Author Archives: Matt Souders

Community Conservatism: Healthcare Under Fire

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The “A”CA – Good for Elites, Bad for the Middle Class

Contain the Cost of Healthcare and Preserve Options for the Middle Class

This is an issue that requires a bit of an introduction. We believe it is very important to recognize that our healthcare system is both incredible in its productivity and humanity…and very much broken. The middle and lower class see healthcare is a pressing concern because the cost to maintain insurance is getting high enough that it is forcing some serious and uncomfortable decisions onto struggling families who have to balance their budgets. The CBO estimates that, by the year 2045, the average American family will spend nearly 20% of its take-home pay on health insurance (about what they currently spend on their mortgage!). At the same time, unfunded liabilities to cover the cost of government-backed health programs like Medicare and Medicaid will soon account for 100% of all estimated tax revenue taken by the government. While we briefly mention Medicare, for anyone looking to find out more about this, Reuben A. Guttman, a false claims attorney interviewed may be something worth looking into, as his insight into the medical field may give people a better understanding of what impact false claims may have on this industry and for patients.

This is obviously an enormous problem. One that threatens to destroy our economy, cripple our access to quality care, and generally make us miserable in the not so distant future.

There are many theories for how we might go about solving this problem, but few of them have been fleshed out enough to back with the force of legislation. Prior to the bastardized half-breed of state-driven insurance mandates and taxes that is now commonly known as the Affordable Care Act, there were two competing visions for the future of healthcare in American. On the left, you had advocated for a single-payer state-run healthcare system as is common throughout the European Union and in Canada, among other places. On the right, you had advocated for transparency in healthcare service charges, tort reform, and interstate insurance commerce. The left’s concept would immediately be recognized by the American public as a massive tax hike. The right’s concept is a series of piecemeal, small-scale ideas that don’t sound like they can really fix the problem of out-of-control healthcare costs on their own.
The healthcare system has cost far beyond the basic ones associated with providing care directly. There are costs associated with:

• Medical Research and Development (and government regulation thereof)
o The research has basic costs
o The government heavily regulates how this research must proceed to get drugs and equipment to market
o The government research institutions try to assist in a wide variety of areas and this unfocused mandate yields inefficiencies
• Malpractice Insurance
o Private practice doctors report that something like half of their profits go straight to malpractice coverage because malpractice lawsuits now routinely go for huge payouts and the insurer must cover the cost. With serious injuries as a result of a healthcare provider’s negligence occurring, it’s no wonder payouts are as large as they are.
• Hospital Administration
o Here again, there are basic administration costs for running any healthcare business
o And then there are bloated government regulations that require record-keeping that rarely makes sense and is exceedingly expensive, while forcing administrators to retain fleets of expensive lawyers
• The Actual Medical Care
o Even here, there are basic costs…and then there are costs associated with doctors padding their bills to bilk the insurance companies (or at least to force them to pay out as much as they possibly can)
o And further, there is the cost of unpaid medical care given to people who are not insured and cannot pay
o And, ironically, there is the added cost of the government’s drive to get us to see our doctors more regularly (preventive care), which has yet to show any evidence of reducing expensive and undesirable health outcomes
• Insurance Company Administration
o And then we have the insurers – who are, themselves, heavily regulated by the government, and are also guilty of padding their bottom lines, and perhaps of paying out more than they should when doctors are overbilling
• American Status as Cost Sponge
o What I mean here – the US is doing most of the work to lead the way on new medical breakthroughs because countries running on single-payer systems or depending on US financial assistance to function cannot afford to do high end medical research – the result is that all of the world comes here to advance medical science (at great cost to our government research institutions), but we in the U.S. pay higher prices for all of the beneficial new drugs and technology they produce, because other places around the world can’t pay enough for big pharma and big med-tech to break even without us being charged far more

The ACA does, to its credit, recognize many of the places where profiteering, waste and excessive spending are occurring, but the liberal answer to each spending sore spot is the heavy hand of more regulation. Rather than just propose a series of bills the way we’ve done elsewhere in this series, we will explain what the ACA does about each sore spot and the risks that method poses vs. what the conservative counter should be. We’ll use the same bullets from above to organize our plan.

A) Medical R&D Costs

The ACA doesn’t specifically address medical research in a major way, other than to levy a medical device tax and make matters worse for research, but the common answer on the left is to move the cost out of the private sector and into increased government spending on the issue. This way, private sector companies can charge less for the drugs and technology they produce and the actual cost of the work can be spread among the taxpayers less obviously. The conservative approach would include carefully relaxing certain regulations on big pharma and big med-tech regarding the cumbersome and lengthy process to get from experimental drug to approved market-ready drug or experimental medical device to sales and reduce the scope and cost of the FDA. It would also include a restructuring of the NIH, CDC and other government health researchers to significantly narrow their focuses and cut the sugar out of their research diets. And finally, the GOP approach should include a repeal of the medical device tax in the ACA.

