Republicans and Gun Control

With the horrific back-to-back mass shootings earlier this year in El Paso and Dayton, the threat of mass shootings has seemed to reach a boiling point in this country. Americans are sickened to keep seeing this happen, again and again, with no end in sight… and they want something to be done about it. Enough is enough — and people have been saying that for years now.

After every mass shooting, people’s feelings of anger and frustration quickly turn political, since Republicans are the ones who oppose the passage of new gun laws that many feel would help solve the problem. The most common explanation I’ve seen for why Republicans don’t want to pass new gun laws is that Republicans are beholden to the NRA & the gun lobby. That they can’t pass anything that would put a dent in the gun industry, for fear of losing the support of these influential donors, and ultimately losing elections as a result.

I can’t say the NRA explanation doesn’t have any validity to it — but in my view it oversimplifies a complicated situation, and it doesn’t address any of the legitimate concerns there are with passing new gun laws.

I’ve been a conservative all my life and I’ve heard all the various arguments against gun control, and I know there are some legitimate reasons why Republicans and conservatives are averse to passing new gun laws — reasons that have everything to do with public safety and saving lives, and also a belief that passing new gun laws won’t do much to stop future mass shootings from occurring.

I write this to share where conservatives are coming from on this issue, and I also think it would be a mistake to ignore these aspects of the problem when crafting solutions. It could make a bad situation worse.

So here goes… As I see it, many of the conservative arguments against gun control can be grouped into a few basic categories.

1. Guns are often used for protection and self-defense.

When conservatives think about guns, they think about people having the ability to protect themselves and their loved ones from harm. I saw a Gallup poll that said the number one reason people choose to own guns is for personal safety/protection (as opposed to hunting or other recreational uses).

And it appears that guns are used for protection more often than you might think. A major study from 2013 found that “almost all national surveys indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.” Some surveys suggested that guns were used much more often for self-defense than for crime.

Some of the new gun laws being proposed involve banning certain types of semi-automatic weapons, typically referred to as assault weapons. But a good friend of mine who knows guns well said that the AR-15 (an assault weapon) is arguably the best weapon for home defense for the average person, due to its relatively low recoil and ease of control compared to other guns. He says the AR-15 is more accurate than handguns, more maneuverable than shotguns and traditional rifles, and its high capacity makes it more dependable than other guns (you’re less likely to run out of ammunition when defending yourself). I found a couple of gun experts online (here and here) who said similar things about the AR-15 being the weapon of choice for home defense.

I found case after case where an AR-15 was used successfully to fend off attackers and quite possibly save lives.

On the other hand, the things that make the AR-15 a great weapon for self-defense are probably also what made it a weapon of choice for numerous mass shooters in recent history. Its accuracy, ease of handling, and high capacity make for a deadly combination. Perhaps a ban on the sale of certain categories of weapons like the AR-15 would leave mass shooters without such easy options for high-volume killing, and yet still leave law-abiding people with great options for self-defense / home defense. This article, for example, found that 4 of the 8 gun experts they interviewed choose to use a handgun for home defense, as opposed to a AR-15 or other rifle.

Another element of gun control legislation has been to restrict the magazine capacity for guns. But I remember a great passage from my favorite writer Thomas Sowell on this subject:

“People who know nothing about guns, and have never fired a shot in their lives, much less lived in high-crime areas, blithely say such things as, ‘Nobody needs a 30-shot magazine.’ 

“Really? If three criminals invaded your home, endangering the lives of you and your loved ones, are you such a sharpshooter that you could take them all out with a clip holding ten bullets? Or a clip with just seven bullets, which is the limit you would be allowed under gun laws in some places?”

I think that people who fight for the right to bear arms do so mainly to make sure that good, law-abiding people have the ability to defend themselves and their loved ones as they see fit. It is about protecting and saving lives.

2. Guns deter crime, even when they’re never used. A lack of guns emboldens criminals.

I think there are more guns than people in this country, which is something a lot of people lament, but is something that arguably prevents a lot of crime from occurring.

Criminals don’t want to get shot, and in many cases they have no idea who’s armed and ready to fight back. I’ve read that in America, about 28% of burglaries are committed when residents are home, whereas in Great Britain (where guns are nowhere near as prevalent as in America), about 59% of burglaries are committed when people are home. American burglars say they avoid occupied homes for fear of getting shot... British burglars have admitted that it’s preferable to steal from homes when people are home so they can take their wallets and purses — which ends up putting more people in harm’s way. This is just one data point (well, two) but I think it’s a good example of how criminals are emboldened by the lack of guns waiting for them on the other side.

A survey of criminals in U.S. prisons found that 40% of them had at some point in the past decided not to commit a crime because they “knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun”.

How many people in America are kept safe from criminals and criminal activity due to the heavy presence of guns in this country, and the fact that would-be criminals don’t know who does / does not have a gun and is able to fight back?

I’ve always said that I wouldn’t mess with anyone wearing an NRA hat — and I don’t think anyone else would either. You don’t want to mess with someone you think might be armed.

