We certainly have oligarchic mediocrity in legacy media.
A perfect example of media monoculture is selection bias. For example, the mainstream media has steadfastly refused to cover victims of illegal alien criminals. It’s not an insignificant number either. They have steadfastly refused to cover voter fraud despite recent evidence that its a lot more common than one wold like. They likewise try to cover Islamofascist terrorist attacks as due to something else. These problem generally don’t affect the affluent members of the media establishment, so they must be insignificant.
David,
I think there is more going on than that. If you present clear data which is contrary to someone’s personal beliefs, they will virtually always discount that data to avoid having to change their beliefs. Eg, you show that Muslim terrorists kill a bunch of people by setting off bombs, and the reaction of ‘progressives’ is not that Muslim terrorists are a problem, or worse, that Islam tends to correlate strongly with terror attacks, but that ‘ladders kill lots more people than terrorists’, so, ‘terrorists are no more a problem than ladders’. The irrationality of such an argument does not matter (ladders are useful… terrorists are not); it is a defense mechanism to avoid dealing with uncomfortable realities. I do not mean to imply this is unique for ‘progressives’; most everyone does this to some extent… but the extent does vary. The MSM is dominated by people who mostly share a set of beliefs (like ‘The teachings of Islam do not lead to atrocities’), and they simply will not present factual evidence (aka report news) contrary to theif beliefs. In the specific case of Islam and terror, Mr Obama was the poster child for this kind of irrational defense mechanism, but every issue with biased reporting is linked to the same conflict between reality and belief.
I see the bias as an outcome of the oilgarchic mediocrity. Even though people despise the news media, the corporations running big media have no incentive to improve. Their place in the oligarchy is too secure and they are making enough profit to sustain themselves. Staying in the oligarchy is the goal. Not innovation. So they ignore honest dialog on race, climate, immigration, environment, Obamacare, etc. Instead the oligarch response is to keep cramming their pov, and ignore or ridicule any alternative view, no matter the set of facts.
I hope we do not lose the connection between the producer which in this case is the media and the consumer who in this case is the reader and in the free market the producer produces what most of these consumers vote for. These choices may not align with what we prefer and particularly if we have minority view points but in free market niche producers are available or the truth can be found in adversarial positions.
Please excuse my writing as I am recovering from triple by pass heart surgery and am taking some strong pain killers.
Anyway the important point is that no way do we want the government deciding or susidizing what is written in the name a good press being required in democracy because that will lead to someone deciding what we read.
Kenneth,
Wow. Speedy recovery and best wishes sir.
Kenneth, best wishes for a full and rapid recovery. You are correct we need to defund all government support of news production. The oligarch in media is killing itself by its own dysfunction, as all oligarchs eventually do. We don’t need a government action against them for content. Nor should the media be able to claim special privileges to be protected from innovation or criticism.
Best wishes Ken!
Ken,
I wish you a speedy and complete recovery.
And don’t get ‘hooked’. 😉
Kenneth,
I hope you have a speedy and complete recovery.
You are absolutely right about keeping the government out of the news media. Monopolies or near monopolies can develop in a free market. But correction is possible, as discussed about with respect to cable and as is likely with the MSM and the internet. Once the government sticks its nose in too far, the game is over. The prudent way to keep the government from sticking its nose in too far, is to not let it stick its nose in at all.
Kenneth—very sorry to hear about your health issues. I hope this works out well for you.
Thanks for the kind thoughts. After many trepidations things have gone very well.
Thanks for the kind thoughts. After many trepidations things have gone very well.
Kenneth Fritsch,
I hope you back to full health soon and I’ll put you on my prayer list.
Andrew
David Young: “For example, the mainstream media has steadfastly refused to cover victims of illegal alien criminals. It’s not an insignificant number either. They have steadfastly refused to cover voter fraud despite recent evidence that its a lot more common than one wold like.”
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Personally, I believe that much of the inaccuracy is due to lying as well as selection bias. For instance, if you look at the DOJ report on Michael Brown it is 99.5% clear that he charged the police officer. (It is also summarized on wikipedia) Nobody who looked at the facts and wanted to be remotely accurate would state that the police killed an unarmed Black man [technically accurate but 100% misleading] without providing the context.
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With respect to illegal entrants committing crimes, I doubt that they commit more crimes than citizens. I believe people make a mistake when they characterize very substantial numbers of illegal entrants as bad people. I would characterize the situation very broadle as the US is similar to a house with private owners. Even if good people decide that they want to live in the house, it can’t be open to all of the people who decide they want to live there. By characterizing illegal entrants as generally bad people, those who wish to stop illegal immigration (my number one priority) are simply unnecessarily motivating the opposition.
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I believe the media is lying about fraudulent voting by illegal entrants. One study found that 800,000 illegal entrants voted. However, all the media does is say that in some particular instance only 10 illegal voters were found instead of rigorously looking at the situation.
JD
Ken Fritsch: Very best wishes on your recovery. If anything goes wrong you can contact me to file a malpractice action. 🙂 (For those who miss sarcasm, I am just joking)
JD
JD…The fraudulent vote is either the most incompetently analyzed issue or the most dishonest one There are between 11 and 20 million illegal immigrants currently in the US. What percentage vote.. We have absolutely no way to know. And what about the 45 million legal immigrants? Or the 6 million felons? And how many vote 2 or 3 or 5 times. No way currently to know. Is it 1%….3% Do you think anyone really wants to know?
I also think Comcast has gotten better. They’ve gone from morning and afternoon blocks to 2 hour window for service calls, which they’ve never missed for me. They redid their software making their On Demand much better now. I thought it was funny they now sell Netflix shows.
They have started ‘selling’ movies, which you won’t have if you switch. They see they are in trouble and are trying to keep things afloat.
Antenna service gives you HD, while all the cable companies charge an extra monthly fee. TIVO has a $300 box with no monthly fee for antenna use.
Hang in there, Kenneth.
I’m still looking for the Adam Smith observation on export tax/bounty effect on cost of susistence. I’ve got someone else looking too. She remembered it, but there’s a chance it isn’t in Wealth, might be Hume.
chuckrr: “There are between 11 and 20 million illegal immigrants currently in the US. What percentage vote.”
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I was checking on these numbers a while ago and found that officially they are about 45 million immigrants in the U.S.. About half are naturalized citizens, and a quarter each are legal and illegal resident aliens. But the 11 million number for illegals is surely low. It is based on telephone surveys. They assume that people never lie when asked by the government if they are here legally. People have tried other ways of making the estimates. The more responsible efforts seem to be around 20 million, with some (questionable) estimates going as high as 30-40 million. So 30 million or so non-citizens (legal and illegal) seems like a plausible estimate. Roughly 10% of the population.
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There is a lot of evidence that voting by non-citizens is not negligible, perhaps only a factor of 10 lower than voting by citizens. That would make 1% of the vote cast by non-citizens, something like 1.4 million votes. That is likely an upper end estimate. So the 0.8 million number cited by JD seems entirely plausible.
Here are two links strongly supporting the conclusion that illegals vote in large numbers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/?utm_term=.82b274e71fea
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/26/hillary-clinton-received-800000-votes-from-nonciti/
JD
Mike M. (Comment #160095):
That would imply that around half of all (eligible-age) non-citizens are criminals purely as a result of voting illegally. That seems like a stretch given that a large subset of those people are perfectly happy to be legal residents and not be deported, some are even on the path to citizenship and have even better reasons not to commit stupid violations, and a bunch of the rest are probably happiest simply not being noticed.
How did you get from “a factor of 10 lower than voting by citizens†to 1% as an upper end estimate?
JD Ohio (Comment #160096):
Both links look to be talking about the same study. Also, I’m not sure both links “strongly†support any such conclusion, since the first also links to several rebuttals, a response by the authors, and another peer-reviewed study arguing that the first study was flawed
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #160087):
Glad to hear it, Kenneth. Stay well!
Oliver: “That would imply that around half of all (eligible-age) non-citizens are criminals purely as a result of voting illegally.”
It would only imply that to the innumerate.
Oliver: “How did you get from “a factor of 10 lower than voting by citizens†to 1% as an upper end estimate?”
10% / 10 = 1%
I suppose that is too hard for the Innumerate.
Re: Mike M. (Comment #160099)
I like to think that name-calling is not what this blog is about. That being said, I’m comfortable with my “numeracy,” thanks.
From what you said:
There are around 300 million people in the U.S. You gave an estimate of about 30 million non-citizens in the U.S., hence non-citizens number about a factor of 10 lower than citizens.
It follows that “a factor of 10 lower than voting by citizens” would require the non-citizens to vote at approximately the same rate as citizens. The turnout for national elections is between 40% and 60%, depending on whether the election is for the presidency or is a mid-term. Hence the statement implies that around half of non-citizens would have to vote illegally.
So what you meant is that the rate of voting by non-citizens is a factor of 10 lower than the rate of voting by citizens, i.e., your upper bound is 5% of non-citizens voting illegally. Fine. What is your best estimate of the likely rate?
Oliver: “Both links look to be talking about the same study. Also, I’m not sure both links “strongly†support any such conclusion, since the first also links to several rebuttals, a response by the authors, and another peer-reviewed study arguing that the first study was flawed.”
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I read/skimmed the articles disagreeing with Richman’s study and his response. I thought his response was reasonable. Additionally, with the past history of voter fraud in the US and many voting authorities not even looking for fraud, it is reasonable to conclude that there is substantial fraud. (or illegal voting. I will agree that many illegal votes are innocently cast). When you consider the level of dishonesty at the highest levels of the government (Clinton, Obama & Trump) and the huge stakes involved in elections, it is hard to fathom how it is possible that there is only infinitesimal voter fraud/illegal voting.
JD
Oliver, MikeM has already said .8 million to 1.4 million, and ‘not negligible’, so I think 1/10 the voting rate was pretty clear.
How do illegal aliens vote legally? I would have thought you had to be on an electoral roll, legally ie not an illegal alien or you would have to assume the identity of a legitimate voter. This would show up as people voting twice or more?
To vote as a dead voter would take nous and organisation and poor voter roll upkeep. America is a funny place at times.
angech,
In many states, a person needs only prove physical residency to be registered, and a photo driving license with your address is enough. In many of those states you do not need to prove legal residency to get a driving license. So it is certainly possible for undocumented aliens to vote in many places. States that tried to make voter registration more difficult (eg documentation proving citizenship) got a lot of resistance from ‘progressives’ like Mr Obama, who characterised those efforts as racist. I don’t know if voting by illegal residents is common, but it is certainly possible.
angech, it puzzles me too.
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For there to be massive voting by the undocumented one has to assume that many of them are willing to bring themselves to the attention of authorities, chance that no suspicious poll-watcher will detect them, and that the local results will not be sufficiently skewed by their contribution to arouse doubt and action. And obviously voting by the undocumented will only work where documents are not required, not Florida for example where documents are required.
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And all of this for an abstract object, or possibly $10?
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And after the fact, there is no outbreak of this sufficiently blatant to bring in calls for an audit.
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And no state election official, Republican or Democrat is willing to agree that there is more than chance illegal voting in his/her domain.
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Is there illegal voting in OZ? In fact isn’t it the case that you are legally obliged to vote there? To whom does this obligation not apply?
democrats are working the courts to make illegal voting as easy as possible. There are no non-cynical reasons to oppose voter ID laws which democrats en masse oppose. There is only one reason to oppose lawful voting. And democrats oppose securing a lawful vote strenuously. In close races a few votes can make the difference. If those votes are illegal alien votes, the democrat favorite of dead voters, or just the old Tammany Hall trick of a single person voting many times is unimportant. But democrats support and practice them all.
Hunter,
I’m pretty sympathetic to your viewpoint and believe that voter ID laws are perfectly reasonable. This said, I think you overstate the case slightly when you suggest that there are no non-cynical reasons to oppose voter ID laws. IMO, there are non-cynical reasons. Some believe voter ID laws disenfranchise minorities. I don’t find this argument all that persuasive, but it is a legitimate, non cynical argument.
I make this point because when a person decides that ‘line’ between good faith and bad faith has been crossed; once it’s decided that another party is acting in knowing [concious deliberate] evil, then the [consequence] tends to be that attempts to communicate, understand, and/or persuade tend to stop. At least in my experience. I don’t think this serves us.
Thanks.
JD Ohio:
Sorry, I don’t see how this is reasonable. It doesn’t follow from the claim that many voting authorities are not even looking for fraud that it’s reasonable to conclude there is substantial fraud, just that it’s possible that fraud took place (assume safeguards weren’t in place).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe each state has a list of the names of the citizens who voted together with their addresses, so it wouldn’t be very difficult for them to determine whether there was the wide-spread fraud of the sort you are discussing.
To me the most reasonable conclusion is the reason nobody’s actually ever found evidence of wide spread voter fraud is because it simply doesn’t happen on that scale.
If they are only voter ID laws which don’t disproportionally affect certain voting blocs, you are correct. People are people, even Republicans are people and not saints (sacrilege I know) and when they write laws, they will try to use the law to advance their position.
Regardless of motive, if the effect of a law is to disenfranchise a group of voters, we both know that won’t survive constitutional testing.
I mean, when you say ‘the democrats practice them all’, who are you talking about? [looks rhetorical but it’s not when you think about it. Is the answer ‘everyone/all dems’? I think it is. If it’s not, then a more qualified statement would be better.] It’s like saying ‘the government is corrupt’. Sure, there are crooked democrats. There are crooks of all stripes. My daughter is a democrat though (God have mercy), I don’t think she practices these nefarious fraudulent devices. I’m quite sure she doesn’t approve of such tactics.
Put the boot on the other foot. If I can find just a few people who deny climate change in bad faith, then therefore all ‘skeptics’ act in bad faith. I don’t think so.
Sorry. I came back to beat this horse to avoid what I’m working on for a few more minutes… I’ll stop now.
I am busy now, but I need to correct one thing. The study I referenced dealt with non-citizens, not necessarily illegal aliens. Of course, illegal aliens are non-citizens but many other non citizens are in the United States legally. However, they are not entitled to vote, so any votes they would cast would be illegal.
JD
Carrick,
Interesting. If we setup a hypothetical situation / thought experiment where:
1. people were legally forbidden to do X,
2. people perceived that doing X was to their advantage, and
3. the law forbidding X was (A) enforced (B) not enforced
You don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude that more people will violate the law in the 3B case than the 3A case?
Or is it that you don’t think this ‘maps’ onto the example?
Or is it something else entirely.
Thanks in advance.
Yes “democrats practice them all” could have been more specific. Which party is caught doing the corrupt practices on that list? As to the assertion that somehow ID is a violation of civil rights: it is a contrived transparent lie. There has never to my knowledge someone turned away from voting who was a lawful voter due to id. All the court cases are based on hypothetical from any of the reports I have followed. But we know that significant numbers of unlawful votes are cast, nearly exclusively in favor of democrats.
Hunter,
Well have you looked? I hadn’t until you said that. I googled and found this in the space of a few minutes:
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/voters-turned-away-because-texas-photo-id-law
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-milwaukee-voter-id-law-20161112-story.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24490932/ns/politics-decision_08/t/nuns-dated-id-turned-away-ind-polls/
It would be strange, in my eyes, if there was never a false reject / type II error for a law of this kind. Our justice is always (almost always?) an imperfect approximation; innocent people get convicted and guilty people get off scot-free sometimes. Sometimes people get denied the vote and sometimes illegals get away with it; it’s gonna happen.
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[Edit:
I don’t know it. I expect it, given the opportunities that our system affords illegals to vote.]
“The illogic is palpable”. Sad.
Carrick,
“Regardless of motive, if the effect of a law is to disenfranchise a group of voters, we both know that won’t survive constitutional testing.”
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I’m not so sure about that. If you could show that voting by non-citizens is a significant problem, then I think courts would have a difficult time refusing to allow reasonable care in allowing people to become registered voters. In my State, you do have to produce some kind of photo ID to vote, but I suspect the process of becoming a registered voter does not include any actual proof of US citizenship.
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I understand that folks like Mr. Obama really see nothing wrong with having non-citizens vote if they are resident in the USA (legally or not), and he has made that clear in public statements. But it is still unlawful for a non-citizen to vote; it’s just another case of Mr. Obama’s willful unlawfulness.
Bugs:
Quoting whom?
ferguson, if true to form, Bugs is referring to himself.
mark bofill:
No I wasn’t saying that… My point is there are already other checks and balances—I pointed that there are already mechanisms in place to test for fraud, the law is enforced, and we have mechanisms in place for detecting fraud, and when it is detected the law is enforced. S
I don’t say it’s impossible that what Trump claims is true about wide spread voter fraud, but it’s no more credible to me that his claims of “wire tapping”.
(Notice the space. The space is important! Or was it the scare quotes? Clearly Trump meant something different by “wire tapping” than wiretapping, no space no square quotes.)
SteveF:
Yes if you could show there was a disenfranchisement through people’s vote getting “watered down”, then I agree—the courts would have to balance the rights of people who are getting disenfranchised by voter id laws and people getting disenfranchised through fraud.
Speaking as a non-expert of course, I’m pretty sure you’d have to present credible evidence of harm from fraud before any significant balancing of the rights of the two groups would be necessary.
j ferguson: I believe Bugs is quoting the Hawaii judge.
Thanks Carrick, it’s a great quote. Thanks Bugs.
Thanks Carrick, I understand now.
Mark I’m glad you followed–it was a bit muddled.
Here’s a link to the Judge’s ruling.
http://www.hid.uscourts.gov/files/announcement142/CV17-50%20219%20doc.pdf
I think the irrationality of the executive order continues to haunt its legitimacy, as does Trump’s poorly thought out words.
The entire enchilada:
“The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable”
I believe most people now, and history in the future, will find the palpable problem to be coming from the extremists who are contriving road blocks to the enforcement of reasonable restrictions that are completely authorized by law, Constitution and precedent.
Angech, when getting a driver’s license you can register to vote. You check the box that asks if you are a citizen. Nothing is verified. States that tried to do it were not allowed to do so.
Most states will not give out a driver’s license for illegal immigrants, but legal immigrants who are not citizens can register in this way.
Another option would be to vote as someone else. That would require some degree of organization. In many places, someone can affirm that you are a resident living with them, and you are registered.
A third option is to register with same day registration as in Minnesota. By the time your registration is verified, the votes have been counted.
Carrick, the voting rolls can be checked, for dead voters and duplicates, etc. TrueTheVote does so. But how can outside groups know if someone is a citizen?
Obama harassed at least some citizen led voter integrity organizations that were not under democrat control. And don’t forget good old fashioned voter intimidation, like what AG Holdren dismissed when the New Black Panthers intimidated voters in Philly.
Carrick, It seems to me transparently obvious that the executive order is legal. Dershowitz agrees by the way. In any case, other presidents have done exactly the same thing including Obama who was just secretive about it. Is the new legal standard that anytime a government official makes a provocative statement about a legal order, it becomes illegal. That’s the worst form of legal precedent and strikes at the heart of our legal system. If we are going to start applying Constitutional rights to non citizens, what does US citizenship mean?
The problem here is simply that perhaps 30% of the country and 60% of the elite really have a personal hatred for Trump and are sufficiently intellectually dishonest to be unable to separate this feeling from actual issues of fact. It’s a strong indictment of the elite and shows why Trump won despite a host of negatives.
Executive Order No. 13,769 January 27, 2017 blocked.
New Order to “protect [United States] citizens from terrorist attacks, including those committed by foreign nationals.†it “clarifies and narrows the scope of Executive action regarding immigration and eliminates the potential constitutional concerns identified by the Ninth Circuit.â€
Dr. Elshikh alleges injuries on behalf of himself, his
family, and members of his Mosque. Hawaii asserts injuries on reduced University attendance and tourism.
Judgement seems flawed as it states,
“Because a reasonable, objective observer would conclude
that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion in spite of its stated, religiously-neutral purpose. The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.”
If Trump had banned all majority Muslim countries the effect of his Order could be seen as discrimination against a religion hence illegal. As it was restricted to only 6 such countries, which the court refused to take into consideration, and the court itself admitted the wording was agreed to be non discriminatory, this decision is manifestly wrong and will be overturned.
The assertion by Hawaii that its tourist business is more important than the role of the President under the Constitution is infantile, matched inky by the judge’s deliberately ignoring the law and the Constitution and instead relying on an incorrect interpretation of what Trump allegedly said to decide in a hidden intent. How pathetic.
Hunter,
Harry Reid got rid of filibusters for lower court judges exactly because Obama wanted to appoint judges like the turkey in Hawaii, and the repulicans were blocking those appointments.
angech,
If the ruling goes to the current supreme court, it will probably split 4:4 and the lower court ruling will stand, and worse, set prescedent. Yes the ruling is the very worst kind of judicial overreach, but can only be stopped by putting Gorsuch on the Court, then issuing another order (if those countries are still a mess).
“If the ruling goes to the current supreme court, it will probably split 4:4”
Shame.
Reading intent into the constitution is all very fine but reading intent into something outside the constitution and outside the Executive Order as it is written is entirely another [illegal] matter.
Judges who put up such decisions, in a clearly partisan manner, need to have a very clear and scorching rebuttal of their actions.
Surely even a split Supreme Court would unite against such an aberration?
angech,
There is no ‘surely’ in the face of American progessivism/statism/leftism, other than it doesn’t concede and will never compromise on what it perceives is its own progress. This includes steamrolling obsolete notions like a principled, unified court.
Andrew
angech,
Rhetorical question?
.
But no, Justices on the left serve for life and appear to have no reluctance whatsoever to ignore both the law and the Constitution as written when it suits their policy preferences. Justice Breyer simply says that the Constitution must be considered a “living document” with no fixed meaning, and so subject to limitless ‘re-interpretation’, even while no actual amendments are added…. as the Constitution itself requires.
.
Which is, of course exactly the same wrong-headed reasoning that the judge in Hawaii used. When laws have no fixed meaning based on their plain words, there is no longer rule of law, but instead rule by naked political power.
David Young, sorry but it’s not all that obvious to me that this EO is constitutional. Certainly not a slam dunk like you seem to suggest.
I’d recommend that people read the actual judgement rather than rely on people who are acting as political pundits to do it for you. I like Dershowitz, but he’s a partisan view here.
David Young:
I’d advise against minimizing what Trump said before arguing it was innocuous. It’s not just “a provocative statement”, which would have been innocuous, it’s numerous prejudicial statements: There are 30 examples are given here. I’d guess there are well over 100 similar statements made by Trump or his surrogates in the last two years.
The judge lists possibly half a dozen examples from Trump asserts there are yet, plus Giuliani’s “very helpful” comments and statements made by the “very brilliant” Stephen Miller.
The words you say do matter, because they provide evidence for your motives. That legal theory and its consequences for the interpretation of this EO is fully explored in the judgement. That makes it an interesting read just to understand that legal issue.
Here are some excerpts (bold face is mine).
I’ll point out that judgements in quotes are findings by other courts. The idea that Watson is made this up out of whole cloth is palpable nonsense.
See text on 36-40 for the examples listed by Watson of statements to motive on the part of Trump and his surrogates. (I’d speculate that if he included all such statements, the document would have doubled in size.
It certainly is the case that the words you say, especially those you repeat multiple times which speak to motive, can be used by a court to determine motive. Probably not a singular statement, but statements repeated over two years would likely meet the test.
Obama is a constitutional scholar. He certainly understood that what he said as president prejudiced any legal case that would be brought against him. (If anything, his knowledge of constitutional law probably allowed him a certain level of abuse not entertained by other presidents.)
On the issue of due process (not addressed by Watson), it’s my opinion that the fact that these six countries were target of a previous EO (which was responsive to a law passed by congress) doesn’t help Trump. It hurts him. The problem is this:
If the countries were singled out previously and presumably the issues with immigration from those countries addressed at that point, what has changed since then to require a further review of immigration specifically from those countries?
I think the objective answer to this is “absolutely nothing”.
The fact this policy is likely based just on populist sentiment makes this policy arbitrary and capricious (subject to 5 U.S. Code § 706) as well as probably placing it in violation of due process constitutional requirements.
This Is a bit off topic but I see evidence for the political push for bigger goverments in the EU reaction to Brexit are much the same as I see it for immediate mitigation for AGW. I hope many of you are following the politics behind these thrusts. If free trade is mutually good for all participating parties why does a nation need to be part of a larger quasy political unit. My answer is that it is larger government that is the controlling factor just as it is for AGW and not climate or trade.
Russian bank thinks the DNS pings were made up.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/03/17/russian-bank-claims-trump-server-story-may-have-been-a-hoax/
Carrick, certainly misquoting and parsing quotes of Trump makes all concerned look pretty cynical. He called for total bans until things could be sorted out. The faux posing about intentions and deciding the assigned motive is more important than the actual text of something is not a precedent any of us will benefit from. And of course the logical way to deal with reforming a problematic situation is to deal with it nation by nation. This TRO is nonsensical and destructive.
The Maryland judge has set a hearing on whether to overturn Trump’s lowering of the number of refugees from 100,000 to 50,000.
A month ago I said:
my suspicion is Trump will end up ignoring the court ruling from the 9th circuit and perhaps even the Supreme Court. Not on this go round, but if his new executive order is also ruled against.
Either Executives can make Executive orders or they cannot. If it is a ratchet that only allows “progressive” orders to stand then we have a much bigger problem. I seriously doubt if President Trump is going to ignore Court rulings any time soon. Certainly he has indicated he will dodge or ignore fewer than his predecessor.
Carrick,
If this question comes before the Supreme Court after Gorsuch is seated, I would be willing to bet (quite a lot) that the lower court judges will be overturned. I can’t remember a clearer case of judicial overreach in my lifetime; really, I have seen nothing similar. What is happening is lots of ‘progressive’ judges don’t like Trump or his policies, and will do whatever they can to impede him.
Carrick “The fact this policy is likely based just on populist sentiment makes this policy arbitrary and capricious (subject to 5 U.S. Code § 706) as well as probably placing it in violation of due process constitutional requirements”
Most all policies are based on populist sentiment such as we want a Democrat Government or a Republican Government which are, I point out, a due process constitutional requirement called voting.
Most all policies are arbitrary and capricious. Obama care could have been universal health coverage. He just arbitrarily chose to limit it to a certain number of people instead of everyone, his choice, so capricious in it’s full meaning.
“The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable. The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed”
Huh?
I would think that if one targeted all of a group at once that is pretty inimical.
If you target any of a specific group that also demonstrates animus towards that group of people.
He targeted specific terrorist countries. He specified stopping terrorism that was a much higher risk in those countries. He could just as easily have banned North Korea or France for a while. Nothing in the act specifies the Muslim Religion They happen to be terrorist prone countries that accidentally have a high Muslim population. [France ? 10% North Korea 0.001% guess].
He is allowed to issue orders regarding foreign countries as long as the order itself has no religious bias in it itself.
There is no other legal interpretation possible, only political interpretations based on a lost election.
Perhaps he should just suspend all refugee processing until his executive order is upheld.
Trump can ignore it but what about the people who have to enforce it? Who do they obey?
I am of the view that EOs give the president too much power and are of questional validity under the original construction of the constitution. The rather obvious arbitrary ways the judiciary can handle these orders gives that branch of government too much power. Just about every post I read here for and against a specific order makes me shudder with thoughts of how corrupted our constitution has become.
Kenneth,
Executive orders can be perfectly normal executive administration (and most are), or can be lawless subversion. Seems to me Mr Obama issued quite a few of the later. Where federal courts blocked Mr Obama’s executive orders (eg several EPA rules or granting legal permanent residency status to millions of illegal immigrants) the rational was that Mr Obama was simply ignoring the law, or in direct violation of it. The arguments against Mr Trump’s EO on a temporary stop to immigration do not cite law, rather they cite Mr Trump’s campaign statements, and purport to read his mind, not the actual words of the EO or the Federal statutes which are applicable. They are garbage court orders, based on politics instead of law, which I hope will ultimately be overturned.
hunter—I don’t think there’s any confusion over what Trump meant. The idea that anybody is twisting his plain language here is just silly.
hunter:
Classic false dichotomy. The President can write executive orders, but they must fall within his powers to write:
He can’t legislate unless given that authority by Congress, and any executive order has to meet constitutional requirements.
Put another way, his powers to write executive orders do not come with ultimate sovereignty. He’s called a “President” and not a “King” for a reason (fun book here).
He’s the head of the executive office, but he “presides” over it, rather than “rules” it. Our founders did not want an elected king.
MikeN:
He might as well pour gasoline on our constitution and burn it then. But that would be an unlawful act and could get him impeached but more likely forced to step down.
SteveF—I don’t really don’t see this as a partisan issue. If anything it’s a question of Article I-vs-Article III power. I think that puts Trump in big trouble as long as the lower court judgements are well reasoned.
angech—no, the US federal government is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. As such, policy must be based on well founded reasons, not just on the opinions of some.
Even if it were a direct democracy, the vote would go to the people. The president doesn’t get carte blanche just because he won an election. In any case, if we put this to a popular vote it doesn’t look like it would succeed there either.
angech:
Sorry but no. It need only have religious bias as effect of the policy. Trump’s allowed to write executive orders, as long as they pass constitutional muster.
Carrick,
The Constitution specifies rights for people who are in the USA, not in Yemen or Somalia. The ‘conflict’ between Articles I and III only makes sense if applied to people within the USA, where the Constitution applies. Heck, even well known constitutional scholars like Dershowitz and Turley (dedicated liberals both) say the lower courts are wrong. As I said above, if Gorsuch is seated and this issues comes before the Supreme Court, I am confident the lower court rulings will be overturned.
Kenneth: Executive orders are simply policy interpretations, often founded on executive office intepretations of statutes created by Congress.
It is totally within the president’s power to set policy, as long as that policy meets constitutional requirements. Like with any other policy, the policy remains in place once set until overturned by an incoming president, congressional law, or judicial review.
What I’m surprised by here, is the number of people who seem to think that judicial review shouldn’t be applied to EOs. That’s a no-brainer to me. The president should not have ultimate sovereignty on any issue. period.
SteveF:
The Constitution also places constitutional boundaries on the powers of the President, and therefore constitutional boundaries to any policy set by the President, regardless of which region of the world the policy relates to. As I mentioned before, any policy must be rationally based (it cannot be arbitrary and capricious for example), and it must observe the Establishment Clause.
Because this policy relates to which people may come to the US as immigrants or visitors, there are potentially additional constitutional issues governing this policy relating to the rights of the people trying to come to the US.
The tension between Article I and III is over whether judicial branch may review executive office policy relating to strictly foreign matters. You are effectively arguing this policy can’t be reviewed and you provide a legal theory for why that is, so you do seem to be acknowledging that tension between Article I and III exists here.
I would expect the SCOTUS would never rule in favor of Article I sovereignty over constitutional interpretation of their policies, on any issue, so I think the White House has no chance on appeal. This is the sort of flop that happens when you take advise from people who are amateurs in both constitutional law and public policy.
I haven’t read Dershowitz or Turley recently, but I wasn’t impressed by the arguments that congressional statutes could provide the President ultimate sovereignty (effectively changing our constitution via a written law). That argument is so obviously facile, I’m surprised any legal scholar would make it.
I expect the courts to ultimate rule against this executive order.
Carrick,
Of course all EOs are subject to judicial review, since these are in fact sometimes directly in conflict with applicable law (this was routine for Mr Obama). But a judge who says the same EO would be OK if the president’s thoughts were ‘pure’ but is ‘unconstitutional’ because the president’s thoughts are ‘impure’ is taking a step along the path to legal anarchy.
.
I think Mr Trump’s 90 day ban would not accomplish much, but that is really not the issue. The issues is if a president can limit immigration as applicable law clearly says he can. The courts are simply subverting the law using an irrational ‘constitutional’ argument.
Carrick,
If you have not read what Turley and Dershowitz have written on this subject, I suggest you do. They do not make the argument you suggest (nor do I), they argue that the lower courts are in error in ruling that the EO is unconstitutional…. even while they explicitly disagree with the policy in the EO.
SteveF:
Motive can be considered when reviewing law or policy. I think that is well established. As Watson pointed out, no mind reading over the President’s views is required here.
Here again you are advancing the theory that a statute written by Congress can give the President new, unreviewable powers. Again, that theory (nor any law based on that theory) will not meet constitutional muster.
If you link to a particular opinion of Dershowitz or Tuley, I’d be happy to read it.
Carrick,
https://www.google.com/amp/s/jonathanturley.org/2017/01/31/is-the-trump-executive-order-on-refugees-unlawful/amp/
.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/harvard-professor-alan-dershowitz-trump-immigration-ban-2017-1
Okay — I found Derschowitz’s opinion that I think you’re referring to here.
Three brief comments:
Motives do matter, so the words of Trump and his advisors for why they issued this order does affect any judgement on its constitutionality.
Even if we didn’t consider Trump or his surrogate’s language, it’s not clear this EO would pass Establishment Clause muster.
Regarding this:
I think Derschowitz is basing this on the fact there was a now expired Executive Order with these six countries on the list. As I said above:
In other words, it hurts his case, rather than helps it, that the countries were on a now expired Executive Order.
(Cross post: Thanks for the links)
Carrick,
One more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/02/09/dershowitz_trump_will_win_travel_ban_case_at_supreme_court.html
Bugs asks “Trump can ignore it but what about the people who have to enforce it? Who do they obey?”
Really Bugs – you are just now asking this? Years too late friend.
So I read Tuley, while he doesn’t explicate what they are, he does seem to view the president as having unreviewable (“plenary”) powers in this matter.
The argument for why this executive order is legal almost always center on powers given to the President by Congress…but that’s precisely where I see the problem to arise. The issue is whether Congress can really give the President powers they themselves do not possess,
When you boil it down, people seem to being arguing that the president has either complete sovereinty on this matter, or near complete sovereignty.
But I doubt the courts will see it that way.
angech:
Carrick:
Indeed, effects and intent do matter. Rules which “just happen to be biased,†whether the bias is based on race, religion, disability, or other, is a time-honored method of institutionalizing discriminatory practices. Classic cases include poll taxes and literacy tests with “grandfather clauses†which were ubiquitous during Reconstruction and afterwards. Policies that result in bias are held to a high standard because we know that policies have often been not-so-secretly intended to discriminate without saying so explicitly.
Here’s Turley on a surprising attempt by 5 judges of the 9th circuit to correct the record on the first EO ruling, basically saying it was wrongly decided.
https://jonathanturley.org/2017/03/17/five-ninth-circuit-judges-file-rare-dissent-rebuking-the-panel-in-immigration-ruling/
I think the evidence is overwhelming that the rulings on both executive orders rest on very shaky legal foundations and are an indication of Trump derangement syndrome and grandstanding by state attorneys general, such as Ferguson in Washington state, who is a political hack.
oliver, This is indeed a very questionable line of reasoning about “intent” to discriminate. Since when do Civil War era amendments to the Constitution apply to foreigners? The intent was to address the rights of former slaves.
There is also a fundamental fallacy in extending this discrimination doctrine to Islam. It is based on the ignorant idea that “all religions are really the same.” As Walter Kaufman said, each religion has a unique view of what mankind is and what he can become. Islam is uniquely antithetical to liberal Western democracy. Why would we want to admit to this country a Nazi fanatic or a member of ISIS? The US has a unique culture and set of institutions. Preserving those things is not a bad thing. It is in fact the heart of real diversity and Federalism.