B) Medical Malpractice

The ACA doesn’t even tackle the cost of malpractice insurance for private practitioners or legal counsel for hospitals – one of its most disappointing failures, but one that is understandable, considering that the Federal Legislature can’t really regulate state civil courts). The left has, traditionally, completely ignored the increasing need for tort reform. Unfortunately, so has the right. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a Republican talk about the need for it, but they tend to be economists, rather than politicians with any clout. The GOP must act now to enact stiff limits on settlement amounts in medical malpractice cases in the states. We recognize that medical mistakes are always extremely damaging and life-altering (or ending) for their victims. This is why many of them will enlist the help of a medical malpractice lawyer (just check out this law firm here which has resulted in $2.25 million for things like drug defects in medical cases). We also recognize that the legal system shouldn’t be a lotto-draw for someone looking to get even with a doctor or make a quick killing after a mistake. The GOP should also enact “loser pays” laws for all civil matters, including medical malpractice. Unfortunately, these are generally matters reserved for the states, and the GOP must spearhead the effort at the state level to address them. If you have suffered a medical concern and feel like malpractice has occurred, checking out the time period to sue for medical malpractice can help you if you have had to wait a period of time to raise the issue.

C) Hospital Administration and Record-Keeping

The ACA likely made these costs much worse, I’m afraid, by changing medical billing codes to a ludicrous, byzantine array of unrecognizable codes and further regulating how this information is to be collected. The GOP should move to vastly simplify medical insurance/incident/billing codes, and take a more holistic approach to auditing hospital financial and medical records.

D) Medical Fees and Insurance Models

As we know, the ACA attempts to decrease the number of people who are uninsured and thus to lower the liabilities for hospitals who must treat all patients, whether or not they are insured, by requiring that everyone get health insurance and taxing you if you do not. On top of this, the ACA requires all businesses of a certain size (more than 50 full time employees) to offer health insurance or pay massive fees. The ACA requires that children under the age of 26 be allowed to remain covered by their parents. And it requires that insurance companies never reject someone who has a pre-existing condition. And finally, the ACA requires that those plans cover a huge range of medical services in an attempt to capture all of the potential costs. The theory was that young, healthy people were going uninsured to avoid paying for it when they felt invincible at rates high enough to balance out all of the people who’d been rejected for preexisting conditions. The mandate-driven approach has proved to be a spectacular failure. Many are choosing to pay the tax – especially the healthy – many more are finding that their plans are far too expensive and have huge deductibles as insurance companies look for ways to shield themselves from the increased cost of covering high risk people. And, of course, if the government is forcing the insurers to cover everyone, many insurers will drop out of the marketplace, and that is exactly what is happening.

Having said all of that, we do not think that every idea in the ACA is bad and we do not think it is necessarily the best approach to wholesale repeal it at this point. We believe that there should be a national program to provide everyone with catastrophic insurance (to protect hospitals for huge unpaid bills, and patients from bills that ruin them financially). We also believe “guaranteed issue” and the clause extending coverage to children under the age of 26 are popular because they are necessary. We even believe the idea of a national health insurance marketplace is a very good one (we wouldn’t have the government running it, we’d set up a cooperation between the various health insurance providers and let a private company maintain the marketplace). Here is what a conservative plan would look like:

• Repeal the individual and employer mandates
• Require all Americans to buy catastrophic coverage plans the same way we require them to buy at least minimal collision insurance if they drive
• Nationalize the healthcare market (no more state insurance networks; this is not simply “selling across state lines”, this is true nationalization) and allow insurers to offer a la carte supplemental coverage – if you need coverage for prenatal care, you buy it; if you need coverage for prescription drugs, you buy it, etc.
• Require healthcare providers (private doctors and hospitals and clinics) to publicly announce their price points on a government-managed website for all of their procedures to allow consumers to price compare instead of being blind to the cost – market awareness frequently leads to market efficiency
• Require insurers to similarly announce what they’ll pay out for given procedures (in an attempt to prevent the sort of “doctor charges way too much to max out what the insurer will pay out” games we previously mentioned)
• Give tax credits to people who buy preventive care packages and repeal the Cadillac tax
• Enact the Ryan/Wyden plan for Medicare