To that end, schools and places of worship seem like such soft targets, where shooters know that people inside won’t be armed and that they can kill as many people as they want to without facing return fire. This is what’s behind the idea among conservatives that schools should have armed guards or armed teachers (if the school district approves and if teachers are trained and willing) — to deter school shootings and better protect students and teachers if anything does happen.

When it comes to implementing new gun control laws, you’ll often hear conservatives say something like, “people who are intent on committing murder are already willing to break the law; it’s only law-abiding people who will be restricted by new laws.” I think conservatives look at new gun laws as shifting the balance of firepower away from ordinary Americans and toward those who seek to do harm, just emboldening them to attack now-softer targets.

3. Conservatives believe that new gun laws would do little to stop mass shooters.

I’ve gotten the sense that a lot of conservatives feel that passing new gun laws won’t do much to stop mass shootings in America.

One reason is the general belief that anyone who is hell-bent on committing a mass atrocity (already very much against the law) isn’t going to be stopped by a new law. It seems that these people are going to do whatever they have to do — steal guns and ammo, buy them from whoever will sell it to them... they’ll find a way around whatever law you pass.

Conservatives also doubt the effectiveness of particular gun control proposals that are out there. Take the assault weapons ban that was proposed in Congress this year — banning the manufacturing or sale of all assault weapons. It just seems that there are so many assault weapons and parts already in existence, that there will be a way for sick people to get their hands on one. (Although making it more difficult for these killers to get an assault weapon should stop some from getting them.) Or perhaps they’ll just use non-assault weapons to commit their atrocity (although this would be better than the alternative, if it resulted in fewer lives lost).

Or take expanded background checks — requiring background checks for all gun sales. This sounds like a good idea, and the vast majority of Republicans polled do support this. But a New York Times analysis of 19 recent mass shootings found that in 17 of these cases, the guns used were purchased legally, with the purchaser already passing a background check. In the other 2 cases, a background check was started, but the shooter was allowed to purchase the weapon because the background check was not finished within 3 days.

Based on this, it doesn’t seem like expanding background checks to include private sales (closing the “gun show loophole”) will make much of a difference in terms of preventing mass shootings. If anything, it seems like the background check process needs to be improved and strengthened, instead of just expanded to cover private sales. In their analysis of 19 recent mass shootings, the NYT concluded, “At least nine gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons.”

Back in 2015, Senator Marco Rubio said, “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.” This statement was fact-checked by Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post — and he concluded that Marco Rubio was correct. (This material is a bit dated at this point, but it still shows where Republicans are coming from, with some validity to back it up.)

I do think it’s important to try and decrease the number of mass shootings or the impact of them, even if you can’t stop them outright. It’s just that many conservatives doubt how effective new laws will be at doing that — and they already see downsides to gun control laws in terms of self-protection and public safety, as discussed above.

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I would support any law I thought would make it harder for would-be mass shooters and criminals to acquire and use guns, if it ensured that law-abiding citizens would still have the ability to defend themselves effectively using guns. We wouldn't want to pass a law that saves some lives but loses even more lives in the process. This is why I support improving and expanding background checks — I think it strikes the right balance here.

But for a lot of the other gun control proposals, conservatives don’t feel confident that these laws will thwart mass shooters and also preserve the means of protection for ordinary Americans. That’s why conservatives tend to favor non-gun control solutions to thwarting mass shooters and gun violence, such as a greater emphasis on mental health issues (finding better ways to identify and address problems before they reach a breaking point); keeping armed guards/teachers in schools (to deter and/or minimize the impact of shootings); and longer prison sentences for violent criminals (a major source of gun violence appears to be people who had committed violent crimes in the past).

I’m no expert on the subject of gun control — I probably should’ve told you that before you spent time reading this — but I do know a thing or two about where conservatives are coming from on the major issues. And this is my honest attempt to explain why conservatives and Republicans are generally opposed to passing new gun control laws — even in the midst of these awful shooting tragedies.

Democratic Debate #2, Night 2 - $3 Trillion??

Well I tuned in to Night 2 of the debates expecting a see a slugfest between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris... and we did see some back-and-forth but no knockout blows.

One thing did catch my attention though and I think it’s worth discussing. At the start of the debate, Joe Biden pressed Kamala Harris on her new health care plan, saying that her plan to cover everyone would cost $3 trillion (I believe that’s per year) and that people would lose their existing employer-based coverage as a result. Harris responded, “You’re simply inaccurate in what you’re describing”... yet she didn’t go on to refute either of the things he said.

Then Biden repeated the $3 trillion price tag and the fact that people would lose their employer-based insurance, and he added that middle class taxes would have to go up to pay for it. Kamala Harris again had a chance to respond, and again she did not refute any of these points from Biden.

Then later, when Michael Bennet harped on the cost and problems of Harris’s health plan, she said, “We cannot keep with the Republican talking points on this. You gotta stop.”

Well forgive me Senator but I need to delve in. That cost — $3 trillion per year — is not something that should be swept under the rug. From what I’ve seen, this $3T/year would be the increased cost to the federal government on top of what they already spend on health care. (I believe Biden and Bennet are putting Harris’ plan in the same ballpark as Bernie’s Medicare For All plan, which increases federal expenditures by around $30T over 10 years.)