Carrick, I read your extracts from the Hawaii decision and it strikes me as a vast stretch of the establishment clause. That clause prevents the government from establishing a state religion. It has nothing to do with immigration, not does it grant any rights per se to anyone. That’s why civil rights legislation was passed to prevent religious discrimination in hiring for example. But this law in no way applies to prospective immigrants or the granting of visas, which is by law at the sole discretion of the president.
Let’s say in principle that Trump tried an actual Muslim ban or a ban on some sects of Islam. On what basis would that be unconstitutional?
David Young (Comment #160169)
David,
You seem to be confusing a number of issues. First of all, we are not talking about Civil War era amendments, we are talking about well-trodden political tactics used to conceal the discriminatory intent of various policies. Secondly these practices were not confined to the immediate post-Civil War era. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not passed until a century after the Civil War, and to varying degrees such practices continue to this very day. Thirdly, the Bill of Rights certainly applies to legal immigrants in the U.S. Fourth, and more importantly, the First Amendment is being invoked because citizens and legal immigrants in the U.S. are allegedly being affected, and more broadly, because it is being claimed that the travel ban is, in effect, expressing religious preference. This is different from arguing that particular foreigners outside of the U.S. are being deprived of their Constitutional rights.
The Constitution doesn’t have an exemption for “any religions which are not really the same.†For that matter, one could argue that not all races are really the same, or that men and women are really not the same. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing on whether the law may favor or disfavor one of those groups over another.
I’ve seen that argument made, but I also notice that many Muslims serve our liberal Western democracy faithfully, including putting down their lives as members of the armed forces. Come to think of it, so did Japanese Americans during WWII, about whom the same things were said at the time.
Preferably we would not admit such people, but we still have to have a legal basis for doing so. If you actually know that someone is a member of ISIS, I believe that does qualify under the law. However, it is a different thing to block people because they come from a religion which also contains people who are in ISIS.
We also have a vision of equal protection under the law and religious freedom, which are also worth preserving. Hence the onus is on showing that the a ban is on the whole necessary and legal (which hinges partly on necessary).
oliver, Your comment is full of conflations.
our first paragraph seems paranoid to me. Disguised “discrimination” is not in my view a serious danger to the Republic. It is just political dogma, much like the Black Lives Matter dogma about police shootings and is easily disproven. I would argue that “civil rights” has been extended too far and prevents people from making decisions that are good decisions. For example, taking into account a recent graduates major advisor or his thesis advisor is justified, but some are fearful to use it as a criteria. This has resulted in a strong reduction of standards as HR departments have instituted strict protocols. It is absurd to have the Federal government monitoring hiring decisions and every economic decision of people as the Constitution provides no such authority.
This decision (Carrick quotes it above) relies on the Establishment clause to I guess say well established immigration law and case law is unconstitutional. That I think is really silly and even dangerous. The establishment clause has nothing to do with immigration or Visas. It prevents Congress from establishing a specific religion or interfering with free exercise of religion.
The problem for Islam is that its theology and in fact its sacred texts have no concept of separation of mosque and state. Islam is based on submission, to Sharia law, and if you are a woman, to men, if you are a Christian or a Jew to Muslims. It’s a fundamentally hierarchical system and its theology is pre-modern in every respect. Christian theology helped shape the modern world by contrast and is based on persuasion, not conquest, even though conquest was used to spread it in the early Medieval period.
Japanese in America in WWII is totally different as I’m sure you know. Ideology is not connected to race usually except for the Klan or LaRaza. We would have been wise to exclude from this country ardent communists or fascists.
You see, the problem here is as Bertrand Russell argued in his History of Western Philosophy, philosophy/ideology can profoundly impact human behavior. In the last century we waged an ideological and real war to eradicate Nazism and Soviet Communism. That was a wholly good thing. We can replicate that with radical Islam. It is just a stupid and ignorant argument to make this a civil rights issue. It is not.
1/21/2017 Trump beats Chthulu
58 days later his appointees have mostly survived unscathed and are ready to start reducing spending (promised) and nanny state overreach.
Vested (read 8 years of democrat inspired PC) interests are fighting hard. Executive orders to stop people from some states which have high terrorist levels have been blocked on specious grounds by applicants from Democrat states only.
If there were seriously valid grounds one would expect a majority of states, including Republicans to be pushing this barrow.
Despite not liking the person’s social habits and flaunting of wealth the issue is plans, commitment , policy and legality.
Many people seem to be arguing the former to deny the latter.
His orders have no mention of religIon in them, apply to non USA people outside the States and are perfectly legal. As others say there is a big difference between intent in the law in the way it is written and intent in people who make the laws.
It bothers me intensely that well meaning, intelligent, legally erudite people can fail to see that it is only can be bias that infuses this very straightforward issue.
SHould he ban them? No, but he can. Better would be to insist on strict vetting. If he really wanted to be legally mean he could insist on a 3 month proving trial for all visas, with all their tax returns for 15 years and no entry without. Now that would hurt.
Carrick, suppose a judge decided that a state or other group had standing, and issued an injunction against drone attacks or the new military actions against ISIS. Then this got upheld by the 9th circuit, with a 4-4 split at the Supreme Court, leaving the injunction intact. Is it your contention that Trump should withdraw the military action at that point?
MikeN,
The ends justify the means for ‘progressives’; anything which stands in the way of ‘progress’ (electoral college, 2 senate seats from each state, laws they disagree with, free speech they disagree with, ect.) should be ignored, blocked, or subverted. Lawlessness to make “progress” is the inevitable result. Just as it has always been on the left, and will always be. Arrogance and ignorance, combinded with a heavy dose of hubris are the basic problems.
There are no direct definitions nor explanation of
Anyone have any thoughts on this :
Pgs. 43-44 “America First” Budget Blueprint
PACE, OCO-3 and CLARREO Pathfinder are planned satellite missions, but DSCOVR is an existing satellite.
It’s incredibly disappointing that these climate data-gathering missions are being terminated. At first glance, it seems like ideological foolishness (or just plain stupidity). Does anyone have more information – are the missions perhaps being reassigned elsewhere, away from NASA?
There are no direct definitions nor explanations of EOs in the constitution and as a result that power has evolved from implication with the further expectation in such form to be both arbitrary and not limiting
David Young, I don’t see Oliver conflating too much of anything, and after claiming conflation, you failed to give examples of conflation (at best you are arguing Oliver’s examples aren’t fully apropos, which is not the same thing), but I honestly don’t see there’s a point in any further back and forth on this:
The courts will decide this and maybe some of us will learn something in the process, but I at least won’t automatically impugn the court’s motives for their decisions regardless of what they decide.
MikeN:
There isn’t any way that I could see this scenario could happen. But yes, if the President is not authorized to use force in a particular case, but if he then uses it, he’s violating the law of our country and should be face consequences for his unlawful actions.
Would you really want a President who viewed his powers, especially military, as unlimited or who would operate unchecked by and in a manner that is contrary to our laws and traditions?
Kenneth Fritsch: Again I think the worries about EOs are overstated and exaggerated by the morons in the media. They are just a class of formalized policy statements, which these days typically (pre-Trump) vetted at a higher level that other classes of policy statements, which Wikipedia gives as:
• Presidential proclamation
• Presidential memorandum
• Presidential determination
• Presidential notice
The Wikipedia points out that EOs in some form have been issued by our presidents, starting with George Washington himself.
The first numbered EO was issued by Abraham Lincoln, link is here.
Like any policy created in the Executive Office, they have constitutional restrictions, and can be overturned by the sign of a pen by the next President.
So honestly, I don’t see much of a problem here with the mechanism. Whether it is in place or not is a different proposition than whether the president is abusing his powers. Nixon abused his powers in plenty of ways that didn’t involve EOs for example.
Carrick, The conflation that stands out in oliver’s comment is the conflation of ideology and race and civil rights issues. The other striking one is the conflation of civil rights laws with immigration law.
I agree the courts will sort it out eventually and indeed even on the 9th circus opinion is strongly divided. It just seems obvious to me that with perhaps 30% of the country (and 60% of the “elites” including the mainstream media), virtually all Congressional Democrats, those wearing Pussycats, etc. in full on Trump Derangement Syndrom it is extremely plausible that it is very easy to find at least a few Federal judges who are caught up in this emotional response and will find any excuse no matter how legally incompetent to overrule Trump if they can.
Further the “Islam is the religion of peace” lie has become a litmus test for those defining and hoping to fight the next battle in the “civil rights” war that strong interest groups in this country keep alive so they can make a lot of money. Recall Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Dees from his childhood has always been a charlatan whose primary skill is raising money. His strongest detractors are on the political but honest left.
Since this thread started as education related, I will go off the current topic and mention an education issue that has hit me recently. I wanted to observe my 5th grade girl in some of her classes and the teachers said OK but they discouraged it because the children are often uncomfortable if their parents visit. (I understand this, I was somewhat this way when I was a kid and my girl would, in fact, be uncomfortable) Additionally, it is close to unthinkable for a parent to observe the classes of a high school age student. (My sophomore son).
….
What has occurred to me recently, is how strange it is that education is such a big part of the life of children, but how little of a role parents’ play in observing and structuring the education of their children. When my kids were younger, I learned a lot from observing their classes. Now I don’t have that opportunity. If I was given that opportunity, I believe I could help them substantially more. For instance, my daughter is in gifted English and I am very curious how kids that smart (top 5%) interact with their teacher and each other. Right now I have no idea. Pretty much I am not given the opportunity to learn about that, and later on, potentially, use that knowledge to help my daughter.
….
If you look at the traditional, customary exclusion of parents from the classrooms of children on a nationwide basis, it could be a significant contributor to the poor general performance of American schools. If attitudes changed here, their might be a measurable, yet inexpensive, increase in educational attainment.
JD
Yes, JD, When I grew up our parents played an active part outside the classroom in teaching us. And they made it clear we would do our homework. That was a cultural thing I think in that learning for its own sake was highly valued. I wonder in the age of the single mother if that kind of thing has become more rare. What separates us from stone age cultures is our cultural transmission of accumulated knowledge.
David,
I agree with most of what you are saying, but my point is that I don’t know what is going on IN the classroom other than by homework, which my children are required to do. (And, they both do a very good job of timely completing their homework.) I think if parents knew what was going on in the classroom, they good help their children more and give better feedback to the teachers.
JD
JD,
I’m not sure there would be any advantage to your kids for YOU to know what is going on in their classes. I can see some ways in which this knowledge could be counterproductive, and can’t imagine any in which it would be useful to them.
Maybe you can expand a little on this.
Of course it doesn’t hurt to remember that Douglas Macarthur’s mother rented an apartment in West Point while he was there, the better to keep in touch.
I have only my daughter’s experience (as much as I know of it) to go by, but my belief is she flourished doing things which would never have occurred to me, that my influence might have been limiting.
JD, I have the opposite experience. I never saw any parents at school. Now there are many who volunteer during the day.
JD, Yes I agree with your thought about knowing what goes on in class. They bring their textbooks home which might give you some idea anyway. I would be prepared for a shock though.
JD Ohio
Yes. I’ve seem teachers who won’t give students a syllabus even though 4/4 student I tutored for this teacher said they asked and one of the parents said she asked. Nope. Not given.
I’ve seen teacher– including this one– who don’t use a textbook.
The kids exams are not returned.
The ability of parents to figure out what topics the kids are taking– pretty much zip. Sure, in principle they can ask the teacher during a parent teacher conference. But … do you really think teachers who withhold this much really give lots of useable info to parents? I don’t. Not. At. All.
This sort of behavior looks like “bottle-neck” to me. It says “parents keep out”.
Honestly, I think some parent group should form that FOIA’s things like syllabus for classes– the full ones they create for accreditation– and things like the range of scores on APs and all sorts of other metrics. Even if teachers don’t think this should be used to rate them, that’s no reason information parents would find useful for making decisions should not be public.
As you recall: I suggested that to make an informed decision about whether your kids should take AP Phys 1 or traditional physics would benefit from
(a) Having the syllabus for the two possible phys classes he is choosing between and
(b) Info on the number of 5-1 grade on the APs.
I know your son has pretty much determined it’s AP Phys 1 for him– and lots of kids do that. Part of it is they have been told it’s the “prestige” class. But it’s not at all clear that’s the right choice– nor the right reason. Both the parents and the students should have more information. (And, honestly given that <5% get 5's, many schools that offer AP Phys 1 ought to stop being delusional and give a different class. If <5% in their school is getting a 5-- which has to be frequent-- their kids are probably not ready for that .)
David Young
Many physics classes these days do not use textbooks. This is true even for schools that buy them.
I don’t know what’s up with other classes, but I suspect a fair number of classes have developed an allergy to textbooks. In those cases: no the parents can’t look at the textbooks.
When my children were in public school if a teacher behaved with that sort of arrogance they would be in deep trouble.
Lucia, Wow, that is shocking to me. Shows how long its been since I was in school. I guess they must use the internet? In science, I would guess the material is probably not slanted. I have heard that history these days is dominated by the works of Howard Zin though.
hunter,
I have no idea what would have gotten a teacher in trouble when I was in k-12 or even later.
I only know that if a kid is struggling and parents have the time to help the kids or resources to hire a tutor, certain information would be useful to permit the parents to provide the help. Knowing the topics that are to be covered before they are covered, having access to sample tests from last year, having access to exams– and I don’t mean just getting to peak at them without being able to photo-copy or take a picture with your phone– all would help outsiders diagnose the actual troubles the student is having.
The idea that one could diagnose this only by(a) asking the student (especially one who is struggling) or (b) talking to the teacher isn’t useful. At least in physics, seeing graded tests lets you know if the student was weak in
(a) algebra skills.
(b) understanding how to read problems and identify what the question is.
(c) sloppy about units.
(d) not getting concepts.
Seeing ungraded copies of last year’s tests would let you know what the teacher baseline expectations are and does so in a way that is much clearer than any discussion with the teacher.
The fact is: teachers are no different from anyone else. Like everyone they themselves may not adequately describe what their real standards are– and their tests may not be well aligned with homework, stated learning objectives and so on.
I get that no teacher, ever, wants to admit this is possible. But it is possible. And the only way to really diagnose “what the teacher wants/expect” is to see items they assigned and how they graded them.
And really lest you think my saying teachers don’t always really know what they want is some sort of anti-teacher slam: I’m saying teachers are no different from people outside school. Some employers are good at recognizing that what they want is “X”, but not all are. Some will say they really want ‘who will speak truth to poewr’, but they really want a yes man. And so on.
Discussions with teachers are better than viewing work if the issue is behavior— but it’s not if the issue is why or where a student who appears to be polite and attempting homework is having trouble.
David Young
Some yes, some now.
The ones using a system called “modeling” generally have students do experiments, take notes and get some handouts. Students keep a notebook and depending on the teacher the attitude is the student is supposed to take good notes, and if they do, then it’s “all there”.
Others make their own videos — usually web accessible–, or create some online materials which are often somewhat fragmentary– and generally online.
Things missing from both “notes” and “teacher videos” include often:
1) Index to help someone find specific material.
2) Inside cover which as most of us recall– often included handy things like the value of constants.
In my view there are all sorts of negatives to not having any book at all. Not having an index to look up things is high on the list. I don’t know about other people but I find it more time consuming to find a useful worked example in a video than in a book. And so on.
But beyond that: Parents cannot tell what students are covering when the only resources are online or student notes. Needless to say: K-12 students are not always great note-takers. Looking at their notes does not always reveal what the teacher really wants. And this isn’t merely because some doodle, but …. well… have you ever seen a poor students attempt to draw the correct freebody diagram yada, yada? Often not a pretty sight.
Even if teachers find it difficult to get students to read the book, knowing students are on a specific chapter makes it much easier to know what they are at least theoretically learning and so on. Admittedly, a parent who doesn’t know physics would still be a bit at a loss– but at least they could find someone who knows physics who could be sent chapter headings. Similar things could be said in most STEM subjects. (Liberal arts might differ– depending.)
FWIW:
Lisle high school seems to not use a book for physics. But I’m not certain.
Hinsdale Central traditional physics: as far as I can tell, no book is used in class at least not by one particular teacher. (They do own Holt and another one of the teachers may use it.)
Benet Academy: Uses books consistently.
Naperville North: AP 1, AP 2 and AP C use a book. Other physics classes… I think no, but not absolutely sure.
Nequa Valley: No book as far as I can tell. Neither in honors nor regular physics.
Metea: No book for either Honors nor AP Phys. C.
One of the Oak Park schools uses a book at least for Honors Physics, so does a Lyons school for AP. Another school around there doesn’t at least not for regular physics (I can’t remember the name– but very near Oak Park.)
I voluntarily took a sort of “teacher training” class last summer to get an idea about the “modeling” way of teaching. But it’s generally a “no book” way. And it’s popular.
Lucia: “Honestly, I think some parent group should form that FOIA’s things like syllabus for classes– the full ones they create for accreditation– and things like the range of scores on APs and all sorts of other metrics.”
….
I had an experience with Ohio’s statewide test scores about 4 or 5 years ago where this came up in a minor way. My son scored well in the subjects tested(the highest, roughly 15th percentile, [a score was given, but there was no way to know exact percentile ranking –only general percentiles were given] but there was no break down as to exactly where he ranked.] I called the state education department and got a condescending employee who told me that I wasn’t entitled to the information regarding my son’s precise ranking. I was trying to be nice, but finally, realizing that he wasn’t going to give me the information, I told him that I was a lawyer and I knew that under FOIA I was entitled to the information. [my statement of the law almost certainly is correct unless there is a specific exemption, which I never looked for because there would be no reason to exempt this info] When he heard that I was a lawyer, he said that since I was a lawyer, he couldn’t talk to me and hung up. (Really stupid on his part because if this matter came in front of a judge, the judge would be thinking, why am I as a lawyer discriminated against in phone calls to the education department)]
….
In any event, I waited 2 weeks to call again and got a really cooperative person who has helped whenever I have inquired over the last 4 or 5 years. The reason I wanted to know the precise ranking was to give my son bonuses that I promised him at the beginning of the year based on his ranking on the state tests. My daughter was too young at that time.
….
In reference, to Illinois FOIA, I think there is a good chance that the syllabi for classes for state schools would be subject to FOIA because the general structure of such laws is that all information in possession of the state government or local authorities is considered to be a public record unless it is specifically exempted.
JD
Lucia: “I’ve seen teacher– including this one– who don’t use a textbook. The kids exams are not returned. ”
….
This is an amazingly bad practice which could lead to all sorts of abuse.
JD
j Ferguson: “I’m not sure there would be any advantage to your kids for YOU to know what is going on in their classes. I can see some ways in which this knowledge could be counterproductive, and can’t imagine any in which it would be useful to them.
Maybe you can expand a little on this. ”
….
I try to be very observant of what my kids like and dislike and what they are capable of doing. Unless you are around the kids in their various environments, you are quite likely to have incorrect assumptions. For example,
…
1. One day I visited my son’s school during lunchtime during the 7th grade. At that time there was a wall of sound and energy. [not bad at all] I had forgotten what it was like to be in the 7th grade.
…
2. I observed my daughter’s 2d grade class and discovered that she had an amazing teacher who had complete control over the classroom. My daughter was put at the same table with 3 other smart girls and did very well in the 2d grade. It turns out that one second grader was so smart that her signature looked like that of an adult.
….
3. I observed my daughter’s 3rd grade class and she was simply placed among all of the students. She had complained that the boys were too noisy,and she wasn’t doing as well in the 3rd grade as she had done in the second grade. I discussed this (in a nice way) with the teacher, and the teacher pretty much disclaimed responsibility by saying the boys were chatty. I discussed this with the school principal after visiting the class (a very accomplished and nice person) and the principal told me that in the Fourth grade, my daughter would be placed with other smart girls again. I moved the next year any way mainly because my son wasn’t challenged enough in the old school district.
….
4. A friend of mine was the grandmother of 2 elementary children who were in a poor school district. She observed her grandchild’s class and in it one child was banging his head against the desk for the whole period and another child was opening and closing the door the whole period. Not exactly a great place for education.
….
I could give more examples, but the basic idea is that if you know what is going on, you can greatly help to place your child in the most advantageous position possible.
JD
JD,
Let me think about what you’ve written. I can see from what you and the others have written that my approach to these things may be quite different, and possibly less beneficial.
JD Ohio
>In reference, to Illinois FOIA, I think there is a good chance that the syllabi for classes for state schools would be subject to FOIA
They are subject to FOIA. But — obviously– most people aren’t going to FOIA them. Most parents don’t want to be obnoxious, many don’t know what they could get– and even if they thought to do it it would likely only be after their kids is having trouble. By that time, between writing, those FOIA’d delaying the full period to response (as we all know is common) the information would often come too late for their kid.
>Lucia: “I’ve seen teacher– including this one– who don’t use a textbook. The kids exams are not returned. â€
To be clear, the kids get to see their exams briefly and then have to return them. But they don’t get to keep them, photo copy them and so on. This seems to be a widespread practice.
But yes: you are correct. There are all sorts of possible things that can go wrong with this, particularly if there are no books.
Among other things that returning tests does is:
1) Make it remotely possible for outsiders to detect unfair or biased grading.
2) Make it remotely possible for outsiders to detect that the test itself has problems (like inappropriate questions, students being required to say the sky is pink when it’s blue and so on.)
If tests are not returned in a way that permits a student who even thinks there might be bias or something screwy going on, then there is no way for any third party– including parents– to determine if the student is correct or incorrect. Now, most often the student will be wrong– but not always.
Not having textbooks– well, in principle, the teacher could insist something they believe to be true but is wrong is “correct”.
I think there are even more things wrong with tests not being returned. I think it is a pedagogically unsound to not return them. I think so because having old tests is the best way to study for cumulative exams (which I think kids in college prep should be given). I also think kids in this years class having access to last years test to use as practice tests is a great way for them to learn.
FWIW: practice tests are one of the re-study methods that is actually known to work. It works better than writing up notes. It works better than reviewing your notes– or rereading chapters– or pretty much anything. The one caveat is the practice test should be done at least 48 hours or so before the test. In the final few hours, re-reading notes can beat taking a practice tests. (Google “retrieval practice”– you’ll find stuff. And if you dig deeper… it will only be confirmed.)
That low stakes practice tests are very a efficient method for “studying” has been known since the very early 20th century– and it’s one of the few learning things that they keep testing over and over with all sorts of variations like “well… is it only multiple choice”, and/or “well, is it only good for memorization” and so on. And the result is pretty consistently “retrieval practice with low stakes tests works better than X” for whatever learning objected they manage to test.
And in terms of motivation: kids are often very motivated to practice last years test if they can get it. Having old tests which kids know are last years tests means kids are actually likely to voluntarily take them even if they aren’t assigned!
The only down side to circulating last years tests is teachers have to write new ones each year. Maybe in some subjects that’s difficult but not in physics!
j ferguson,
In fourth grade, I had a mean math teacher. I also had her in 6th grade.
I was almost never the target of her meanness. She picked on more vulnerable kids. But one of the kids who lost at flashcards was told “If you miss the next one you’ll have to stand in the garbage can.” And stand in the garbage can she did.
This teacher did other mean things too– but none as cruel as that one.
One time she tried to be mean to me…. but it backfired. Story is too long to tell. But I still relish how it backfired on her. 🙂
I don’t know if a parent would have detected her meanness because I’m sure she would not have made a kid stand in the garbage can if a parent was there.
Re: Teacher Mistakes. In the 5th & 6th grade, I used to help my son with Social Studies. About every 2 or 3 weeks, the teachers would get something that encompassed legal principles wrong. I didn’t even bother to tell my son because the time and effort of correcting the issue (and potentially fighting teacher embarrassment was not worth it).
….
Also, when I was an undergrad in college, I had a professor who said she hated to use textbooks because they had so many errors. Before each chapter, she would point out the errors, and one could see how the errors were made because of a superficial understanding of the subject that was not an area of expertise by the author.
JD
Should have mentioned in comment 160204 that the professor correcting the text books was an American History professor.
JD
David Young, not just textbooks are missing. Homework is done on IPADs now.
My wife taught 23 years in public schools and we have many friends who have been teachers and Administrators. If a teacher would not offer a syllabus or return tests there would be professional consequences. And parental complaints if brought to the Administration would be taken seriously for those types of issues. Teacher assessments for job performance would measure things like parental complaints, communication, lesson plans and testing.
The fact that EOs evolved very early in the nations history and the types of EOs have been neatly categorized for us does not change the matter that the constitution is silent on the matter. This puts these orders in a special category beyond even a living constitution in allowing arbitrary use of EOs and rulings on its use. Partisan picking and chosing in these debates makes my case for arbitrariness.
Kenneth,
I don’t see EO’s as anything out of the ordinary. The EO is a directive for the people who work for the president, directly or indirectly. If I wrote an email message to the people who work for me and said: “From now on we are going to only use metal film resistors, to reduce excess resistor noise.” then that would be an executive order. Of course EOs have to be legal, and I couldn’t write an email saying “From now on we are not going to hire any women.” without running the risk of a lawsuit. I just don’t see that there is anything about presidential EOs which make them of dubious constitutionality. The Constitution gives the President authority over executive functions, and EOs are a natural consequence.
Kenneth, best of luck and get into that cardiac rehab stuff, it works.
hunter,
Based on what students say, at at least one school – Metea– , not returning the tests is school policy. It’s not their individual teacher’s decision! At Benet, I know not returning the main tests is school policy- or at least when done endorsed by the school.
JD Ohio,
I don’t see many mistakes in high school physics books. My one criticism of is
theysome add to much “stuff” to give “context”. I think that stuff is supposed to make it interesting. Sometimes those bits are an interesting read for me. But it’s never stuff students are supposed to learn and makes it harder for them to identify which bits they are supposed to learn. And when they are struggling trying to learn how to do a circuit analysis, a discussion of how they wire up Christmas lights is not interesting to them at that moment. (I on the other hand thought: Oh. Wow! I didn’t know that!)SteveF
The Constitution gives the President authority over executive functions, and EOs are a natural consequence.
Yep. Precisely.
It’s only when the EO is intended to do something the president doesn’t have the power to do that it’s a problem. Replacing long term treaty power is a problem. This is where things like the Paris Agreement are problematic.
I talked to sister-in-law who was a career teacher in LA School system about coping with parental interest in classroom activity. Sh said the system limited parental visits for 20 minutes. her experience was that they were disruptive and not particularly informative. She is highly opinionated, and very proud of her classroom prowess. she was a CE graduate of Rice Institute and it’s not entirely clear how she found her way to teaching the lower grades, maybe difficulty of woman engineer finding a job in engineering in houston in the ’60s.
I suspect she actually was pretty effective and may not have aroused concern by the parents of her students.
My reaction to my parents’ classroom visit would probably have not been constructive, more they didn’t believe what I was telling them, but then I don’t think I ever told them what was going on. I was ‘trained’ to believe that if i was having trouble, it was my fault and I should work harder. They never did visit a class, but we always had teachers to dinner. After one such meal, I was yanked out of public school system and sent to a military school in Minneapolis. 2 years, one as a boarding school.
problem apparently was teacher had spoken grammar problems.
My belief is that school is where you learn to deal with the outside world as it’s expressed in its more formal manifestations. I think You have to learn it for yourself, although sharing experiences with your parents might be useful. Having this experience diluted by direct intervention by the parents is probably not a good thing.
hunter, it would be wonderful if you could get your wife to share her observations on parental participation in student classroom exposure.
j ferguson,
I read teacher forums on reddit. And some teacher blogs. I think generally speaking teachers do not like parent teacher conferences. I suspect neither good nor bad teachers like them. At the same time even those who don’t like them seem to complain if parents don’t come.
My mom was a school teacher. Honestly, as far as I am aware, neither she nor my dad ever, ever, ever went to parent teacher conferences involving their own kids. We knew when they were and they didn’t leave the house. Ergo: they must not have gone. That said: We were generally good students.
She did have to go to parent teacher conferences as a parent. She definitely didn’t like it if parents took their kid’s side. I can assure you that my mom’s view was the teacher was always right. Always.
I never heard her bitch if parents didn’t come– I think she would have been happy if they didn’t show up!
It is often odd to talk to may mom because our views on situations can be so different. After I took a particular “physics teacher training” thing last summer, I told her that one of the teachers was a biology teacher who was going to be ‘stuck’ with physics in the fall — because the physics teacher was leaving and the system wasn’t going to hire someone suitable. (I don’t know if she was going to be the only one teaching physics– but she was going to teach it.)
I sat at a table with her for the first “rotation”. It was clear based on a pretest the woman knew no physics. I mean zero. No kinematics. Difference between distance and displacement? Speed and velocity? What’s a vector vs. scalar. No Newton’s first law. She didn’t know. Nothing.
My mom’s reaction was “How brave of her” with the assumption that somehow this woman would “muddle through”. Mine was “poor students!” How appalling of the school system!”
At least she was taking 3 weeks of “teacher instruction” on physics. Sure she may have been “brave”. But really: I doubt she was going t be competent when the time came. (I can tell you that if I was a parent, I would want to be forewarned about this and either (a) have my kid a section with a different teacher or (b) have my kid take chemistry, biology or anything else that year and have them take physics in summer school. )
Something one would detect by meeting them. 😉
I think that depends on what’s going on in the classroom. The kid in my 4th grade class who had to stand in the garbage can for loosing at flashcards would have benefited if her parents or other parents had intervened. There were other not-nice incidents with that teacher.
But there is a point where you don’t want parents too be too “helicopter-ish”. But really, some intervention is good. After all: your parents did take you out of the school system based on interaction with the teacher.
Jferguson,
I should add: even in the “real world”, sometimes people do need to learn to have a proxy evaluate situations negotiate for them. Kids whose parents intervene appropriately learn this.
The alternative to no one every intervenese for you might work out to “Even if someone s**ts on you, if they are in authority, you have to take it whether it’s fair or not.” This is not necessarily a good life lesson.”
Lucia,
I could clearly hear the slap, slap, slap of helicopter blades in some of what I read above, but then I have no idea whether that can be effective.
I tend to think that self-sufficiency could be a product of education, or if it was there already, not quashed by the experience. I have some stories I could share if I can convey them without suggesting that anyone here could be capable of such a thing.
Daughter spent a few early years in a truly wonderful Montessori school in LaGrange. When she spent weekends with me after the divorce Saturdays would be at the office. I’d give her scissors, some unneeded 30×40 prints and a roll of scotch tape and she’d cut them up and tape small pieces into little boxes and create hill-towns complete with cars, buses, all manner of houses, water towers etc. she was 4 or 5 at the time. I’ve kept one of these.
Lucia, it never occurred to me that the teacher might not be right. Never. Mom had a year of teacher school after college, but never taught. Her mother had taught for a couple of years after college, but I never heard anything about the experience.
Daughter’s experience teaching at Cornell was that a lot of the kids demanded the syllabus, the reading list, and the vocabulary (key words) at the beginning of the term.
she happened on an open terminal of one of her teacher associates and added a couple of words to her on-line keyword list. Next day tow students showed up wanting to know where these words could be found in the required reading. I should add that they were Lewis Carollish so clearly off the wall. She was forgiven.
I was the smallest boy in the class until I grew Junior year in HS. I also wore glasses from 2nd grade when they discovered i couldn’t see what was on blackboard. I got beat-up all the time.
I thought it was a comment on my personality, never realized it was because it was easy.
It stopped completely when i passed 5’11 on my way to 6’3. At first I didn’t quite know what to think, but then realized that small kids with glasses look like prey to some people. The downside of this experience is that I still over-react to anything aggressive which comes my way. One would think this could be outgrown- so to speak – but in my case not entirely. Spouse says I really need to get control of this because some of my reactions given my size can be terrifying.
Good article on how EOs have changed the separation of powers n our government and concentrated it in the executive branch and the unelected bureaucracies.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/william-l-anderson/executive-orders-vs-law/
Listening to the hearings this AM brings home the fact that these agencies are unaccountable. The hearings are a farce since the pertinent information is not available to the public due to prevailing secrecies or that it is part of an ongoing investigation. How are leaks handled? How about trust me?
j ferguson,
“Spouse says I really need to get control of this because some of my reactions given my size can be terrifying.”
.
FWIW, I didn’t find you at all terrifying…. ‘course, maybe you were more laid back than normal in the Keys. 🙂
j ferguson
I think some parents are over-involved to the point of helicopter and some are under-involved. I do think some school decisions have sufficient impact on a kid that parents should intervene if things are not right. In appropriate classroom placement can be one of those things.
If you are suggesting JD Ohio may have been overinvolved: I suspect that if JD Ohio had been mistaken about the situation in his daughters classroom he would not have been able to the the principal to agree to assign her differently the next year. You didn’t see the class, and it is quite possible the teachers self evaluation of the behavior of the boys in her class was just fine was basically the teachier making excuses for her own inadequacies in controlling the classroom. Insisting JD’s daughter should just deal with it could have been mistaken and the principle may very well have known so.
I, on the other hand, absolutely knew my 4th grade math teacher making the little girl stand in the garbage can for losing at flash cards was not right. I knew this despite my mom’s constant tendency to interpret anything I reported a teacher — or for that matter a scout leader– did as ok no matter what it was. It was all always “things can be difficult for teachers” and so on.
What I knew by fourth grade was that my mothers view of these things was biased in favor of the category of “her fellow teachers”.
Also: as an Adult, I still know what that teacher did was not right. And she did other things that weren’t right. If I’d been a parent and she’d done them to my child I would certainly have spoken to her and to the principal. Heck, if necessary, and my child was being made to stand in garbage cans, I might have become utterly obnoxious and written a letter to the editor documenting the situation.
There are three things there: Syllabus, reading list and ‘vocabulary’ list. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the students expecting two of these. In fact, I tend to think a teacher who doesn’t provide the syllabus and reading list in college is not treating students fairly.
Most schools I’ve gone to or am familiar with consider it important for students to learn time management and this information permits students to budget their time. For this and other reasons, most college/universities I am familiar with require faculty to give students a syllabus nowadays. I was also always given some sort of syllabus when I was undergrad.
Heck, the local community college in this county requires their instructors to give one out. I got one when I took sewing! So if a college professor complains students expect to be given a syllabus, my thought is “something is wrong with that college prof.”
Students are also generally told all the material they will need to purchase or obtain which means they need to be told the reading list unless the teacher is giving reading material out as handouts. So: if a college prof thinks students are are expected locate obtain and likely purchase materials on the reading list are out of line, then I think something is wrong with that college prof. (Or at least explain why you think this out to be a surprise.)
On the other hand… a “key words” list seems like students pushing it. If,for some mysterious reason, students are asking for things like “key words”, it would be wise for the prof to not give in or provide a document be titled “Incomplete list of key words”. I really can’t think of a reason why students are owed a list of key words at the beginning of class.
Yeah…some students will try to treat certain documents as limiting what they need to cover and a prof needs to push back on some of that.
I can also tell you times some students requested inappropriate things too. But some students sometimes making inappropriate demands doesn’t make all student requests or expectations unreasonable. Did I once have a girl argue that I should only take 1 point out of 33 for her numerical error that resulted from her forgetting the 1/2 is 1/2 ÏV^2 instead of 3? Yes. I. Did have a student do that. I had a grading rubric and I told her: that’s 3 points. I decide that before grading any tests, and no… you lose 3.
So yes, I know students (and parents) can be pushy. They will be. A teacher needs to know how to deal with that. But the fact that students will sometimes have inappropriate expectations doesn’t mean teachers are always right, or justified, or should never be questioned.
Sometimes teachers are wrong. Sometimes a teacher ought to be questioned. Universities even have formal avenues for this– ombudsman, deans and so on.
It was a lot less formal in my time although the​ successful students were probably just as methodical.
I should have mentioned that all three of these were standard at Cornell.
