Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 21, 2012
In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughtful essays, as the poet (more or less) put it. And if your fancy turns there too, the new spring issue of National Affairs is now online to help. Among the offerings:
James Capretta and Robert Moffit on how to replace Obamacare
John DiIulio on just how big our government really is (and why)
George Weigel on the sorry state of the liberal project
Adam White on the scourge of “independent” regulators
Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel on why inequality matters and why it doesn’t
Jay Cost on the politics of loss
And much more, including, in honor of the life of James Q. Wilson, a reprinting of a Wilson essay from the Winter 1967 issue of The Public Interest that reads like it could have been written yesterday. Some are free to all on our site, some are available only to subscribers (and here is where you can subscribe — to also get the journal in print).
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 21, 2012
Today’s New York Times editorial against the new Ryan budget is basically a reprinting of the DNC talking points that I got by e-mail yesterday before the budget was even released. The Times does, however, expand on one argument in those talking points in a way that clarifies further that the editorial was written without actually referring to the budget document it criticizes. In taking up Ryan’s Medicare proposal, the Times says:
His plan to convert Medicare to a “premium support” system, though less damaging than last year’s proposal, still weakens a guarantee to the elderly and risks driving up costs for future beneficiaries. He would still offer the elderly a fixed amount of money to shop for their own health insurance, but allow the option of enrolling in traditional Medicare.
Unfortunately, that could lead to higher costs and premiums in traditional Medicare because it would attract older and sicker patients who would be expensive to cover, while healthier, cheaper patients flocked to private plans.
Well no. First of all, this makes it sound like “the option of enrolling in traditional Medicare” is an alternative to the “fixed amount of money to shop for their own health insurance.” But the Ryan plan proposes to transform Medicare into a premium-support system and to have one government-run fee-for-service option available to seniors within that system — which would compete with private insurers for the business of seniors deciding how to use that “fixed amount of money.” It is not an alternative to premium support but an element of it.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 20, 2012
Last year, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan transformed the Republican domestic policy debate with a budget proposal that showed conservatives where they should want the Republican party to be on the key fiscal issues confronting the country: entitlement reform, tax reform, and federal spending. The success he achieved has been nothing short of extraordinary. These days, it’s hard to find anyone on the right who disagrees with Ryan’s prescription for our fiscal ills—and (which was not true a year ago) even with his proposal for Medicare reform, which is the most needful and essential of his prescriptions.
Today, Ryan has released his new budget proposal for 2013, and what he offers is no less remarkable—and in some key respects even more remarkable. The outlines are similar to last year’s budget of course. What was the right way forward then remains so: repealing Obamacare, restraining federal spending, reforming the tax code to broaden the base and lower the rates, fixing and modernizing the safety net so that it helps make the poor more independent rather than making the middle class less so, and reforming our entitlement programs—averting fiscal catastrophe by advancing the novel idea that markets work and consumer choice is better than bureaucratic mandates. The budget cuts spending by $5 trillion over the next decade (compared to Obama’s budget), reduces deficits by $3 trillion, begins to reduce the debt as a share of the economy very quickly, and (especially thanks to its Medicare reform) averts a disastrous debt crisis beyond that.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 9, 2012
As the date for Supreme Court oral arguments in the Obamacare case draws near, the White House is working to orchestrate demonstrations in support of the law. The New York Times today reports:
On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.
Looking over the constitutional arguments offered by the administration’s lawyers in defense of the individual mandate, it is perhaps not too difficult to see why the White House deemed itself in need of prayer. But the irony is pretty stunning nonetheless.