If this is to be paid for with taxes, consider that there are today 158 million people employed in this country. This means it would require an average of around $19,000 per taxpayer per year, in new taxes, to pay for health care. A working couple could be looking at paying $38,000/year in new taxes for health care coverage under Harris’ plan.

To put that number into perspective, I looked up and found that in 2018, the average employer-based coverage in America for an individual cost $8500/year (premiums + deductible). I didn’t find a number for copays but let’s assume $500 for copays in a year, which means a total of $9000/year today for employed-based individual coverage (with the employer paying the majority of that). Kamala Harris’s plan would cost around $19,000/year per taxpayer in new taxes.

For employer-based family coverage, the average yearly cost was $19,616 in premiums. I didn’t find numbers for deductible or copays, but let’s assume it’s double the individual numbers above. That would mean a yearly cost of $23,800 today for family coverage, compared to $38,000 under Kamala’s plan! And again, that $23,800 today is mostly paid by employers... whereas the new cost would be paid in taxes.

Now I did make an assumption here (to get a ballpark cost), which is that Harris’ plan would be paid for with income taxes — and I showed the average cost across all taxpayers. I’m sure she’d say she would tax “the rich” to pay for it. But the burden of proof is on the prosecutor here to show us how this will be paid for, and she didn’t address it during the debate. Her plan to tax Wall Street transactions and offshore corporate income doesn’t come close to paying for $30 trillion over 10 years (it would bring in about $2 trillion instead).

Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all tout health care plans that would cost about $30 trillion over 10 years. And from what I’ve seen of government programs, there are often cost overruns compared to what’s expected at the outset.

It seems to me like a staggering cost to the middle class compared to what many are paying today for health insurance. There’s no way many families could afford to pay >$10,000 more/year compared to what they’re paying today.

In my view, many Democrats at this point are just looking for anyone other than Trump to be our President. I would imagine many Democrats aren’t looking for such a steep, dramatic change that would cost so much — and they certainly don’t want that to be the lightning rod in the general election against President Trump.

Democratic Debate #2, Night 1 - this Republican’s take

I thought last night’s debate had some great back-and-forth on the issues of the day - and also some great entertainment value, between someone telling Bernie to stop yelling, the fly darting around Buttigieg’s face as he was trying to deliver his closing remarks, and the incredible Marianne Williamson — who almost tripped as she entered the stage but went on to deliver the biggest applause lines of the night and get millions of Google hits to show for it.

But I just wanted to remark on a few of the points that came up during the debate, from a conservative perspective.

There was a lot of debate over whether to support big, sweeping proposals like Medicare For All and Student Loan Forgiveness (Sanders and Warren), or whether to make more incremental improvements by providing help for those who need it and leaving the existing systems in place (i.e., don’t kick everyone off their private health insurance and put them on Medicare, and don’t forgive student loans for people who already have the means to pay for it).

I do think that John Delaney and others were right when they said that the huge, sweeping proposals aren’t good politics — they won’t help Democrats beat Donald Trump — because Republicans and conservatives are strongly against such proposals and they’d rather not see the country go that way.

With health care, conservatives want to help people in need, but we’re wary of putting every single one of us on Medicare as the way to do it. As I understand it Medicare currently only covers certain things, and by putting everyone on the program and having to keep a lid on costs, it seems inevitable that there will either be major restrictions in what type of care is covered, or long waiting lines if everyone is covered for everything.

Now you could argue that private-run health insurance has its own issues, and Bernie and Warren certainly argued that last night... but when you’re proposing to move over 100 million people off of their existing private insurance and onto Medicare, you got some ‘splainin to do. Jake Tapper asked candidates whether they’d raise middle-class taxes to pay for their health care proposals, and after Warren and Buttigieg didn’t answer the question, Bernie scolded Jake Tapper, “Your question is a Republican talking point!”

Well call it what you will, but I think it’s perfectly legitimate for Americans to be informed of the full cost-benefit of such sweeping proposals. I remember one poll showing that the majority of Americans do support Medicare For All, but then when they were told they’d have to pay more in taxes, the support went down and suddenly the majority of Americans did not support it.

I think many Americans won’t sign on to the risk of switching from their existing coverage over to Medicare, if there’s a chance they’ll have to pay more for it anyway.

Student loans is a separate subject, but conservatives generally oppose large-scale student loan debt forgiveness. Again, we want to help people in need, but we also want people to be accountable for the decisions that they make — under loan forgiveness, *other* people will be held accountable for those decisions. And that’s not fair to those other people to have to now carry an additional burden (when many of them already paid for their schooling, or don’t have a degree themselves), and ultimately it’s not fair to young people to put a system in place that says no, you don’t have to worry about the cost of getting this degree - just go on and get it because other people will pick up the tab. If there is no cost to making a decision, people have much less incentive to make a good decision - one that will “help them thrive”, as Marianne Williamson puts it.