Jferguson,
You’re saying giving syllabus, reading list and “key terms” was standard at Cornell? That’s what I would expect — other than “key terms”.
I’ve never gotten a “key term/vocabulary” list.
I think the handing out a syllabus in college has gone from “recommended” to “highly recommended” to “compulsory” over time. Certainly, it ratchets up as you advance in school. I don’t think anyone gives a to kids syllabus in grade school. It would be pointless. I don’t think I got one in most classes high school. My English and French lit teachers did tell us what books were were going to read.
That said: A parent asking for a document describing that topics were planned in grade school strikes me as a valid request. If that document exists, they should be given it. If it does not… kinda gotta wonder about the planning at that school.
Jim and I have friends with a daughter in middle school and many of the parents in her class talk to each other. Evidently the ones our friends know think the teacher is just redoing stuff they already learned last year– based on worksheets, kid’s stories and so on. If true, that ought to be looked into and dealt with in some way.
Hi Lucia,
That something was surprising to me is certainly not evidence that there is anything wrong with the practice.
Nor that JD’s concern for his kids is expressed by hovering. Our daughter’s high school tour was replete with any number of negative reviews while she was doing incredibly well on any standardized test that we heard about. She was almost always in trouble, and frequently for doing things that I wished I’d thought of.
And it did cost her. no admission to a class college on graduation. it didn’t bother her, she was in Barcelona..
Her mother and i agreed not to contend with the negative reports although she did go to the meetings to which she was summoned to hear about Jane’s most recent infraction.
I felt that the problem was as much lack of imagination on part of some faculty members and possibility that they felt threatened, in the sense of having witless things they said in class challenged, or made fun of – mostly made fun of.
We felt that this situation was not one that the school was likely to be able to (or willing to) deal with, and we were not financially able to send Jane to a day school which is probably what we should have done.
As things have worked out, she’s flourished. I can’t imagine that anyone else would be interested but I can forward a url from Bangkok TV showing her lecturing a movie theater audience on history of Burmese movie industry in Thai.
Lucia, in case you ever come across him, there is a guy in the Chicago area who claims to be descended from Bach, I think it’s Robert Bach, who puts up Christmas lights for hundreds or thousands of dollars a house. The guy is a crook, though he does a good job with the lights.
j ferguson,
I still giggle when I recall the story you told about your daughter’s essay on the adventures or a free-range chicken… maybe because I worked on a chicken farm as a teen, and can appreciate the absurdity.
Didn’t realize this, but New York Times headline story after Trump’s victory on Nov 10 was
Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency
On a little different topic, but one I’ve touched on here before. Interesting article comparing Trump to Teddy Roosevelt. There is a lot of substance to this. Teddy Derangement Syndrome was rife amoung the “elites” of the late 19th Century.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-trump-the-new-teddy-roosevelt/
Liberals are starting to acknowledge that Obama didn’t write his books. If Republicans had been willing to make this argument, would he have been elected?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/03/obamas-book-deal-the-60-million-selfie/
MikeN, if Republicans had pointed out that Obama used a ghost writer for his books it would have been dismissed and the accusers condemned as racists. Just as the fact that the wikileak emails are accurate is apparently unimportant in the current disturbing media obsession.
MikeN,
I suspect Obama would have been elected even if people knew his book was ghostwritten. Lots of people get ghostwriters for their books. Obama’s was better than usual.
Of course today the leak of Obama’s ghostwritten book would have been linked to the vast Russian plot to hack America.
If Trump ‘writes’ a book about his run for president, I suggest the title: “The audacity of grope”.
.
But Trump doesn’t need the money, so it probably won’t happen.
hunter,
Obama can’t write without gramatical errors; he no more ‘wrote’ his books than George W. wrote his. Few politicians have the background, intellectual rigor, or honesty to write well. Jefferson could write, Madison too. But who since Lincoln? None, as far as I can tell.
Obama sure fooled me. I thought the books exceptional. Guy in the URL’s piece is pretty convincing. i wonder if it’s possible to edit something into the shape books wound up in.
I think Teddy R. wrote his own books, and probably Wilson.
I’m still working my way through McMaster’s book. There is a funny line from the Kennedy era, that someone thought him “All profile, no courage.”
SteveF,
I don’t think honesty has anything to do with creating a legend which will work in politics. And a legend is what you need if you are young and have popped up from no-where.
j ferguson,
Honesty and politics are orthogonal vectors.
.
Of course a young politician who has never done much of anything benefits from an inspiring story. By all accounts, Obama’s ghost writers were better than most. When I read the few pieces that Obama honest-to-goodness wrote, he comes across as someone who struggles with basic grammar and syntax, not at all a talented writer. By comparison, his wife manages to make him sound like Ernest Hemmingway (no, too conservative…. more like Gore Vidal) Nobody is going to believe she wrote any part of her upcoming book. For the sake of future readers, I do hope she hires a talented ghost.
j ferguson,
If the editor is given a free hand and is allowed to do it heavily and take more than one pass, sure. The problem is that if the editing is sufficiently “heavy”, someone should admit the editor was a co-author. I think in academia, generally, one considers “editing” to consist of fixing grammar, typos, perhaps shifting stuff around. But not writing anything from scratch based on “the idea”. The latter is authoring. I think lay people see this the same way.
Bear in mind, Obama’s educational background is law. Law is a profession where the person whose name appears on document is not necessarily claiming to have written material. While people do admire judges who obviously write much of their argument, I think it’s not unusual for some judges to have clerks suggest ideas and to submit those in the form of prose. And I don’t think anyone considers their taking large chunks verbatim from submissions by their clerks as plagiarism and the clerks names aren’t added to the opinion. (At least I don’t think so. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a judges ruling add a “thanks to so and so for helping on this”.)
Law also uses a fair amount of boilerplate. It takes skill and education to know what boilerplate to use. But many things are not written from scratch. In fact, my impression is it is often not a good idea to write every sentence in a contract from scratch. Lawyers can predict how certain specific phrases and even sentences will be interpreted by judges. Tweaking for originality or to add your own particular “flair”… not so much. (Real lawyers feel free to tell me I am wrong here.)
Lucia,
There’s a wonderful story on the web of the reaction of a publishing house to a manuscript proffered by Eleanor Roosevelt which they thought needed ghostwriting, something like it looked like she had written it while riding a bicycle. She demurred, submitted it to another house who published it ‘as was’ and it was a great success.
I was also astonished that Truman didn’t write his own books.
I have some trouble believing that Obama can’t write well given his educational tour, Law Review at Harvard, his profession, etc.
j ferguson,
I’m not astonished because I don’t know enough about how much law professors care about style, grammar and so on on law exams. It wouldn’t stun me to learn that the major part of the grade was for things like detecting “the legal issue” and discussing how the law applied and the grader gives quite a bit of slack on style and grammar. (Sort of like I cut slack on my own typos here in comments.)
As for assignments: I don’t know whether law professors would consider hiring an editor for class assignments cheating nor whether people would do it even if it is cheating. I do know there has always been a brisk business in people hiring editors for MS and Ph.D. theses. Most students I knew did not do this, but I don’t think it would be considered cheating to have someone find typos and so on. There used to be a brisk business of people typing the documents. That was generally not considered cheating– and back in the day, typists sometimes noticed typos.
I also know that now a days there is quite a business of people making a living writing class papers from scratch for those students with more money than ethics. This is definitely cheating. I’ve heard people hire gunners for theses too– but I’m not entirely sure how that could avoid detection for a STEM thesis at even a half-way decent school if that thesis had a significant experimental, or numerical component. That is… unless the data were all made up, which would likely be caught at some point.
That said: perhaps I am just not creative enough in my imagination about how one might cheat.
Maybe JD can help us with this.
Writing exactly what you intend to convey is not easy for everyone. I would expect it to be near mandatory for attorneys. A serious inadequacy in this area might flunk you out of any respectable law school.
Maybe JD can help us with this.
Writing exactly what you intend to convey is not easy for everyone. I would expect it to be near mandatory for attorneys. A serious inadequacy in this area might flunk you out of any respectable law school.
I have the impression that there is a lot more to book-editing than fixing grammar. Readability is important. Getting from manuscript to publishable work is a result of a highly iterative negotiation between the author and the editor, assuming the author wants to keep his/her hand in on the result.
Usually the author gives profuse thanks to the editor in the preface.
Lucia,
My oldest son clerked for an appellate judge in New Jersey. He said that huge pieces of the opinions issued by the court were verbatim copies of what clerks had composed. He told me of one court opinion where his entire brief was (save for a few word changes) the published opinion of the court. He was unhappy when the NJ Supreme Court reversed ‘his opinion’.
j ferguson,
“I have some trouble believing that Obama can’t write well given his educational tour, Law Review at Harvard, his profession, etc.”
.
If you can, read the few pieces he did actually write (before he had ghost writers, speech writers, and teleprompters).
j ferguson,
I would expect it to be near mandatory for attorneys.
I agree this would be near mandatory for attorneys– on final polished documents. Tales of judges throwing the book at attorneys who write sloppily are legendary. But this also means that attorneys who graduated law school and passed the Bar but also can’t write well also exist.
> A serious inadequacy in this area might flunk you out of any respectable law school.
A serious inadequacy would, I am sure, result in poor grades and likely failure. Still, I’d pretty much have to hear whether attorneys are surprised to learn a graduate might be somewhat sketchy on writing.
I have the impression that there is a lot more to book-editing than fixing grammar.
Sure. But there is a point where contributions are no longer “editing”. Where the line is may be a matter of some debate.
j ferguson
This is supposed to be an example of a formal letter written by B. Obama in 1990 when he was president of the Harvard law review.
http://hlrecord.org/2008/10/record-retrospective-obama-on-affirmative-action/
I’d be happier with a pdf of a photo copy to be sure those errors I see immediately are not entered during transcription. If those errors were in the letter itself, I’d say the level of grammar is about what I expect of a rather quickly written blog comment by someone who doesn’t proof read well. (Looks at self in mirror.)
I’m not going to comment on commas…
Examples:
All in all: If this reproduction is verbatim, it looks like a hastily typed letter that was not proof read.
I’m a bit surprised the review itself wouldn’t have people proof-reading before publishing it in a volume because I would think that is something “Law Review” would care about. If this was a quickly written email I wouldn’t call the writing horrible — in fact, I wouldn’t even blink an eye. But that’s me… self-admitted queen of typo.
And I thought I overused the “,”.
SteveF, Teddy Roosevelt was an excellent author and wrote I believe 18 books that were of high quality.
David Young,
Then I stand corrected… add Teddy Roosevelt to the list. But not Bill Clinton, George Bush (Sr or W), Barack Obama, etc. Ghosts in the books all.
hunter,
Commas… As I said, I wasn’t going to discuss that. In blog comments I obviously wouldn’t criticize any writer for using the “conversational comma” rule (which is putting one anywhere you want a pause. However, evidently this letter appeared in
Volume 91, Number 7 (November 16, 1990) of the Harvard Law Record
As such, I’m rather surprised there wasn’t some review to bring the letter into compliance with standard writing academic writing practices. In fact, I’m especially surprised since the point of the letter appears to be to an attempt to persuade readers that affirmative action picks don’t degrade the quality of law review– particularly not the choices for who sits on the law review. Assuming the errors — and comma usage– as that letter stands, I suspect it might have given the contrary impression.
The standard looks fine… for a comment deep in the bowels of a blog.
Re: Legal Writing–
Lucia, the example of the letter written by Obama was so bad it gave me a headache, and I don’t have the energy to parse out the mistakes. Not very good for a one-time president of the Harvard Law Review.
….
J. Ferguson: “Writing exactly what you intend to convey is not easy for everyone. I would expect it to be near mandatory for attorneys. A serious inadequacy in this area might flunk you out of any respectable law school.”
There are many angles to this. A person’s writing may be 100% accurate, but dense and difficult to read. Judges are notorious for this type of writing. In fact, Judge Mark Painter of Ohio has railed against it for many years. After he retired (and had less influence), the Cincinnati Bar Association refused to print a column of his that used opinions by Ohio judges as examples of poor writing. (See Painter resigns from CBA — http://www.judgepainter.org/judge-painter-resigns-un-post-2) Legal writing has been considered to be so poor that many law schools now have legal writing classes. (See http://www.bing.com/search?q=writing+courses+in+law+school&qs=n&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=writing+courses+in+law+s&sc=0-24&sk=&cvid=D0FDC31B7A7149BEAE248FE687093DE4) When I was at Ohio State, it did not have a legal writing class.
On the other hand, I still remember one of my professors telling one of my law school classes that there had been blind grading of a law school exam by both English professors and Law professors and that there was a strong correlation between good writing and good law school grades.
Also, as you practice, you realize that judges are busy people and that your chances of success increase as your writing becomes clearer and more economical. If a lawyer takes the long and winding road, many judges will just stop reading.
JD
Lucia: “Bear in mind, Obama’s educational background is law. Law is a profession where the person whose name appears on document is not necessarily claiming to have written material. ”
….
I would say that this only applies to matters within the practice of law. For instance, if I, as an attorney use boilerplate, it benefits the client because the language has been vetted and my bill will be lower because of the time saved. If a clerk writes an opinion for a judge, the clerk is saving the time of the judge. All that matters is that the opinion is a correct statement of law.
….
I don’t think lawyer “authors” have any exemption from an honest person’s obligation to fairly credit those who have contributed to a writing or book. Of course, many politicians’ books are ghost-written. So, one can say that a politician who does not give fair credit to the ghostwriter hasn’t committed a major political wrong or gaffe. On the other hand, it is still dishonest to take credit for something that was not really your work. A politician who uses a ghostwriter without crediting the ghostwriter simply reinforces the idea that politicians are dishonest.
JD
>I suspect Obama would have been elected even if people knew his book was ghostwritten.
It’s not that he had a ghostwriter. That Jon Favreau wrote The Audacity of Hope would have been no big deal, other than that Obama lied about it in a speech, “I wrote them myself.”
Dreams was written by 60s radical Bill Ayres, whose interview was published on 9/11,”I wish I had set off more bombs.” The incident of Obama eating dog was probably invented by Ayers from what he saw in Vietnam, rather than Obama in Indonesia.
JFerguson, Jack Cashill has written about it extensively. Dreams From My Father is using an Odyssey structure like O Brother Where Art Thou, with Obama playing both Telemachus and Odysseus. Ayers invented a Circe modeled after his own girlfriend, and probably Cyclops too.
He also places at the end of the book, Obama talking about his brother
One wonders where he found the time to wiretap Trump. Who will provide evidence of his claim very soon.
JD Ohio
I know it’s supposed to only apply there. But sometimes some practices “bleed” out. Perhaps it did with Obama. But “politician” is likely the more important point.
MikeN, After this surfaced here, I read some of Cashill’s work from 2012 (IIRC). I found it compelling and believable. And I believed it.
The interesting story would be how anyone knew that Obama could use a legend in 1993-4. It was too early to be thinking about the next president, that might have made sense in 2002 when one could have assumed that W would serve 8 years and that there would be a clear opening for an electable outsider who was a democrat. 1993-4 is too early for that.
But there’s the book. Why else?
“A politician who uses a ghostwriter without crediting the ghostwriter simply reinforces the idea that politicians are dishonest.”
Well, that’s an entirely superfluous result. But actually, I disagree. When a politician gives a speech, we don’t expect an acknowledgment of the speechwriter(s) involved. Book-writing is just an extension of this. While many politicians in the past may have been skilled writers/rhetoricians, it is rare today. We [well, I] tend to think of a politician as the leader of a group of advisers, writers, etc. and credit all of that group’s ideas to the leader as a shorthand. E.g. “Trump’s tax plan” — Trump may be responsible for the kernel, but he’s not a CPA; certainly the details were worked out by staffers. Or “Obamacare” — no one person, least of all Obama, wrote those hundred of pages of complex regulations. Possibly no person read all of it.
Back to the original point: I think it’s expected that someone who is not a writer by profession will need a lot of assistance in producing memoirs. Not always credited. A little unfair to the writers/editors who helped, to be sure. I’d like to think that they are acknowledged at least in the introduction.
jferguson
He used the book to support running for state senator.
Who would have thought it would have taken a book to run for state senator in Illinois?
.
Maybe he didn’t understand the advice, which was that in order to fit in he needed to have been booked.
I’m pretty sure that Obama never wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review. AFAIK, if that’s true, he is the only editor to have never written an article. I suspect that’s the origin of the affirmative action letter.
The stupidity of Trump not firing Comey on his first day in office is now evident.
Reagan could write pretty well, as evidenced by his published collected letters.
DeWitt,
I agree that keeping Comey around was a mistake. But at this point Trump compounds the mistake by not ending Comey’s refusal to supply information about ‘investigations’ of Trump advisers.
.
Trump should just call up Comey and ask all the questions about his investigation of Russia which Comey refuses to answer for Congress. (Eg, “Did you or anyone at the FBI provide Loretta Lynch, Barack Obama, or anyone else in the Obama administration with information about any telephone calls, or emails, by any person associated with the Trump campaign?”) Trump has the authority to declassify and disclose publicly anything Comey tells him. If Comey refuses to answer direct questions from Trump, then he should be fired on the spot, escorted from the FBI office, and subject to criminal investigation.
JD Ohio,
“A politician who uses a ghostwriter without crediting the ghostwriter simply reinforces the idea that politicians are dishonest.”
.
I doubt much reinforcing is needed.
HaroldW: “When a politician gives a speech, we don’t expect an acknowledgment of the speechwriter(s) involved. Book-writing is just an extension of this.”
….
I disagree. Books are published with the name of the author. It is easy and simple to give credit where credit is due. A major motivation for a politician to have a ghost-written book is to deceive voters into thinking that the politician/”writer” has important and thoughtful things to say. Additionally, speeches, for the most part, are not meant to be cited repeatedly and are mostly just designed to create enthusiasm for the politician’s supporters. Speechwriters are much more ethically justifiable than are ghostwriters.
JD
Lucia: “I know it’s [having legal writings being composed by people other than the person formally responsible] supposed to only apply there. But sometimes some practices “bleed†out. Perhaps it did with Obama.”
….
My conclusion would be exactly the opposite. Lawyers have to compartmentalize their work all of the time. Sometimes a lawyer as acting as an agent with binding authority. Sometimes a lawyer is simply acting as an advisor. Sometimes evidence in a criminal trial has different consequences than the same evidence in a civil trial. Lawyers who actually practice are very careful as to how they compartmentalize their work and their relations with clients. A competent lawyer would easily separate work as an author of a book from legal writing work. From what I can see Obama never really practiced as a lawyer. From Wikipedia:
…….
“Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004).[71] During this time he taught courses in due process and equal protection, voting rights, and racism and law. He published no legal scholarship, and turned down tenured positions, but served eight years in the Illinois Senate during his twelve years at the university.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama
….
It is apparent to me that Obama was merely a politician from the get-go and used his stay at Harvard Law to further his own political ambitions. He should simply be judged as a politician with a very minor interest in law. I would say that by virtue of nominally being on the faculty of a law school, he had more of an obligation than a plain politician to be honest about the authorship of any publications that were issued in his name.
JD
JD Ohio,
Fair enough. I don’t know how lawyers generally think about that.
That’s my impression also. I don’t think he ever worked as a lawyer. His training is as a lawyer.
I agree that by virtue of working as an academic, he should see giving correct credit for authorship as important. Certainly, an academic would be expected to have written their own memoirs.
The argument that he did not write his own memoirs is persuasive. It would be one thing if the first memoir style didn’t match Obama’s emails, other types of writing and so on. People do sometimes have different styles for different types of communications. But having different styles in different books is odd.
To really know, the ghostwriter(s) may need to step forward. If Ayers was the ghostwriter, I suspect he’ll never come forward.
Lucia: “His training is as a lawyer.”
….
I would question whether he even applied himself to train as a lawyer. He graduated from Columbia in 1983 and didn’t start at Harvard Law until 1988. My take is that he met influential people after graduating from Columbia and got into Harvard through their influence. (Nothing per se wrong with that) Then after graduating from Harvard, he used the additional brownie points gained from a Harvard degree to further advance his political career as he probably planned from the get-go. However, based on his letter written as President of the Law Review, it is clear that he didn’t have traditional Harvard talent or qualifications.
JD
>based on his letter written as President of the Law Review, it is clear that he didn’t have traditional Harvard talent or qualifications.
That conclusion seems warranted.
I would have expected nearly any student at any law school in the top half of law schools to have wanted to proof-read a document before it was published in any formal way. Certainly, the President of Law Review ought to have wanted that document proof-read before publication. That he did not… oy.
I agree with you that his goal was probably never to practice law. The evidence certainly seems consistent with his goal being to enter politics and have credentials that looked good for politics. That’s what he ultimately did.
JD Ohio,
You forget that he was a transfer student at Columbia, starting in his Junior year. I would say that he met influential people when he was at Occidental College as a Sophomore. They got him transferred into Columbia, not a common occurrence, and then into Harvard Law. I still would much like to see his transcripts from Occidental and Columbia. I suspect I never will. From what little is available, his time at Columbia was not spent as a normal student. IIRC, his only course his Senior year was a seminar.
An example of a literally true fact that is very misleading. From Wiki: ” He graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991″
…..
Grade inflation at Harvard at that time: “Under the old system, 76 percent of Harvard Law grads earned honors, 16 percent of them magna cum laude and 60 percent cum laude, the school said.” See http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-06-09/news/9906100096_1_laude-harvard-law-school-system-implemented-three-years
JD
JD,
from the URL in your comment
This sort of smacks of lawyering to me. Why not to you? Although I would concede that 4 years full time in my trade would have produced more like 10,000 billable hours.
j ferguson,
That few billable hours as a normal new associate would probably not be enough to be retained at a top law firm. My impression is that you would need at least 3,000 hours in your first year, probably more. Again, somebody likely pulled strings to get him enough experience to be able to claim that he practiced law.
j ferguson:
To me too, but the answer to why they don’t seems pretty obvious. To say they aren’t working very hard to be charitable here is an overstatement.
Carrick,
Charitable or not, under 1,000 billable hours a year is not normal. Ask some young lawyers if you doubt that. Maybe he had a special arrangement to work as a part time associate at reduced salary. Maybe there is some other explanation.
.
I think you meant to say “understatement”.
He was also teaching at the same time – so the wiki statement that this was ‘full-time’ was inaccurate.
Carrick,
I didn’t read the number of hours he worked. So, I was wrong when I though he never lawyered. He did. But I still don’t think that was his goal. I suspect his goal was politics. He was a community organizer in the 80s. I think that’s the sort of thing a person who want to be in politics does. I think he knew or thought legal training would help advance that.
I don’t think his goal was “to lawyer” per se. It appears he did a little– but not much. Which is fine.I don’t even think there is any shame in a person getting a law degree for some reason other than to practice.
>four years Obama worked as a full-time lawyer at the firm, he was involved in 30 cases and accrued 3,723 billable hours.
Assuming 50 weeks of work a year, we get 3723/(50*4) = 18.615
hours a week.
>My impression is that you would need at least 3,000 hours in your first year, probably more.
Not according to Yale:
https://law.yale.edu/student-life/career-development/students/career-guides-advice/truth-about-billable-hour
They say “Firms “average,†“target†or “minimum†stated billables typically range between 1700 and 2300” That would put Obama’s annual billable on the low end– but the number of billable hours seems to vary. (The article says public interest law firms rack up fewer billable hours.)
JFerguson, I’m not sure about the timing, but Obama’s plan was to be mayor like Harold Washington. If he had the presidency on his mind, he likely never would have joined Jeremiah Wright’s church.
Lucia, Bill Ayers HAS claimed responsibility for authorship. However, it was in a semi-joking fashion, saying if you can prove it he’ll split the royalties with you. In the same video he describes the other book as a hack job. Christopher Andersen wrote about it in his biography of the Obamas seemingly without even realizing it was a big issue.
I don’t recall the details, but if Jon Favreau is not the author of Audacity of Hope, then there are plagiarism issues.
j ferguson: “During the four years Obama worked as a full-time lawyer at the firm, he was involved in 30 cases and accrued 3,723 billable hours.[74] Obama was listed as counsel on four cases before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.”
….
I missed this. Thank you for pointing it out. I saw where he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago and was a State Senator soon after he returned to Illinois, and I stopped reading. My statement was wrong. He did have some substantial experience as a lawyer. Not a great deal, but enough to say that for a period of time, he was functioning as an actual lawyer. It would be interesting to see if there were any filings where he was the sole writer, and how those filings compared with the style used in the books he claimed to have written.
There are some lawyers, who after they graduate, end up teaching English and never handling real cases. Obama was not one of those.
JD
JD, grade inflation or not, I am surprised that Obama ended up in the top 1/6 of his class at Harvard.
Self-explanatory description of hours worked by associates:
”
“Students are concerned about hours. So are firms. You will hear anecdotes and twice told tales about monstrous hours. You will hear that Smith & Jones is a sweatshop, but that Arnold and Baker is a laid back place. Most lawyers are hard working by nature and will work hard no matter where they practice. You will work many hours beyond client hours to manage the practice, be trained and to train others, stay current in your field, market, and manage the firm.
The differences among firms’ expectations have never been as great as students believe (and hope). In the wake of the 2000 and 2007 compensation avalanches, expectations on chargeable hours changed forever. Do not assume that size has a direct relationship to chargeable hours. And, do not assume that third hand hearsay about “kinder, gentler†firm ABC has any bearing today. On the flip side, you should not always assume that a premier mega-firm is hostile, impersonal, or any more demanding than its somewhat smaller distant cousins. Firms that pay at the top (no matter how large) have comparable expectations.
Chargeable hours for associates at leading firms are rising. The once typical expectation of 1,900 hours a year has nudged north to 2,000-2,100. It is an inevitable consequence of the dramatic increases in compensation. Most firms have chargeable hour guidelines (quotas). They establish a performance floor for compensation purposes. If your hours fall below the floor, your compensation and future are in trouble. Earning $160,000-300,000 annually from your 1st through your 7th year out of school for 2,000-2,300 hours of work does not violate the 13th Amendment.
Typical associate chargeable hours in mega firms and large firms are 2,000-2,100 per year. However, the typical associate who is “in the hunt†for partnership – an ambitious-prime-time-player – are likely to bill 2,300-2,400 hours per year. Typical partner hours for the same firms are at the same level — and when one includes the time that partners spend developing business, managing clients, and administering the firm, their total time is typically higher than total time for associates. The message for students: when one becomes a partner, one will work harder. And the best will work harder than that. Tough but true facts that students should understand before they dip their toes in the professional pond of private practice.
Even the best, hardest working and most focused lawyer can’t bill more than 80-85 percent of their time in the office. It’s just not possible. Interestingly the battle to do so does not get easier with age because as you become more senior your administrative distractions (all of the above plus the development of clients and the management of the law firm) become greater.”
See http://abovethelaw.com/career-files/law-firm-hours-the-real-story/
JD
MikeN,
Why?
I think there is something wrong with the “tradition” at Harvard if law students don’t proof-read letters that they intend to publish formal records. Obama appears to have done that.
But he may very well have had good grades. I still haven’t read anyone say that it would not be possible for someone to get good grades on exams with imperfect writing. It’s sufficient for professors to consider it much more important for the students to identify the “legal issue” cite correct law than to punctuate correctly on timed tests. I think Obama is overly generous with commas. But it’s quite possible that few law professors would give a student a bad grade on an otherwise correct answer to a legal question owing to a superabundance of commans.
Law professors aren’t 5th grade grammar curmudgeons.
At a different college maybe, but I haven’t seen much evidence that Obama is the smartest guy in the room. It appears magna cum laude at the time was based on a certain grade cutoff, and everyone who reached it was in. Still I would expect that there were lots of people doing very well at Harvard. One professor even defended the grade inflation on the basis that the students were just that good. It may be that Obama had underperformed because of drugs, but he didn’t have exceptional grades at Occidental or Columbia.
It’s not just commas, agreement of subject and verb is a problem for him. I defended him on ‘You didn’t build that.’ for this reason.
SteveF: I think I’m guilty again of writing an overly difficult sentence to parse: The expression “they aren’t working very hard to be charitable” is an overstatement, meaning it’s an exaggeration. I’d say “making absolutely no effort to be charitable” is closer to the truth.
lucia—I don’t doubt that Obama always intended a political career though I think the scope of his ambitions likely changed after the 2004 Democratic Convention.
I’m not defending Obama here, but if had ghost writers, that’d make him no different than Trump of course, who also takes credit for things written by others…heck, Trump takes grabbing credit from others to a whole new level!
Carrick
Agreed.
Yep!
Lucia,
I very seriously doubt Mr Obama got very good grades….. save for Harvard law school, where good grades seem all you can get. I would be happy to have my undergrad grades published anywhere (3.65 on 4.0 scale at Stevens Tech, before grade inflation!). Obama has never revealed his undergrad grades, nor do I expect hin to. He did however make sure that the Harvard Law review was staffed with a representative mixture of people (race, gender, etc), quite independent of their scholastic merit. His pilitics were very clear even then.
SteveF, the staffing of Harvard Law Review wasn’t up to Obama. It was based on grades, with a separate affirmative action selection program, that got Obama in.
DeWitt, based on policies at the time, it is possible Columbia never saw Obama’s grades or GPA at Occidental when he applied for a transfer. During the 2008 campaign, Percy Sutton said he wrote a letter of recommendation of Obama to Harvard, at the behest of a wealthy Saudi, Khalid Mansour, who paid for his education. Later a family spokesman said Percy Sutton denied this, and later people in the family said they’ve never heard of this family spokesman.
SteveF, we know that 5/6 of Harvard did not get as good grades.
MikeN,
Oddly enough, no matter how Obama ended up editing the Harvard Law Review, one thing is clear: his only known written contribution to the review was a defense/explanation of the affirmative action program to select ‘desired’ editors. How very odd.
Re: SteveF (Comment #160287)
This whole fixation on the “I believe Obama got in on affirmative action, not his own merits, because we don’t know any better,” argument seems strange to me.
Even if it were true, what conclusions are we meant to draw from it?
Is this just another version of the birther argument, but applied to transcripts and LSAT scores instead of long-form birth certificates?
What are we supposed to take from this?
That Obama may not have written Dreams From My Father seems plausible but maybe more to the point are the thoughts his? In 2008 we were active supporters of his candidacy. Maybe we were bewitched.
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Friend who we would otherwise have expected to be a strong supporter and who also had read the book was troubled by concern that Obama didn’t seem to know who he was. This came through clearly in the book.
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At the time, I thought his concern overdrawn but agreed that the uncertainty was there. Given Obama’s childhood and teen years the uncertainty was not at all surprising. Being raised white by his apparently semi-literate grandparents while being black must have been confusing. i think when he started to run black friends of Hillary labeled him in-authentic, not really Black.
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My friend’s appraisal of the possible cost to the rest of us if someone who wasn’t sure who he was became president would be indecision. Maybe he was right.
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I’ve noticed that any extemporaneous discussion of his is likely to reveal a few subject/verb disagreements. I’m guessing this problem is one he grew up with.
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There’s an undercurrent of “he didn’t do this himself” in some of the comments above. Maybe better would be that he didn’t do it all by himself, he had a lot of help.
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I don’t buy that he is not highly intelligent. I base this judgement on watching his behavior in press conferences and interviews. He invents answers on the spot, much like Bill Clinton was able to do, but not Hillary.
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Had he not been highly intelligent, the kids at U of C would have wasted him.
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Notwithstanding the above, I hated some of the things he did in office.
MikeN,
According to this article, Occidental did not include grades in their student transcripts. It also turns out that Columbia was easier to get into as a transfer student at the time than I had previously thought. Still only 67 of 450 applicants were admitted in the year Obama transferred.
j ferguson,
I think Obama is highly intelligent. However, I don’t think he’s as smart as he thinks he is, i.e. always the smartest man in the room.
Hi Dewitt,
I’ll give you that.
Uncle who sat on Missouri Supreme Court in the ’50s said that you seldom knew who the smartest guy in the room was because he didn’t say much.
Given Obama is very intelligent and articulate. Given further he is well mannered with a high activity level and confident appearance in all manners of engagement. How do you explain his activities in promoting ObamaCare and totally ignoring the problems with this legislation? I do by noting that past politicians and the politics within which they engage has very little to do with character traits or intelligence. Obama was perhaps more engaged on a personal level in these politics and other presidents have mostly made more use of spoke persons, but no matter there is nothing unusual or exceptional to see here. In becoming a president the politics have been learned to one degree or another and the important matter is evaluating the amount of political misdirection that was used in getting actions done and how detrimental that misdirection was or will be in the end. It should evaluated on a case by case level.
As an observer on these matters the grades that the one being evaluated received in school matter not one whit. The politics are there for all to see and judge.
Mother marrying and divorcing and moves from countries with a variety of cultures has the potential for confusion also.
Tons. One would find even more in quickly written emails by someone who might have used cut-and-paste to change a few things and then not proof-read carefully. Other things that are common “it’s” where “its” should be used. I know the difference, and rereading comments I often see I inserted the apostrophe where it does not belong. If I know I do it, I’m hardly going to conclude the “only” reason it happens is lack of knowledge.
Very few people are always the smartest man in the room.
Not so sure about that. I think Ben Franklin was known to be chatty. He was very smart. Arguably one of the 10 smartest historically known people ever.
Carrick: “I’m not defending Obama here, but if had ghost writers, that’d make him no different than Trump …”
Nope. The cover of “The Art of the Deal” says it is by Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz; an honest acknowledgement of the ghost writer. The cover of “Dreams from My Father” says it is by Barack Obama; no mention of a ghost writer there or anywhere else. Very different.
Hi Lucia, one thing i’ve encountered with advancing age is to type homonyms, ‘their’ for ‘there’ for example. A while back, one of the commenters here made a big deal of this. Guy must be younger.
Can you ask your mother why she didn’t like parent meetings?
j ferguson: “his apparently semi-literate grandparents”
Huh? A semi-literate bank vice president?
Mike M. If not at least one of the grandparents, then where? I concede I was probably a little loose there.
And semi-literate bank vice-president. I know one. She works at a branch of an outfit that should have stuck to horses.
MikeM:
Trump’s ghostwriter apparently wasn’t acknowledged in this book
j ferguson
As a teacher?
Oh… well… to some extent, you have to know my mom. I remember the types of gripes she had.
My mom is definitely not the type who likes to be questioned. At. All.
I know she definitely did not like parents who advocate for their kids in pretty much anyway. Obviously, in some cases, you’ll have parents who are the kind who think their bratty kid walks on water. But my mom is definitely in the category of “if the teacher did it, it must be justified.” So for example: In her mind, when my 4th grade teacher made the unintelligent but well behaved little girl stand in the garbage can for losing at flashcards there must have been a good reason. It did not need to be explained. And had her parents complained of it, the teacher would be justified in saying that’s a good practice and explain no further. ( Perhaps some here disagree with me that it’s a horrible practice. But if you do….sorry, you are wrong. I shall not be questioned on this. 🙂 )
Mom’s view definitely was that the way teacher parent conferences go is she tells the parents her views and then the parents go home and use their authority to tell their kids to comply with her view, policies, rules etc. Period. Obviously, a teacher with this sort of belief system is not going to enjoy parent teacher conferences if any of the parents have any ideas of their own. Some parents will. And some may sometimes have better ideas than the teacher.
While we’re on the subject of ghost writers, I’d guess about 90% of news articles have at least one ghost writer. AP licenses typically allow their licensees to reuse AP material without specifically crediting the original authors. In any other field, this would be considered blatant plagiarism.