E) Insurance Company Administration

The ACA includes a bunch of downright frightening top-down controls in an attempt to reign in insurance payouts for Medicare (because retired people are expensive, health wise, and paid for on the government dime), including but not limited to yet another in a long line of ill-advised price-fixing schemes promulgated by the left. They keep trying to fix the market to their liking and it keeps going spectacularly wrong and cause misery every time. This time, I’m referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board. While I would stop short of calling it a ‘death panel’, there is excellent reason to fear this entity and its impact on the end of life process. IPAB will basically regulate insurance company payouts to Medicare by fiat, which will cause doctors and hospitals to begin to refuse to perform certain procedures, leading to a downward spiral in the quality of care for the elderly. We saw a glimpse of this with the VA – where aging WWII and Korean War veterans were being denied access to treatments and redirected to hospice care in some cases. The left sees the IPAB as a way to end insurance company inefficiency and doesn’t understand why this process should lead inexorably to premature death in some cases, but we have many examples – starting with the British National Health Service. The conservative answer to insurance company bloat and overpayment is, as noted above, to improve price transparency and let the customers straighten out the market. We would also add that government could play a role here with some far less heavy-handed regulations on payouts based on the going market rate for the service, once the service itself is priced publicly. Data is power – market data leads to a powerful market. Either way, the IPAB must be dismantled as soon as possible.

We’ve laid out many proposals here that attempt to make healthcare decisions less costly and stressful for the middle class, but rest assured, we’ve barely scratched the surface. We are hoping that this will start a dialogue among conservatives as to what sort of healthcare platform GOP Congressmen should build heading into 2016.

Community Conservatism – Choosing Education that Works

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Making Education Work for the Middle Class

A) Simplify the Department of Education by Block Granting Most of its Budget to the States

Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Herman Cain all tried appealing to conservatives in the primaries in 2012 with the simple-minded proposal that we should simply abolish entire Federal departments. There is a certain libertarian appeal toward deleting expensive and useless departments with good-sounding mandates but bad results. We get that. But the public – the conservative public – rejected such notions and elected the guy that wanted to streamline the government and increase state power in an attempt to make government work properly, rather than giving up on government entirely. We believe most in the middle class want to see their government achieve results, rather than gambling that the results will happen naturally without government interference. We believe the GOP must embrace the notion of governing. One way to do that, is to let the states make decisions about education policy by handing them the money and reducing the role of the Federal department to that of balance sheet management and effectiveness monitor with a mandate to make sure that state programs are producing results and striking state policies that fail. We recognize that much of the spending is already block granted to the states – we are proposing to further shrink the Federal budget and return that money to the states with fewer restrictions on how it is spent.

B) Pass Federal Legislation Protecting the Right of Parents to Choose Homeschooling

There is a move afoot in some states to ban homeschooling – we have seen the same sort of movement in the EU and elsewhere in the developed world and it has led to some frightening limitations on liberty that no one should wish to see replicated in the US. The middle class, in particular, is interested in new and innovative education solutions including massive open online courses (MOOCs) at all educational levels and a variety of other homeschooling models. Some of these models are even designed to help benefit those children who may be better suited to the one on one educational method due to learning impediments such as Non-Verbal Learning Disability (Read more here: https://littlethinkerscenter.com/parents-guide/learning-challenges/non-verbal-learning-disability/) that could impact them greatly in a traditional classroom. Instead of forcing a change for the sake of ease of management, let’s get on the right side of history and liberty before we find ourselves unable to act decisively.

C) Incentivize States to Enact School Choice Laws

It is not within the appropriate jurisdiction of the Federal legislature to mandate open school choice, in our opinion, but we can encourage the states to accept that school choice is in high demand by the lower and middle classes by increasing federal awards to states that back successful public charter, public magnet, private, parochial and homeschooling alternatives, such as the CLEP program and the clep prep supplementary material that follows, monetarily and favor successful schools over bad ones in the distribution of education budgets, and by giving states bonuses that are efficient with their education funds (generate better performance to dollar ratios).

D) Back Trade Schools, MOOCs and Private Colleges with Oversight

One of the biggest problems with the alternatives to public colleges that prevent employers from giving much value to job applicants who obtain certifications and technical degrees from private technical schools, MOOCs and trade schools is that it’s the wild west for these colleges and they are under no obligation to provide a useful and quality education. Take a note here – because you will rarely see us asking for more federal regulation, but this is one such case. The Federal Government must promote alternatives to expensive public colleges to help ameliorate the growing higher education bubble and keep young people out of debt (and, in so doing, grow the future middle class). In order for us to break our addiction to student loans – click here to learn more – we must empower high school kids to choose high school and college curricula that lead to technical certifications and trades, and we can’t do that until we can guarantee that our private and technical/trade colleges meet basic standards of educational value that will convince employers to hire people certified and degreed by such institutions. The standards need not be identical to the public system, but quality assurance should be required.