But these are just some of my musings on the subjects. And when I say conservatives want to help people in need, I’m talking about doing it through charity and safety net programs, and by lowering costs and improving job opportunities. I do think we need to address the high costs of medical care and higher education - but by actually addressing the costs and not just ignoring them and throwing them on the backs of the taxpayer.

Also one last point, on the minimum wage. Pete Buttigieg said “So-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage, when scripture says that whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker”... Well, much of the opposition to raising the minimum wage comes from the thinking that companies won’t just go along and pay the new, higher wage — but instead many lower-paying jobs will go away altogether, or be replaced by automation. The CBO recently found that if the minimum wage were increased to $15/hour there would be over 1 million jobs lost. If I’m concerned about whether lower-paying jobs will vanish altogether, leaving many people without options to work their way up... can I still call myself a Christian, Pete? 🙏

Would love to hear your thoughts on these and other issues. In the meantime I am looking forward to Night 2: THE REMATCH between Biden and Kamala Harris. 🥊

The Great Divide

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the great divide in our country between liberals and conservatives. It seems like every day now I see a new conflict or even violence between the two sides - and I keep hearing people say there’s bound to be another civil war.

A civil war. You know things are bad when people think we’re about to start killing each other. But for as divided as we are, I have a feeling that there isn’t as much actual disagreement between us as you might think.

I think most of us these days rarely hear where the other side is coming from - and worse, our impressions of the other side are formed by listening to our own side tell us what the other side is all about. If you were to actually sit down and listen to someone from the other side’s genuine concerns, I bet you’d agree with a lot of it.

Our being divided into two camps that rarely communicate with each other is, in my opinion, largely due to the influence of both our news media and our social media. It was President Obama who got me thinking along these lines with some things he said recently:

“We are operating in completely different information universes. If you watch Fox News, you are living on a different planet than you are if you listen to NPR.” - President Obama 

“Those who watch Fox News and those who read The New York Times occupy completely different realities.” - President Obama 

“One of the dangers of the Internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be just cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases.” - President Obama‬

Everyone has to get their news from somewhere, and with many available options it’s only natural that people will pick the news sources that they enjoy reading/watching the most.

As a conservative, I tend to avoid the mainstream media news sources (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, ABC News) because in my experience they tend to paint conservatives/Republicans in a bad light. When I see their headlines or read their stories I get defensive - I can tell based on what I already know about the issue that they’re only covering one side of the story, leaving out what matters most to conservatives.

As an example of this, take the Republican tax bill from last year. This is a bill that cut taxes for the majority of taxpayers for the next 8 years: taxes were reduced for 75% of working Americans, and taxes were reduced on average for every income group in America.¹

It meant a raise in take-home pay for millions of Americans, and for the next 8 years! But this is far from the impression you get from looking at mainstream media headlines.

I went back and googled “tax bill Washington Post” and “tax law Washington Post” to find the articles that the Washington Post published the first week after the bill had been signed into law. I then did the same thing for the New York Times and CNN.

I found 93 different WaPo/NYT/CNN articles discussing the new tax law - and only TWO of their headlines said there’d be ordinary Americans (non-wealthy people) receiving a tax cut. Just 2 headlines out of 93!²

A tax cut for the great majority of U.S. taxpayers was a major element of the tax bill. Yet only 1 of the 93 headlines said that most of us were getting a tax cut.³

Here are some headlines I did see though:

• “The Republican tax bill spurred more than 120 public protests in November”
• “Bernie Sanders: New tax bill a ‘disaster for the American people’”
• “Blue states may get their revenge for the GOP tax bill”
• “New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: GOP tax law will ‘pillage’ blue states”
• “Quotation of the Day: Homeowners Hurrying to Soften Tax Law’s Bite”
• “With Cuomo Assist, Homeowners Rush to Soften Tax Bill’s Impact”
• “Will Americans punish Republicans for cutting taxes for the rich?”
• “Trickle Down? Not Now, and Not for a While at Best (Wonkish)”
• “2017 was a sensational year for the richest people in the world”
• “Trump Could Save More Than $11 Million Under the New Tax Plan”
• “2017 was a great year to be rich”

With headlines, news outlets can select one or two facts to present (from the full picture) and really sway people’s impressions of that full picture. And people don’t have time to click every headline and read the full article underneath, so the headlines themselves are often what sticks in people’s minds. Given the WaPo/NYT/CNN headlines, it’s not surprising that a poll showed that only 24% of people thought they were getting a tax cut (when in reality it was 75%!).

Your average quick consumer of news could very well think it’s only rich people who benefit from the tax bill. And if you’re somebody on their way to work, and you see that rich people are getting a nice tax break, and you don’t see anything about yourself and your family getting a break, actually you might have to pay more... that will drive you up a wall!

But that’s only getting one side of the story. I suspect many Americans never heard that taxes were being lowered on average for every income group - a help to many people & families who could really use the help. Or how cutting the corporate tax rate will lead to innovation and job growth, meaning better job opportunities for people and more needs being met overall. Or what those rich people will likely do with their tax savings - investing, spending, donating... things that spur economic activity and improve people’s job prospects and people’s lives in general. People all over the place being helped by the Republican tax bill... but rarely will you see it presented that way in the mainstream media.