If you look at different newspapers around the country, usually there’s a paragraph or two inserted into the original AP story, the by-line is given as the local journalist, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where the AP wasn’t even given credit for the original story. (These days they seem more careful…they at least have a line like “reporters from Associated Press contributed to this article”.)
We all know (I suppose) that the person seen asking the questions to interviewee isn’t usually the same person who was asking questions to the interviewee (off camera). For “live” TV, they run a taped, usually edited together from multiple takes, version of the interview, with the announcer reading the questions as if he’s actually talking to the interviewee himself. Improves the air of authenticity of the report. It’s really funny when you see the same interview footage used by more than one network, especially when you hear how different announcers work the same question.
Anyway, it’s actually split-gut funny for me to watch newspapers & other media attack presidents & other politicians for having ghostwriters, when so much of what the newspapers and other media do is just a pretense of authenticity.
Lucia,
thanks. I’m compiling my short list of hazards of parent involvement in the classroom. One item would be to go in assuming that the teacher du jour is going to see things as your mother does.
I cannot remember anything like the garbage can affair ever happening in a class I was in. The kids who went to parochial school in Glenview in the ’50s were full of stories of corporal punishment, mostly hands rapped with rulers.
J Ferguson: Re: parental involvement in observing children in school.
…..
I think you and I are coming from different places. I want to observe my children in school mainly so I can help them adjust to the way that it is. Teachers have many students, and they can’t adjust the fundamentals of what they do based on one parent’s input. I, on the other hand, can adjust what my children do.
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By way of background, I have had close to 0 problems with my children in school. They both do their homework almost 100% on their own with no prodding from me. (Of course, there is a bonus system to motivate them.) My idea is more to put my foot on the accelerator for them to do better (and save me on tuition) than to deal with problems.
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One practical benefit for me in visiting my daughter’s 3rd grade class was to see that she was surrounded by what were at best average students who couldn’t challenge her. It made it much easier to change school districts — a decision that has worked out well for both of my children. Also, in a general sense, just being around your children when they interact with other children, whether they are in school or not, is useful.
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I would add parenthetically, with respect to your relative who taught in Los Angeles, that, at least for the last 20 years or so, the Los Angeles school district has performed horribly. Don’t know how this affected your relative. However, having partially grown up in Southern California, I read the LA Times regularly, and the subject of the schools comes up a fair amount of the time. See for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_District
JD
Carrick,
Yeah…. I don’t think this is necessarily even new. My Dad always said this was what things like 60 minutes did. Also… he said whenever he heard “he declined to be interviewed by 60 minutes”, his reaction was “that’s a person with some good sense!”
The practice can result in seriously misleading programs.
I’ve also noticed the practice of newspapers running the same AP material. No bylines and so on. You are right: newspapers and magazines have quite some gall to complain of ghostwriting.
>As an observer on these matters the grades that the one being evaluated received in school matter not one whit. The politics are there for all to see and judge.
The media pointed that out once John Kerry’s grades were revealed.
JFerguson, Dinesh D’Souza made a movie, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, that was starting with the premise that Obama wrote the book. The rage was really Ayers’s. Obama was almost universally loved at Harvard, even among people who were not fellow travelers.
j ferguson,
I rarely saw corporal punishment. One time my 7th grade social studies teacher lost it and slapped a kid in class. He was bratty, insolent and so on. But this was not her usual method of dealing with him– nor the schools. I’m sure if this was escalated everyone would have agreed she lost it and was out of line.
Oddly, they ability-grouped us in lots of sections by 7th grade. But not social studies. (They didn’t tell us they ability-grouped us, but we all knew. We knew science, math and reading were ability-grouped. It was obvious. ) In social studies, I was always finished with the assigned material by 1/2 way through the class and I just read fiction the other half the time. I can’t remember if he was one of the smart kids who also was done and got tired of occupying himself or if he was one of the slow kids who didn’t get it and was frustrated trying.
Both ends could lead to bad behavior in the un-tracked classes. He did act up. All the kids agreed that he did. None thought he should be slapped around.
Oddly, the mean teacher ‘garbage can’ teacher never actually lost it in a similar way. But … she was mean….. She often said disrespectful, nasty, not-nice things.
On hazards
Yes. And the teacher may not see things as your mother does even if your mother is right. However, some teachers would listen. And in some cases they could escalate. But the fact is: without any element of parental choice in education, it’s possible that (a) the teacher or system could be wrong (b) they cannot be made to see they are wrong (c) they will be inflexible (d) a parent talking to them will only make them be worse than they already were.
On the other hand: Some parents have been known to sue schools. And. Win. Because teachers and school systems are sometimes wrong.
What would you do as a parent if your boy was the kid in this story:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/22/school-orders-boy-to-tolerate-undressing-with-girl-and-make-it-natural.html
“School Orders Boy to ‘Tolerate’ Undressing with Girl and Make It ‘Natural'”
> For “live†TV, they run a taped, usually edited together from multiple takes, version of the interview, with the announcer reading the questions as if he’s actually talking to the interviewee himself.
I didn’t know this. I assumed the parent network arranges lots of interviews for affiliates.
Lucia, McNamara sued 60 Minutes when they did this to him, editing in different questions to go with his answers like Jay Leno.
JD, I agree that it is really informative to see how your kids interact with other kids and with teachers, if you are there long enough to see.
I always wanted my daughter to generate the official family reaction to particular teachers, not me, nor spouse. This was pursuant to the notion that Jane had to spend the year with each of them and nothing good, to my mind, was going to follow from our agitating change. I’m pretty sure that I’m much less disciplined than you are, maybe because I spent my career in situations where I could get away with it. Mostly I feared the impact of some thoughtless reaction of mine to something stupid i heard at a parent/teacher interaction.
We never had any idea what daughter was going to do as a big lady. we assumed it would not be architecture, since we each were architects, but still, we assumed college and graduate school. And it all came to pass in the fullness of time; one year in Barcelona, 4 years at college, and 7 in grad school – sort of gives ‘fullness of time’ a bad name.
We did look at the things she wrote at home and I often helped her to tune them up. She took Suzuki violin when she was 5. I did get involved with this, mainly rejecting the violin she’d been issued in favor of a much better one. It was pretty funny, instructor knew it was a bad instrument and assumed parents wouldn’t realize it, and after all, most of the kids weren’t that good anyway. I guess with music, school hit my hot button and i did all the things that I’ve been ranting about not doing. I think I threw a bit of a fit, alleging that it was impossible to believe that anyone could actually make such a bad instrument, let alone the school not filter it out of the system.
Ah well, hypocrisy is so hard to avoid.
Since it was discussed on this board. Just got my medical bill for the fall down the stairs from the hospital. The pertinent part is that I whacked my head pretty good on the basement floor, requiring 4 staples for a substantial amount of bleeding, but I had absolutely no other injuries, which was evident about 25 minutes after the fall. (I was bleeding, but literally was on an exercise high [from exercising just before the fall] even while in the emergency room.) The total that the hospital billed was $4,700 and the insurance companies allowed $4,200. The statement I have from a supplementary insurer says that I only owe $117, but I find it very hard to believe because most of my policies have high deductibles. (Could be though)
….
In any event, one charge that appears to be ridiculous to me is $1,100 for “laboratory pathological.” Can’t imagine what they tested and why the charge was so high. The bill for the CT scan of the head was $900, which was reasonable. I guess I saved some insurer (ultimately, more probably myself) $900 by refusing the neck CT scan. The charge, apparently, for the use of the emergency room was $600. A little high for some cases, but reasonable for mine. Also, $137 for pharmacy — assuming tetanus shot. Again, somewhat high but OK.
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My little adventure with health care shows why it is so screwed up in the US. Haven’t got the ambulance bill yet.
JD
I would have expected $4700 to drop to $2200, not $4200.
Hospital billing is deeply dysfunctional. It does not clarify the cost of services. The infamous over charging for trivial low cost items like bandaids or tetanus shots cannot be rooted in rational cost accounting. The reliance on bloated charges that are frequently cut by 90% or even 100% because of insurance payment contracts is not an ethical way to bill. A hospital has an economy of scale that apparently works in reverse. And the lack of a cash discount at mist hospitals is evidence of bad faith. Hospitals are the front line of meaningful long term healthcare reform.
JD Ohio,
Clearly, it pays to not fall down stairs. 😉 Besides, falling down stairs injures far more Americans than Islamic terrorists, so we should focus on reducing the number of staircases, not the number of Islamic terrorists.
hunter (Comment #160315)
hunter, bravo. It is hard to imagine how this could have been written more succinctly.
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we’ve been perplexed by hospital event values listed on the bills where less than 10% is paid by insurance and our co-pays might be much less. And yet the debt is discharged. Obviously the hospital’s books are going to show a significant loss, but to what end?
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SteveF, it’s something about taking steps where the trouble always starts.
I underwent a root canal procedure yesterday. Total bill for the endodontist (including X-rays): $1400. Insurance amount: about half. My portion: under $200.
I mentioned to the clerk that it seemed silly to put down $1400 when they were about to mark it down by half or more due to agreements with insurers. She remarked that those without insurance are billed the entire amount. Presumably it works the same with hospitals. But I’d guess that those without insurance are the ones least able to come up with the full amount…so I wonder if those high fees are often collected.
I heard a piece on NPR about hospital billing. It’s dysfunctional because hospital accounting is dysfunctional. By and large, they don’t have a clue how much anything costs. Then there’s the problem of Medicare. Medicare reimbursements do not cover the costs of Medicare patients. The government gets away with this because they can. Health insurance companies have less clout than the government, but can still force discounts. And hospitals are required to give emergency care regardless of ability to pay. The money has to come from somewhere.
The fundamental problem with health insurance billing is that 99% of the consumers are incapable of examining their bills and saying no to services they don’t need. Additionally, with insurance paying most of the bills many of the consumers don’t have any skin in the game.
JD
JD Ohio,
‘No skin in the game’ has been the basic problem since health insurance became a common (tax free!) compensation for many employees. The disconnect between who pays and who benefits is why health care costs have been running out of control for decades.
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All the political controversies boil down to not accepting the reality that you can control costs in only two ways: 1) make it truly market based (meaning little coverage for very poor people or high risk elderly, unless they are wealthy), or 2) set up a system that rations treatment and further reduces costs by restricting compensation to health care providers (including drug companies), as in Canada and most of Europe.
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We have a partial “single payer” system for the elderly, of course, (Medicare) but unlike most single payer systems, there is very little rationing or cost control…. elderly voters tend to vote any politician out of office who wants to reduce Medicare benefits, and health care providers are a powerful interest group that block any real control of compensation levels.
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The insane thing is that the USA spends a vast amount of money on health care, leading to much higher BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes sales to medical doctors (which is nice for Germany), but has health outcomes and lifespans no better than (and in many cases worse than!) places with far lower health care expenditures. It is not just that our health care is impossibly expensive, it is also not very effective. Reminds me a bit of expenditures on climate ‘science’.
I say again: Until the average American starts taking better care of himself, the US will always spend more on health care with poorer results than the rest of the developed world. We’re obese and violent and drive more miles. Even though cars are a lot safer now, a lot of medical care still goes to victims of car accidents. Add being unwilling to let go at the end of life to that too.
DeWitt,
Yes, people should take better care of themselves. If the consequences of not taking care of yourself were more evident (eg. you pay a huge amount more for health insurance when you are obese, a smoker, have drunk driving arrests, etc.) that would help people appreciate the need to take better care of themselves. The requirement of insuring people with pre-existing conditions is more of the same… only worse. It is exactly the opposite of what has to be done to rein in costs. Same with end-of-life treatment choices… when having Great Grammy around for a few more months through “heroic” medical effort costs her and her family nothing, heroic effort will usually be the choice.
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The disconnect between costs and benefits is most all of the problem.
I want to add to JD Ohio’s comment that most people are “incapable of examining their bills and saying no to services they don’t need.” In many (most?) cases, the costs of services aren’t discussed in advance.
When taking one’s car in for service, the mechanic will typically make a brief examination, and then offer alternatives with cost estimates such as “replace tires now for $400, or patch for $100, but this will only postpone replacement for a year.” Which allows one to make a decision based on relative costs.
Contrast this with what happens when one sees a doctor. She might say something like, “that cough might indicate XYZ syndrome. I’d like to take a chest X-ray to be sure.” No discussion of the costs of the X-ray (and reading), or the relative increase in information from the procedure. [E.g., only 100 cases of XYZ are reported annually in the U.S., and the X-ray is only definitive in 50% of the cases.] I’ve been covered by insurance all my life, with no (or little) “skin in the game”, and I can’t recall asking the costs of such diagnostics. One could argue that it’s not a great use of MDs’ time to provide cost/benefit information — although I’ve had such discussions with regard to treatment. But if the consumer (patient) doesn’t have the information, or is incapable of making a well-informed choice, it’s left up to the discretion of the MD. And that decision may be influenced either by profit — perhaps the X-ray lab is owned by the physician’s group practice — or by “defensive medicine”, that is, fear of lawsuit.
My wife is a recovering accountant. She goes over our bills tooth and nail.
She frequently finds errors both in our favor and the medical people’s.
Very often the money side of the medical outfit will ask her why she cares, she isn’t paying for it.
SteveF (Comment #160321): “you can control costs in only two ways: 1) make it truly market based (meaning little coverage for very poor people or high risk elderly, unless they are wealthy), or 2) set up a system that rations treatment and further reduces costs by restricting compensation …”
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There is another option. We could have a market based system with safety nets for the poor and unlucky. We can get almost all the benefits of a market without going totally Darwinian.
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SteveF: “The insane thing … is not just that our health care is impossibly expensive, it is also not very effective.”
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That is, I think, a combination of two different things. Since other countries restrict costs, we in the U.S end up paying for R&D, much of which is privately funded and recovered by charging patients. The other is that medicine (other than public health) has little impact on average life expectancy, so you can not judge it by looking at things like life expectancy and infant mortality.
Mike M.
“The other is that medicine (other than public health) has little impact on average life expectancy, so you can not judge it by looking at things like life expectancy and infant mortality.”
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I don’t think that is necessarily true; after all, life expectancy has increased rather dramatically over the past 60 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_by_Region_1950-2050.png) Some of that is better nutrition and reduce childhood mortality, of course, but some is due to improved medical treatment of the side effects of aging.
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But even if it were true that medicine has little impact on logevity, how would you then judge medicine?
j ferguson,
“Very often the money side of the medical outfit will ask her why she cares, she isn’t paying for it.”
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Yup, that is a very big part of the problem. Dental implants at $3,000 per tooth might be considered too expensive for many… unless you are not paying for them.
SteveF,
The biggest increase in life expectancy was from public works, i.e. sewer and water, not medicine. That’s probably why the increase was so much larger in Africa and Asia. My guess is the next biggest was vaccines. Antibiotics are up there too. In fact, drug development in general, a small fraction of total health care expenditures, probably had more effect than the really expensive stuff like the more exotic forms of medical imaging.
MikeM:
I agree completely with the first statement. It’s my observation that countries that are socialist typically have little left to invest in R&D (or defense for that matter). Countries like the US end up bearing the brunt of the R&D.
I think the second statement is “mostly true”: There are many factors that influence life expectancy, and while medicine does affect life expectancy, it is difficult to tease out of the noise associated with other factors, such as life style, risks associated with daily activities (DeWitt mentions driving), and so forth.
I would say rather that life expectancy is not a good predictor of the quality of health care, and so can’t be used as an effective measure of the impact of improvements in medical science.
SteveF:
You look at the outcome of a particular medical treatment compared to other medical treatments, or even the absence of medical treatment, on groups which otherwise as similar as possible. (As genetic testing improves, this is getting easier to quantify.)
It may well be the case that Group A with a particular medical treatment is no better off than genetically distinct Group B in the absence of that medical treatment. It’s a natural thing to assume this means that the medical intervention is either useless or creates net harm.
Of course that’s not what this implies at all. What you need to be asking is “what happens with Group A when that medical treatment isn’t applied?”
Here’s a practical example:
People with the HLA-DQ1 allele are more propose to developing celiac disease from consuming wheat gluten (it seems to be an inability to process the protein gliadin that is at fault).
For this group, ceasing to eat wheat will yield on average a better health outcome than continuing to eat it.
For people who don’t have a genetic predisposition for celiac disease there probably is no benefit from ceasing to consume wheat gluten, and probably a net negative effect form the slightly worse diet as a result of that.
Simply looking at the effect of longevity in this case isn’t going to be helpful without sub-grouping, either for the impact of a gliadin free diet, or in the efficacy of genetic testing in a case like this.
Shorter version, you need to make the comparison “apples to apples”. Longevity studies typically fail to do that.
SteveF (Comment #160327): “”life expectancy has increased rather dramatically … Some of that is better nutrition and reduce childhood mortality, of course, but some is due to improved medical treatment of the side effects of aging.”
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Well, it has increased by about a decade in the more developed countries. The large increases elsewhere are due to public health. The increase in the U.S. is not all due to modern medicine, so maybe medicine adds a few years. That is tough to pick out from other factors, like lifestyle and accidents. Within the U.S., life expectancy varies from 81 years to 75 years, depending on the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_expectancy
That is probably mostly due to things other than health care.
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SteveF: “But even if it were true that medicine has little impact on logevity, how would you then judge medicine?”
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Good question. So far as I know, nobody has an answer. Amazing considering that we spend trillions a year on it.
I was in the hospital for 10 days with a triple by-pass and in a hospital that my relatives and friends said looked more like a luxury hotel room. I was visited by more doctors than I have probably ever seen in my entire life. The care was excellent and as was the staff. I really have no complaints about those issues on the face of it. The entire cost of the procedure and stay will be covered by Medicare and my supplemental insurance and thus I am not incentivized to complain, but the system has to be far from efficient with so many doctors walking into my room doing essentially the same procedures – stethoscope front and back, etc – and asking nearly the same questions for their cut of the pie. Even the nice room does not help one from going nearly stir crazy after a week in hospital.
I do think that free market solutions exist to greatly improve the efficiencies and costs of these types of procedures, but getting their will be a difficult task with so many people already accepting unquestioningly the third party payer. I also judge that the more government intervention we have in these procedures the fewer choices people will have in the amount and quality of care provided.
I think if Obama Care provides no other lesson the critical one is that the government will never admit to mistakes in the system and neither will the big government apologists in the MSM. At least with the current system we can informatively discuss what is wrong with it and propose changes, but once government has total control there will be no options outside of throwing more money – that we do not have – at it or rationing care. True denial mode will be reached by those running the system. The only why out of a government system would be a collapse in the financial system that supports it and caused by incurring eventually unsustainable unfunded liabilities. Unfortunately the rest of the world has essentially gone the government way and unfunded liabilities are mounting much as we see in the US government run Medicare.
The only glimmer of hope I see is for an opting out of a government system option into a free market one that would eventually find solutions to some of these problems. Oh and by the way, did I mention a second lesson to be learned from ObamaCare: be wary, be very wary of mandates.
One thing I would look at would be the average survival for different types of cancer. Britain’s NHS in the not too distant past had a much shorter survival time for breast cancer than the US and some other developed countries. I think that’s been improved, but I haven’t looked.
Kenneth,
The Swiss have a health insurance mandate. It seems to work for them. There are subsidies for low incomes.
I would say be wary of mandates that aren’t actually mandates. That way lies adverse selection, moral hazard and high premiums.
Kenneth Fritsch: “but once government has total control there will be no options outside of throwing more money – that we do not have – at it or rationing care. True denial mode will be reached by those running the system. The only why out of a government system would be a collapse in the financial system that supports it”.
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That nails it.
The Canadian system is arguably better than the U.S. system. But it has significant problems and there is no way to fix the problems. At least it is possible to make the U.S. system better, although given the dumb and dumber parties that we have, that may not be likely.
Statistically, aren’t most causes of death still preventable? Everyone dies eventually, of course, but in the US, of the things people die of, most are still self induced. And I think there’s a lot of recent understanding about cancer and dementia as influenced by lifetime diet.
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Health care doesn’t reverse these things.
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At least before one’s pancreas gives out completely, diabetes is 100% reversible by diet alone!
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It’s sad that people’s expectations and the medical community’s motivation, are for late life treatment, not for the free or cheap dietary changes based on what’s now understood.
Kenneth,
If it was a teaching hospital most of those guys would have been interns. they all look like doctors.
I asked my grandfather, born 1892 what was the biggest advance in his lifetime. He said ‘automobile.’ It was because they got rid of the horses and as a consequence the horsesh*t, and as an effect of that, the disease. He said it was up to the curbs in Minneapolis at turn of the century. When it was collected it was piled in vacant lots to settle down before it could be taken to the country.
He told my Dad that he was one of 11 kids his mother had of whom only 4 made it to 20. I’ve tried but been unable to verify this, possibly because kids dies young and weren’t there for the next census. It was cholera in Milwaukee where they lived before 1900.
Jferguson, someone living in 1905 time travels forward to 1955, the house has a telephone, cars, which were supreme luxuries you only heard about in 1905, and the residents occasionally go on a plane, as well as indoor plumbing, and some magic box called a television. He then time travels another 50 years to see how much more things have changed. Not much.
Where have you been MikeN. We have the internet ,a vaccine for polio, many labor saving devices, a modernized agriculture that is capable of feeding many times the people of 50 years ago and with all these advances reaching people who 50 years ago were living as though in the dark ages.
Leaving ObamaCare in place is probably a good political idea as it will only show more problems as time passes and maybe even to the extent that the MSM can no longer defend it. The replacement proposed only appeared to much of the same with a Republican name on it. Of course the MSM would have no hesitation criticizing it then and labeling it a free market alternative.
ferguson (Comment #160338)
Many of those doctors who came visiting were young and female and easy to look at and very easy with whom to converse – but no matter I saw it as a deficiency
Kenneth, I forget where I read the original story, but most of these changes are not as obvious. The house is almost the same, and many of the labor saving devices were there in 1955. A microwave might be the most obvious change.
Kenneth,
“Many of those doctors who came visiting were young and female and easy to look at and very easy with whom to converse….”
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Extremely non-pc, and the worst kind of micro-aggression…. you are not allowed to EVER draw a distinction between attractive and unattractive people, and especially not among women. 😳
MikeN,
The internet has made a huge difference, not for everyone, but certainly for many. (Which is related to the widening gap between mean and median income.) Virtual communities like this blog have substituted in many ways for physical communities. The availability of information has fundamentally changed (how obtained and how much). Even 25 years ago, a patent search was an major endeavor, including a trip to a patent repository library; now it is a couple of minutes sitting at your desk. Want to know the density and refractive index of barium titanate? You can have that answer in seconds.
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Some activities (eg university education, office labor) have been slow to adopt the improvement in communication, but I expect that the appalling inefficiency of having a professor teach a handful of students in a classroom, or having an office worker drive 15 miles to spend the day sitting in a cubical, will eventually lead to changes in those kinds of activities which improve efficiency.
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But of larger concern to me is the inevitable substitution of automation for human action. Substitute an autopilot for a truck driver or taxi driver and you reduce cost and increase safety…. but what will those people do instead? Substitute an autopilot for driving your own car and it completely changes the true cost of driving (effectively reducing that cost). If I can choose between either a 7 hour ordeal of crowded airports, surly TSA agents, smelly passangers, screaming babies, and glacial rental car lines, or a 12 hour car ride were I can do pretty much anything I want, including sleep overnight, I will choose the 12 hour car ride every time. Self driving cars will disrupt the airline industry by eliminating much short haul air travel. Which will simultaneuosly make long haul air travel a lot more pleasant. But what will the people no longer needed to staff airports (and airlines) do instead? The ‘disruption’ of automation is just beginning.
Mike N,
Sorry, I had a couple of rhetorical questions in that comment; my soap box was so high that I briefly forgot the rhetorical question prohibition.
MikeN,
In 1966, architecture school had a visiting professor who was Russian. There was a monday night lecture series. When he stood up the night he spoke, he waved the Saint Louis Yellow Pages over his head and said “you have this and we don’t.”
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He had discovered that it was possible to look up what you needed by subject, find sellers, call them on the phone, order and it would be delivered or you could visit store.
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He then described the process (undocumented) required to purchase concrete block for project to be built in Moscow if you didn’t already have a source. Go to someone else’s project and ask where they got their block. Be prepared to not get information because sources for useful stuff were highly valued and not always shared. Once having gotten source go see them – can’t do this kind of business by telephone. Guy says he’ll sell you the block if you can get him lube oil for his machines. So then you call someone you know and he can get the lube oil but he needs something. Round and round, but eventually everyone gets what they need.
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We were laughing but he didn’t think it was funny.
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I used to think I was really good at Yellow Pages and could usually be talking to someone who had what i needed or could tell me who to call by second call. When i moved to Washington DC, I found this worked in Chicago but not DC, DC was below critical mass for sourcing technical stuff.
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I share this story because it is exemplary of just how hard it was to find off-the-wall things before the internet, Alta Vista, then Google.
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The difference between then and now is cataclysmic. It sometimes used to take me weeks to find parts for something I was working on – wooden doweling to make pushrods for harmonium – pedal organ that worked like harmonica with bellows. I can’t remember the diameter, less than 1/4 inch but a really odd fraction. the guy I finally found who had them asked what they were for, laughed and gave me enough for what I was doing. He sold truck-loads, not ten or twelve sticks.
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or finding people who are building integrated gps, magnetometer, accelerometer marine autopilots. google the chips you are using and in seconds you’ll find a blog where the folks who are doing this are conspiring. When i tried to do stuff (well, simpler stuff) like this when i was a kid, I almost never was able to find anyone else who was interested in the same things. No shoulders to stand on.
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This all changed with BBS’s in the late ’70s but they mostly worked with computer hobbiests and the things those folks could be interested in beyond writing assembler for USARTS. But now it was possible to find people, not just stuff. Again, a cataclysmic improvement.
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So I suppose there hasn’t been much change since 55 if you’re frying an egg. But if you want to put together a great dinner in 20 minutes, you can do it now, but couldn’t then.
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SteveF, i really like your observations about autonomous cars. We just got back from air-trip to NJ sitting amongst a lot of people with colds. I used to fly from Miami to DC and back every week – 2 years of this. And in steerage. I don’t know how I stood it.
Kenneth,
No, it’s not. The GOP now owns health care whether they like it or not. The Democrats will claim that they would have fixed any problems that arise if they’d been in charge. If things go on as they are now, by 2019, they will take over the Congress. The Republicans, who are demonstrating that they are incapable of governing, will be consigned to the outer darkness for decades.
I like the WSJ’s name for the Freedom Caucus in the House, the Freedom-From-Reality Caucus.
If I’m going to the West Coast or across the pond, I’ll fly. If I can drive there in two days or less, I’ll drive. Flying has become torture.
Although j ferguson is correct that there has been much progress over the last half century, Mike N is correct that none of it has been as transformative as indoor plumbing, telephones, electricity, radio, automobiles, airplanes, and antibiotics.
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SteveF wrote: “But of larger concern to me is the inevitable substitution of automation for human action.”
People have been worrying about this sort of thing for at least two centuries. Somehow, it never turns out to be the problem that some imagine it will be.
DeWitt: “Flying has become torture.”
I remember one of my professors complaining about how unpleasant flying had become. That was nearly four decades ago. In my experience it has become steadily worse since. Some of that is surely airlines pushing the boundaries of what people will tolerate. But I suspect that a big part of it is that as I age, I become less tolerant of imposed discomfort.
Re: Mike M.
It’s seldom been the problem that people writing about this sort of thing think it will be, but it’s often been a problem for the people doing the work that gets substituted for.
j ferguson,
Air travel was somewhat less painful before 9/11. It is now, as DeWitt notes, bordering on expensive torture. I took a redeye from San Diego to Charlotte a few days ago; older Airbus plane with a known-crappy temperature control system. I sweltered in the middle of the plane for nearly four hours, making sleep impossible, while those in back were freezing to death; I have encountered the same problem 15-20 times before on the same model airplane. Air travel sucks.
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WRT marine autopilots: the chipsets needed are very cheap compared to the commercial product. The problem is the investment in a one-off system for mounting, interfacing, and software development. Companies like Garmin have driven prices somewhat lower, but the system prices remain eye-watering. Were the market bigger, lower cost producers would surely pressure the incumbents, but it is a relatively small market with significant entry hurdles, including product liability considerations. I saved about half the cost by installing a Garmin system myself, but that is not for everyone.
I realize that what I’m about to relate defies belief, but …
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in 1979, we were doing a project in Cleveland, the one that is 60 or so miles up 59 from what was then called Houston Intercontinental. We flew in on Sunday night and home to Chicago on Friday evening. We’d been flying American until someone alerted us to a Braniff flight which had an unusual level of amenity.
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So we tried it. It was a 727, one of the smaller ones, painted in some unlikely color, and it was about a quarter full. It appeared that most of the people on the flight took it every week and there would be one of two crews. Everyone knew each other, PAX and crew. One of the flight attendants, (stewardesses as they were then called), had a cassette boom box with dance music. So we danced from Houston to Chicago, taking turns of course. I think I had a dozen or so of these flights, before someone senior at Braniff found out about it and stopped it.
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One evening the trip flew between a low to the west and a high to the east which produced a truly stupendous tailwind so that we arrived in Chicago an hour early. Braniff had one gate and the landside folks weren’t there yet. Captain re-opened the bar, the dancing continued and although the gate-keepers got there in about 45 minutes, it was agreed that we could all work with the normal arrival time — more dancing — more booze.
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I will always treasure my Braniff experience.
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Another time I was the only passenger on a Northwest DC-10 from Denver to Chicago. That crew did not rise to the occasion although they did let me ride in first class.
SteveF, my parts cost for crude autopilot in 2011 was $175, but I already had the servo from a Benmar CourseSetter.
One last airline story then off the the opera.
We were returning from Hawaii in an American DC10. The seat pitch was so short that I was unable to fit knees in front of me but had to straddle the seat in front. I was also between the aisles in the back. and the plane was full.
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And Robert Crandall had chosen this month to include a piece on seat pitch in the flight magazine and how people wouldn’t fly their planes over another airlines if American had more leg room if it meant the trip cost more.
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I seethed all the way LA, and to never take American again if there was a choice. And I didn’t.
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After he retired Crandall bought a large sailboat and attempted an Atlantic crossing west to east. He broke down half way across and apparently expected to be rescued by the folk he’d bought the boat from.
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grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
j ferguson,
A 3-axis accelerometer/3-axis magnetometer (0.1 deg resolution) with included microprocessor and software to generate heading, pitch, and roll values at 10 Hz costs today $96 (single piece). You then would need an interface microprocessor board ($25?). Throw in a WiFi chip, a UART chip, and some D/A hardware (to communicate with an Ipad/Iphone, chartplotter, and servo) and you are still probably under $150. Mounting (crude) and power supply might add $50-$100. So the hardware is still cheap if you have the servo drive/pump in place. The bugaboo is all the time you would have to invest to write the code for the interface microprocessor and the iPhone/Ipad…. big investment…unless it is a hobby.
SteveF,
I would have thought you would have a 9DOF board, not six, three accelerometer, three gyro and three magnetometer. At least that’s what they use for quadcopter drones. You also need GPS to correct for drift from integrating the noise in the MEMS sensors, which are quite noisy. Of course you could spring bigger bucks for ring lasers.
DeWitt,
A recreational surface craft has vastly lower requirements for inertial navigation than a drone. Also, the iPad/plotting functions already provide GPS.
Yeah 9dof. Sparkfun electronics sells one for $75 I think.
DeWitt,
You could use all three I guess, but the precision chips that are specifically designed for marine navigation don’t seem to. The key data is very accurate heading updated ~10 times per second, both for autopilot/direction control and to adjust radar angles on the fly so that radar targets are held in the the correct position on the navigation chart, and not gyrating wildly. Without this on-the-fly correction, radar is essentially useless. GPS is a separate input for the chartplotter (which displays geographic position and radar targets and their motion relative to you and your path).
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Mark,
I doubt that board has sufficient magnetic resolution (+- 0.1degree readings).
oliver,
It depends on the surface craft. For collecting data on a race car, I’d want at least 9DOF, preferable 10 by adding a barometer for elevation change. GPS sucks for elevation and vertical acceleration is the difference between two large numbers. Low velocities, like on a boat, also require higher precision accelerometer data.
SteveF,
Integrating the gyro (actually three axis rotation rates), accelerometer and magnetometer data with GPS, called sensor fusion, improves the data precision significantly. I don’t know if it would give +/-0.1 degree, but it would be a lot better than the magnetometer data alone. I’ve read that calibrating three axis magnetometers in a vehicle can be tricky.
DeWitt,
On a boat the navigation is not ever inertial based (AFAIK). For anti-roll systems (either based on gyroscopic or fin stabilizers), you need accurate pitch and roll. For everything else, you need heading and GPS position. Single receiver GPS gives you a positional uncertainty of about 10 feet. Dual receiver systems reduce the uncertainty to under a foot.
DeWitt,
Yes, vehicles have lots of steel, and that distorts Earth’s magetic field. So to calibrate, the vehical with sensor mounted has to be slowly rotated so that the microprocessor can see how the field changes with rotation.
I found stabilizing the compass the most difficult. What I did was crude but it worked after a fashion. It didn’t give a comfortable ride. Compass problem was tilt compensation. reported heading would swing a lot with pitch and roll due to sea.
I had a real autopilot too and just did the project to see if I could.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #160349)
March 25th, 2017 at 7:05 am
Your call is what the Democrats and the MSM are claiming but I do not see in a reasonable world where the Republicans suddenly own ObamaCare when none voted for it. The changes up for vote were not going to fix it and then the Republicans would own it according to Democrats and the MSM.
If the Democrats are truly concerned about fixing ObamaCare they should be making proposals on how that would be done. I heard one already, while not making a specific proposal, but, in general giving the usual pitch of shoveling more money at the problems and raising the eligibility incomes for subsidies. The Democrats should be in the same position as the Republicans were before the administration change – but as big government builders they are may be immune.
J ferguson,
My understanding is the dedicated chips with on-board microprocessors use approximate latitude (horizontal and verticle omponents of the field) and the pitch/roll data to compensate the magnetic readings for a non-horizontal orientation of the boat, so that the heading information is always accurate, even in rough seas.
Kenneth,
I don’t consider the Journal Editorial Report on Fox News to be the MSM. Paul Gigot quote: “The Freedom Caucus owns Obamacare, lock, stock and barrel.” All the other Journal opinion writers agreed on the panel agreed.
It doesn’t matter now that not a single Republican voted for the original bill. It only matters that the Republican vote to repeal and replace failed when it counted. Health care reform is dead for this Congress. Any problems that arise now are because the Republicans failed to fix them.
Now that blood is in the water, passing tax reform will be a whole lot harder. If that fails, what are the Republicans going to run on in 2018? They’ll have nothing.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #160368): “… I do not see in a reasonable world where the Republicans suddenly own ObamaCare when none voted for it. … If the Democrats are truly concerned about fixing ObamaCare they should be making proposals on how that would be done.”
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Exactly right. Unfortunately we don’t live in a reasonable world.
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DeWitt Payne (Comment #160370): “Any problems that arise now are because the Republicans failed to fix them.”
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Silly, of course. Won’t stop the MSM from trying to sell it. They might even succeed.
SteveF, in 2010 when I did this I was using an Arduino Mega for the controller and modules I could get for it. I hadn’t realized that tilt-compensation was going to be such a big problem which is why I bought the accelerometers so I could use them to report the actual tilt at a range of headings so that a look-up table could tell the system what the swing was at that tilt and at that heading. it sorta worked.