E) Encourage States to Enact Reforms that Limit Public Degrees that Do Not Produce

Here again, it would be beyond the scope of Congress to start outlawing college degree programs that do not produce expected revenue that justifies their existence – what we can do, however, is increase the available federal assistance for students who are majoring in a STEM, manufacturing, or technical field (and any other degree program with a solid history of wealth creation), decrease federal assistance for less productive or overrepresented majors, and tie interest rates to risk (a risky degree like puppetry or cultural studies should come with much higher interest rates than a STEM degree). Federal student loans should be treated like the investment they were billed to be, not like a pipeline of money that students may use and abuse to their heart’s content. Although student loans can seem like free money, it’s important to understand that the money is provided to make your university experience less stressful for you; The loans are intended to prevent you from having to worry about economic factors. However, if you find your loan doesn’t fully cover your university experience, you might want to see if you could get free money for college. Remember, college degrees should improve the US economy, not burden it.

F) Pass a Law Requiring a Government Census of College Degree performance and Making Info Available Online

Openness and transparency in financial outcomes and expenditures usually has the immediate impact of change the demand for products based on rational financial decision-making. College degrees are a bit more emotional than the average investment opportunity, so having good data on which degrees are good investments and which are not will not stop bad degrees from existing, but I believe it will alter the number of students falling for them (because it will cause parents to deny their children’s requests to attend expensive colleges in order to study something that has a poor earning potential, along with making some students think twice about choosing bad or, at least, over-saturated, degrees). So require the department of education to conduct a census of colleges and universities and their various degree programs and report information such as the default rate on student loans for each school, each degree program and each combination of the two, the graduation rate, the employment numbers, and the net earnings of students (per capita) by degree program at each school. If a college degree is an investment, we should know what the investment is worth.

G) Pass a Law Guaranteeing the Right of Refusal to Parents

One more thing that Congress cannot tackle directly, but must move to address in what ways it can is ‘Common Core’. The concept of a Federally mandated curriculum is not compatible with liberty and the GOP should move to guarantee the right of all families to refuse to participate in common core and choose a different standard. This won’t help parents who are currently stuck in public schools and don’t have a viable alternative, but as GOP governors work on the problem of school choice, it will be crucial that alternative programs have the right to opt out of common core and use different teaching methods and standards.

Education is a state problem for the most part, as it should be, and in spite of efforts by leftists to nationalize and further institutionalize learning – but that doesn’t mean the legislature can’t take certain steps to lead on education policy and encourage the states to be bold and innovative o their own. Middle class families are aching for a better way forward for their children ad Congress should show that this is a priority for them as well.

Community Conservatism – Government Accountability and Service

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Restoring Faith in Public Institutions

One effect of the Obama administration that many conservatives think is, somehow, positive, has been the massive deterioration in public trust in government. Liberty-minded folks have variously argued that the millennial generation has no faith at all in government and that this makes them budding allies against liberalism. We would argue that millennial voters now attempting to enter the middle class all seem to want badly to believe that government can work and that Democrats are better at garnering their votes by promising that the latest wave will be the ones to restore that trust. We believe that being conservative is not the same as being anti-government, and that we need to seize upon this opportunity to convince a frustrated generation of Americans that conservatives can govern, that government can be a positive force if properly restrained, and that we can make the system work. Accountability and an end to cronyism are the keys.

A) Abolish Federal Employee Unions

Franklin D. Roosevelt – the granddaddy of all classical US progressives – believed that it was wrong to allow federal employees to unionize, because it represented a fundamental conflict of interest when they bargain with the same people for their benefits that they use union funds to elect. One of the major sources of “good-pole-boys” cronyism in Washington is the persistent political power of federal employee unions. Many of the same people lobbying Congress to enact the Affordable Care Act, for example, were members of the union for IRS employees. Federal employees should not be shielded from the realities of the policies enacted by Washington, and they should not have collective power to exert over policies that they must enforce, by which they themselves do not live.

B) Pass the ARM Act

Don’t go looking for that acronym – I invented it (sounds strong and impressive, right?). The Annual Reporting Mandate law would require all federal agencies granted budgetary allowances to report precisely how those funds were spent to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and would task Congress with affirming that those funds were properly disbursed in the service of the mandate of the agencies, issuing refund requirements when agency spending is not deemed appropriate. Simple, albeit time consuming, this annual review of the unelected fourth branch of government would force transparency and keep federal agencies leaner and less prone to fraud and abuse (this should include the Federal Reserve).