And if many people think the tax bill only benefits the rich, and does nothing to help the poor and middle class - and that it hurts a lot of ordinary Americans — then what do those people think of Republicans and conservatives who support the bill? How could we support something that gives to the rich (who already have it made) but does nothing to address the needs of those in the lower and middle classes? If we support a bill that has no upsides and only downsides for ordinary Americans, then I guess we’re fine with hurting a lot of people who have real needs in this country... This sort of media distortion has to cause many people to think ill of their fellow Americans for what they think - when they don’t even know what we think & why we support the bill.

When one side of the story is left out, the part you end up hearing can seem outrageous. And every new outrage builds on the last - to the point where people are so fed up with the other side, that when the next controversy erupts there’s no need to hear the other side’s take on things - they’re just wrong, based on everything from before.

I think our news media has been having this sort of effect on us for a long time now - on both sides. And the more one-sided our major news sources become - focusing on different aspects of the story, or on different topics altogether - the less we understand about where the other side is coming from, the more we may even come to despise the other side, and the more we drift apart.

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We get a lot of our political information these days from social media rather than from TV and news sites. And I think social media has played a big role in us being divided over politics.

We share our political views on social media because these are issues that affect people’s lives, and often we’re upset about what’s happening to particular people or to the country, and we want to do something about it. We think it’s important for people to know about what’s happening if they don’t already know.

But the nature of social media makes it a bad place to discuss controversial issues. For one, we tend to be a lot harsher to people online / from behind a keyboard than we would be in person. And when an argument breaks out on Facebook over an issue you really care about, and a bunch of people are watching, you feel the need to defend yourself and defend your side and make sure people understand why this issue is so important... and it becomes more about being right than about listening or being respectful or any of that good stuff.

Ugly arguments played out online make you want to avoid the other side instead of talking to them. Even just seeing political posts that anger you or offend you makes you want to steer clear of the other side online.

It’s all too easy to hit Unfollow and be done with it. It’s probably the most peaceful thing you can do for yourself and for your relationships with the people who offend you. But before long, we’re pretty much only seeing our own side’s take on things - which leaves us with a skewed representation of the other side and what they really care about.

I get a lot of my political info from Twitter, and that platform is definitely oriented toward showing you opinions mostly from people on your own side of the political spectrum. You’re inclined to follow the people who like what you say or who followed you first - and then you see the tweets that they like, which introduces you to even more people who think just like you.

And once we’ve reached the point where we’re only seeing our own side’s views on social media, there is nothing to counter the divisive voices of politicians and other groups who have a vested interest in getting you to hate the other side.

As just one example of this, take a look at this tweet from Bernie Sanders on the passage of the tax bill:

Republicans are celebrating raising taxes on working families to give tax breaks to billionaires, corporations, private jet owners and themselves. Remember that. pic.twitter.com/gZX6Iq7C4d

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 20, 2017

That’s a very misleading statement about a bill which lowered taxes for 75% of working Americans for the next 8 years. But to say that Republicans are “celebrating raising taxes on working families” is so inflammatory and divisive - if you see enough of that stuff you’re bound to hate the other side.

I have a feeling though that there’s more agreement between the two sides than you’d think. We’re living in two separate camps - hearing about and focusing on different issues altogether a lot of the time. We’re talking past each other and about each other, but rarely to each other.

We are currently very divided over President Trump - over people’s support of him, and over the things he says and how he says them, which are often incendiary and divisive in nature. But even concerning him I bet there’s more agreement among us than you’d think, if we were to drill down to any particular aspect of it. But our news media & social media present us with such vastly different information about him and his presidency that it’s no wonder we’re miles apart.

I don’t have any grand solution to all of this, and I don’t know where we go from here - I just thought I’d share my thoughts on things as I see it and as I feel it. I’m hopeful that the pendulum will start swinging back the other way soon - away from civil war(!!!) and back towards us being able to see where the other side is coming from. I’ve been seeing signs of that here and there — hope I’m not just seeing things. :-)

1. This is based on the Tax Policy Center report which shows that in Year 1 of the new tax law, taxes are reduced for 80.4% of taxpayers, and in Year 8, taxes are reduced for 75.5% of taxpayers. And in Years 1 and 8, taxes are reduced on average for every income quintile.

2. There were 3 other headlines that hinted at there being tax cuts for ordinary Americans (non-wealthy people), but even these didn’t make it clear that there’d be everyday people who would be paying less in taxes:

• “Expecting a tax cut? Spend it on others”
• “Trump signs sweeping tax bill into law”
• “In signing sweeping tax bill, Trump questions whether he is getting enough credit”

Several other headlines mentioned “tax cuts”, but didn’t say who’d be getting them. “Tax cuts” could very well mean “tax cuts for the rich only”... “Tax cuts” by itself doesn’t tell you that taxes were reduced for a number of ordinary Americans (non-wealthy people).