Today, it would be much easier, but then I’d also want to do a much more sophisticated steering algorithm.
It’s hard to do engineering if you aren’t an engineer.
Try? They have succeeded without trying very hard at all.
This is a classic example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The real problem is that one person’s perfect is the other person’s anathema.
It’s not clear that any bill would have gained the support of the Freedom-From-Reality Caucus. If it had, nobody else would have voted for it. The concessions that were made to the FFRC had already lost the support for the bill from of a lot of Republicans in Congress. If it had come to a vote as it was, it probably wouldn’t have received more than 100 votes for. That’s why the bill was withdrawn before the vote.
DeWitt,
I expect the freedom caucus members are going to be under considerable pressue from constituents as the existing law implodes. Whether that will happen soon enough for a similar bill to pass in the next 18 months is not clear. The Secretarty of HHS can expedite its implosion by simply refusing to do anything to save it. But I agree it is uncertain the numbskulls in the freedom caucus will ever vote for a replacement bill which can pass both Houses (restricted by conciliation requirements in the Senate). Trump’s election was shocking, but the slow motion train wreck engineered by the freedom caucus nut cakes is even more shocking.
I saw an interview with some folks in West Virginia who don’t see any point in Obamacare’s survival or any other health plan because Trump is going to bring back their coal mining jobs which will have company-paid insurance.
Reminds me of a Dark Side cartoon with dog leaning out of car window to tell another dog that his owners are taking him to be tutored.
Voting for the bill would have had Republicans and Trump owning ObamaCare. The bill would have made premiums rise even more. They had provisions for lowering them, like making it harder for people to wait until they are sick to sign up, but you still have the same death spiral, only accelerated because there is no individual mandate forcing people to buy.
MikeN,
“Voting for the bill would have had Republicans and Trump owning ObamaCare.”
I disagree. Most any reduction in the level of coercion in the current law would be a win for the conservative base. What sticks in the craw of many taxpayers was the individual mandate. “Just leave me alone!” was one of the most common reactions to Obamacare. The freedom caucus blew their chance to rid the people of that grotesque intrusion of the Federal government into private activities. They will regret their refusal to support the bill.
SteveF, if people don’t want to pay the individual mandate, they likely do not have to. Trump has essentially repealed that law by fiat.
There is still the issue of people wanting to buy health insurance for less than $1000 a month.
Kenneth Fritsch:
The way I see it, it’s pretty simple:
The Republican Party controls both legislative houses and the presidency now. If there are problems with ObamaCare it’s up to the Republicans to address these.
If they don’t, it will be seen by most as a failure in governance on their part.
Being in such total control does put them in the spotlight, and puts them in a pretty exposed position.
MikeN is correct I think–Trump has fixed one of the more onerous parts of the ACA.
He hasn’t been able to address the imposition put on small businesses of course (partly because he seems disinterested in policy…in case people haven’t noticed, he’s not exactly a wonk).
That concerns me a lot more than the individual mandate.
But honestly, what exactly is going to make the ACA implode/explode?
It’s going to muddle along if left alone, but if the Republicans agree to act like adults for a while, they’ll make some tweaks here and there (much easier to do piecewise than as an omnibus bill) and it’ll slowly morph into a much better version of what it is now.
The Republican Party might even get credit for saving the ACA. The irony in that is pretty rich, but I could see it happening. The Freedom Caucus would not be pleased, but many Republicans might like that even more, right now.
Regarding the employer mandate, after the last round at the Supreme Court, is the Trump Administration at liberty to declare that subsidies and thus the employer mandate only apply to states that set up exchanges?
“We’re obese and violent and drive more miles.”
Life expectancy is a marvelous thing. Heavy smoking, drinking, gambling and sex. 70% of people obese [weird statistic but then].
Junk food plus. And yet life expectancy has risen. This obviously means junk food, smoking, being overweight is actually good for people. Not to mention medicine and the sanitation improvements. People of 60-70 today are 15 years younger than those of 40 years ago in terms of what they can do and how long they will live for. Thank god for the politically incorrect people of the world.
Medical costs, unbelievably high, why? Basically if only a couple of people know how to do something and the rest do not they will charge what they can. This is very true of pathology testing and Radiology. Ken, could some of those many doctors have been students? They could not have all been charging you. All those tests for a fall down the stairs, now that is the fault of the American Legal system and lawyers, pure and simple. If I was working as a doctor in America I would have done every test under the sun on a lawyer who fell down stairs. Only groups to get more tests, the wives of doctors, lawyers and schoolteachers, . Mathematicians and scientists do not count so I will only be offside with a small group here.
Carrick,
“It’s going to muddle along if left alone, but if the Republicans agree to act like adults for a while, they’ll make some tweaks here and there (much easier to do piecewise than as an omnibus bill) and it’ll slowly morph into a much better version of what it is now.”
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The freedom caucus numbskulls will never go along with tweaks, nor will any Democrats, so it is hard to see how you get 218 votes in the House. Pretty much the same thing in the Senate, only worse: no meaningful changes unless you get 60 votes, and crazy Chuck Schumer (general of the ‘resistance’) is not ever going to let that happen, on health care or any other legislation which is contrary to what his base wants- taxes and government spending at 60+% of GDP, tight public control of most private activities, broad redistribution of income, confiscation of both firearms and ‘excess wealth’, no nuclear power, crushing carbon taxes, criminal penalties for saying what you think, and Kumbaya sung at the start of each school day while holding hands.
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I will be shocked if there are any changes in the next four years to the health care law unless it is imploding, and maybe not even then. By ‘imploding’, I mean not offering any insurance in many places, or only at prices which are impossible for most people to pay.
Pelosi didn’t indulge in much gloating. She offered to work with the President to fix problems. Of course she thinks the problems are minor, and that is a laughable claim, but she clearly recognizes it isn’t working. The so-called freedom caucus by refusing to compromise and let a good reform pass is committing the fallacy of letting the perfect drive out the good.. Meanwhile healthcare plans continue to dramatically increase in costs. Insurers are hamstrung, unable to craft plans tailored to what customers want. And most importantly uninsured Americans are increasing in number. The idea that the financial and health mess Obama tricked America into should muddle along is pretty annoying. But that is apparently where we are for the moment.
Mike N,
Yes, Trump can do by fiat all the unlawful things Obama did by fiat (picking and choosing which laws and parts of laws to enforce based on political expediency); Obama set some very ugly precedents, and I think history will not be kind. But I don’t see rule by fiat as a good thing. If the law is not changed, in 4 years (or 8) a Democrat can re-institute the mandate, and will.
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angech,
Yes, malpractice liability is a significant part of the cost of health care in the USA, and only tort reform will solve that problem. But I very much doubt it will happen in my lifetime, if ever. Politicians are almost all lawyers, and lawyers benefit immensely from malpractice lawsuits. Maybe JD Ohio can tell us if the ER staff was aware he is a lawyer.
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WRT supply and demand pricing (specialists making much more than GPs), that is true in some places, but not everywhere. The differential ranges from near zero to huge, depending, I suspect, mostly on how much governments think specialists should be paid. In the States, all types of medical doctors (on average) have large incomes, about 4 to 8 times the national average income. That ratio is much higher if you compare to the median income. Medical doctors in the States control the number of medical doctors, which combined with with strict licensing rules (and criminal penalties for “practicing without a license”) ensure medical doctors have high incomes… it is much like foxes guarding the hen house in terms of competition. Scientists and engineers don’t control how many scientists and engineers there are.
SteveF, Are there too many engineers and scientists?
j ferguson,
Depends on the field. There has certainly been an oversupply of chemists off and on for the last few decades (difficult for many to find employment after school), especially for PhD level. There is also an oversupply of environmental scientists, especially below PhD level. I know one reasonably bright masters level environmental scientist who has tended bar for years. There is usually a shortage of BS level chemical engineers, in part because the work is not sufficiently ‘glamorous’ for some (very non-PC-touchy-feely), and in part because the course work is… well… too much work for many to stomach, and starting salaries for chemical enginers are much higher than most BS level graduates. I think only petroleum engineers are paid more (even less PC than chemical engineering!). The larger point is that you see enrollment in these fields responding to the realities of the work and the marketplace, not to artificial restrictions placed on enrollment numbers (as in medicine).
SteveF, I never would have guessed that there could be an oversupply of technical people.
j ferguson,
Oversupply or shortage tends to be self correcting given enough time, but it takes a while, and the delay between students making choices for fields of study and their influence on the market is long enough (3-6 years) that ‘oscillation’ seems to be a problem, at least in some fields.
j ferguson
I think there does tend to be some lack of technical workers. But part of companies complaints about lack of tech works is …. cost:
Of course, lower salaries depresses the number of people who enter and stay in tech jobs over the long term.
Which jobs have a surplus varies. They are never huge, but they do exist. Generally, engineers — especially in the “main” departments– have had few problems getting jobs. That is partly because engineers are more likely than ‘scientists’ take “low glamor” tech jobs — like running a factory, building a bridge, working on a teach to develop a “thing”. If someone wants something done it’s likely a kid who picked engineering is likely to be willing to do it. (I mean… someone has to run the factory for purina. Or figure out how to optimize a company that makes cardboard boxes.)
While some students who enter science want to “do science” see themselves on some cutting edge and so on. These personality proclivities affected choices early on. If you want to be the next “Einstein/Borh/Shrodinger…. ” you don’t pick engineering. Oh the other hand, if you aren’t “Einstein/Borh/Shrodinger…. ” you probably aren’t going to have the next breakthrough and even if you are, there are a limited number of spots for these people. There will always be.
It’s not a 100% thing by any means. But you’ve seen this even in architecture. Some of your classmates surely wanted desperately to work on “famous” architecture while others were willing to build enclosures for sewage treatment plants. . . People who are willing to build non-glamourous stuff generally were more able to get and accept jobs because they were willing to step off the “avenue to fame” path when a “real job” that was clearly not glamorous came along.
Carrick (Comment #160379)
March 26th, 2017 at 12:22 am
OK, let us take this a step or two further. We have runaway deficits. We have Social Security and Medicare that are unsustainable with unfunded liabilities. We have military involvements that are quagmires. We have AGW. The Republicans control all branches of the Federal government and therefore they currently own all these problems. That seems a very reasonable assessment of blame. I’ll send it along to the the New York Times and Washington Post where they can use it in the blame game – until their Democrats gain control and we switch back to the Republicans being blamed for not wanting to cross over the aisle.
Actually the problem is government and bigger government with bipartisan support for it but these partisan blame games take the attention away from where it belongs.
Hah, Lucia, designing enclosures for sewage plants. You got me. 5 years out of school I’d designed more than any of my classmates and had more authority over the results I think than all but two of them. Nobody really cared what they looked like so long as they were well built. Requirement at the time was they had to be designed to last 100 years, except for roofing. This meant I could do what I wanted. It’s funny how prosaic the results look today. Except maybe the Blower Building at Toledo WWTP.
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This work also paid better, much better than SOM at the time. It was easy to get architectural jobs in 1968 – there was a boom on.
High deductibles and high premiums means that there are lot of people out there who will be paying a big part of their income without ever actually getting reimbursed for any medical expenses. The government subsidies for premiums and Medicaid will eventually catch the attention of the very few observers out their interested in our climbing debt.
Tweaking huge government programs that are in the long run failing and making them all better is a favorite (promised) solution of the left in this country. It actually means throwing more money at the problem and ignoring the deficits it causes – or for that matter the real problems.
With ACA the major pitch was getting everybody insured and it would appear to be no matter the cost and something akin to some advocates approach to AGW mitigation. It appears we talk little these days about how well the ACA goal is being attained.
SteveF:
If that’s really the landscape, then there’s no hope for reform.
But I think you’re wrong on both accounts.
Trump blew the negotiation by not understanding what it is he was trying to negotiation. Steven Bannon blew the deal by trying to ram it down people’s throats. Ryan blew the deal by trying to rush a bill to deliberation without any serious attempt to develop a workable alternative that was anything more than yet another transfer of wealth to the rich.
Reagan was very successful in dealing with the Democrats to get his legislation passed. I think a competent negotiator in the current White House could so also, by building a coalition between the moderate Democrats and more centrist Republicans.
You might end up being right, but we’ve no evidence here of this, as no effort has been made (Trump in fact has been making it worse with his idiotic tweets)–just your suspicions and the lack of any effort at coalition building.
We can blame others when the roll-out is even marginally competent, the sales pitch by the President starts dealing with the “little sh*t” in the bill that the legislators care about, and they stop trying empty threats as a method of cajoling the legislators to act against their own, and their constituents, best interests.
Kenneth Fritsch:
Based on what data? What I see says otherwise..
Other than the huge spending spike generated by Obama’s reckless spending post the fiscal melt-down, it’s been remarkably stable (as a percent of GDP).
High deductibles and premiums, especially for the elderly (and increased deductions for the highest income levels)—that more aptly describes the bill that just failed to pass.
Without a universal health care system (and there’s no stomach for this politically), the percent insured will never practically get to 100%. But I would view the increase of percentage of people insured is a metric of success of a health care reform.
Still we have seen success with this bill in reducing the percent uninsured. Of course, by that metric, the Republican replacement bill would be a complete disaster.
Many other metrics I’ve looked at have similarly improved (e.g., rate of increase in premiums has nearly halved for most previously insured). There are of course some that have not.
The overall feeling I get by looking at the overall performance of the ACA (most of the metrics haven’t been updated to 2016 yet, it takes a while to collect and process this data), suggests a better path would be to fix a system that is working, but not optimally, is to improve the system, rather than a complete replacement of it.
If it isn’t improved, I predict it will continue to muddle forward. If it is improved, the Republicans will get credit for that (probably undue credit, given the way Washington politics works). If they let it crash and burn (especially if they help it along a bit), I predict they’ll own that failure too.
Carrick, if you see that deficits (as in accumulating debt) and unfunded liabilities for SS and Medicare going forward are not major issues for the financial health of the nation then I understand better your comments even though I totally disagree with your view. High annual deficits, no matter the change in the ratio to GDP, accumulate and create a ever increasing debt that has to be financed. We currently have artificially low interest rates and with our huge debt that has to be funded when interest rates increase that burden will greatly increase.
http://danielamerman.com/va/Conflict.html
Interesting that we have the Republicans who voted against the bill under discussion as clowns but the Democrats who 100 % voted against it as what – the loyal opposition. Why would reasonable people think that there could not be valid reasons for not voting for this bill? What was so scared about this bill that it required passage? The more fundamental problems of healthcare were not even being discussed such as encouraging more doctor aid practitioners, allowing more foreign doctors to practice in the US, allowing sales of insurance across state lines, remedies for tort laws as it effects medical malpractice, encouraging doctor clinics that eliminate the third party affects and making medical insurance less employer oriented and more portable. Finally there should have been a discussion of Medicare and its unfunded liabilities and further by what meaningful measures are we better/worse off after the ACA was enacted.
If you all think that muddling and tweaking your way through these problems is going to make everything turnout OK I say bless your faith in muddling and tweaking. In my view we cannot afford muddling and tweaking.
The bright spot in failure of Trump on this bill is that it might weaken his presidency and that in general would be a good thing – as his views on and against free trade will not see fruition, we will not waste a trillion dollars on make work infrastructure projects, build a useless wall on the southern border and make silly immigration policy. An added bonus would be that it quiets his tweets and thoughtless comments.
Some perspective on increases in premiums under ACA and subsidies. Too bad we cannot account for these costs given a deductible.
http://time.com/money/4535394/obamacare-plan-premium-price-increases-2017-states/
Like AGW if the only goal is to eliminate or mitigate the problem, ACA and percentage coverage becomes an issue for big government advocates of merely how much money can we shovel at it. If it is felt that there are no restraints on debt then better to dream on.
j ferguson
Well… yes. But I think you understand that sometimes, some people want glamour and some are more willing to do something less glamorous to get a job. There is rarely a glut of technical people doing the less glamurous applications, or just less glamorous jobs that require high levels of skill and training.
There is sometimes a glut of those who went in with the idea that a particular area was ‘sexy’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘what the really, really smart people do’ and so on. But not always. Sometimes something really does because “the next great cutting edge thing” or it is in high demand because the economy booms and highly trained people are scares even if a particular area requiring high training attracted a lot of people. In those cases, the market really does absorb all these people and they are lucky and happy.
There is also sometimes a glut of people in low skill not glamorous jobs. The latter happens during depressions.
Carrick, with higher interest rates, those budget deficits expand pretty fast. Every quarter point is another 50 billion dollars of interest payments, that itself has to be borrowed.
SteveF, that was not my question. I asked about the employer mandate, which is based on receipt of subsidies by an employee. The Obama Administration ignored the details and gave subsidies to people in every state instead of only those states with exchanges. The Supreme Court ruled it acceptable. My question is can Trump do the reverse and the Supreme Court will again defer to the executive branch, or did the Supreme Court rule there is only one correct interpretation?
MikeN,
” My question is can Trump do the reverse and the Supreme Court will again defer to the executive branch, or did the Supreme Court rule there is only one correct interpretation?”
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I really do not know, nor do I much care. The Supreme Court has been disconnected in its rulings on the law from reality, from the words of the law itself, and from the constitutional limitations which should apply.
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The original court ruling that treats the individual mandate as a “tax”, and so constitutional, is such a dog’s breakfast of illogical nonsense that I wonder how John Roberts faces himself in the mirror each morning. Had Roberts simply struck the individual mandate as an unconstitutional usurpation of individual liberty (as I think the constitution requires) then the whole nightmare would long ago have ended, and the country would have better health care today. I doubt history will treat Roberts kindly.
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Compared to the individual mandate, every other part of the law seems to me small details… if the Federal Government can compel individuals to purchase something they do not want to purchase, then there are no real limits on what the Federal government can force individuals (or employers) to do. The compelled purchase of a $250,000 ‘birth license’ for the right to have a child is a perfectly logical extension of the individual mandate. Support by the court for the individual mandate is even less defensible than Kelo V New London, but far more damaging to personal liberties in the long term; it was by far the most damaging Supreme Court ruling in my lifetime.
Carrick,
“But I think you’re wrong on both accounts.”
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You want a friendly bet? I say there will be no Democrat support for changes in the direction Republicans want for at least 2 years, nor any Republican support to ‘save’ Obamacare…. which would mean more of all the things (taxes, mandates, regulations) Republicans say they detest. What say you?
Re: SteveF
Hang on — you seem to be making the ultimate “slippery slope” argument here. Whether one hates or loves the individual mandate, the federal government already mandates that individuals buy all kinds of things that they may not want on an individual basis. How does this imply that there are “no real limits” on the power of the federal government to force individuals to buy or do things?
Oliver. what other service or product of a private company does the government force you to buy or pay a penalty?
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hardhats, goggles, safety glasses, steel toe boots, but they aren’t very abstract, like health insurance; nor expensive.
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Now, maybe if it was an Alfa Giulia …
Technically Roberts ruled that if the penalty tax were so high as to be coercive, then it falls.
The employer mandate was a separate case. Subsidies should not have been going to states that did not set up their own exchanges. This would have ended the 30 hour hiring phenomenon in a majority of states.
30 hour hiring phenomena?
Oliver,
Yes, if you want to use a boat, you have to purchase life vests. If you want to buy a car it has to have a seat belts (and many other things). The individual mandate is completely different: you must buy insurance, no matter what. It is a slippery slope.
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Mike N,
Yes, and that is part of why the ruling is such utter crap: the whole point of a penalty is coersion, nothing else. If you refuse to pay the penalty, then you face legal action or even jail time. To suggest the penalty is not coersion is Orwellian.
j ferguson,
Employees working under 30 hrs per week are not subject to the employer mandate, so there is strong motivation to limit hours.
During my hospital stay I must have asked several dozen hospital employees excluding doctors their weekly working hours. It was divided between 24 and 36 hours.
SteveF, that subtle difference between an ObamaCare mandate and that for example of requiring a drivers license to drive on public roads appears to me lost on a lot people. It is sad because it means the public is evidently willing to be told what to do by the government without limitation.
j ferguson
I’m not required to buy, have, own or use any of those things. So there is a distinction that makes these things different. One is required to use safety equipment in certain situations. (And in principle, one might dispute the governments right to make the rule. There are moves afoot to dispute some of the more ridiculous licensing requirements and the same would likely occur for safety requirements if the government started requiring steel toed boots for softball players.)
The health insurance is everyone– total blanket.
Oliver: “the federal government already mandates that individuals buy all kinds of things that they may not want on an individual basis.”
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No, it doesn’t. I bet you can not provide a single example. The federal government does require that employers provide employees with certain safety equipment, but I don’t think that applies to individuals. It sets minimum standards for certain products, but nobody is required to buy those products or upgrade older versions. None of that is remotely like the health insurance mandate.
Something I have missed seeing at this blog:
Only 17 percent of those polled favored the ObamaCare replacement. I also believe that ObamaCare as it is currently formulated has become more popular with the public. It would appear to me that real world problems will have a bigger effect on people’s view of ObamaCare than partisan rhetoric for and against.
Carrick,
The US debt to GDP ratio is not constant. It’s increasing. It’s now over 100%. Without major tax reform, and by that I mean significantly increased revenue, the next recession, which is likely in the next couple of years, will see that figure increase even more. That would put us in the same territory as Greece and Italy.
Kenneth,
” It would appear to me that real world problems will have a bigger effect on people’s view of ObamaCare than partisan rhetoric for and against.”
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Sure, the Republicans can just let it collapse by not infusing ever more money, and even hasten the process by adopting some of the Obama rule-by-fiat strategies of selectively enforcing some parts of the law but not others.
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In the end, the hole point of Obamacare was to make some people pay for other people’s healthcare, either by 1) expanding Medicaid or 2) forcing younger/healthier people to purchase expensive insurance with “benefits” they neither need nor want. It is fundamentally a wealth transfer law masquerading as a crazy, inefficient health insurance program. Honestly stating “We are going to move most of a $100 billion per year increase in welfare costs off the Federal budget to hide it from voters”, would not have worked very well.
j ferguson,
The individual mandate maxes out at $3,200 per year ($267 per month)….but likely increasing in future years. So not equal to an Alfa Romeo Giulia, but certainly the lease cost of a less expensive car.
I think I’m too old for the mandate – medicare don’t you know.
j ferguson,
“I think I’m too old for the mandate”
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For sure. It is gone at 65 when you become eligible for medicare.
SteveF,
Insurance always involves wealth transfer. The problem with health insurance is that there’s a large prepaid medical care component. Social Security works as well as it does because there is a mandate. If you have an on-the-books income, you pay Social Security, disability and Medicare taxes, i.e. you are forced to buy it. It’s just that the seller is the government. They are in trouble long term because benefits were increased too fast. If we do end up with single payer, you won’t be able to opt out of that either.
So much for a health insurance mandate being some sort of massive intrusion on individual freedom.
DeWitt,
Social Security was explicitly called a tax.
lucia,
A distinction without a difference, IMO. Although the Constitution does require that tax bills originate in the House, something that required a lot of pages to get around in Chief Justice Robert’s opinion on the legality of the ACA.
I don’t think the Swiss are any less free for being required to purchase health insurance. In fact, Switzerland, at fourth, ranks in the Free countries, while the US at 17 is in the middle of the Mostly Free category.
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
There is a new lawsuit that is based on ACA is a tax and did not originate in the House.
SteveF, the insurance mandate is higher than that. That is the minimum value, and goes higher with income.
DeWitt
I think it makes a difference. Taxes aren’t non-compulsory. But I think it makes a big difference whether we call a tax a tax relative to whether we start having all sorts of “compulsory” expendictures which we don’t call taxes.
If something is a tax it should be called a tax, the legislation should be passed in the way taxes are passed and so on.
Mike N
Yes. And good. Because the constitution recognizes that taxes are different from other things.
DeWitt,
“Insurance always involves wealth transfer. ”
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Really? I fail to see how term life insurance involves wealth transfer, save for that some people die while covered and some do not.
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“Social Security works as well as it does because there is a mandate. If you have an on-the-books income, you pay Social Security, disability and Medicare taxes, i.e. you are forced to buy it. Social Security works as well as it does because there is a mandate. If you have an on-the-books income, you pay Social Security, disability and Medicare taxes, i.e. you are forced to buy it. ”
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Works well? Wow. It has a huge unfunded liability. Not sure were to start, but Social Security does have a very large wealth transfer component, designed specifically to transfer wealth from higher income earners to lower income earners, and that has absolutely nothing to do with it being partially ‘insurance-like’. With real insurance, the benefit is strongly related to how much you pay. With social security, that relationship is weak. With Medicare (with an even bigger unfunded liability!), there is no relationship at all between ‘lifetime contributions’ and benefits, and once eligible for healthcare benefits your continuing ‘contributions’ (AKA out of pocket monthly payments) rise sharply with income… with no increase in benefits. There does not exist a real insurance policy with those characteristics.
MikeN,
Most recent rate is 2.5% of a specially adjusted gross income figure, but topping out at the monthly figure I gave.
SteveF, you are correct. I had never heard of the max before.
https://www.healthcare.gov/fees/fee-for-not-being-covered/
The issue in the new lawsuit is that the Senate took an unrelated House bill, stripped out nearly everything except something like the title and ‘be it enacted’, and put in ObamaCare.
DeWitt: “A distinction without a difference, IMO.”
I am with Lucia on this. Taxes do not go to for-profit companies. Lucia is correct that we should call a tax a tax and not call other things taxes. The words that we use affect the way we think. If we say that there is no difference between a tax and something that has some tax-like properties, then the word “tax” loses its meaning and comes to mean whatever the Humpty-Dumpty in power today wants it to mean. Keep doing that with other words, and we no longer have the rule of law, since the law will have no fixed meaning.
lucia,
The issue of the law not originating in the House has already been ruled on. It’s not a new issue. IIRC, Robert’s decision spent more pages on that than anything else. I doubt it will get anywhere this time either. The logic is that the tax is not meant to raise revenue.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/29/appeals-court-upholds-obamacare-tax-constitutional/
My bet is that the Supreme Court won’t grant an appeal of this decision, allowing the decision to stand.
MIkeN,
Niceties like constitutionality are irrelevant when you are making ‘progress’. That I fully expect. It was the Roberts acquiescence to that shirking of the Constitution, the individual mandate penalty, and the rest which was shocking.
The ‘germane’ issue won’t go anywhere either.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-obamacare-supreme-court-origination-clause-20160119-story.html
Dewitt, I don’t see anything in Roberts’s decision addressing this. I believe the Supreme Court has ruled on something similar in the past.
Re: Mike M.
There are many well known examples that are very much more expensive than hard hats and safety glasses. DeWitt already brought up three: Social Security, disability, and Medicare. Unemployment insurance would also count.
If we want to get more abstract and much more expensive, we can also talk about our individual stakes in programs with an arguably insurance-like function, like national defense, counterterrorism, and so forth.
Re: SteveF
Yes, many people do not die while covered and hence do not receive benefits, but a very few people die and receive payouts which are many times what they would have paid even over the entire term. This is how wealth transfer gets involved.
Oliver,
“Yes, many people do not die while covered and hence do not receive benefits, but a very few people die and receive payouts which are many times what they would have paid even over the entire term.”.
Thanks for that explanation, I had never realized that before! (I’m joking, of course.) The wealth transfer I am talking about is a process where money is taken (by force of law… AKA by government) from one group and given to another. Certainly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and many other government programs qualify as being all (to at least a significant extent) wealth transfer programs. Life insurance does not. Nor do police, national defense, etc… none involve wealth transfer.
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By the way, dead people do not ever receive insurance payouts; you probably know that, but since you seem to like REALLY clear explanations on insurance, I figured I should write that.
Oliver,
Nah, defense expenditure is a fraction of the expenditures for social security medicare, medicaid, etc, not “much more expensive”. Defense is actually much LESS expensive that those social programs. (http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/119/2016)
Oliver
Just like the hardhat etc. examples which turn out to be examples of things the government does not make everyone buy, these are also things the government does not make everyone buy.
You don’t pay social security, disability or medicare if you don’t work. Same for unemployment insurance. In fact, I don’t pay unemployment insuranace. In contrast: the mandate required you to get insurance.
These are paid through taxes, which is different. It’s true you can’t get out of them, but that is different from being required to buy insurance as a supposed “mandate”.
Suppose we had a tax credit of $3000 if you buy health insurance.
If you buy health insurance, you pay $3000 less in taxes. Is that an unconstitutional mandate?
SteveF:
DoD + DHS + VA is right there with Social Security expenditures in terms of the federal budget. For 2014 they were slightly above, even though we have been on a downward trend from 2011. Medicare, etc. are smaller individually, but of course if you add them all together it’s more than defense. None of that accounts for straight up loss of life, other human and societal costs, and the lesser secondary costs of reconstruction aid. These are arguably the costs where defense gets “much more expensive” than providing social insurance and healthcare.
lucia:
The “mandate†charges you a “tax†for not having insurance. You can get exemptions for things like: you don’t file a tax return or the lowest-priced coverage exceeds a certain percentage of your income. A fair question is whether these are differences in degree or in kind from exemptions from paying social security if one is not working.
Again, the “mandate†is structured such that you aren’t “required†to buy insurance. You are taxed for not buying insurance. One argument that has been made by certain well known Republicans is that such a tax is actually “softer†than “being required†to do things, e.g., paying taxes for things you may or may not want. You are taxed, not arrested, for not buying insurance.
MikeN,
I think it would be unwise, and something that would only benefit people who pay Federal taxes. And most of those people already had health insurance before Obamacare. It makes as much economic sense as the home interest deduction: distorts the market prices and leads to less than efficient use of capital. Probably would be held constitutional, even if economically stupid. It is less distorting to fund very basic health coverage for poor people out of general tax revenue via medicaid, and be done with it, while simultaneously instituting tort law reform, allowing national competition for health care providers, and negotiate price reductions for government funded large scale programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Oliver,
Add in the value for loss of life? You are moving the goalposts. Homeland security (which is mostly mundane things like Customs and Border Protection,TSA and ICE) doesn’t have much to do with DOD expenditures. If you combine DOD and Veteans Affairs it is still only about 19%, smaller than either Medicare/medicaid or social security. And social expenditures have grown pretty much continuously as a fraction of the total expenditures for 50 years, while defense has pretty much continuously fallen, and is now only about a third as large a fraction as 50 years ago. Social expenditures are projected to grow even more rapidly in the future… they are unsustainable at current benefits and funding levels. Obamacare only adds to that problem.
oliver
Yes. To get the mandate to withstand a challenge in court it was dubbed a tax when it was originally structured (and still is structured) more like a “fine”. It’s all well and good to try to call it a tax, but it operates as a fine or penalty, which is a different thing.
They could have given deductions for buying the insurance. That’s the more usual thing — used for interest deductions and various other things (child care, some education and so on.) Then you would not be fined for not buying it.
You are fined and penalized.
Re: SteveF
Not sure I agree that saying loss of life and intangible costs are what make wars “really expensive” is a moving of the goalposts, but okay.
Homeland Security may be “mostly mundane things like Customs and Border Protection, TSA, ICE,” but these are some of the same activities being ramped up for counter-terrorism.
Meanwhile, lots of DoD expenditures are also mundane things like painting ships and waxing missiles.
Or are we arguing about “real” defense expenditures now, like “real” insurance and “real” wealth transfers?
lucia:
The gas guzzler tax is a kind of penalty, and so are taxes on gambling and cigarettes and lots of other things. How is this so different?
What do you see as the essential difference between “being taxed†for something and “not receiving a credit (or deduction)†for the very same thing?
oliver
That’s easy– and ought to be obvious if you aren’t trying to not see the difference.
These are penalties for buying something. They are not penalties for not buying. A penalty that compels you to do something you don’t what to do or buy something you don’t want is fundamentally different from one that applies when you chose to do something.
I have not been given tax credits for installing solar panels. But not getting them is not a “penalty”. The tax credit is a “reward” or “incentive”.
Lack of incentives or rewards is not a “penalty”. I failed to take all sorts of tax incentives — and other incentives and promotions– all the time. This is fairly widely recognized and the reason we have different words for things.
If I park my car illegally I get a ticket, which is a fine. That’s appropriate. It would be very odd if the government decided to tax everyone an amount to cover “illegal parking” and then give a “tax deduction” for having parked legally all year. We use fines to ding people –as in penalize– or kick in the shins– for things. We give “tax deductions” for other reasons.
If, for some reason, the government wants to encourage solar panels, I think tax credits are a much better choice than inflicting penalty on people who do not install solar panels.
Beyond that, having been raised Roman Catholic if owning solar panels was (for some mysterious reason) a sin, and I was going to be fined for not having them that would be very unjust. In contrast, my choosing not to take a tax break would be ok. There are lots of tax breaks I don’t take.
oliver,
For what it’s worth: I’m not a big fan of gas guzzler taxes either. If we are going to penalize gas use, I’d rather just see a general tax on gasoline. I don’t think it’s “worse” for someone who drives small distances each year with a car that gets few miles per gallon than for someone to drive many miles in a car that gets better gas mileage. I especially don’t think it because I know that to a fair extent the number of miles people drive is discretionary.
Cigarette taxes and liquor taxes… are they mostly “sin” or mostly revenue? I really can’t tell. I suspect both.
MikeN (Comment #160438): “Suppose we had a tax credit of $3000 if you buy health insurance.
If you buy health insurance, you pay $3000 less in taxes. Is that an unconstitutional mandate?”
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No, it is not a mandate because you are no worse off if you choose not to comply. The mortgage interest deduction is not a mandate to buy a house. Also, the tax helps you do that which the government wants to encourage. The differences may not be that great globally, but for the individual they can be huge.
SteveF (Comment #160441): “I think it [tax credits] would be unwise, and something that would only benefit people who pay Federal taxes.”
Such proposals are typically for tax rebates, not deductions, so they can be claimed by people who owe no tax.
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SteveF: “And most of those people already had health insurance before Obamacare.”
Not so. Pre-Obamacare, a bit under 11 million people had health insurance in the individual market, compared to 50 million without insurance. What most people have is employer paid insurance on which they pay no taxes. http://kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/data-note-how-has-the-individual-insurance-market-grown-under-the-affordable-care-act/
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StevF: “It makes as much economic sense as the home interest deduction: distorts the market prices and leads to less than efficient use of capital.”
We already have that with respect to health insurance. But those of us who are self-employed/unemployed/retired early get all of the disadvantages and non of the advantages.
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SteveF: “instituting tort law reform”
What do you mean by that? Limiting payouts to people who are genuinely harmed will do virtually nothing to reduce costs.
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SteveF: “allowing national competition for health care providers”
How would that work? How does a hospital in New Mexico compete with a hospital in Florida? Real question: Have you purchased health insurance in the individual market lately?
SteveF: “negotiate price reductions for government funded large scale programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”
Already done for everything except drugs. Extending that to druges would be a good way to kill pharmaceutical innovation.
This makes me cringe. I hope this question isn’t leading towards the bizarre and (in my view) wrongheaded argument that when the government cuts taxes on some group that they are in fact giving that group a subsidy. It reminds me of that type of thinking.
Yucky.
mark, agreed.
Mike M,
Proposed tax credit: The proposal was for a $3,000 tax credit, and my resopnse was to the proposal.
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Who was insured pre-Obama: I was talking about all the people who already had health insurance. I have been self employed for 24 years, and am aware of the tax treatment of health insurance for the self employed.