C) Pass ‘Unrevolve’ Legislation

No one is surprised, anymore, when someone from a government agency is fired for malfeasance of incompetence, latches on with a lobby firm, and returns a few years later, under a new administration. No one is alarmed when members of Congress lose political races and are immediately absorbed by lobbies, PACs and Wall Street, only to return to politics shortly thereafter in a new state. This phenomenon was given the term of ‘revolving door’ and ensures that no one is ever truly held accountable when they behave as political operatives within the system, breaking rules to achieve political ends, even if they are caught. Congress should act to bar people who have been by PACs, lobbying firms or other specifically politically organizations from serving as elected officials or as appointees in government agencies. The same bill should provide for the enactment of new, harsher penalties, the revocation of pensions and the lifetime barring of any government employee implicated in wrongdoing or incompetence while in service. It’s not clear that we can ever completely stop the crony wheels from spinning, but we can make it much more difficult for political operatives to avoid accountability.

D) Codify The Ryan Plan for Better Service

We’ll talk much more about containing the cost of our unfunded entitlement liabilities and securing those benefits for future generations in a later installment, but while we’re on the subject of government accountability, one of the main reasons that even the poor who are being theoretically most served by the safety net have lost faith in government is that customer service and accountability in government flat out sucks. As someone who is legally blind, I have had the misfortune to require access to the Social Security Goliath, and let me tell you – the way in which the government disseminates benefits, administers mistakes, keeps tabs on benefit recipients, and attempts to improve their standards of living is hopefully out of date, painfully bureaucratic, inaccessible and, frequently, just plain dehumanizing.

But you don’t have to be receiving SSI or retirement assistance or Medicare or veteran’s benefits to know how appallingly depressing government services are. Just take a look around your local DMV office the next time you’re updating your state ID or driver’s license. What you’ll see in any government office from the IRS to the DMV to the SSA is a collection of overworked, miserable employees using hilariously out of date computer systems, handling citizens as though they were cattle, and generally taking their frustrations out on people who need their help. It’s a bleak landscape filled with despair and dependency and no one enjoys it – not even those who claim to be perfectly happy to stay on welfare (and yes, they do exist). If conservatives would like to shed the unfair label of uncaring toward the poor, they should take steps to improve customer service while reducing the cost of that service and saving the taxpayers money. Fortunately, Paul Ryan has devoted considerable ink to discussing how he would accomplish this. The basic tenets of his plan go as follows:

• Nuke the federal workers unions (as already discussed) and allow federal and state agencies to fire employees who do not work with compassion and manners toward their charges.
• Instead of funding (at last count) 86 separate federal anti-poverty programs, many of which overlap in their missions, creating enormous redundancy and waste, while confusing the heck out of the public, block grant federal budget dollars to the states and establish achievement-based standards in the provision of such programs (in other words, judge the merit of state-run anti-poverty, affordable housing, healthcare, preventive care, and nutrition programs by how well they work, rather than by the appeal of their stated mandates), to be run by the states and scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Let the states have considerable latitude to experiment on needs-based programs, but revoke programs that fail to improve outcomes or that get horrible customer service ratings. This review is to be conducted annually.
• Rather than sending each citizen to many different offices to manage his or her benefits, establish a personal management system in which all people seeking any type of benefit consult by appointment with one social worker who oversees all of their needs – in this way, re-humanize the process and establish a relationship between the citizen in need and the resources at his or her disposal, while making interacting with the state more efficient and more frictionless for the customer. Each social worker can probably handle hundreds of recipients at a time without an overworked schedule, and without life-sucking endless waits in lines to be seen by a stressed-out bureaucrat who doesn’t know anything about your needs. This managed model has proven to be more cost-effective in private sector human resource management as well.
• Give civic non-profits and religious organizations access – don’t limit petitions for participation in new state anti-poverty programs to government bureaucrats. In this way, empower (through the provision of federal grants) the mediating “civic society” to do good works that can be tracked by the government and good ideas duplicated when they prove effective. Turn the generosity and goodwill of the people into a giant engine of creativity that stands a better chance of rescuing the poor.

This basic template should be honed into policy that can stand as a strong platform for Republicans running for office in 2016 and unite social conservatives with the poor and disaffected that they wish to help, broadening the potential voter base for the Republican Party through improved dialogue.