Also, full disclosure: some of the 93 articles that didn’t say anything in their headline about there being tax cuts for ordinary Americans did mention it or imply it in the blurb right below the headline (the part right below the headline that you can see before deciding whether to click the article, if you’re seeing the article on social media). There were 6 such articles.

3. Some of the 93 articles that didn’t say anything in their headline about most of us getting a tax cut did mention it or imply it in the blurb right below the headline (the part right below the headline that you can see before deciding whether to click the article, if you’re seeing the article on social media). There were 5 or 6 such articles - depending on how you interpret things.

School Choice: The Untold Story

Alanna Clark still remembers the feeling of third grade. She remembers feeling mortified when it came time to read aloud in class, the other students reading with ease while she struggled to grasp each word. Little Alanna had a reading disability, and it was causing her to lose confidence and fall behind in class. Her mom desperately tried to get help from the school... but the problems persisted. She feared that Alanna was heading down the same path as her older sister, who fell behind in her early years, kept getting moved up grade after grade despite her struggles, and eventually failed out of community college... Alanna’s mom finally decided to enroll Alanna in a school choice lottery -- where the winning students would be allowed to attend a school other than their local public school. Alanna won the lottery and soon transferred to a charter school, and since then has made tremendous progress. Now in tenth grade, Alanna is poised, confident, and dreams of heading to Johns Hopkins to one day become a surgeon.

Denisha Merriweather used to think she’d be nothing more than a high school dropout. D’s and F’s were the norm for her, and it was embarrassing, and angering. She became disruptive in class, and then started getting into fights... School was a nightmare for her. Then, in sixth grade, Denisha began living with her godmother, who saw the writing on the wall and wished she could send Denisha to this excellent Christian school she knew of, right in their area. But it was no use -- as they couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Then a friend told them about a school choice program available in their area, where low-income students were given a scholarship to help offset the cost of private education. This gave Denisha just the break she needed to attend the top-notch school, and the environment was drastically different for her. Her grades and self-confidence rose, and she began to believe in herself. She worked hard and graduated with honors, and today Denisha is a proud college graduate, the first in her family. She credits her state’s school choice program with giving her the opportunity she needed to succeed: “It allowed me to have dreams I didn’t know I could have.”

In her first visit to a public school since becoming our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was met head-on by an angry group of protesters, who physically blocked her from entering the school. “Go back!” yelled one protester, before another upped the ante, shouting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The strongest chant, and the most damning, seemed to be “Stop DeVos, and fund black futures! Stop DeVos, and fund black futures!”

Listening to the protests that morning you would’ve thought that Satan himself had stopped by for a visit.

The pure outrage at Betsy DeVos on display that day -- and throughout the nation at the time -- got me thinking... what was it about Betsy DeVos, school choice champion, that had everyone so dead-set against her?... Looking through the media’s coverage of her, it didn’t take me long to see why.

I googled the term “Betsy DeVos” to find the top articles on her from the time she was first nominated as Secretary of Education up through the day of the protest above. Reading the media’s early coverage of Betsy DeVos -- namely, how she was introduced to the general public -- I found that many of the top articles described DeVos as a super-rich Republican, whose policies would strip funding from America’s public schools. A majority of the articles at some point characterized her as being a cruel person, especially towards children. Here’s a look at some of the descriptions of her:

• “diverting resources from the young people who most need them”
• “diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich”
• “no consideration of the severe harm done to traditional public schools”
• “she has made a career trying to destroy neighborhood public schools”
• and my favorite: “Betsy DeVos is coming for your children”

In contrast with that demonry, you would never know from the media accounts that this same person once started a foundation specifically to give low-income children greater access to quality education options. And that this foundation has given financial aid to more than 400,000 low-income families to allow them to take their children out of schools where they weren’t getting a good enough education, and put them into schools they felt would be better for them.¹ Out of 50 different articles on Betsy DeVos, only 1 of them mentioned any of this.

As for the children left attending traditional public schools, the articles said that DeVos’ policies would “devastate”, “severely harm”, “break”, or even “destroy” public schools. This sounds horrifying, and can only lead readers to believe that school choice will mean awful things for the educations of public school students... Yet, in not one article was there any discussion of how public school student achievement has actually been affected by school choice in the past.

Many of the top articles also seemed to imply that DeVos’ school choice policies would particularly hurt poor and/or minority students. Here are some examples:

• “these schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps”
• “would pull resources from struggling public schools”
• “lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools”
• “civil rights groups like the NAACP have expressed concern that low-income children and children of color suffer when oversight is scaled back”
• “the NAACP has demanded a moratorium on charter expansion nationally”
• “Betsy DeVos and other Republican lawmakers do not value quality education for black and brown children”

Yet, while many of the articles mentioned DeVos’ support of charter schools and voucher programs, not a single article pointed out that charter schools and voucher programs are mainly serving poor and minority students.² Nor did any of the articles mention how well these programs have worked for poor and minority students.