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Tort reform: A portion of health care costs are directly (malpractice insurance) or indirectly (CYA excessive testing) the result of malpractice suits. Limiting punative damages and non-economic damages (pain and suffering) is already done in some states, and does lead to lower costs. The single most effective change would be adoption of the English tort rule of making the loser pay the winner’s legal fees, and specifically for contingincy-fee based lawyers to pay the other side’s costs out of pocket if the suit fails. I believe that would dramatically reduce the number of cases with marginal merit. Many threatened liability lawsuits of marginal (or no) merit are settled because legal costs to defend against the claim are higher than the cost to settle, and there is no chance of recovering those costs. Unfortunately, I doubt significant tort reform will ever be adopted by Congress…. too many lawyers in Congress.
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By health care providers, I mean insurance companies and networks of health care providers (eg a chain of hospitals).
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Drug costs: yes R&D costs and approval costs are astronomical, and often for new drugs that are only very slightly better (or no better!) than existing drugs. Makes perfect sense to me for both insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid to negotiate with drug manufactures on bulk purchase contracts. Would this reduce the number of new medications? Maybe it would, especially for the host of “me too” medications which usually follow the development of a truly innovative medication (consider how many erectile dysfunction drugs and how many ‘statins’ are on the market). I have no problem with having pharmaceutical companies consider carefully if a new medication will justify (based on its performance relative to ther drugs) a price which will cover development costs. It is OK with me if the world has fewer choices in erectile dysfunction drugs.
Mark Bofill,
Yup, tax cuts are “expenditures” only if the starting assumption is all income belongs to the public, and any part of your income you are allowed to keep is therefore an “expenditure” by the public. This is closely related to both basic socialist doctrine and the well known observation that people who start a successful business aren’t responsible for that success: “You didn’t build that!”.
“It is OK with me if the world has fewer choices in erectile dysfunction drugs.”
Sad comment, but funny.
Viagra is definitely an improvement on the injections and when I get to needing them I certainly hope there are still choices.
Brought some medications in China 3 years ago, Ciproxin ear drops and some antibiotics. Cheaper than chips, A couple of US dollars for something worth 60 dollars US back in Australia. Both USA and Australia are ripped off by drug companies.
Judith’s testimony tomorrow.
angech,
It was meant to be both funny and serious. Not sure why you think it sad.
SteveF,
Medicare and Medicaid don’t negotiate in any proper sense of the word. It’s take it or leave it. Medicare reimbursements do not cover hospital costs. The same thing would happen with drugs. That would jack up the price for everyone else.
All drugs are not equal. What you call a “me-too” drug can work better for some people than the original drug. Vioxx worked better for some people than Celebrex, for example. Side effects can be different as well.
SteveF,
I distinguish between wealth transfer and wealth redistribution. Social Security does both. Term life insurance transfers wealth from the living to the estates of the dead, but it doesn’t redistribute from rich to poor.
DeWitt,
“What you call a “me-too†drug can work better for some people than the original drug. Vioxx worked better for some people than Celebrex, for example. ”
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Sure, and no doubt there are other examples. The question is if a drug that is marginally more effective for certain people justifies the development/approval costs. My guess is that consumers with skin in the game would be reluctant to pay a much higher price if a lower price alternative with similar performance were available. Eg, when Viagra goes ex-patent and generics are available for 1/10 the original cost, what happens to the pricing and sales of similar drugs. My guess is there is strong downward pressure on all the others.
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“I distinguish between wealth transfer and wealth redistribution. ”
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Fair enough… make it wealth redistribution.
SteveF: “Tort reform: A portion of health care costs are directly (malpractice insurance) or indirectly (CYA excessive testing) the result of malpractice suits. Limiting punative damages and non-economic damages (pain and suffering) is already done in some states, and does lead to lower costs.”
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That is debatable. Some states enacted reforms and saw rates moderate, but states that did not enact reforms saw the same effect. It seems that any effect is too small to tease out of the data. Actual malpractice direct costs are something like $10-20 billion a year. That sounds like a lot until you realize that it is something like 0.5% of health care spending.
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The main cost of malpractice suits is defensive medicine. Limiting payouts won’t affect that. Getting sued is a major headache for a doctor, so it is the threat of a suit more than the fear of losing that motivates most defensive medicine.
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SteveF: “The single most effective change would be adoption of the English tort rule of making the loser pay the winner’s legal fees, and specifically for contingincy-fee based lawyers to pay the other side’s costs out of pocket if the suit fails. I believe that would dramatically reduce the number of cases with marginal merit.”
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Probably true. But it might also deny redress to people who are genuinely harmed and can not afford the risk of losing. But how large are the potential savings? This says that the cost of defensive medicine is about 2% of health care spending: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/managing-your-healthcare/healthcare/articles/2010/09/07/cost-of-medical-malpractice-tops-55-billion-a-year-in-us
I do not know if that is correct or not. It is not what one usually hears.
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I think a better approach is to make people more responsible for their own spending, and to make costs more transparent. Then people will question tests that are not needed and sign releases to let the doc off the hook when they refuse a test.
SteveF: “Makes perfect sense to me for both insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid to negotiate with drug manufactures on bulk purchase contracts. Would this reduce the number of new medications? Maybe it would, especially for the host of “me too†medications which usually follow the development of a truly innovative medication”.
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I’d rather let consumers, rather than insurance companies or the government, decide if a new drug gets purchased. The latter have a vested interest in not paying for a new drug if there is an old generic available. So does the patient, but the patient might decide to pay the higher price if new new drug works better for that particular patient. A market will work better than government fiat; which is what happens when the government “negotiates”.
SteveF,
It’s not necessarily a marginal difference. The new biologic cancer drugs work through the immune system and bind to different receptors. The Merck drug, Keytruda, binds to the PD-1 receptor. If your tumor cells have this receptor, it can work. If they don’t, it won’t. Others use different pathways and receptors. But they’re all monoclonal antibodies.
Statins vary in their potency, drug interactions and probability of dangerous side effects. Human biochemistry is not isotropic. One size does not fit all.
Generics are a separate subject. They don’t require anywhere near the level of testing for a new drug, which drastically reduces development cost. The risk of failure is also small, again lowering cost. I would also recommend not buying generics manufactured in China or India.
Ron Graf,
Assuming you’re still lurking, dark matter isn’t dead yet. A proposed mechanism for the formation of quasars in the early universe uses dark matter. An alternate mechanism involving a cluster of stars “spectacularly failed.”
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2016-15
Mike M,
“The latter have a vested interest in not paying for a new drug if there is an old generic available. So does the patient, but the patient might decide to pay the higher price if new new drug works better for that particular patient.”
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The problem is the disconnect be tween costs and benefits (or if you prefer, a lack of skin in the game). The patient usually does not have much skin in the game, and often none at all… so only the very, very best treatment options will do, regardless of cost. There are no panaceas here: someone has to weigh costs/benefits, or costs will explode, as history shows. Single payer systems usually do that, and restrict treatment choices to reduce costs. UK: one internal examination for colo-rectal cancer at age ~60, none after that, absent symptoms. The rational: the cost for additional internal examinations is not justified by the number of person-years saved. Compare that to the States, where such examinations seem almost as frequent as haircuts. (I’m joking to make a larger point.) This sort of thing absolutely works to control costs.
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So would a system where patients have substantial skin in the game (significant personal financial motivation to control costs). The current system, or anything similar, is not ever going to control costs.
I would like to get back to that up thread link I posted that showed the dilemma of financing the interest payments on the ever increasing US government debt and the Federal Reserve maintaining artificially low interest rates ostensibly to keep those payments from skyrocketing and what those low interest payments do detrimentally to retirement incomes. This problem as shown does not have a solution that can found from tweaking – as many big government advocates dream about. The elephant is already in the room and must be dealt with soon and that will occur not without some pain.
Now we can put the dilemma into terms of Social Security and the snowballing effect that can occur there. We have a large debt that requires low interests to maintain it as, at least, somewhat tractable. Low interest rates on retirees income that is supplementing Social Security income puts forth pressure for increased payments out of Social Security. Social Security is already contributing significantly to the federal debt and without an increase in payroll taxes we get even higher deficits and accumulating debts to finance.
Eventually at some point in time even the big government advocates have to admit to deficits/debt getting out of hand and it is here that most of these advocates will not acknowledge the negative effects that large tax increases mostly on the wealthier classes will have on the economy. Growth will be reduced in the economy in the manner we see more clearly with most European nations with higher tax rates. The feedback effect here is the a lower growing economy reduces the base upon which to tax and thus the taxes collected are less than anticipated.
http://danielamerman.com/va/Conflict.html
I’m a little late to this discussion, but healthcare economics is an area in which I have a fair degree of experience, so I’ll add a few comments:
– I’ve never understood the argument against “me too” drugs. DeWitt Payne is correct that different drugs in the same class (his example is COX-2 but it applies broadly) don’t necessarily impact all people in the same way. “Me too drugs” are not A/B rated generics – they are new chemical entities and clinically differentiated. But the benefit goes beyond this – “me too” products are essential for competition and keeping prices down. Remember the outcry when Gilead launched Sovaldi at $84,000 per course of treatment. We don’t hear that outcry anymore. Why? Zapatier and Viekira. What some would call “me too” products. Sovaldi now sells for a fraction of its launch price. This is the free market at work. (And despite the sticker stock, $84,000 IMHO is not unreasonable given it is almost a complete cure for hepC).
– the question of letting federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid negotiate price reductions is a red herring. The non-partisan CBO scores the value to the US government of allowing this at $0. If you are type of person who likes to read CBO scoring, here is the link: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/dataandtechnicalinformation/51431-HealthPolicy.pdf
– SteveF’s allusion to skin in the game is a common view, but is partially contradicted by some recent research. In particular, there was a fascinating 2016 NBER paper which compared pet healthcare to human healthcare in the US. Despite a much lower incidence of insurance for pets, they found similar levels of inefficiencies. A really interesting finding. Here – if you want to read more: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22669.pdf
-finally, if we really want to meaningfully reduce healthcare expenditures in the US, cutting drug prices won’t do it. Drugs are 10-12% of total healthcare expenditure and have been at that level for some years. The substantial majority of spending is on services. However, because of the peculiarities of insurance (exacerbated by Obamacare), deductibles tend to be much higher on drugs and that is what the public focuses on.
J Ferguson: Being active in children’s lives.
Two days ago my son was selling camera equipment on ebay for $275 with little interest over the past 2 weeks. Someone offered $200. I told my son, it was a good calculated risk to respond with $225. (assuming that virtually everyone has some give in their first offer) I responded with $225 and we sold it for $219. My son is much more mature than the typical 15.75 year-old boy. However, he knew nothing about bargaining (which I hadn’t suspected) and thought I was a genius for being able to get the extra $19. (Of course, I was simply doing low-level, basic bargaining)
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My point is that if you are in a position to observe your children, you will notice things you hadn’t expected or would have a hard time imagining. In the future, if I do mid-level bargaining in a situation where I can partially relate the details, I will explain to him what happened. I am pretty sure that he will take it from there on his own initiative. It is things like this that I would like to see when I would like to observe my children in action in school.
JD
JD,
I gather you can sit in on your kids’ classes for longer than 20 minutes?
SteveF,
Drug companies are often working in parallel on similar drugs, i.e. “me too”. If you say that first to the market wins, then net development costs go up because the probability of failure is higher. For a new drug, it costs just as much to bring a ‘me too’ drug to market if it’s been developed in parallel.
J Ferguson: “JD,
I gather you can sit in on your kids’ classes for longer than 20 minutes?”
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In the past, I sat in for 2 or 3 classes — about an hour and 20 minutes.
JD
JD,
that sounds pretty good. I think you ought to be able to get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in that amount of time. What sort of camera equipment?
MikeM, SteveF, I did not say tax deduction which lowers the amount of income that is taxed, but tax credit, which directly lowers the tax bill. Throw in payroll taxes as well to catch people who don’t pay $3000 in income taxes.
If you buy health insurance, your tax bill is lowered by $3000. If you do not buy, your taxes paid is $3000 more than if you do. How is this different from the tax penalty in ObamaCare, constitutionally?
DeWitt,
There are sometimes truly independent parallel efforts of course, and human papilloma virus vaccine seems to be a perfect example. But the me-too syndrome can’t be ignored. Once a pathway is eplained, an alternative medication is much easier to identify develop and commercialize. The me-too syndrome is almost unavoidable.
Mike N,
An executive chef at McDonald’s (burger flipper,$8.50 per hour) would not pay $3,000 per year in any kind of taxes. If you eliminated social security/medicare taxes under the condition that person bought health insurance, they might buy insurance, so long as it did not cost much more than the reduction in taxes. It would not then be a penalty, but closer to welfare. In any case, if given a choice, that executive chef most likely would prefer to have $3,000 more in their paycheck than health insurance.
Kenneth,
Retirees depending on fixed income are (of course) hammered by very low interest rates. Those retirees would be better off in an SP500 index fund, with much higher average returns. I think the greatest harm to the economy is not that Federal debt absorbs most available capital, but rather that Federal regulations make lending to small business almost nonexistent, If Trump wants to see greater job growth, he needs to get rid of the rules which limit lending to small businesses. The correlation of weak jobs growth with bank regulations on lending seems pretty clear.
SteveF, I was not proposing a plan, but asking about the constitutionality of it. If the tax penalty under ObamaCare is not OK, then this plan should be as well right?
JD, I thought people bid on EBay. Is this something new, or was this an offsite discussion?
Has anyone gotten the details on the latest Trump executive order? Has the Clean Power Plan been suspended? Is Paris Accord done?
MikeN,
His tweets just say “reevaluation” of clean air. I haven’t seen anything on Paris yet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/climate/trump-executive-order-climate-change.html?_r=0
So… starting a legal process.
In other news, it looked like Theresa May signed some letter triggering article 50 for Brexit. Next it gets delivered.
MikeN
Bidding was the early way and still the main method on Ebay. But there are also “buy it now” and other things on Ebay.
I’ve sometimes bought used books and a few other things. I’ve bid; I’ve also done “buy it now”.
I’m familiar with Buy It Now, which has been there I think since the beginning, but am not familiar with back and forth negotiation. I originally thought JD had suggested bidding on his own item to get the bidder to go higher.
Re: Ebay,
There sometimes is an option for ‘make an offer.’ I took it that an offer is what JD’s son responded to.
MikeN,
I doubt tax reduction as an incentive to do something would be held unconstitutional. Lots of things have tax incentives (home mortgage interest deduction, IRA contribution exclusion, etc). That doesn’t mean those incentives make any economic sense or are good ideas.
J Ferguson “Re: Ebay,
There sometimes is an option for ‘make an offer.’”
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That is what we used. Been a long time since I used Ebay, and it was the first time I used it. It turned out to work fairly well. Also, my son sold a Canon camcorder, some lenses and extra batteries. Got no offers during first 10 days or so. Then we got the offer that worked. Ebay gets 10%.
JD
SteveF (Comment #160455)
“It was meant to be both funny and serious. Not sure why you think it sad.” Most men would be happy with more choices I thought was all.
Vioxx and Celebrex, interesting comparison. Aspirin reduces heart attack and cancer risk at a gastric cost. Other NSAID’s actually cause increased risk but are sold over the counter. Vioxx caused extra clotting? Celebrex was smeared with the same potential through one dodgy test but was a great drug , some people reacted allergically to it if they were allergic to sulphur.
I “know” a little aspirin even three days a week might be as good for me as zero carbon would be for the world but do I take it? No.
Re: Obamacare generally
One very misleading statistic we hear all of the time is that X% of people are “insured” by Obamacare, and they may lose it if such and such plan is adopted. The problem is that for most working people, it is really terrible insurance with high deductibles. If you have $500 in the bank (the situation of many people), and your deductible is $5,000, you are close to functionally uninsured. From a purely financial perspective, you may be better off getting the treatment and then going bankrupt if you can’t pay your bills.
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On top of that it is so hopelessly complicated with doughnut holes and tiers that 99% of the people can’t possibly understand what they have.
JD
While I am posting, I will mention that I called a pathology professor I know from my workers compensation days about the $1,100 pathology testing bill I received for an ER visit. She said that even if you appear to be healthy, it is possible that you have undiagnosed conditions, such as diabetes that could be diagnosed by electrolytes testing. So, to protect themselves (and in my view conveniently make money), the hospitals will order a battery of tests. So the pathology bill was not a total scam, but it was in good measure motivated by defensive medicine practices, which were of no benefit to me because I am healthy.
JD
SteveF (Comment #160472): “The me-too syndrome is almost unavoidable.”
Of course it is. But you seem to ignore the fact that me-too drugs are valuable. Drug A might work well for some people, while Drug B might work well for others. And Drug C might be essential for people who suffer intolerable side effects with Drugs A and B.
Mike M.
I pointed that out above. However, SteveF seems to be under the mistaken impression that the difference between similar drugs is always marginal. As you and angech noted, it often isn’t.
Idea for Funding Drug Research
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I think the federal government (and possibly the governments of all comparatively economically advanced countries) should give large financial incentives for the development of useful drugs with some sort of cap on the payment. For instance, the federal government could state that it would pay a drug company $2 billion dollars if a drug saved $10 billion dollars in medical costs over, for instance, 3 years. The idea being that the federal government has the funds to make what are large payments to the inventors of drugs in such a way that the inventors could make profits but in the long run the drugs save the government money.
This also avoids the moral problem of very expensive drugs costing $5,000 a month for some seriously ill people who often can’t afford the drugs. (In fact, the liver cancer drug that was prescribed for my deceased wife did cost $5,000 per month)
JD
JD,
Wouldn’t you agree that some very beneficial drugs might not save money? A cure for a heretofore incurable disease where the departure is usually sudden and the decline not treatable for example. The Ebola vaccine might be an example, or at least in its application in Africa.
I would worry that government funding of drug development might lead to bureaucratic pseudo-science, as if we didn’t already have enough in the thermo-politics dodge.
JD Ohio,
Sorry if this sounds insensitive, but dying is probably less expensive than living. Assigning a value to increased lifespan is difficult, if not impossible. I seriously doubt that Keytruda and the other new monoclonal antibody cancer drugs will save money unless you value increased lifespan very highly.
j Ferguson:
“Wouldn’t you agree that some very beneficial drugs might not save money?”
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Most effective drugs do save money in the long term. I am concerned with the morality of telling someone they may die if they can’t afford the cost of the drug. You raise an interesting point, but to me the moral issue overrides the potential government interference issue. If drug companies are given what are in effect bounties, I don’t see that much cause for concern. The government is already involved in deciding whether certain drugs are effective. I had insurance for the $5,000 a month drug, but at the same time I was thinking about what would happen to other people with no money, or possibly even worse, little money. I don’t like government interference, but I “like” having people die for lack of money for treatment even less.
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Also, one additional method of dealing with this would be to make the “bounties” optional on the part of the drug companies.
JD
DeWitt Payne: “Sorry if this sounds insensitive, but dying is probably less expensive than living. Assigning a value to increased lifespan is difficult, if not impossible. ”
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This is a very good point. I am mostly talking about drugs that “heal” or “manage” an illness in a meaningful way over a long period of time. For instance, there is a very cheap anti-depression drug that is very effective for many people. (might be prozac)
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Also, the $5,000 a month drug was only supposed to prolong the cancer victim’s life by 1-6 months. I also thought about that and wouldn’t have been greatly offended if the insurance company had refused to pay for it. However, I have read about other actually life-saving drugs that are very expensive and those are the ones I am concerned about.
JD
It would be good to know how many people die each year whose deaths would have been significantly delayed had they themselves been able to afford the treatment.
I’d also be curious about the cost delta of defensive medicine/appropriate medicine. it could vary with the locality.
JD Ohio,
“I am concerned with the morality of telling someone they may die if they can’t afford the cost of the drug. ”
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You can’t make that kind of calculation in a vacuum. In fact, all expenditures on healthcare are trade offs, even if that seems sometimes to present a moral dilemma. Wealth is always limited. Are we (as a society) obliged to spend every penny of our wealth if that would add a month to the life of a small number of patients? I think not; there are many better things to spend our money on. For example, relatively modest expenditures for clean drinking water in Africa would save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, mostly children, which are currently lost due to preventable diseases. How do you weigh the morality of not improving sanitation in Africa while spending a much greater amount of money on very costly treatments for a handful of patients…. who are almost all near life’s end? (Not a rhetorical question.)
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Life is terminal. But rational health care choices can make life, on average, much better. Poor choices can make it, on average, much worse. If we spend unwisely on ‘heroic’ health care, then many other more worthy goals will necessarily suffer.
DeWitt: “dying is probably less expensive than living”.
An example is that the lifetime health care cost for smokers is less than for non-smokers. Smokers tend to die before they get to an age where costs get very high. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199710093371506
j ferguson: “It would be good to know how many people die each year whose deaths would have been significantly delayed had they themselves been able to afford the treatment.”
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My impression is that when life saving treatment is involved, it is common to provide the treatment, then bill (and perhaps take a loss) rather than to refuse to treat if someone can not pay. It would be good to know how common that is. I suspect that what is more common is people just assuming that they can not afford treatment or declining treatment rather than taking on the financial burden. The latter is probably more common when the treatment will only slightly extend life and the burden would end up on one’s survivors.
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j ferguson: “I’d also be curious about the cost delta of defensive medicine/appropriate medicine. it could vary with the locality.”
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I’ve seen 2% of total health care costs, which surprised me.
SteveF “You can’t make that kind of calculation in a vacuum. In fact, all expenditures on healthcare are trade offs, even if that seems sometimes to present a moral dilemma….
If we spend unwisely on ‘heroic’ health care, then many other more worthy goals will necessarily suffer.”
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I agree with these statements. On the other hand, there are situations where it is possible that the failure to be able to afford a drug can kill someone who would otherwise lead a long and productive life. I am not concerned with the fringes: I am more concerned with someone who might lead a normal but close to normal life if treated with a drug. One such drug that appears to be effective is “Myozyme” which is super expensive. (Found it quickly. Didn’t have time to search for less expensive but still expensive drugs)
JD
JD: “One such drug that appears to be effective is “Myozyme†which is super expensive.”
We surely need a better way to fund cures for orphan diseases. The government does give large financial incentives, but that does not stop the resulting drugs from being insanely expensive.
Mike M.,
I think those prices are like hospital charges in many cases. The drug companies can discount them, especially for people who can’t afford the full price. People who can afford it subsidize people who can’t.
Mike M,
Was it more than you expected?
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My brother, the doctor, doubted there was even that much, but then his experience is from long ago internship in ER in Chicago. He thought they were too busy for this sort of thing.
j ferguson: “Was it more than you expected?”
I should have made that clear. It is widely believed that the costs of defensive medicine are large. A number of commenters above clearly believe that. I used to believe that. But 2% is certainly not large.
Mike M. 2% of the whole thing is still a lot. This has to be things done for no other reason than to avoid complaint of negligence. It cannot include things done because they always do it, things added to the list carelessly, things done in the lab owned by the doctor because “it is there.” I’d love to see how they can refine this sort of thing out of the noise. I’ve gotta believe that the introduction of a pricey new piece of diagnostic equipment into the local environment will generate all sorts of people needing its use.
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Best access to this sort of information would be the insurance companies who can compare diagnostic costs in a low litigation area to those where litigation is a sport.
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FWIW, State of California monitors prescriptions written by all the docs in the state. This makes it easy to track fads, discover practices which write a disproportionate volume of one thing or another, and possibly detect incompetence. The state calls docs whose prescribing seems unbalanced to ask them why their patient population is different from all other patient populations.
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DeWitt, Republicans passed something like that in the late 90s, targeting rare diseases that had too small a potential market for drugmakers.
SteveF, if something like that is not unconstitutional, then the tax penalty in ObamaCare should also be constitutional right?
Re: 2% cost of treatment is due to defensive medicine.
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My anecdotal experience is that it is 20-25%. Clearly in my own case, there is a much larger than 2% component. Second, in talking with the pathologist, she considers it to be part of her job to anticipate that people lie a substantial amount of the time (undoubtedly true — same is true with respect to clients talking to lawyers) and charge people for tests that are premised on the circumstance that large numbers of people lie. However, those people who don’t lie to their doctors are being grossly over charged.
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Mike M — I would be very interested in the definition of defensive medicine. Is it just to avoid malpractice? (in which case, I could potentially see that the 2% figure is true) Or, does it also include doctors ordering a battery of tests simply to be extra-cautious about a very unlikely problem. In this situation, it is in the health institutions financial interest to order the battery of tests — which is what happened when the hospital was going to ct scan my neck after a fall when I had zero neck symptoms. No physician would have ordered a ct scan on himself in that situation.
JD
JD,
i may not have read your earlier posts on the hospital’s disposition of the effects of your contretemps with the basement stairs, but…
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The question which needs answering before you assign a 20% excess diagnostic cost to what they did to you is what would they have done to anyone else coming in from this sort of event?
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There is a pig-in-the-poke element to this.
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Maybe there was an element of covering all the bases to this?
J Ferguson “Maybe there was an element of covering all the bases to this?”
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Yes, there definitely is. However, in a lot of circumstances covering the bases is very inefficient. Additionally, however, I was being hauled in for a neck CT Scan without anyone having asked me a single question about my neck, or even examining my neck. Sometimes, what you expect to be typical does not happen and you can save money by examining what the actual circumstances are. I would also point out that the hospital did a urine sample and billed me for it. When I asked the ER doctor what it was for, he said he had no idea. (Was billed $37, I believe for that)
JD
I’d look at it as the doctors savoring the business case for a guy who walks in the door with a contingent fee case. What he has in mind is you spending your money in the hope that he will benefit in some way in the end.
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But you need to mind your own store against the possibility that what he is describing isn’t what actually happened. So you ask a lot of questions, the better to size the thing up; diagnostics as it were.
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Urine specimen? maybe you need to ask around some more about it. It could be that there is a remote chance that it could be needed for diagnostic purposes which might not be recognized in front, but when the need is discovered, there it is, already done.
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I admit that your view of the thing could be reasonable.
JD Ohio (Comment #160508): “Re: 2% cost of treatment is due to defensive medicine.
My anecdotal experience is that it is 20-25%. Clearly in my own case, there is a much larger than 2% component.”
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So lets say that defensive medicine is 20% of emergency room bills. Those are 5-10% of total health care costs. So defensive medicine in the ER would be 1-2% of total health care costs. My guess would be that defensive medicine is a bigger factor in emergency care than in other aspects of medicine.
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JD: “I would be very interested in the definition of defensive medicine.”
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An excellent point. The 2% number might be based on an very narrow definition.
These posts have brought back my memory with respect to incidents related to the high cost of medical care.
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1. I played golf with a respiratory therapist one time. He told me a farmer with cash (about 20 years ago) got his heart operation done for $25,000 when the doctors eliminated unnecessary procedures as opposed to the usual $65,000.
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2. About 20 years ago I had a bunion on my big toe. The podiatrist told me I needed an operation for about $5,000. I said I would have to look into it because I had a high deductible. His office then said they could arrange a loan for me. I then decided I wanted nothing to do with the podiatrist. I went to an orthopedic surgeon who told me the last thing I needed was an operation and that I could control the problem by taking a minor amount of drugs. I then got lucky and solved the problem myself by buying tennis shoes with support under the ball of my foot. 20 years later, I still have no functional problem with my big toe and am still not taking drugs.
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Covering all of the bases in legal context. About 20 years ago my father was stuck co-owning 80 acres of land in Florida with a con man realtor. The land needed to be split, so I checked with Florida lawyers about the cost of a partition. I made the mistake of calling a satellite office of a large firm, and I was told it would cost $30,000 for a partition. (They were figuring expert witness fees and extensive discovery) I got it done for $750 by telling the Florida lawyer to put in the pleading that we would take either the Southern or Northern half and that the realtor could choose either half he wanted. The realtor chose one half, and we were done without paying for experts or discovery.
JD
Hi JD,
letting the real estate guy choose which half was brilliant.
MikeN,
No, they are not the same. It was a 5:4 vote in the SC, and many people had expected it to go the other way. John Roberts was the suprising vote that kept the mandate. Should Ginsberg be replaced by someone like Gorsuch, I expect that question to be revisited by the court.
J Ferguson — Thanks for the kind words.
JD
SteveF, that is my point. You say it is unconstitutional, fine. Then explain why that is unconstitutional but my proposal is not.
It looks like Trump has solid basis for dumping Clean Power Plan. I thought it flowed cleanly from Mass v EPA and then the endangerment finding made by the EPA as required by the Supreme Court.
Mass v EPA found that greenhouse gases can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Key language is
Greenhouse gases clearly fit the second part, and the Court argued that the use of ‘including’ means they automatically qualify as air pollution agents. However, EPA argued and this was never answered by the Court, that “Any American automobile, including minivans and trucks,…” would not mean that foreign minivans are American automobiles.
Regulation was still not required, just a determination by the administrator as to whether public health and welfare is harmed by greenhouse gases.
The EPA then conducted an endangerment finding and said yes, and then produced the Clean Power Plan, among other regulations, one of which serves to kill CPP.
According to the Clean Air Act, the EPA cannot regulate under section 111d, for any sources that are already regulated under section 112, which includes all stationary power plants.
To get around that, the EPA used a novel argument. Their basic goal was that it didn’t matter what legal basis they used; by the time the courts ruled, the coal plants would be shuttered. They would have gotten away with it, except in a previous case they bragged about their strategy after losing, and this time the Supreme Court issued an injunction.
EPA is claiming that there were two versions of the bill that passed, and they can feel free to ignore the law on the books in favor of the other one. The part about not regulating under section 111d that the House had added(changed from the previous rule that no pollutants except for those listed in 112b1a), the Senate passed an amendment to the same section that removed the text ‘1a’, listed as a ‘conforming amendment’. With this ‘ambiguity’, EPA thinks they can make their decision and the Court should defer to their judgement.
MikeN,
One is coercion to compel behavior, the other is just wrongheaded tax incentive. Even Roberts acknowledged that coercion to compel a purchase is unconstitutional, but then in the most bizarre of twisted logic declared that in this specific case the coercion wasn’t really coercion but rather a special kind of tax which only applies to those who make undesired economic choices. Read the SC dissenting opinion if you want a more complete rational for why this is not consistent with the Constitution.
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But here is a thought experiment: Suppose a majority in Congress figures that it should ‘recommend’ purchase of a wide range of prioritized items which would, if purchased, consume 100% of all income for virtually all people, and motivate those purchases by setting up a series of ‘Roberts Taxes’ which are only assessed upon failure to buy the ‘recommended’ items. So failure to buy those ‘recommended’ items means all income is confiscated, while following the ‘recommended purchases’ means all behavior is controlled (it’s a progressive’s wet dream in either case!). Like with Obamacare, only people who did not have enough income to actually purchase all the ‘recommended’ items would not be charged the “Roberts Taxes” on the lower priority items they could not afford to purchase. Under the existing court ruling, a majority in Congress can exercize complete control of all economic choices by all people in the USA. If you think that is consistent with the Constitution and the principles of government described in the Declaration of Independence, then there is not much more to talk about.
Interesting comment at the opening of the hearing that the subpoenas were now being adhered to and that NOAA admitted it did not release all its e mails for political reasons. While discovery may lead to nothing of note there is certainly potential for another coverup scandal to occur. Let us hope there are some smoking e mails.
On a brighter note Australia to have a change of Prime Minister in 2-3 weeks.
MikeN: ” Then explain why that is unconstitutional but my proposal is not.”
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Your position seems to be that there is no difference between giving someone money for doing something and taking money away for not doing it. That is consistent with the frequent claim that not taxing something is the same as subsidizing it. Both positions implicitly assume that the government has the right to everything you have and that anything you are allowed to keep is by the grace of the government.
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It is legal for Ford to give you a $1000 rebate for buying one of their cars. But it is not legal for Ford to charge you $1000 for not buying one of their cars. So in that context, there is obviously a big difference between giving someone money for doing something and taking money away for not doing it.
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Of course, the government is different. But I don’t think it is sufficiently different to justify charging people for not buying something, unless you assume that the government has the right to take anything it sees fit to take.
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p.s. – It helps if you quote, at least in part, what you comment on. Or at least refer to the earlier comment by number.
With regard to the EPA: Most of their rules fall well outside the intended purposes of the laws Congress passed. They have consistently ignored Congresse’s intent and promulgated rules (with the force of law) which Congress never intended. Trump can, slowly and with great difficulty, eliminate many of those rules, but only Congress can pass legislation which permanently reins in the enviro-lunatic bureaucrats at the EPA. Unless the Repubilcans get 60 votes in the Senate, or eliminate the filibuster (something I think will be needed for representative government to actually function), that is just not going to happen.
MikeN: “EPA is claiming that there were two versions of the bill that passed,”
But surely there can be only one version that was sent to the President to be signed.
SteveF: “With regard to the EPA: Most of their rules fall well outside the intended purposes of the laws Congress passed. They have consistently ignored Congresse’s intent …”
I agree. Unfortunately, intent can not guide the courts since there is really no way to determine the intent of of a group of 535 people. Instead, one has to focus on what was *meant* by “pollutant” in the context that it was used. I think that in the section used to regulate CO2, “pollutant” meant trace emissions of toxic substances.
Mike M,
Yes, and that is the version the Court said had to be used. The EPA was essentially declaring that it would do whatever it wanted, whether that was ever intended by Congress or even consistent with the text of the law. Just more Obama lawlessness.
MikeM,
” I think that in the section used to regulate CO2, “pollutant†meant trace emissions of toxic substances.”
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Of course. The clean air act and clean water act were passed in response to widespread pollution of air and water with toxic compounds which are normally not present. The application of these laws to CO2 emissions and farmers’ irrigation ditches is beyond bizarre.
Mike M:
In the case of taxes, why yes the government can levy taxes, it’s in our constitution. In the case if imminent domain, it also has broad power to take things, when it is viewed in “the people’s interests.” The government also have powers granted to them by constitutional law.
But it can’t of course take anything “it sees fit to take” because we are a nation governed by laws.
I think the argument here is people who choose not to buy health insurance are effectively shifting the burden to the rest of the population:
They still have access to health care even though they haven’t purchased it.
The “obvious fix” to that is to deny them healthcare then, because otherwise you are incentivizing derelict behavior. We lack the political will to deny people healthcare they need, and there’s an economic argument why it’s to our benefit to pay for their healthcare, if they can’t afford it. So that won’t happen.
The alternative is you force them to pay, because the argument is, in a statistical sense, they will someday need healthcare, and healthcare is too expensive for most people to be able to pay for without the help of insurance (yes, insurance is part of the reason they can’t afford to pay for it, but there’s no reset switch here).
Carrick,
Are you a skier? Seems you like slippery slopes.
If you can’t force people to buy health insurance, you guarantee that a single payer system, which amounts to the same thing in practice but with zero freedom of choice, will eventually be imposed.
Carrick: “In the case of taxes, why yes the government can levy taxes, it’s in our constitution.”
I never said it can’t. The question is whether a fine designed to force someone to buy a product is a tax.
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Carrick: “In the case if imminent domain, it also has broad power to take things.”
Kelo extended the power of eminent domain far beyond what the constitution permits, in my opinion and in the opinion of many others (including 4 justices at the time). It is a good bet to be eventually rescinded.
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Carrick: “The government also have powers granted to them by constitutional law.”
And only those powers.
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Carrick: “But it can’t of course take anything “it sees fit to take†because we are a nation governed by laws.
I think the argument here is …”
The argument here is irrelevant if the only justification is a desirable end. Because we are a nation governed by laws, chief of which is the Constitution.
DeWitt: “If you can’t force people to buy health insurance, you guarantee that a single payer system, which amounts to the same thing in practice but with zero freedom of choice, will eventually be imposed.”