The Obama administration has just put into force a new regulation under Obamacare that amounts to the most far-reaching instance of governmental religious intolerance since the Blaine Amendments. There is no other word but intolerance to describe what the rule aims to do: It doesn’t say that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs—which of course they do have in our country. It doesn’t even say that the government should facilitate people’s access to these drugs—which of course it does today and has for many years, at great public expense. It says, rather, that the Catholic Church and others who have religious objections to the use of such drugs should facilitate people’s access to them.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 7th, 2012
I think Mitt Romney had a very good night last night: He doubled his delegate count and won six states, including an upset victory in a state much better suited to Rick Santorum’s strengths and which is next door to Santorum’s home state. But listening to him speak yesterday, and reflecting a bit on what he has had to say for himself more generally throughout this campaign, I’m left baffled by the basic message of his campaign.
Anyone running for office has to offer an answer to a very basic question: Why should I vote for you? That answer will inevitably have basically two parts: It will involve a sense of what’s wrong with the other candidate or candidates in the race, and of what’s right with you. Both are very important, perhaps even equally important, but one without the other will not do. The Romney campaign has not been paying nearly enough attention to the second of those questions. Romney makes a good case for why Barack Obama has been a terrible president, and he says nice things about why America is a great country. Both those points, however, are totally obvious to Republican primary voters, and neither of them really adds up to a case for Romney. Now, the Romney campaign is making some abject (yet unpersuasive) inevitability arguments too, telling reporters that no other candidate could get a majority of the delegates anymore. This is pretty silly: That no one else could get a majority doesn’t mean that Romney will get a majority, or that he should, and doesn’t amount to an argument for voting for him. The idea that you should vote for Romney because he is the person most likely to win the general election makes some sense as a campaign argument of course, but the idea that you should vote for Romney because he is the person most likely to win the nomination is basically insulting.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, March 2, 2012
America owes an enormous debt to James Q. Wilson, and it’s more than the obvious debt. Clearly we owe him a lot for the ideas he proposed that got enacted into enormously successful public policies—especially in the fight to save our cities from crime, but in other arenas as well. But more than that, Wilson taught several generations of political scientists and scholars of administration how to think about public policy. Not only what he did but how he did it through his long career was brilliant and innovative, and anyone who thinks about policy for a living today has learned from him—whether they know it or not.
A big part of the reason for Wilson’s success in changing how we think was the exceptional clarity and elegance of his writing. He wrote great books, but he was especially a writer of great essays—truly a master of the form. Many of the best ones, especially on matters of policy, appeared in the pages of The Public Interest through the years. Wilson first appeared in the PI’s second issue, in the winter of 1966, and he wrote no fewer than 41 essays in the course of the magazine’s 40 years.
National Affairs, which seeks to follow in the footsteps of The Public Interest (knowing that can never be more than a mere aspiration) and houses the online archive of the PI’s four decades of issues, has now made all of Wilson’s contributions to the PI (and his one National Affairs essay, from our own second issue) available in one place. The sheer breadth of subjects he took up is a tribute to Wilson’s capacious mind, and the depth of these essays is an extraordinary thing to behold.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, February 15, 2012
The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Laura Bassett report on the administration’s response to congressional efforts to overturn its contraception, sterilization, and abortion-drug mandate:
Unbowed by the dust-up from last week’s contraception debate, the Obama administration has jumped feet-first into the next round.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, in a statement to The Huffington Post, weighed in heavily against a toughly-worded measure being considered in the Senate that would greatly restrict women’s access to critical health care services.
Just what does this “toughly worded measure” do? Carney puts it plainly himself:
“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake,” said Carney. “The proposal being considered in the Senate applies to all employers — not just religious employers. And it isn’t limited to contraception. Any employer could restrict access to any service they say they object to. That is dangerous and it is wrong. Decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss.”
So it says that any employer can decide what kind of insurance he does and doesn’t want to purchase for his employees. Sounds very tough indeed.
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Published for www.nationalreview.com, February 13, 2012
The interesting thing about the early responses to the president’s budget today is how focused they have been on the tax increases on the wealthy, and the class-warfare argument the budget implicitly advances. The budget has been treated as an electioneering document, and that is surely what it is. But we are struck by its class-warfare components first and foremost because we have come to take for granted what really ought to be the most glaring and astonishing fact about this budget: its sheer, incredible, and utter fiscal irresponsibility. It completely fails to budget.