Given the well-known achievement gaps that exist along lines of race/ethnicity and household income, the fact that school choice is being utilized by so many students who are underperforming their peers -- and whether or not it is working for them -- seem like pretty important aspects of the story to be left out of the news coverage entirely.³

So, it isn’t surprising that so many people are up-in-arms over Betsy DeVos, given how detestable the media made her seem... and given the fact that so much of the story of school choice has been left untold.

---

In the Upton/Druid Heights neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore, graduation parties are thrown for kids graduating 5th grade. Because, as one school director puts it, there’s no guarantee these kids will even survive childhood to get the chance to celebrate higher achievements. “It’s not just, ‘Oh my kid isn’t going to college.’ It’s ‘Will my child even be around, even be alive, to have those milestones?’”

43% of the kids in this neighborhood say they witness physical violence one to three times a week, and 40% of them know someone with a gun. 1 in 3 children said they knew someone under the age of 19 who was killed by violence.

For these children -- surrounded by violence, and faced with far too many examples of lives cut short, either by death or by drugs and crime -- getting a better education or a better school experience is not just a nice-to-have. It may be a matter of life and death. And it’s the best chance many of these kids have of making something of themselves, of gaining confidence and getting inspired to reach for what they want and achieve it! We owe it to these kids to think of school choice in terms of the impact it’s having for them academically.

For years now, some families have been choosing to take their kids out of traditional public schools and enroll them in nearby charter schools instead -- an option open to them through school choice. A recent national study, conducted by a leading research organization in education, tracked the progress of individual charter school students over time and compared it to the progress of public school students with the same demographics and same starting point academically. The study found that charter schools have had a positive impact on academic achievement for the following students:

• Students living in poverty, on average, gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year in both reading and math, compared to public school students also living in poverty
• Black students gained an additional 3 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Black students living in poverty gained an additional 6-7 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Hispanic students living in poverty gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
• Hispanic English Language Learners gained an additional 8-10 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects

These are remarkable gains for hundreds of thousands of poor and minority children across the country. And these gains aren’t even the extent of what charters are doing for some kids. Right in our backyard (and right by those protesters, funny enough), students in D.C. charters gained an astonishing 3½ and 5 months of learning per year in both reading and math.

In DeVos’ home state of Michigan, the average charter student gained an additional 2 months of learning per year in both reading and math, after starting far behind their peers in both subjects.

Voucher programs, too, have been studied as to their impact on student achievement. In certain states, vouchers are available to help low-income students attend private/religious schools instead of their local public schools, by covering a portion of the private school tuition. It’s paid for with the tax dollars that would’ve gone toward funding their education in public school.

Just last year, researchers published a “systematic review of systematic reviews” of voucher programs. Not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read, but it did give a clear consensus: vouchers generally produce modest achievement gains, or neither gains nor losses, for participating students. One review summed it up this way: “Voucher studies, generally of high quality, indicate a slightly positive impact, particularly for African American students.”

More recently, studies have found negative achievement effects for participants of voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana -- which are some of the first negative studies to come out on vouchers.

Not every student who participates in school choice will be better off for it. Like all choices in life, we don’t always make the right one. But if there’s one thing to take away from the studies on school choice, it’s that many minority students living in poverty have made real strides academically. And I’m sure their parents are thankful that they had a choice in the matter.

---

Going back now to the central argument against school choice -- that it drains money from the public schools, damaging them and hurting the kids who remain there -- there now have been plenty of instances of school choice having been implemented over the past few decades, in many different areas in the country. So I spent some time looking for evidence that school choice has been hurting public school students academically.

According to an article published last year, 11 different studies have measured changes in public school student achievement following the establishment or growth of charter schools in the area. Only 1 of the 11 studies (which looked at a single school district) found any negative effects of charters on public school student test scores. In 10 out of the 11 studies (comprising 6 major cities, 5 states, and a nationwide sample), they found no negative effects of charters on public school student achievement. And in the majority of studies, charter expansion was found in some cases to have a positive effect on public school student achievement.

The author summed it up this way: “Most of the research implies that charter schools do no harm to students in district schools, and may even promote improved outcomes for all students.”

Some voucher programs, too, have been found to improve the performance of the public schools mostly closely associated with them. As one economics professor put it, “Competition improves the performance of the public schools most closely threatened, for want of a better word, by the voucher program.”

In addition, I haven’t found any evidence that any public school curriculum has been negatively affected by charters/vouchers/school choice (such as the loss of an arts program) -- though I certainly could be missing something out there. I actually found one public school district that reinstated music and arts programs in most of its elementary schools in response to charter schools.

I did stumble onto this report though, in which numerous public school superintendents said that charter school expansion in their district contributed to them closing one or more public schools (due to budget impacts). And from what I’ve read, school closure can certainly have a negative effect on the academic achievement of students who are displaced.

But given the expansion of school choice across the country, for decades now, if it really were “devastating” or “disastrous” for public schools -- taking away critical funding, and causing the best/most motivated students to leave -- I would think there’d be more evidence of public school test scores having gone down as a result of school choice. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be more evidence that school choice has improved public school student performance than diminished it.