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I don’t see why. There is no need for 100% coverage, 80% or so should be enough. That could likely be achieved by providing tax benefits (rebates or deductions) or direct subsidies. Or by expanding community rating to remove employment status as a basis for discrimination. Or a combination of the two.
SteveF:
Sorry about missing this—I’ve been on a roller coaster ride most of this week. I think that a competent politician could peal enough Democrats off to get a more centrist policy thru: One that doesn’t throw the poor under the bus, but recognizes the undue burden being put on small businesses by current law.
This goes through the math, and it isn’t that daunting.
DeWitt:
Oh I agree with that. I was responding to Kenneth Fritsch’s comment that “We have runaway deficits”. I suspected afterwards he meant that the debt was increasing.
By it’s not a spiral. Rather if you look at it by year, year-to-year has stayed relatively flat over the last 45 years, except for a period between 1981 and 1993 and of course the post 2008 financial crisis period.
Neither of these events were associated with just government spending nor with just with large tax cuts, though both of these government policies obviously contributed to the debt.
DeWitt,
I hope not, but that is preferable to the unconstitutional nightmare we currently have in place. I find it odd that humanity managed to survive without a single payer health care system for as long as it did. Joking aside, the issue is that we have become unwilling to enforce laws that offend the sensibilities of some, and refuse to allow people to suffer the consequences of either their own imprudent choices, simple bad luck, or a combination of these. As John Kennedy noted, life is not always ‘fair’. Sacrificing liberty in a useless effort to make it so is terrible public policy.
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Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
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Insurance is inherently socialist in this way: the well pay for the sick.
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Free market principles seem to work in most cases, but with healthcare, two factors separate equilibrium:
1. insurance
2. apparent social agreement that we won’t deny care
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But the laws of economics don’t disappear just because it’s not a totally free market. Subsidizing insurance has the effect of increasing cost.
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With all this in mind, perhaps England’s national health care ( as opposed to our health insurance ) makes sense. There is implicit rationing ( through long wait times ) but given our care for the poor and guaranteed insurance for the sickest ( Medicare for the old ) isn’t that what we want? Government has an incentive to ration but universal insurance coverage means increased demand on a somewhat limited supply.
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England still has insurance, but only the rich buy it and they tend to be healthier.
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Also in this shuffle is still the notion that:
health insurance = health care, and that
health care = health
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Most ill health and premature death now comes from lifestyle choices, not lack of access to care. The chronic accumulation of these choices appears in later life when we’ve guaranteed health insurance ( Medicare ). So, to some extent, we’ve disincentivized healthy lifestyle
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Here’s an idea, inverse Medicare. Cover everyone UNDER 65, but not the elderly! Maybe we’d live healthier if we knew we’d pay for it later.
MikeM:
And that’s exactly why we have a judiciary branch to decide it. Simply because you don’t agree with the Courts’ decision doesn’t mean the decision was wrong.
SteveF:
I’m about as big of a fan of the slippery slope analogy as I am of the “it’s a start” argument. We have checks and balances for a reason.
Carrick,
Federal debt has grown from 30% of GDP to 100% since 1980. How is that remotely like relatively flat?
Carrick,
Sure the debt to GDP ratio has flattened somewhat in the last few years. The problem is that, IMO, there is a near 100% chance of a big recession in the next couple of years. That will put the deficit back in the trillion plus dollar range and the ratio will increase significantly. The debt is already a drag on the economy. Absent major tax reform, which I don’t think is in the cards now either, it will get worse.
If interest rates return to normal, that won’t help either.
SteveF:
I never say it was flat over that entire period.
I pointed out that there are large periods, especially since circa 1993, where the debt as percentage GDP is relatively flat—where it noodles around a more or less constant value, compared to the two identifiable periods where we saw large growth in the deficit.
The most recent increase is clearly associated with the 2008 financial meltdown. Clearly government policy (a combination of deregulation and grand social experiments) played a role in that, but obviously not the sort of factors people have been arguing here.
Outside of the explosive growth of those two years, it has stayed pretty much constant since 1993. We could use the 2008-2009 meltdown to argue that it is possible for bad government policy to create a similar disaster in the future , but we can’t really say from the data that we have a “spiraling out of control” of the sort Kenneth Fritsch was discussing.
Carrick,
“We have checks and balances for a reason.”
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Sure, and we have people constantly trying to subvert them in the name of ‘progress’ (eg. see many EPA rules under Obama, and his lawless executive orders).
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There is a difference between enforcing laws and refusing to enforce them; the later is subversion of constitutional government. The ‘sanctuary cities’ officials are not violating laws by refusing to hold ilegal aliens charged with (or convicted of) crimes until ICE officers arrive, they are directly violating Federal law that explictly prohibits anyone from providing sanctuary to someone they know is an illegal alien; it is a felony to do so. Ditto for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens: Federal felony. Yet for 40 years no president (from at least Carter to Trump) has been willing to enforce those laws. Why do we have 11 million illegal residents? Because nobody is willing to enforce the law! Ditto Federal marijuana laws. This way is a certain path to anarchy.
SteveF (Comment #160520)
March 30th, 2017 at 6:57 am
Your thought experiment is valid SteveF, but unfortunately I see others and including most posting here looking at a problem that they feel that only government can attempt to solve and that it can attempt a solution only by citizens giving up freedoms once thought protected by the Constitution. The rationalizations are along the lines of Chief Justice Roberts.
The example of the government telling you what you have to purchase for food items was along the lines put forth in a query to a new member of the court, who I believe was Justice Elena Kagan, and she did not deny that the government had that power. One could always point to the government costs arising from a choice of food purchases and consumption that was not optimum by some government standard no matter how arbitrarily derived.
The only restraint that I think some people may think stands in the way of these more complete controls on people’s lives is that law makers and voters would never go to these extremes. Given sufficient rationalizations such as I hear in some of the posts at this blog I think some very extreme measures could be enacted.
The only way out of this spiral is to acknowledge that government control is not the best solution or attempt at a solution in these matters and to continue to point to and explain the problems with existing government programs that were instituted with good intentions.
DeWitt:
Historically downturns haven’t had that big of an overall effect on our debt burden.
I don’t anticipate our current president to choose the necessary fiscal policy, so I think the debt will grow too. Probably another big spike like post Reagan tax cuts.
There’d need to be the sort of political realignment that for responsible fiscal decisions to get made. That’s pretty unlikely.
Carrick, you might want to reread or read the link I provided that talks about the current debt already being an 800 lb gorilla in the room and its negative effects on retirement savings, state and local pensions and restrictions it places on the Federal Reserve. It further points to the snowballing effects of compounding debt at higher interests rates. Our national debt is already out of control and none to very few of our irresponsible politicians want to talk about it. You might want to give us a short list of actions that you think might be taken in the near future to address the issues of debt.
When you see large deficits year after year as we have for the past 16 years and you concentrate on the yearly changes in deficits as a measure of control I think you are very much missing the point of accumulated debt and its adverse effects.
http://danielamerman.com/va/Conflict.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/07/12/forget-debt-as-a-percent-of-gdp-its-really-much-worse/#79b9e2f253ba
Debt to GDP is not the optimum way of looking at debt unless you assume that all of GDP or a constant portion of is avaiable for paying down debt. Government revenues is a better choice.
And as if on cue, new CBO projections for debt-to-GDP of 150% in 30 years.
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Good thing the gov still owns the printing presses.
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Monetizing the debt works right up until the revolution.
MikeM, the bill signed by the president, which is an amendment of previous law, has two amendments to the same section. Congress’s manual on drafting explains what to do in this case clearly. The President and head of the EPA are on solid ground dropping the Clean Power Plan as unconstitutional, without having to undo the endangerment finding.
Carrick,
That assumes that the next recession will be relatively mild and that we weren’t already running a large budget deficit. The budget deficit for 2016 was $552 billion. The CBO expects that deficit level to continue through at least 2027 if nothing changes:
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/52xxx/52370-home-summaryfigure1.png
Reinhart, Reinhart and Rogoff wrote a paper for the NBER on Debt Overhang and their effect on economies. Their conclusion was that a debt to GDP ratio over 90% caused a reduction in GDP growth of more than 1%.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18015
If the next recession is as bad as the last one, budget deficits could exceed $2 trillion. And federal debt rises faster than the official budget deficit. Over the last 2 years, the deficit was $1 trillion, but government debt increased by $2 trillion.
The total of all debt, corporate, non-financial business, federal, state and local plus unfunded liabilities is around $65 trillion or about 340% of GDP.
If that’s not depressing enough, we can talk about the increasing mortality rate among males aged 25-54 in the US.
http://ggc-mauldin-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/newsletters/170328-02.jpg
Totally off topic:
OMG. My kid just had a multiple choice homework problem come up that literally asked him – (a) given (these) 5 numbers, is the variability of the data large or small? (We guessed wrong). (b) is the interquartile range a better representative of the variability than the range? (We guessed wrong again. The ‘help’ for the problem said, and I shit you not, that our guess was wrong because the number 17 was an outlier! Needless to say, there was nothing in the problem that actually indicated that 17 was an outlier. It was the largest number in the set by a bit. Go. Figure.) I feel like we just missed a homework question written by an aspiring young climate scientist, honestly. I didn’t compute it, and I didn’t write down the numbers, don’t really remember what they were but my sense was that 17 wasn’t even a standard deviation from the mean of the set. So WTF?
Incredible.
What principle are they supposed to use to determine if it’s “large” vs. “small”? Compared to the mean? (That’s useful in some contexts but not others. After all: if the mean is zero, then variability will always be ‘yuge’. And that’s not correct.)
I think the answer to this is generally “yes”. Sort of like the standard deviation is generally yes.
What principle is he supposed to apply? Standard deviation relative to mean? (That makes sense in some contexts; others.. not so much.)
With only 5 numbers how are you supposed to be sure 17 is an outlier? Did the problem say?
You should take snapshots. (Was this mastering math? Webassign? I’m curious.)
Lucia,
I should have snapshotted. I’m out and about, but I’ll see if we can get the problem back up later this evening. No idea how we were supposed to make these determinations. Looked utterly subjective to me, which is part of why i was so outraged.
mark bofill: ” is the variability of the data large or small?”
Sounds like they might have provided the students with a rule of thumb that has no use other than allowing students to answer such a question. I have seen such things in first year chemistry texts, for deciding if an approximation is good or not. Ugh.
Here. This was it. I was wrong about several details (17 not within a stdev, number of data points, etc), but I think my overall point remains intact. Or not; maybe this is a perfectly fine problem and I just don’t know what ‘high’ and ‘low’ variability actually means.
Somehow we were supposed to just zen the difference between high and low variability I guess, and also just sort of intuitively know 17 was a stray data point. Beats me guys. But maybe I just suck at math. 🙂
[Edit: Thanks Mike M. They might have, maybe my kid just zoned out during the in class explanation. It’s been known to happen… ]
Alright, and now that I think about it at leisure, – I don’t mind this bit as much:
Fair enough, right? (rhetorical : I think so) I think it’s pretty sophisticated reasoning to expect out of a 7’th grader, but I think I get what they mean. The 17 isn’t included in the interquartile range, so – if we actually knew it was a ‘stray data point’, the question and answer would make more sense to me. But – if we don’t know 17 is a ‘stray data point’ – in other words, if it counts – isn’t it important in that case to make sure that the 17 counts towards the variability? If we want the 17 to count, interquartile range isn’t what we want.
Oh well.
I think you are supposed to grok that the ‘because’ part doesn’t match the answer in the distractors.
So for example: if 17 is stray, then the range can’t be the better answer. So “D” is wrong because the “because” doesn’t support the conclusion. The same for “B”.
That said: I’m not entirely sure why “c” is wrong– except that the only way in which the “range” is “too high” is if 17 is “stray” (i.e. ‘outlier’) thus making make the “range” too high to describe the variability. If so, A is a better answer than A. (But this is stoopid in the sense that actually both “a” and “c” are sort of right. Still, it’s the answer.
And likely the thought in the question writers mind is the actual magnitude of the spread doesn’t affect the answer (which it doesn’t.) But still the a student is likely to intepret “too large” in context— and in context 17 being a “stray” is what makes it too high. So.. well.. you could argue about wording. (Which makes it a crappy multiple choice distractor.)
So… yeah…”A” does seem better than C in the sense of giving the reason why the range might be too large to describe the spread. But… yeah. This looks a bit dumb.
This is the way of multiple choice.
It reminds me: pre-finals, one of my student who knew she sometimes needed to understaind “terminal velocity” and other times needed to “just assume” air friction was zero on questions– but nothing was ever in between. So sort of understood that in some situations, it must be the case that drag fell between practically zero realtive to gravity and enough to balance gravity. She wanted to know how she could tell. I told her: In real life, this isn’t always obvious. But on her upcoming test unless something scream “this is a question about free-fall”, then she should decide drag was zero. So: If the problen doesn’t say “parachute”, “feather” and so on or actually mention “free fall”: pretend its a cannon ball dropped to the floor from the height of a kitchen table.
Oddly, if you read a lot of high school multiple choice, you start to see stooopid “tells”.
I see what you mean. You’re absolutely right. Drat! We could have gotten that.
What really happened there was, after we got the first part of the question wrong (the variability obviously wasn’t zero, but whether or not it was ‘high’ or ‘low’ still remains beyond me) I told Rowen to just guess the rest to get through the problem. But I see now that if we’d kept our cool we could have puzzled that bit out.
Thanks Lucia.
Mark,
I would like the answer better if the just said, “for statistical reason related to probability, the interquartile range is always a more robust measure of variability”.
I mean: really, it doesn’t matter if 17 is or is not an outlier. The fact is: the tails of a distribution are always affected more by statistical flukes. So it’s better to use a standard deviation or inter-quartile range. But this is true whether or not 17 is “an outlier”. That reason would be less crap if it said 17 might be an outlier. But you don’t know it’s an ‘outlier’. For all you know this is a distribution with weird ass tails and the 17 actually tells you something important. You can’t know that without more data. You might suspect but you can’t know.
You could draw 5 numbers from some population and you’d find the interquartile range has a smaller standard deviation than the range– and that’s even true if you scale by some number. So: it’s always better. But the “because” after the reasin is crap.
How do you know 17 is stray? It’s outside the range of the others, but maybe there’s something wrong with them. I find this very troubling.
Mark Bofill,
I think this falls in the category of things that will need to be unlearned. One could make a good case for using median and interquartile range with small data sets since they are more robust than mean and standard deviation, so it will matter less if there is an outlier. But there is no way that you can identify 17 as an outlier in the given data set without additional information. They are training students to improperly massage data. Ugh.
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The high or low variability is nonsense without context. If you look at a series of monthly average temperatures, whatever rule they are using would probably say they are high variability if the temperatures are in C and low variability if they are in K. Whether variability is high or low is like whether measurement errors are high or low: It always depends on the question being asked and the purpose of the measurement.
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Edit: I should have said “there is no way that you can PROPERLY identify 17 as an outlier”.
Yeah… I have a student studing for the AP2. We were looking at a practice test. It has some questions for which she has not yet covered material. So I was explaining to her how to “guess” when you see it and thing OMG.
So: on physics tests:
1) Check whether units make sense. (This always eliminates at leat 2/4 of the multiple choice choices when the answer is an equation.)
2) Think whether you even need to know the bit they are trying to trick you with. Often you don’t– there was a question involving a “pion” a “proton” and baryon. The aren’t even supposed to know what the heck a pion and baryon are– although (for better or worse) they will have discussed the existance of sub- subatomic particles. So the risk of a test taker flipping out and they needed to knwo what those are was high. What did you need to know? : conservation of momentum. That’s it.
Will my pointing out that fairly frequently the include odd crud that “doesn’t matter” help? dunno. I told the student we are trying to help develop her “nerves of steel.” But really, there was a question about diffraction of matter waves and I pointed out you didn’t need to know squat about the matter waves, and she said it had never occurred to her that since it was multiple choice and one has to be correct she can figure out based on knowing diffraction only.
Thanks for the feedback all. It’s nice to hear that I’m not totally nuts for thinking there are issues with that problem. Of course I might well still be totally nuts, but just the same – that problem stunk.
Mike M: Definition of Defensive Medicine
…..
I reviewed the article that I think you were citing above and here is the narrow definition that was apparently used:
“An initial challenge is to settle on a definition of defensive medicine. The most commonly used definition, proposed by the now-defunct U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), conceptualizes defensive medicine as occurring “when doctors order tests, procedures, or visits, or avoid certain high-risk patients or procedures, primarily (but not solely) because of concern about malpractice liability. See “conclusion” link in this link http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/09/07/129706676/defensive-medicine-not-as-much-as-the-doctor-ordered-after-all
….
Personally, I think a more useful definition would include procedures ordered by doctors as part of a blanket rule used even though particular patients may not benefit from the procedure where the doctors make little or no effort to check and see whether a particular “blanket” practice benefits a particular patient.
JD
MikeM, on what basis is it coercive to add $3000 to tax payment for not buying health insurance, but not coercive to subtract $3000 from tax payment if you do buy. In both cases, your taxes are lower by $3000 if you buy health insurance. You could even adjust my proposal to reduce the personal exemption by $3000, making the total tax bill the same under both proposals if you buy health insurance.
Your analogy with Ford breaks down because you are not paying them money if you do not buy the truck, but you do pay the government taxes regardless. Your extreme hypothetical was rejected by John Roberts as coercive, but the same hypothetical can be extended to my proposal. Suppose they returned to Eisenhower 91% tax rates, without the exemptions and workarounds and is now a flat tax for everyone. Then they added in tax credits if you spent on health care, organic food, mass transit, apartment housing, etc.
WRT whether a single number in a group is ‘stray’, I think the normal test is to calculate the mean and an estimate of the standard deviation for the other numbers in the group, then see how many standard deviations the number in question is from the mean. Of course this assumes normality in the distribution of numbers, which may not be correct, though there are no doubt tests for that assumption as well.
MikeN: :on what basis is it coercive to add $3000 to tax payment for not buying health insurance, but not coercive to subtract $3000 from tax payment”.
You are insisting on making an abstract mathematical exercise out of this. That is fallacious, since people are involved.
Find 10 random people. Ask them the following question: “Does the government force people to buy houses?” I am pretty sure that all 10 will answer “no”.
SteveF: “Of course this assumes normality in the distribution of numbers, which may not be correct, though there are no doubt tests for that assumption as well.”
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There are tests for normality, but you need a lot of data points. You also need more than a few points to make a decent estimate of the standard the deviation. If memory serves, with 100 points the estimate is uncertain by +/- 20%.
MikeN,
A 91% flat tax is by itself very nearly as coercive as a 100% flat tax. There is no room for ‘liberty and the pursuit of happyness’ when all wealth is confiscated, and only partially returned for ‘good behavior’. That is not liberty, it is prison. It is a sad commentary on John Roberts that he finds ‘small’ coercions OK, while recognizing large coercions are not. History will not treat Roberts well.
JD,
That is not the article I saw, but it sounds like it traces back to the same source.
You wrote: “Personally, I think a more useful definition would include procedures ordered by doctors as part of a blanket rule …”
Sounds more like autopilot medicine than defensive medicine. That surely fits under the heading of waste. I have seen numbers like 30% for the total amount of waste in the system, but I am not sure if they are to be believed.
JD,
I took a quick look at the source: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/29/9/1569.full
It seems we have no idea how much is spent on defensive medicine. I’d say that if the 2.4% figure the authors arrived at has any value, it is as a lower bound.
Mike M,
The correction factor for standard deviation (assuming normality) combines Bessel’s correction, using (n-1) instead of n in the calculation of the estimate, with the c4 correction, which is modest for 5 or more numbers in the pool. For five numbers, the c4 correction is an increase in the estimated standard deviation by a factor of 1/0.94. (See ‘unbiased estimate of standard deviation’ in Wikipedia.) I doubt this was how they wanted the kids to determine if ’17’ was an outlier. 😉
JD Ohio (Comment #160561 Mike M: Definition of Defensive Medicine
“Personally, I think a more useful definition would include procedures ordered by doctors as part of a blanket rule used even though particular patients may not benefit from the procedure where the doctors make little or no effort to check and see whether a particular “blanket†practice benefits a particular patient.”
Don’t quite get it, if it is a blanket rule then there would be no exceptions? Blanket rules should cover all patients, that is why it is called a blanket.
Practicing defensive medicine costs a lot more than 2.4% But so does being thorough or inquisitive. Not everyone is Dr House.
Multiple choice questions have a uniqueness to them that defies normal logic rules. A bit like cryptic crosswords. This question is one of them.
“D.The​ range, because the value 17 is a stray data value.”
the answer A became correct
“A.The interquartile​ range, because the value 17 is a stray data value.”
While I appreciate the maths of Lucia, Steve F etc the answer is not to be found in mathematics alone. There was a failure to take this into account.
The examiners have tossed in the concept of 17 being an outlier twice, not once.
This is a massive clue. It is rare for obviously wrong answers to be repeated in two of the answers hence it had to be relevant in the examiners mind and the current question.
While not used in the original question a lot of direction on answers can be found by reading the subsequent information provided in the answers.
Once pointed out it becomes apparent that 17 in the context of the numbers provide is different enough. Hence the answer chosen must include this. Hence C cannot be right.
Blanket rule is ‘we always do this with someone with this complaint.’ I would hope that this practice is based on experience and do not consider this part of defensive medicine.
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Ordering up a battery of tests some of which may not seem pertinent may seem defensive, but in a working environment where the sharp guys are hard-pressed for time and discovering that the results of a particular test may now be necessary, having them already in hand could be worth all the times when they didn’t turn out to be necessary.
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SteveF: “The correction factor for standard deviation …”
Yes, but that is for the best estimate of standard deviation. If you want to use standard deviation alone to estimate an outlier, you need to keep in mind the fact that the best estimate is likely at least a little wrong and might be very low if you have a small sample size.
Angech: “the answer is not to be found in mathematics alone.”
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I think that Lucia fully recognized that: Answering multiple choice questions is often as much about test taking skills as it is about the subject matter. Even if you try to avoid that in setting questions, the students will assume otherwise, since they have been conditioned to expect tricks.
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I think that multiple choice questions could be useful, provided that each question asks just one thing. So putting incorrect units in possible answers should only be done if the purpose of the question is to test whether the student can recognize correct units and that is all that is needed to find the correct answer. But the conditioning of students probably makes such a direct approach impossible in practice, except for the simplest questions.
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I used to put some multiple choice questions on my chemistry tests. Typically something like 1 point for the correct answer and 4 points for the reason, with the possibility of earning points for the reason even if the answer was wrong. Of course, that defeats the “purpose” of multiple choice.
Another way to look at ‘defensive medicine’ is to ask who is being defended and from whom. Maybe some of it is the institution protecting itself from its doctors. This might be the basis of ‘blanket procedures.’ ‘These guys occasionally make mistakes. What procedures and tests can we make standard at our shop to protect all of us?’
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There is also the possibility that paying the cost of having docs who are so sharp that they only do what ultimately turns out to have been needed and nothing more would be even higher.
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I submit that no-one is paying for what perfection would cost, nor would.
Mike M,
I’m really not sure what you are suggesting. Are you saying there is uncertainty in the unbiased estimate of the standard deviation? I agree there is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use that estimate to evaluate if a number is likely an outlier. Are you saying there is no rational way to answer the question?
Angech: “Don’t quite get it, if it is a blanket rule then there would be no exceptions? Blanket rules should cover all patients, that is why it is called a blanket.”
….
Wasn’t using the term literally. Was using it more in the sense of a strongly suggested policy that could be overriden. The point being a hospital could tell its physicians, every time there is a fall injuring the head you have the license to order neck examinations. Much easier for physician to order the whole battery of tests even if not really necessary than to try to sort out what would really be necessary. I would infer that that is what happened in my case.
JD
j ferguson,
My (limited) experience with medical doctors is that they pretty much “do it by the book”…. if that means tests a,b,c,d,and e, then those are the test which will be ordered. “Standard treatment” is the description that I believe is used. On the rare occasion that I have discussed with a medical doctor a test or treatment which seems to me to defy all logic, I have never received a coherent explanation. The portrayal in TV dramas of medical doctors carefully piecing together apparently conflicting data to (heroically!) solve a medical mystery and save the patient from certain death seems… ahem…. a bit of an exaggeration of reality. Most medical doctors are just following standard procedures. Of course, there may be additional tests run on trial lawyers or their family members. 😉
SteveF: ” Are you saying there is no rational way to answer the question?”
I am saying that in a small data set, it is highly problematic (at best) to identify an outlier solely on the basis of the data. One typically needs additional information, such as a reason to be suspicious of a particular data point or an independent estimate of what the standard deviation should be.
I think that SteveF is correct about doctors following standard procedures. That makes perfect sense for relatively inexpensive tests. It is likely more cost effective to just order A, B, C at a few 10’s of dollars each, rather than carefully considering for each the odds that it might be needed, then maybe realizing after seeing the results of tests A&B that you should have done C as well, then keeping the patient around, occupying valuable space, while test C is done.
But it seems that doctors sometimes order tests costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, just because. More careful judgement is warranted in such cases.
Mike M ‘”But it seems that doctors sometimes order tests costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, just because. More careful judgement is warranted in such cases”
This is a good statement of the issues which I agree with.
JD
The concept of standard procedure, legally known as standard of care, is itself defensive medicine. IIRC, the rule is that you can’t be found guilty of malpractice if you follow standard procedure.
http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/medical-malpractice/standard-of-care.html
Hence, doctors do things ‘by the book.’
‘Standard of care’ is not the same as ‘standard procedure’
Mike M,
3, 4.2, 2.9, 5.3, 4.85, 3.7, 17.
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Which do you think is the likely outlier? Why?
j ferguson,
Please tell me how “customary practices of the average physician” is different from standard procedure.
j ferguson,
I don’t see a big difference; the linked article describes ‘standard of care’ as what an average doctor would be expected to do.
SteveF, I used 91 because that was the actual tax rate, but 100% is fine too. The point is this is a situation that MikeM described as not coercive, at least in the nonextreme case.
Why is this not coercive, but the tax penalty is?
MikeM, the government is not forcing you to buy health insurance, it is raising your tax bill by $3000. Your analogy of houses is with a tax deduction not a tax credit, but even if it were a tax credit, what is the difference between that and having the government charge $3000 extra to people who do not own a house(let’s assume the credit is for owning not paying mortgage interest)? You think it is just mathematical trivia, but this was the basis for John Roberts’s decision, and I have yet to see an argument that counters this. That it feels different to the recipients isn’t in the Constitution I think.
I concede the argument that the government cannot force you to buy things. However, what is the difference between having a tax penalty, and a tax incentive, when the result is the same? If there is no difference, then eliminating the ObamaCare tax, would require eliminating many other tax deductions and credits.
MikeN,
If you really don’t see a difference, after all these exchanges, then I doubt anything anyone says (writes) will help you understand. Coersion to force the purchase of anything, no matter how small, is userpation of personal liberty. If the government can increase your taxes $3,000 for not buying something, why not $30,000 or $300,000? Some don’t think personal liberty matters much; I strongly disagree. The threat of taxes to coerce behavior amounts to tyranny, nothing more.
SteveF,
The limit is the next election.
Suppose the government passed a new health care tax and then contracted with private insurers to administer the system and provide some choice in health care plans, paying them with the tax money. I see no difference in principle from requiring an individual to buy health insurance. Yet a tax would be constitutional, as far as I can tell.
DeWitt,
The limitation should be the Constitution. The next election only means rule by 50%+1. Or if you prefer, the tyranny of the majority. The Constitution carefully limits majority control, especially WRT personal liberties. That is a feature, not a bug.
SteveF,
The Constitution is just words on paper. Those words mean whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says they mean. That’s been true since Marbury v. Madison. Progressives are opening a huge can of worms with the ‘living constitution’ argument and appointing judges who rule according to the desired result. Tyranny lies around that corner.
MikeN: “what is the difference between that and having the government charge $3000 extra to people who do not own a house”
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Are you just having us on? Can you really not see how people would react if the government said they are cancelling the mortgage interest deduction and instead will be imposing a $3000 a year tax on renters? If not, you need to get out more.
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Lucia: Sorry about the rhetorical questions. I just did not see how else to express my incredulity.
DeWitt,
Sure, the living constitution is no constitution at all, and under a living constitution, the federal courts are just another politcal branch, but with no possibility of control by the electorate.
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I think Gorsuch is very smart and capable. But I think he grossly underestimates in his public comments the ideological influence on SC rulings. Sure, they usually agree on the simple stuff with little or no policy implication. Not so the important cases…. those rulings are just naked power politics. Most people expected every one of the SC votes on Obamacare, save for Roberts. Chuck Schumer knows it is mostly politics on key decisions. Mitch McConnell knows that too, and so does most everyone else. The nuclear option almost certainly will be invoked to seat Gorsuch.
> If the government can increase your taxes $3,000 for not buying something… Some don’t think personal liberty matters much; I strongly disagree. The threat of taxes to coerce behavior amounts to tyranny, nothing more.
OK. Now why is the tax credit different? The government is still increasing your taxes $3000 for not buying something.
>Can you really not see how people would react if the government said they are cancelling the mortgage interest deduction and instead will be imposing a $3000 a year tax on renters?
Yes I see it, but I don’t see how that changes the constitutionality of one vs the other. The point is, there right now is a tax on renters. They do not get the deduction that the house owners get.
The minimum personal deduction largely levels the field between those with mortgage deductions and those without. We are not renters. Nor do we have a mortgage. We own. The personal deduction, around $12,500? Is good for us. We don’t do much itemization except for investment results.
MikeN
It’s very very very different. Among other things, when you are taxed for not buying X you must buy X to avoid the fine. This is entirely inflexible. And you are compelled to do something other than merely paying taxes which is a general obligation unrelated to any other behavior. And the general obligation applies to everyone regardless of behavior– it isn’t a fine on someone.
Perhaps you don’t want to see this– and if so you never will. But refusing to see the difference doesn’t make the difference non-existent, nor does it mean the difference isn’t easy to see.
If the government taxed you $3000 unless you bought a pile of chicken shit, kept stored it on your lawn, and proved you’d complied, you might see the difference. Or maybe not. But being taxed if you don’t buy is different from getting a rebate where you are paid to assume a burden.
MikeN: “Some don’t think personal liberty matters much; I strongly disagree. The threat of taxes to coerce behavior amounts to tyranny, nothing more.”
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Oh. Sorry, MikeN, I completely misunderstood what you were saying.
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I commented above that for those who think that the government has the right to take anything we have, there is no real difference between tax deductions and tax credits. I overlooked the fact that there is a different extreme view that leads to the same result: The idea is taxation is theft. I am not saying that MIkeN is that extreme, only that he appears to be far enough down the libertarian rode to agree with that conclusion. I think that position ignores a couple hundred years of judicial and legislative history, as well as human nature.
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A young libertarian pitches an idea to a like minded but more seasoned friend. The friend thinks for a while and comments “It is likely that your proposal might work well in practice. But it will never work in theory.”
Mike M,
You quoted me, but attributed it to MikeN. I do not think taxation is theft, I think forcing people to buy something by threatening them with taxes is cercion.
lucia,
‘…unless you bought a pile of chicken shit, kept stored it on your lawn, and proved you’d complied, you might see the difference.’
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I nearly snarfed my coffee! Maybe that is because I worked on a chicken farm at 15 and had to shovel mountains of the stuff; truly revolting.
MikeN,
“The point is, there right now is a tax on renters.”
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We’ve obviously gone through the looking glass here. Please cite the part of the IRS code which assesses a tax on an individual because they rent an apartment.
I had no idea the Left was so monolithic. I suppose one isn’t Left if he doesn’t believe/support the things which some lefties surely do and which you list above.
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SteveF, maybe not being able to deduct mortgage interest is same as being taxed?
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I chuckle at the thought of how spending youth on a chicken farm could prepare one for a lot of what later life presents.
j fersuson,
I use the expression “that’s chicken shit” more ofen than I otherwise would. 😉
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Loss of the home mortgage deduction is not the same as being taxed. It would actually improve economic efficiency by reducing market distortions, but I very much doubt that will happen.
SteveF (Comment #160647): You quoted me, but attributed it to MikeN.”
No, I quoted MikeN (Comment #160642).
Mike M,
In Mike N’s comment he was quoting my comment at #160627. He didn’t use quotation marks or a blockquote, but instead just started with ‘>’.
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Mike N clearly did not agree with my earlier comment. It helps if commenters make clear what is quoted and what is not.
SteveF,
Ok, I see. MikeN’s quoting skills need work.
Your quote does not in itself imply that you think taxation is theft. But in the context of MikeN’s other comments (if it had been his statement) it does imply an opinion pretty far down that road. I now have absolutely no idea what MikeN is trying to say.
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You say “Some don’t think personal liberty matters much; I strongly disagree. The threat of taxes to coerce behavior amounts to tyranny, nothing more.”
I agree, but with the quibble that I would use the word “tyrannical” on the grounds that a specific tyrannical act does not make a tyranny.
MikeM, at the time I thought the Supreme Court should have thrown out the mandate as unconstitutional, but I find Roberts’s argument convincing, that there is no difference constitutionally between the mandate enforced as a tax penalty and a tax credit. If someone considers the tax credit constitutional, then I think the tax penalty should also be constitutional.
In the case of tax penalty, you calculate your income, then the taxes due, and if you do not have the requisite health insurance you add $3000.
In the case of tax credit, you calculate your income, then the taxes due, and if you have the insurance, you subtract $3000.
It would be easy to modify the tax credit proposal, so that the behavior is identical, adding $3000 in both cases, by adjusting the personal exemption.
MikeN,
One can certainly argue that credits and penalties are equivalent in the abstract. Most people do see the two as being very different in practice. Technically, if the Supreme Court ruled they are the same, then they are the same. I am willing to accept that; but I still I have pragmatic reasons for saying one is acceptable and the other is not. But many people think that the Court set a dangerous precedent and have good arguments for that position.
MikeM
Wrong. The Supreme Court ruling can’t make them “the same”. All the Supreme Court can do is decree that Congress has equal power to do either under the taxing authority. But the Supreme Court decree doesn’t make them two things “the same” and even the Supreme court doesn’t say the are actually the same. Because they don’t rule on such issues which would be moot. They only rule on whether something is constitutional.
They are different. Evidently, under the law, Congress could pass a law requiring you to:
1) Own a gun or pay a fine.
2) Be enrolled at a university in any given year or pay a fine.
3) Buy potatoes or pay a fine.
That doesn’t make fining people for not doing “X” “the same” as merely taxing the and giving a credit for people who do “X”. It merely means that the Supreme Court says they may legally do it do it under the taxing authority.
That fact that two things are both allowed of Congress doesn’t make the two things “the same”.
The tax argument is around page 40, while the dissents are at 140.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf
The dissenters never really argue against the idea that Congress CAN impose a tax on not buying health insurance, only that they didn’t do so in this bill. Surprisingly, they even include the tax credit proposal I suggested as a valid alternative.
Lucia, Roberts’s decision makes clear Congress can do none of those things, if they are fines. He ruled that the ObamaCare mandate can be interpreted as a tax, even though the law says it is a penalty, just as before they ruled certain taxes were actually penalties(Drexel Furniture).
Lucia,
“That fact that two things are both allowed of Congress doesn’t make the two things “the sameâ€.”