Let’s recall that this document lays out what President Obama wants to do in terms of fiscal policy in the coming years. It is what he would do if he were completely free to act as he chose. And what would that be? After having presided over three of the largest deficits in our history, the president wants to go for four, and to end his term having added $6.4 trillion to the nation’s gross debt (about as much total debt in four years as the United States amassed in its first 225 years combined). He proposes to spend more next year than this year (and next year is the only year for which this budget would actually be the budget), he offers no meaningful entitlement reform (and therefore no way out of an oncoming debt crisis), and to soften the blow he filters his spending numbers through a series of patently transparent and insulting gimmicks (for instance, he counts as savings from the Iraq and Afghanistan drawdowns money that was never even requested or budgeted in the first place, he counts interest savings from tax increases as spending cuts, he relies on completely unrealistic growth projections for the coming years, and on and on).
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, February 10, 2012
The more you look at the details of today’s White House proposal the more preposterous and infuriating it appears.
Whatever you think of the accounting trick at the heart of the rule—whether it just means the cost of the contraceptive and abortifacient benefit would be passed back to religious employers in the form of higher premiums or would be eaten by the insurers as just another price to pay for the captive population handed to them by Obamacare—the basic structure of the rule means that by contracting with an insurer to provide health coverage to their employees, religious employers would be making contraceptive and abortifacient coverage available to those employees. That’s exactly what they were opposed to in the original rule. So the “accounting gimmick” question isn’t even essential to the problem. The only difference today’s new twist makes is that now those religious employers would either also be compelling another actor—the insurer—to pay for the benefit more directly (and so compelling that other actor to act immorally too, as the religious employers see it), or they would be effectively laundering the money they use to pay for the benefit. Either one would be even worse than what was envisioned by the original rule.
Basically, this new rule would create a new class of Americans who are the only people in the country eligible to receive contraceptive and abortifacient drugs from their insurance companies at no cost, and that class of Americans would consist of the people who work for religious employers. Religious groups opposed to contraceptive or abortive drugs would put people into this class by employing them and providing them with health insurance, or else they would have to pay a fine.
And that’s a compromise? How is that not even more offensive than the original rule?
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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, February 10, 2012
If I understand the White House announcement correctly, their newly proposed rule would not actually change the moral circumstances at issue in any way.
The problem that opponents of the original rule have had is that it effectively requires religious employers to purchase a product (an insurance policy) that provides their employees with free access to contraceptive and abortifacient drugs that they would not have otherwise had, and thus requires those employers to purchase a product that violates their religious convictions. The new rule does exactly the same thing.
It puts religious employers in the position of having to choose between providing their workers with free (to the workers) access to contraceptives and abortifacient drugs or not providing those workers with health insurance at all (and also paying a large fine). The only difference is that the access to those contraceptive and abortifacient drugs would not technically be listed as one of the benefits the employer was paying for directly but would be listed as a benefit the insurer was paying for (with the money the employer paid for the broader insurance policy, of course). But employers who offer insurance don’t pay for individual benefits and products when they are provided anyway, they pay for the policy that gives their workers access to those benefits and products when they want them. Under this rule, then, it would still be the case that as a result of being employed by a religious institution that provides insurance coverage (which Obamacare would require employers to do, or else pay a large fine), workers at that institution would have free access to contraceptives and abortifacients that they would not have had if that employer did not offer insurance coverage. So it’s still the case that the rule would require religious employers to purchase a product that violates their convictions, in the same way as the original rule (a fact also highlighted by the administration’s decision to retain the exemption for actual houses of worship in this new rule, just as in the old one). The choice for religious employers is still between paying an insurer to provide their workers with access to a product that violates their convictions or paying a fine to the government.
What ground is the administration giving in this compromise? And how is it any less a violation of religious liberty?
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