Final Note: I considered discussing the possibility of pushing a Constitutional amendment that would enact term limits for Congressmen, Senators and Federal Judges, since this is an idea that is growing increasingly popular as anti-incumbent sentiments rise nationally, but I believe that is a concept that has strong plusses AND strong minuses and should be more carefully considered at the state level before any action is taken.

Community Conservatism – Reviving the Middle Class Economy

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Governing for a Healthy Middle Class Economy

Conservatives do not believe that the government can “create” jobs directly. This canard of the left does nothing but destroy market-driven, sustainable jobs at the expense of increasing the national debt and attaching an anchor to GDP growth in exchange for short term government employment and expanded private sector government influence. That doesn’t mean that a conservative Congress can’t stand for job creation. The way we get there is by providing the modern infrastructure, economic freedom, and competitive tax code that attract, rather than repel the world’s wealth. We want to decrease the cost of doing business here at home and focus government resources on business-supportive roles, rather than coercive ‘partnerships’. It begins with a smarter tax code.

A) Pass Corporate Tax Reform (dare Obama to veto)

I don’t recommend settling for half-measures here and I recommend putting this near the top of the agenda for 2015. Obama has, on multiple occasions, put Corporate tax reform in his state of the union address in his 6 years in office (five addresses, 4 mentions). Corporate tax reform that accomplishes the closing of certain loopholes, the ending of certain forms of corporate welfare, and the reduction of rates to something that competes with the rest of the developed world has broad, bipartisan support among the voting middle class. In Washington, such measures have met with stiff resistance from corporate lobbies who do not want to see the corporate tax base broadened to include them, specifically (through the removal of loopholes). Let the GOP stand for the voters, not for special interests, and pass comprehensive corporate tax reform that does the following:

• Cuts the corporate tax rate to 25% at most
• Creates a two-tiered capital gains tax bracket, where all capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate below $250,000 each year
• Excises many of the tax-sheltering loopholes used by the biggest corporations to avoid paying; in particular, the shelters to profits earned overseas by American companies
• Gives corporations a ‘tax holiday’ to repatriate foreign capital until January of 2021
• Creates a lower corporate tax rate for wealth generated by manufacturing concerns – 15%, perhaps

There are, I’m certain, other great ideas that could be included in a sweeping change like this, and we’re all ears. This is just a start. The goal is to create an environment that encourages businesses to take risks and expand their workforce here at home without taking the punitive approach championed by Obama (penalize companies that keep their money overseas, rather than improve the economic climate at home).

B) Pass the REINS Act (obtain Obama’s veto)

REINS is a relatively simple piece of legislation passed in the GOP-controlled house and left to gather dust in Harry Reid’s file cabinet. It requires congress to approve all regulations in excess of $100M as scored by the Congressional Budget Office each year. If said regulations cannot be approved, they are immediately stricken. This is good policy on so many levels, not the least of which is that it maintains the separation of the non-political government agencies from the political process in the drafting of public policy regulations but forces Congress to exercise some oversight on those regulations that are particularly costly. We recognize that regulatory science should not be trapped by the political process, but we also believe that unelected agencies should not have carte blanche to pass regulatory rules without oversight that serve as a huge burden to economic growth. It will give the voters some ability to hold their representatives responsible for the regulatory state and encourage those who draft said regulations to minimize their costs or garner broad public support for their necessity. It will also make public the CBO scoring of the cost of every major regulation, helping the public to get a sense for the true costs and benefits of each.

C) Return the Full-Time Workweek to 40 Hours

We’ll talk more about the Affordable Care Act when we get to healthcare, but one of the most pernicious things the ACA accomplished was to effectively reduce the American workweek to 30 hours in the eyes of the law. Democrats supported this concept to avoid the tendency of corporations to get 39 hours of work per week out of employees to avoid having them counted as full time and thus be forced to offer benefits. The problem, of course, is that reducing the workweek to 30 hours meant a lot of people just got cut down to 29 hours. If you’re a struggling poor or working class American, this tends to drive you to take two part time jobs and you end up working more and still not getting benefits, or working drastically less and not making enough money to survive. If all else fails, regarding the ACA, increasing the workweek back to 40 hours at least offers some relief for people in this situation (and the CBO projects a big surge in part time labor under the ACA as it currently stands).

D) Expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit

Right now, if you earn less than $11,000 for an individual or $88,000 for a family filing jointly, and are legally eligible for that work, you can claim an earned-income tax credit (variable by family size and earnings). The EITC is good policy for the poor and working classes and should be expanded with increased credit sizes (perhaps another 30-40% proportionally) and availability (up to incomes of less than $125,000 for a family filing jointly). Make this revenue neutral by creating a “super-wealthy” tax bracket (>$1,000,000) that is taxed at a slightly higher rate and by eliminating eligibility for certain tax credits for people in this new upper tax bracket. Normally, the GOP is not associated with eve the smallest of tax increases for the wealthy, but if we reduce corporate taxes as previously outlined, this sort of minor compromise will come out in the wash while selling as good, fair tax policy to middle class voters.

E) Exempt Small and Moderate-sized Businesses from Burdensome Regulation

Small business start-ups are responsible for the majority of new jobs that pay above the media household income. They’re also in sharp decline here in the US. One of the major reasons for this is that, when Congress enacts legislation to regulate business, it does so with larger businesses in mind. We recognize that it is indeed necessary to regulate larger corporations, because they can have disproportional impacts on the environment, the free market, and the welfare of the people. We also recognize that big business can absorb the cost of our most aggressive regulations, but small business cannot. We also believe it is unreasonable for small businesses, frequently run by citizens without the resources to educate themselves on the full extent of the regulatory state cannot be expected to comply to the same degree as larger corporations, and that their likely impact on people, the market or the economy is greatly reduced. We, therefore, must pass a law stating that regulations determined to be of great impact by the CBO as in the REINS act, should be applied only to corporations with greater than 250 employees or more than a negotiable amount of total assets.

F) Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley and Replace with Common Sense Reporting

Again on the subject of over-regulation, this panic-move following Enron’s collapse is among the worst offenders for needless corporate regulatory burden, annually costing billions in the private sector for compliance and producing no change in accounting transparency. It reminds us of the mindless and often pointless busywork we used to get in school, and compliance requires companies to hire a fleet of folks who are specifically experts in the labyrinthine letter of this law. It must go and be replaced by much simpler-to-follow guidelines for financial reporting.

G) Greenlight Keystone XL and Other Energy Infrastructure Projects on Federal Lands

The latest estimate by industry sources is that Keystone XL pipeline would create in excess of 20,000 good paying jobs immediately and have extensive multiply impacts on the job market, not to mention making it cheaper to move oil to high-demand parts of the country where oil prices are currently far too high. Our best environmental impact studies conclude that the XL pipeline would be a net positive for the environment if you assume that the alternative is transport by rail, rather than non-use. This is a no-brainer.

H) Abolish the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Allow Nuclear Energy Expansion – Complete Yucca Mountain Facility for Waste Management

As the science improves to reduce waste products from nuclear fission power, and as the EU and Japan continue to move ahead of us on safe, clean nuclear energy, our ability to innovate and, perhaps, solve the problem of excessive fossil fuel emission is stymied by the anti-science left’s crusade against Nuclear Energy. It’s time to stop being parochial and superstitious in the face of overwhelming evidence that nuclear energy is, by far, our best source of affordable, clean energy.

I) Abolish the Export/Import Bank

It may not be immediately apparent how ending this brand of corporate welfare can help create jobs, but it becomes clearer when you realize that many of the businesses that benefit from Ex/Im assistance are the non-dynamic, struggling corporations not likely to hire a large labor force, and it always seems to come at the expense of healthy competition. Again, the key to job creation is a competitive, free market that rewards well-run companies, not the ones out begging for federal dollars to stay afloat and squash upstarts.

Long Slow Burn – GruberGate as a Microcosm

GRRRRRR

We, here, at The Liberty Papers do not generally share our correspondence, but the big issues of the day are, in fact, talked about at length in our site’s Google Group as we coordinate what we’ll be talking about at this lovely blog. Without being specific or quoting anyone directly, I would like to put forward what the group reaction was to the so-called ‘GruberGate’ scandal. In a word:

‘Meh’

If you’ve been living under a rock or watching nothing but MSNBC (same difference, really), I’ll give you a quick summary of what GruberGate entails. For six years, conservatives have blasted away at the Affordable Care Act (hereafter, the ACA). For six years, we’ve been talking about how the promises made by people trying to get it passed were impossible to keep, how the bill would raise the deficit, make healthcare more expensive and less stable, drive away doctors, narrow your networks of providers – basically the exact opposite of every claim put forward by Democrats between 2008 and 2012. The media uncritically reported White House talking points for most of that time, doing absolutely zero digging and finding no evidence of problems with the law as a result.

Then some guy who’d lost his insurance after being promised that that wouldn’t happen and decided to do some actually investigating. Within a day of beginning his search, he found video footage of one of the ACA’s chief architects, Jonathan Gruber, candidly discussing the ACA with his peers in Academia in which he said THIS (follow the links to see the videos), THIS, and THIS.