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Even more bizarrely, while what 5 of 9 jurists declare is ‘constitutional’ does, at least for now, have the force of law, what they say does not necessarily have the force of logic, or even the force of rational thinking. In this case, what they said clearly doesn’t. I expect this issue will be at some point revisited and reverse…. it is too perversely illogical a decision to stand for long. It is the thin gruel of the totalitarian left, allowed to remain in force by a cowardly John Roberts, who should have known better.
MIkeN,
That doesn’t actually make the “tax” anything other than a fine for not complying the wish of Congress.
I should add Mike N, that even if it’s a tax, a tax for doing nothing is inappropriate. This is not a constitutional claim, so what Robers “says” about constitutionality is irrelevant.
It would simply be better to have refunds for behaviors one wishes. Not ‘taxes’, or “fines” or “penalties” for non-behavior. The label doesn’t matter– it’s what’s being done. Requiring a person to fork over money for inaction.
Suppose they impose a universal health care tax on everyone, say $3k annually, and including old folks? If you buy insurance, it’s credited against the $3k. Maybe the problem was asking the immortals (people less than 40) to bear the burden alone. Maybe if it’s such a good thing, we all ought to pay … even me.
and yes, an additional tax.
j ferguson,
That’s makes more sense to me. The old folks could, if they wish buy more expensive policies $5K policies, and get their $3K refund Younger folks would have an incentive to look for policies that cost about $3K. But since they are healthier, they likely could find something as long as they didn’t have to pay for policies for older people.
>a tax for doing nothing is inappropriate. This is not a constitutional claim, so what Robers “says†about constitutionality is irrelevant.
I don’t understand. He was asked to throw out the law on the grounds that the tax is unconstitutional.
>That doesn’t actually make the “tax†anything other than a fine for not complying the wish of Congress.
That was the argument of the dissenters. However, my reading of the dissent is that it is OK if Congress had passed it as a tax forthrightly. At the least, they don’t appear to argue against it.
Lucia, how is jferguson’s proposal different from ObamaCare tax penalty?
Punishing people for not sharing Congress’s spending priorities, and calling it a tax, is Orwellian. Both the dissent and Roberts agree that coersion to force purchases by individuals is unconstitutional, yet Roberts searches desperately for, and after 50+ pages of arm waving text, ultimately finds a fig leaf (“this blatant coercion is really just another tax”) to allow that coercion of individuals to stand. I note that Ginsburg basically argues that Congress can force individuals to do just about anything… no surprise there; she has always supported public control of all private activity, as ‘progressives’ always want. It was Roberts who was the shocker. Bush the younger probably regrets that particular appointment.
MikeN,
If Congress wanted to simply raise income taxes to fund health care for the poor or the unisurable, then they should have done that. There would never have been a legal challenge. And it would at least be intellectually defensible, since it would be a tax based on income, not undesirable behavior. A graduated income tax is certainly more ‘progressive’ than forcing young people to pay for other people’s insurance (young people who often can least afford to pay). Congress did not sinply raise taxes and fund health care for the poor because it would have caused too much political backlash; they knew a large tax increase was unlikely to pass. The whole point of Obamacare was to move costs off the goverment books and onto private individuals. Coercion, pure and simple.
Lucia,
Health insurance for people over 50 costs a lot more than $5,000 per year, unless it is essentially ‘catastrophic’ coverage (giant annual deductible). Of course, that kind coverage is no longer ‘legal’ under Obamacare.
MikeN
I think the difference is pretty obvious. We’ve been discussing this. One can get a refund. It is now structured more like the method we use for deducting for mortgage interest, buying solar panels, child care credits and all sorts of things that are not structured like the mandate.
I’m mystified why you don’t see this is structured differently. But it is.
I could understand if you were saying the difference doesn’t matter to you. But the difference exists– and it’s obviously different. That difference matters to me and some others. And I think Congress should structure things j ferguson’s way, not the way they structured the mandate.
SteveF,
I know that health care for people over 50 costs more than $5000 a year. That the burden on the young– many of whom are financially badly off– to fund old — some of whom are well off–would be lower is one of the many things that makes j ferguson’s suggestion different from Obamacare.
I could, of course, add that to the answer to MikeN’s question about how it is different. As I said: I think the differences are obvious.
j ferguson (Comment #160728): “Suppose they impose a universal health care tax on everyone, say $3k annually, and including old folks? If you buy insurance, it’s credited against the $3k.”
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That is functionally identical to a $3K penalty for not buying medical insurance. In both, if you buy medical insurance, you pay the same tax as now. In both, if you don’t buy medical insurance, you pay $3K more than now.
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I think this pretty much demonstrates that in the abstract, MikeN is correct: In the abstract there is no difference between a tax rebate and a penalty. As such, if one is constitutional, then so should be the other.
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But as Lucia’s response (Comment #160736) shows, there is a huge difference in how they are perceived. So although they are functionally equivalent in the abstract, they are certainly very different as a matter of practical policy. I don’t see that the Court should take that into account in ruling on constitutionality, but Congress should certainly take that into account in setting policy.
Mike M.
I probably didn’t fully understand the ObamaCare system, but I had thought it only penalized part of the population for not buying insurance. If that was incorrect, then my scheme is pretty much what you suggest.
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It didn’t look to me as if I had this exposure. Maybe my proposed scheme is one-payer in disguise.
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My thought was more that if getting everyone’s medical expenses paid was the goal, especially the people who cannot afford the cost, then everyone should pitch in.
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I think the part we’re choking on is that it’s not really insurance that we’re talking about but paying the medical expenses when people cannot afford them. it looks like the country agrees that this should happen.
j ferguson
If they can buy insurance from a range of providers with a range of provisions it is not single payer in disguise. Its just a tax incentive to buy qualifying insurance.
One could argue which sorts of policies qualify. I would suggest people should be allowed to have fairly wide latitude– as they did before Obamacare. If they judge they only want catastrophic and they’d rather pay for birth control or annual physicals out of pocket– that seems fine to me.
MikeM
I don’t consider it so. And your merely saying it is doesn’t make it so. The “function” of getting a rebate is different from the “function” of a tax penalty.
We currently have “tax penalties” for not withholding enough– because that is the function of “penalty”. We have rebates and incentives for other things. These are done differently because the function of “rebate” and “penalty” are different. It is not merely a matter of the balance sheet.
And, moreover, if someone really does think it’s the same, they should be happy to accept j. ferguson’s tweak if they are willing to accept the mandate. The difference only matters to those who perceive the difference. So it might as well be structured the way those who care about this difference want it to be structured.
MikeM
It’s not a matter of “perception”. It is different in a functional way. You are conflating “function” with “net dollar amount on a balance sheet”. “Net dollar amount on a balance sheet” is not the only function of the method of structuring something.
You are also confusing whether or not both are constitutional with whether or not the two are the same. The question of whether two different things is permitted under the same constitutional mandate is not the same as the question about whether they are “the same” as each other.
I’m sure Congress has equal authority grant funds for making chocolate and vanilla ice cream under the “same power”. But that does not make chocolate or vanilla “the same”. They are different.
SteveF,
A graduated income tax is certainly progressive, Karl Marx made it one of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto. It also causes more damage to the economy than a consumption based tax like the VAT. Young people already pay for other people’s insurance. It’s called the OASDI (Social Security) and Medicare tax.
Health insurance doesn’t work unless there’s a large pool of healthy people paying premiums. That’s why corporations can afford to self insure for health insurance. It really doesn’t work if you’re allowed to buy health insurance when you get sick and then drop it again after you get well. That’s how it works now under the ACA.
Some sort of mandate is necessary. It’s quite clear that it’s possible to structure that mandate constitutionally as a tax or tax refund. If the ACA bill had been bipartisan and not rushed through passage without time for review, that might have happened.
I went to get a sandwich and another functional difference bewteen j ferguson’s method and the mandate occurred to me:
In j ferguson’s way, the people who get the deduction are reminded annually that they are getting a subsidy. In the mandate, they are not. They think of themselves as paying their share.
This is a function of the way the program is structured. Functions are not limited to entries in a balance sheet.
j ferguson (Comment #160739): I probably didn’t fully understand the ObamaCare system, but I had thought it only penalized part of the population for not buying insurance.”
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I think people who qualify for Medicaid are excepted. And some can qualify for religious exemptions. There might be some other special cases.
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“It didn’t look to me as if I had this exposure.”
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I can’t imagine what you mean. Or what you meant when you said “even me” in your earlier comment.
Mike M.,
80% of whom? We already had over 80% of the nonelderly population covered with health insurance before the ACA. The uninsured rate of this cohort ranged from 16.3% to 18.2%. But that’s something like 48 million people. In 2015, the uninsured rate dropped to 10.5%. But that’s still 28 million people.
http://kff.org/uninsured/fact-sheet/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/
MikeM,
I think he means under Obamacare, he falls in a demographic would would never, ever be charged the $3K. Under his scenario and retiree he could be charged unless he either proved he bought it or proved his exemption.
Bear in mind: some older people don’t qualify for Medicaid. Teachers in Illinois are exempt from Social Security owing to a negotiated agreement about teachers not paying into social security. As a result, they do not qualify for medicaid unless they took a side or summer job that did pay into social security or they qualify under as a spouse of someone who did pay. So the idea that older people may not qualify for medicaid is not theoretical, nor is it limited to people who grew up with inherited wealth and never worked.
Mike M. I apologize for my lack of clarity. I meant that it didn’t look like I (at 74) was subject to the mandate.
DeWitt,
“Some sort of mandate is necessary.”
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I could not disagree more. The Social Security and Medicare taxes are regressive in the sense that the highest income individuals essentially escape those taxes, in addition to both programs having huge unfunded liabilities; I was not and would never suggest anything like a Medicare tax for funding basic health care for poor people.
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Some kind of (very) limited single payer system makes more sense for poor people. The idea that everyone, regardless of income, is entitled to the best (and most costly!) healthcare services available is both irrational and impossible, and is one of the many things wrong with Obamacare. The single payer systems (like in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere) ration care and services to control costs… along with limiting health care provider’s wages. Obamacare is the worst of all possible worlds: wasteful and inefficient, no possibility of controlling future costs, and coercive instead of forthright.
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As for VAT: in the countries which use VAT plus income taxes, government generally takes well over 50% of GDP as taxes. This usually shows up as retail prices that are about double what they are in the States; this is not what I think most voters are looking for from the Federal Government. It’s certainly not what I am looking for.
DeWitt: “80% of whom? We already had over 80% of the nonelderly population covered with health insurance before the ACA.”
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80% of the pool eligible to be covered. Under Obamacare, that would require 80% of the individual market. It is presently at 40%.
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If people in the individual market were charged the same as people in the large group markets, we would have well over 80% coverage and there would not be a big adverse selection problem or any real threat of an Obamacare death spiral.
j ferguson,
Actually, I think your uncertainty about whether the mandate would have applied to you at your age shows one of the functional differences between your method and the mandate in Obamacare. Under your method people in your age bracket would know they are receiving a $3K subsidy to use to buy insurance. Or they can forgo it. And you would be reminded of how the subsidy applies to year every year.
Under the other method, the subsidy by the young to the old is invisible.
So: one method has the function of making the transfer transparent. The other has the function of masking it. As I’ve said before: This is a function. It is not merely the “perception” of a difference. The two methods function differently.
DeWitt: “Some sort of mandate is necessary. It’s quite clear that it’s possible to structure that mandate constitutionally as a tax or tax refund.”
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No mandate is necessary. But some sort of encouragement and/or assistance is, in my opinion, desirable.
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Words matter. A “mandate” that I buy a product is unacceptable to me, no matter how it is enforced. I would find Obamacare rather less objectionable if if instead of a mandate and a penalty they had set it up so that people without insurance would pay a tax that would go into a fund to be used to reimburse providers for uncollectable bills.
SteveF,
A single payer system is equivalent to a mandate. You don’t usually have a choice whether to join or not.
As I’ve said several times before, the Swiss have a legal mandate to buy health insurance. There are subsidies for low incomes. The Swiss rank higher on the Freedom Index than the US. I would much rather have the Swiss system than single payer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
The problem with Social Security is that benefits were increased too fast. At one point benefits were indexed to both inflation and wages. That’s the origin of the unfunded liability. The rich don’t ‘escape’ the OASDI tax. Their benefits are limited and are taxed at a higher rate on a larger fraction (85%).
Mike M.
I assume that you mean 80% of the uninsured before the ACA. That would still leave nearly 10 million people without coverage.
Mike M.,
I assume you’re employed. Do you have an option to decline your company’s health insurance coverage? If not, then how is that different from a mandate? Real question.
j ferguson,
“I think the part we’re choking on is that it’s not really insurance that we’re talking about but paying the medical expenses when people cannot afford them. it looks like the country agrees that this should happen.”
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I agree… the controversy has almost nothing to do with ‘health insurance’, but has everything to do with paying for health care for those who can’t pay for it themselves. I agree that there is a broad consensus to not have people dying in the streets for lack of health care. But what is missing is a grown-up public conversation about the level of care which is reasonable for the those who can’t afford it themselves, and that depends on how much the voters are willing to spend.
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Obamacare avoids that needed debate by coercive cost shifting in an effort to obscuring the true costs of providing very good (and very expensive!) healthcare to those unable to pay for it. It is an uncomfortable debate, but one the country needs to have.
DeWitt,
Those taxes are limited to $110,100 of wage income. The wealthy don’t pay on most of their income.
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Some people may think Switzerland is a paradise of freedom, but I rather suspect many of those have not suffered sticker shock from a restaurant check in Switzerland. It is extremely expensive to live there. I do not envy the Swiss all their exceptional freedom.
j ferguson
It’s also about:
* who should pay these costs and
* whether those who are subsidized have it be made clear that they are subsidized.
The Obamacare method is designed to shift the costs onto the young and healthy and to allow people to believe the fiction that the old and sick are paying their own costs.
The method you proposed where everyone pays a tax and then gets a rebate controls the shift of the costs- by caping the amount the tax at a number (in your example $3K). It also makes the subsidy clear to those who receive it. I think both the cap and the transparency about the subsidy is important. So I think the mechanism used should have the function of making the ‘tax/subsidy’ element transparent.
Perhaps others don’t. Or they don’t “see” that a system that is transparent functions differently than one that is opaque. But prefer programs that are designed to operate transparently. Not ones who have systems in place that function to make them opaque.
SteveF,
My Mom’s step-brother’s wife lived in Switzerland. She grew up in Germany, lived in the US a long time and moved to Switzerland. Let me assure you, she did NOT find Swizterland a paradise of freedom!
DeWitt Payne: ”
Mike M.,
I assume you’re employed. Do you have an option to decline your company’s health insurance coverage? If not, then how is that different from a mandate? Real question.”
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Easy. Anyone can leave their employer. You can’t exempt yourself from Obamacare, taxes/fines/penalties. Also, if you are valued enough, you can negotiate with your employer.
JD
DeWitt: “I assume that you mean 80% of the uninsured before the ACA. That would still leave nearly 10 million people without coverage.”
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No, I mean 80% of whatever the pool might be. For Obamacare that would be 80% of the individual market. Many such people had medical insurance pre-Obamacare. Many of the 50 million who were uninsured got insurance other than in the individual market: expanded Medicaid, moving onto Medicare, getting jobs a the economy slowly improved. I am not sure just how big the individual market is. Maybe it would still be 10 million uninsured; so what?
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DeWitt: “I assume you’re employed. Do you have an option to decline your company’s health insurance coverage? If not, then how is that different from a mandate? Real question.”
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I am retired. I am not yet 65, so I buy medical insurance in the individual market. Don’t people have the option to decline employer coverage? If the government says they can’t, then I suppose that is a mandate. But I don’t see your point.
Mike M: “Don’t people have the option to decline employer coverage? If the government says they can’t,”
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My strong supposition is that regular employees can’t decline health insurance. Also, my strong supposition is that this for economic reasons in that the private insurers would want a large pool that would include healthy employees. Otherwise, there would be a strong tendency for the healthy to opt out.
JD
JD Ohio
Especially if they could accept the money their employer paid in health benefits as income!
j ferguson: “I think the part we’re choking on is that it’s not really insurance that we’re talking about but paying the medical expenses when people cannot afford them. it looks like the country agrees that this should happen.â€
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SteveF (Comment #160756): “the controversy has almost nothing to do with ‘health insurance’, but has everything to do with paying for health care for those who can’t pay for it themselves.”
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Not quite that simple. There is also the issue of people who can normally pay for themselves not wanting to be afraid of being reduced to penury by exceptional medical bills. Such people do not always have room in their budgets for medical insurance, or pre-Obamacare, could not get such insurance at all. Then there is the issue of runaway medical costs. And the issue of opaque billing practices.
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“I agree that there is a broad consensus to not have people dying in the streets for lack of health care.”
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Of course, that is not happening now, at least to any great degree. The prevailing ethic among providers with respect to essential treatment is treat first, bill later. And that is required by law in ER’s.
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SteveF: “But what is missing is a grown-up public conversation about the level of care which is reasonable for the those who can’t afford it themselves”
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That is missing, but I don’t think that is, or should be, central. The current system is a huge mess even for people who can pay for themselves.
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p.s. Another problem is the use of “health insurance” and “health care” as synonyms for “medical insurance” and “medical care”. They are not the same.
MikeM,
I think a public conversation about what is a reasonable level of care to be provided for those who can’t afford to pay for it themselves is very important.
I think it’s also important to distinguish between “insurance” and “health related care”.
The former a word that should only be applied to a product that covers exceptional medical bills, rather than all the garden variety more or less expected stuff. People will get a cold from time to time, they may get poison ivy. All of these things are bills that do not reduce people to penury or don’t do so any more than a broken water heater. Treatment for poison ivy could certainly come put of pocket for many people.
Obamacare did it’s best to conflate the two items. This makes the cost of protecting against unexpected exceptional needs high– precisely because a person must buy a product that provides birth control — a product whose need is as predictable as the need to buy toilet paper.
lucia: “I think a public conversation about what is a reasonable level of care to be provided for those who can’t afford to pay for it themselves is very important.”
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There will always be people for whom care must be provided. That should be a *very* small portion of the population, much fewer than now qualify for medicaid. Others should be primarily responsible for themselves. Some will need a helping hand, but it should be to help people fulfill their responsibility, not to lift it from them. I don’t think it a good idea to tell people that there is a certain level of care to which they are “entitled”, unless they are truly unable to look out for themselves.
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lucia: “I think it’s also important to distinguish between “insurance†and “health related careâ€.
The former a word that should only be applied to a product that covers exceptional medical bills, rather than all the garden variety more or less expected stuff.”
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I strongly agree. People use “health insurance” to refer to “prepaid medical plans”. It muddies the waters in two ways.
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lucia: “Obamacare did it’s best to conflate the two items. This makes the cost of protecting against unexpected exceptional needs high– precisely because a person must buy a product that provides birth control — a product whose need is as predictable as the need to buy toilet paper.”
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So true. And yet, Obamacare plans have huge deductibles. Mine pays almost nothing until my bills are over $7000 in a single year. I don’t mind that, but I do mind paying through the nose for that plus a lot of things I have no use for.
Mike M: “There is also the issue of people who can normally pay for themselves not wanting to be afraid of being reduced to penury by exceptional medical bills.”
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I agree with this and I always insured myself only for catastrophic bills. However, Obamacare has roughly doubled the cost of this insurance for myself. (I have always been healthy) Obamacare is very bad because it is very expensive and so complex that it is beyond the capacity of 99% of the people to understand. If I spent the time, I could understand it (because of my workers’ comp background), but I simply rely on a very good health insurance broker. The idea that people without very substantial exposure to the healthcare system are supposed to plow through these very complex coverages is a a joke.
JD
JFerguson, I had suspected you were being sarcastic, because your proposal is so similar. Many are exempt from the ObamaCare mandate, as I suspect they would be under your proposal. You can’t charge people taxes if they don’t have the money. The Constitution allows for direct per head taxes though.
Lucia, you say there is a substantial difference between JFerguson’s proposal and a tax penalty. The process of receiving a refund check changes it that much? How about if there was no refund check, but it is handled on the same form? That is there is line 50a $3000 UHC tax, 50b -$3000 if you have purchased health insurance(with a separate calculation on whether your income qualifies)? The mere act of adding then subtracting, makes it different than subtracting(T=T+3000; if X then T=T-3000; vs if NOT X then T=T+3000)? If calling it a subsidy changes the intentions that much, how about they change the ‘shared responsibility payment’ or whatever the mandate is called on the tax form to ‘forgoing health insurance subsidy’? The Supreme Court declared a tax was actually a penalty when they didn’t like such word games.
Either way you are agreeing with my main point. That if the mandate is unconstitutional as a tax, then so are tax credits. You came down on the side that both are constitutional. The only remaining dispute is whether ObamaCare is a tax or a penalty.
MikeM, “I think this pretty much demonstrates that in the abstract, MikeN is correct: In the abstract there is no difference between a tax rebate and a penalty. As such, if one is constitutional, then so should be the other.”
Yes, although the two proposals were so similar I didn’t think it demonstrated my point at all. Well done JFerguson! I was trying to get to the idea that if the penalty is unconstitutional, then many other parts of the tax code would fall.
I was hoping people would come up with mandate(as tax) unconstitutional but deductions and tax credits are valid because… Instead I am seeing lots of, if done differently, the mandate could be done as a tax, which means Congress is not limited by the Constitution to coerce people with the tax code.
>There is also the issue of people who can normally pay for themselves not wanting to be afraid of being reduced to penury by exceptional medical bills.
That is where catastrophic health insurance comes in, that can be very cheap, and is now banned. I read this was an issue in the 1986 elections that cost Republicans the Senate.
JD: ” The idea that people without very substantial exposure to the healthcare system are supposed to plow through these very complex coverages is a a joke.”
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Seems to me that the one good thing about the all-must-fit-one-size approach of Obamacare is that it simplifies the decision tree. At first, I just bought the cheapest PPO available from a provider with a good reputation. Then, when that insurer left the market, I went with the HMO with the best reputation and got the cheapest plan they had on offer.
DeWitt Payne: “Do you have an option to decline your company’s health insurance coverage?”
Yes, it was very easy to do so. In former years, at least one company for which I worked gave the employee a (smallish) sum of money if they made this selection.
However, with the exception of those who chose to be covered under a spouse’s plan, I don’t recall anyone who made that choice. The company used to cover perhaps 90% of the insurance cost, so it was an excellent deal. Over the years, the employer portion has been reduced — perhaps two-thirds now — and co-payments have increased. It’s still a good deal.
But it has always been voluntary, at all the companies I’ve worked for. I’m surprised that some people expect it to be mandatory. I don’t see any advantage to a company for making it so.
MikeN,
I try never to write anything sarcastic. It’s hard enough getting the idea across without begin tricky.
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My thought on the $3k healthcare tax was that it would be a line-item on everyone’s 1040. We’re on medicare so i suppose it might get washed out, but my thought was that burden of paying for medical care for those who cannot afford it, or cannot pay for costs of long term treatment ought to be shared by everyone, not just kids who don’t want to buy insurance.
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Maybe the cost of this sort of thing should be broken out of the insurance and treated for what it is, necessary expense which cannot always be afforded by those who need it.
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so to make this idea as plain as I can, let’s limit insurance to those situations which actually involve accumulating resources against the ‘possibility’ of trouble, and pay for existing health problems some other way.
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And I don;t have any trouble being taxed specifically to help share the cost of people who have real problems they can’t afford.
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As SteveF points out above, this would involve making collective decisions about what gets covered, how comfortable the care is, and what copays should be.
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I suspect a lot of my leftist brothers think that we should all enjoy the same opulence of care. For $2k annually we can receive Concierge Care from our doctor. This would get us house calls where warranted and he promises to remember our names. And there are better magazines in our special waiting room, Forbes, the Economist, etc.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing on the Left’s agenda is to stop this — make sure we all suffer out the rest of our lives sitting in waiting rooms full of old people.
MikeM
Yes. That’s why we need a conversation to discuss the extent of care that will be provided at others expense.
Well, the rhetoric under Obamacare, was the poor were entitled to a lot. It may not have worked out as true — lots of doctors won’t take mecicaid or medicare patients and so on. Gut the way discussions went made it sound like they could plausibly get heck of a lot of care for free.
This is, I think, one of the reasons many end up preferring to pay the fine rather than get the insurance. If they buy the insurance and have a more or less predictable level of medical needs, they have trouble paying for their own needs. And the irony is that this is for “insurance” that supposedly “covers” very predictable everyday things like birth control!
MikeN. (Sorry MikeM– I forgot I’d switched comments.)
Yes. It does. As I’ve explained. I’m not going to rehash those– you can scroll back and read them.
As I wrote way back:
I’ve repeating that notion several times– but your responding by providing detaiuls of a balance sheet seems to suggest you are ignoring that point rather than addressing it.
Perhaps before rehashing numerical tallies– which are irrelevant to my points– you should re-read them and try to explain why it’s not ‘different’ for a person getting a refund to be reminded each year that they are getting a subsidy vs. a person being reminded they are subsidized each year. Repetition of a tally doesn’t touch on the point I made at all.
I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with your point about what the Supreme Court decree. It’s got nothing to do with my objection and I have no particular legal theory one way or the other about it.
I’ve said I’m not making constitutional argument about what Congress is permitted to do under the taxing authority. So what the Supreme Court said is irrelevant to my observing they two ways of dealing with funding are functionally different. That difference doesn’t happen to be either (a) how it affects the tally of $$ nor (b) the constitutionality.
I have no problem with you arguing about the constitutionality of the bill. But I don’t happen to be participating in that part of the argument, and I neither agree nor disagree on it’s constitutionality. I think the mandate is a bad way to find it for other reasons– which I have explained.
SteveF,
Benefits for those who earned more than the maximum OASDI income are also capped at a maximum In addition, if your adjusted gross income is high enough, 85% of those benefits are taxed, not 50% or less. Then there’s the redistributionary aspect of SS benefits where low income earners receive far more for their tax dollars than high income earners. At current income tax rates, 39.6% of 85% is 33.66%. The marginal tax rate may be even higher than that in some income ranges. After taxes for someone retiring in 2016, that’s $1571.59/month or less. I don’t see how that qualifies as ‘escaping’. The taxes for the really high earners may be trivial, but so are the benefits.
If you’re suggesting that OASDI taxes should not be capped but benefits should still be capped. That’s a non-starter.
MikeMMikeNFWIW. I’d prefer they do precisely what J ferguson suggested. Raise taxes $3000 and permit people deductions for having gotten qualifying insurance. That gets away from the “fine penalty” aspect.
Obviously the tax law may include fines. It already does– for not witholding enough. But it’s still a fine. And I don’t think one should have a fine for “not buying insurnace”. I think it should be structured as a refund.
People, no mathematical tallies showing me the $$ value is the same in either case. This has nothing to do with the balance sheet and everything to do with making it clear that people who buy the insurance are getting a subsidy. And reminding them of this fact annually. The other structure gives people in impression they have done something wrong.
But anyway, if you think the two are no different, you should be willing to accept the structure j ferguson proposed. Because– according to you– it’s no different. So: we ought to have something we can agree on: Do it the way j ferguson structured it.
Mike M.,
More than 80% of the US population had health insurance before Obamacare. So your opinion would be that we didn’t need to do anything. That’s a minority view, possibly a very small minority.
Mike M.,
Correct.
If you think that’s bad, the loophole granted to the government by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause is even worse. For example: If you grow vegetables in your back yard for personal use only, you’re engaging in interstate commerce.
lucia,
Besides being anecdotal, was your relative that lived in Switzerland a Swiss citizen? I’m betting not because it’s not all that easy to gain citizenship. For one thing, you have to live in Switzerland for twelve years, including three of the last five before you can apply. Permanent residency requires ten years residence. You have to be granted this not only by the federal government, but also the canton and commune where you reside. In that case, she would have been subject to all the laws but not necessarily all the benefits of a citizen.
http://www.expatica.com/ch/visas-and-permits/A-guide-to-Swiss-citizenship-and-permanent-residence_107630.html#Differences
Mike M: “JD: †The idea that people without very substantial exposure to the healthcare system are supposed to plow through these very complex coverages is a a joke.â€
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Seems to me that the one good thing about the all-must-fit-one-size approach of Obamacare is that it simplifies the decision tree.”
*****
I suspect that there are real gotchas in each plan that are very hard for anyone to discover and are beyond the abilities of most people, including yours. For instance (I just got on Medicare), I have a $25 a month drug supplement. It has 4 tiers. (don’t even bother to try to understand) I was going to lower my cost a little and my insurance agent told me that the plan I was going to choose had very poor traveler’s coverage. (I travel a lot). Nothing that I would even suspect for such a small charge.
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I just got this yesterday from my credit card company. ” Re: Your account ending in xxxx
We noticed UNITED HEALTHCARE PART D charged you $201.60 this month. That’s $179.20 more than last month, so we want to make sure you know about it.” Have no idea how in particular I was charged $179 more. Suspect it has something to do with my recent fall. When I gave United authorization to charge my credit card, in my mind, I was giving it for regular monthly payments, not for additional charges related to payment for treatments or any other reason. In any event, there is something probably buried in a 10 page small print disclosure that authorizes this. If I talked to a United representative and asked that person where the authorization was in particular, I would bet that the representative would have no idea.
JD
Lucia: Switzerland
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I have a request somewhat parallel to Dewitt’s question above. What were the practices and laws that made living in Switzerland so difficult for your relative?
JD
To Mike M from JD: “I suspect that there are real gotchas in each plan that are very hard for anyone to discover and are beyond the abilities of most people, including yours.”
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I was referring to your plan and not your intellectual abilities when I used the term “yours” above.
JD
DeWitt: “More than 80% of the US population had health insurance before Obamacare. So your opinion would be that we didn’t need to do anything. ”
I never said anything even remotely resembling that. My comment re 80% was about insurance risk pools.
Lucia and DeWitt,
You might keep in mind that there is both a Mike M. and a MikeN here.
DeWitt
No. She naturalized to US from German. Of course it’s anecdotal.
The ‘lack of freedom’ was things related to rules about when stores could be open. Also, they were about to have a vote about school hours. And, evidently, in her Canton, the locals voted for different non-overlapping school hours for elementary, middle and high school. She said — based on letter to the editor– the motive for different hours was precisely to make it very difficult for mothers of school age children to organize days to work outside the home. Whether this was true, I don’t really know.
Her kids were all grown up, so that didn’t affect her. But she felt lots of things about the rules and regulations were set to create great inconvenience and limit individuals choice to organize their own lives the way they prefer. In contrast, she thought the US was the opposite.
Mike M.
Sorry,
I should cut and paste the name too! I edited the name above the quote. Sorry.
JD: ” the plan I was going to choose had very poor traveler’s coverage.”
Typically, if not always, Obamacare plans have no travel coverage other than for the ER. I don’t know what people who divide their time between two states are expected to do.
My plan is simple. My flu shot is “free”. Otherwise, the rule is simple: it ain’t covered until the total exceeds $7150.
I exaggerate only slightly.
Cost of insurance rose steeply in 1990. We had 9 employees and had been providing insurance as one of (very few) benefits. We talked to the employees and settled on a three tiered scheme. We would buy policies which had a $4,000 deductible. Employees would pay first $1,000 and company would bridge the gap from $1,000 to the $4,000 deductible. It seemed to work. At least we didn’t hear any whining. We did kick in $2,000 to cover an infection which proved resistant to everything except money.
Mike M.,
Sorry, I missed a reply.
Maybe that’s an insignificant number to you, but I don’t think a majority of Americans would agree. You might just as well say ’30 million; so what?’
DeWitt: “Maybe that’s an insignificant number to you, … You might just as well say ’30 million; so what?’”
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That’s right. I see no reason that everyone has to be insured. That is the kind of thinking that led to Obamacare. It is a free country. That includes the freedom to be imprudent. But if rates are to be kept reasonable, risk pools need enough uptake to be stable. That takes about 80%; higher is better.
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I do think that everyone should have reasonable *access* to medical care. That could be a prepaid plan, or high deductible insurance, or a HSA backed by catastrophic insurance, or whatever else the market can come up with. Let people have a choice. People should have access even if paying out of pocket. That requires fair, equitable, and transparent pricing.
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No one should loose their insurance (or be forced to pay inflated rates) because they get sick, or lose their job, or move from one state to another. That means that risk pools have to be broad enough that there are not major differences in rates between different pools. There will, of course, be differences due to age and location.
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Lower income people will need help paying for insurance and/or funding an HSA. That may extend as high as middle income.
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Some people will require direct provision of services. There will have to be safety nets for the poor, the imprudent, and the very unlucky.
DeWitt, MikeM, 10 million uninsured is pretty close to the real number. The 50 million uninsured includes illegal immigrants, young people who don’t think about it, and people eligible for Medicaid but don’t need it for now.
With a high deductible, you still get reduced prices. For car insurance and home appliance warranties, the prices go up if you have insurance, but in health care they go down.
JFerguson, not having young people shoulder the burden is separate from your proposal of a universal health care tax with rebate; we just established the effect is similar to the mandate. Young people are shouldering the burden because they are healthier while everyone is paying the same premiums. In ObamaCare there is a multiplier based on age and smoking but not enough to account for different usage. That they get $3000 from the government(which they aren’t getting) to buy the insurance doesn’t matter. If the $3000 collected from people who don’t buy is used to lower the premiums, it would still be unfair to young people, just a little less so.
Mike M: “My plan is simple. My flu shot is “freeâ€. Otherwise, the rule is simple: it ain’t covered until the total exceeds $7150.
I exaggerate only slightly.”
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My experience is way different than yours. I do doubt that everything over $7150 is covered, which is where the most complexity would arise. However, I have not seen your policy, so I can’t know.
JD
MikeN
But the structure Jferguson describes has two function absent in Obamacare:
1) Those who get the rebate know they were subsidized.
2) The degree to which the young are burdened to support the old is made clear to both the old and young.
These two features are important. They also make the unfairness to the young less because under Obamacare, not only is one fiscally unfair to them, but people don’t even recognize that the young are being saddled with supporting the old. When you are saddled with a burden, and those supported aren’t even aware of the burden you are carrying, that’s even more unfair. It’s an type of unfairness that is not reflected in the $ balance sheet.
>When you are saddled with a burden, and those supported aren’t even aware of the burden you are carrying, that’s even more unfair.
I would argue the other way around. It’s less unfair if you don’t realize it.
Either way, JFerguson said he wanted to not have the young shoulder the burden. They are still being saddled with it, but now they are aware of it.
There was an ad for Obamacare signups, ‘When you sign up for insurance, it makes it easier for him to get health care.’ Mickey Kaus recommended going beyond that with special trinkets for people to show off that they signed up, like how a Prius is deliberately designed strange. Perhaps a special black or gold health insurance card.
Has anyone followed the visa reform process? They are implementing extreme vetting. Also there is a separate memo that appears to eliminate the H1B visa as its being used now. It’s a little confusing, and I would think if it did that it would be getting more attention.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocuments/PM-6002-0142-H-1BComputerRelatedPositionsRecission.pdf
MikeN, My thought was that the young should not be unevenly saddled with the burden, that it should be shared by everyone. My scheme was naive, but I thought pretty plain.
Cheating much easier with technology. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/04/15/calls-airport-style-searches-students-exams-following-telegraph/
Ran into this article by chance, which is relevant to this post. States that airport like searches may be necessary on exams.
JD
JD,
When I see various “cheat” devices, many seem to involve phones. The one you link seems to as well
Clearly, phones, which are larger, should not be permitted.
If cheating ends up only requiring something that small and nothing larger to supplement it.. well, it’s going to be hard to thwart!