Many things have been said about GruberGate, and I won’t rehash them here. The response to this story by many libertarians (not just those of us writing here) has been a collective “well duh!” We have, after all, been talking about everything that Gruber willingly admits in his various talks on the ACA – that it’s a pack of lies intended to fool the American taxpayer by fooling the Congressional Budget Office, that it amounts to a giant national experiment and the architects have no clue what it’ll do, that expanded coverage can’t happen without raising revenue to pay for it, and that the archetype (RomneyCare) was already a failure, being propped up by federal dollars all along. We knew all of that. The insults he lobs at the American voters aren’t entirely unfounded either. Many Americans, like it or not, vote without any idea of what they’re supporting. So why should we get up in arms over it.

After arguing rather cantankerously with my fellow bloggers here, trying to explain why this story enraged me so, it dawned on me what was really going on in my head. I may come to self-awareness later than I should on occasion, but I generally get there if I think on it long enough. This whole story – the story of the Affordable Care Act from conception, to birth, to signing, to repeal efforts to angry Americans who feel lied to and voting R to prove something to the left to the GruberGate controversy…it is a microcosm of everything I’ve been battling for years.

When the ACA was first being discussed, the conservative reaction was a combination of people like those in my family, who were horrified by the likely outcome of such a bill and who relied heavily on health insurance to make their various medical problems affordable to treat, but who reacted by studying the proposal and attempting to logically argue as to why it was a very bad bill indeed…and people screaming at town hall meetings because they just instinctively feared such a big, sweeping change. It’s human to fear change, and in this case their fears were justified, but instead of focusing on doing the work of exposing the lies in the ACA, most of conservatism was consumed with death panels and doomsday imagery of Uncle Sam examining a woman’s lady parts (yes, that was a real conservative ad).

Now I’m not saying I think the IPAB is good for “end of life” care…it’s not. But ‘death panel’ rhetoric sounds literally insane to your typical low-information swing voter who might be swayed by bringing a convincing argument to the debate. And, of all of the conservative reactions to the ACA, which ones do you suppose were primarily covered by the media, by ACA advocates and in the political discussion on Capital Hill – the reasoned arguments as to why the ACA would fail and make things worse, or the fear-mongering?

But guess what – that made someone like me who worked hard to understand the problems with the ACA into a looney tune screaming about death panels when I voiced my opposition to the law before any leftist. They accused me of being a liar. They accused me fearing change. They accused me of not caring about the poor and the uninsured. And they had the support of, once again, an uncritical, unserious mainstream media telling them any concerns about the ACA raising costs, impairing the system, causing doctor shortages or narrow networks, etc. were just crazy conservative fear mongering. Our detached, empirical expert, Jon Gruber, says so – read the study.

When the truth came out – when it turned out that Jon Gruber believed everything I did about the ACA except the part about those results being bad for healthcare…when he gleefully admitted that RomneyCare was a failure economically, that the ACA had nothing to do with making healthcare affordable, and that he and his colleagues had no clue how to bend the cost curve down – and then had the audacity to call us stupid for believing him, I would have been satisfied. I wouldn’t have been angry for long – it would have brought some semblance of peace to be vindicated in the fight. Except that the reaction of the left was to lie even more, minimize Gruber’s roll in crafting the bill, and then…call conservatives fear mongers again for reacting to this story with anger and for losing trust in government to solve problems like these.

This is inherently the entire problem I have with the left – every time their bad ideas don’t work and people realize it, they find the loonies in the conservative ranks and make those guys their opposition, and when you try to bring reason to the party, they accuse you of just being one of the loonies. And when you turn out to be RIGHT…oh well whatever nevermind. That fight never mattered anyway – on to the next fight.

Until conservatives are willing to call liberals (and other conservatives) out for not fighting fairly, for distorting the history of the argument, for scanning through the crowd for the easiest person to attack, for straw men and lies, for parliamentary tricks and poor research, and for their ugly assumptions about the American people, we will always lose the argument. Always. And that…is what is truly terrifying me into anger. We were right. All along, conservatives were right about the ACA and the insincere, cynical motives of its creators. We were right, they were wrong, and somehow, we still lost the argument. And it’ll happen again and again until we get angry enough to turn the tables on them – to call them out on their unfair tactics and their bad science and their twisted, utilitarian assumptions.

We’re about to have the same fight on immigration. Learn to recognize their tactics and fight back, or there will come a day when you remember how right you were about the negative consequences of an open border, and how little it mattered that you were right.

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