That said, I do know there’s much more to education than test scores. And I know I haven’t addressed a lot of the negative impacts that school choice has had on public schools and school teachers. All I’m saying is, if school choice is helping at-risk children achieve real gains in their test scores, all while having a neutral, or even positive, effect on public school student test scores... there is something to be said for that.

And what it says, about the real effects of school choice on our children, is the opposite of the story the media told us about evil Republican Betsy DeVos.

There is an important debate to be had about school choice in America. Just as we shouldn’t promote school choice in disregard of its impacts on public education, we shouldn’t dismiss it without acknowledging its real benefits to so many children in need. To do either would be a disservice to the lives and futures of too many young Americans.


Angelo Jones “would’ve been gun-toting in two years”, says his mom, if he hadn’t changed schools. Angelo, afflicted with ADHD, would routinely get into fist fights and shouting matches at his former school (where such altercations among the students were all too common). Angelo was falling further and further behind academically, when his mom -- a single mother of two -- decided to enroll him in a school choice lottery. She ended up winning a spot for Angelo at the Davis Leadership Academy charter school -- and just by changing schools, Angelo’s entire educational experience was transformed. Angelo’s family credits the charter school’s zero-tolerance discipline policy for teaching Angelo how to be respectful, and focused on his schoolwork. And they credit the school’s particular attention to African-American history and culture for inspiring and motivating Angelo. Now, far from gun-toting, Angelo pledges to someday inspire others and help bring about advancement within their communities -- to which his mother can only respond, with tears of pride in her eyes, “How’d I get so lucky?”


1. “Betsy DeVos founded [the American Federation for Children] to provide better education options for lower-income children throughout America. I’m very proud of what the AFC has achieved, particularly at the state level. More than 400,000 lower-income families have been empowered with financial support to take their children out of schools where they thought the kids were not getting an adequate education, and put them into schools that they thought were better.” -- Senator Joe Lieberman, at Betsy DeVos’ Senate confirmation hearing

2. A recent national study on charter schools found that 53% of students in charter schools are living in poverty, and 56% are either black or Hispanic (see page 16). And a 2016 review of school voucher programs says “The U.S. programs all are limited to students with incomes near or below the cut-off for the federal lunch program… The overwhelming majority of voucher participants in the U.S. are either African American or Hispanic.”

3. The same national charter school study found that the average charter student’s starting test scores are below the 50th percentile in both reading and math (see page 21).

In Defense of Ben Carson

A cousin of mine recently told me that he “can’t stand Ben Carson” because “as Politifact points out, honesty is a challenge.”

So I hopped onto Politifact’s Ben Carson page, and sure enough, the picture was clear: Ben Carson hardly ever tells the truth. Right at the top of the page is a histogram showing that the vast majority of his statements were found to be False, Mostly False, or Pants on Fire...and not one statement was found to be True!

A quick glance at the site makes it look like Ben Carson has never spoken the truth in his life. The reality is that Politifact’s assessment here is purely a product of which statements were selected for analysis, and more importantly how these statements were evaluated.

So I decided to look into some of the statements that Politifact found to be False, and I gotta say — each of these ratings is very questionable:

1. “German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930’s,” which allowed the Nazis to “carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.” - Ben Carson [rated False by Politifact]

In their writeup, Politifact acknowledges that the Nazis’ 1938 gun laws specifically prevented Jews from owning guns, ammunition, and “stabbing weapons” — and that even before these laws were put into place, the Nazis had been raiding Jewish homes and seizing weapons.

So why then does Politifact rate Carson’s statement as False? Because he said that “German citizens” were disarmed, when in reality German citizens as a whole were not disarmed — just the Jews. But Carson didn’t say that all German citizens were disarmed — he said German citizens, which includes Jews.

Politifact also concludes that it wasn’t the seizing of guns that allowed the Nazis to “carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance”, because many non-Jewish citizens did have guns and could have used them to fight the Nazis if they had wanted to. But the Nazis certainly did encounter relatively little resistance compared to what they would’ve faced had their victims been armed.

So Carson’s statement here is 100% true, yet Politifact didn’t even call it Half True, or Mostly False — they called it flat-out False.


2. Ben Carson says he “didn’t have an involvement with” nutritional supplement company Mannatech. [rated false by Politifact]

Politifact rates this statement False because it “suggests he has no ties to Mannatech whatsoever.” They point out that Carson has in fact delivered paid speeches for Mannatech, and has promoted their products on numerous occasions.

But during the debate when Carson said that he “didn’t have an involvement with” Mannatech, he went on to explain that he did do some paid speeches for them, and he actually endorsed their product right then and there: “Do I take the product? Yes, I think it’s a good product.”

Politifact says the statement here is false because it suggests there are no ties between Carson and Mannatech, when in fact Carson admitted some of those ties directly after making the statement. It’s unfair for Politifact to narrow in on Carson’s “didn’t have an involvement with Mannatech” comment and judge it as if he hadn’t gone on to clarify what he meant.


3. Ben Carson says his tax plan wouldn’t leave the federal government with a $1.1 trillion hole. [rated False by Politifact]

By calling this claim false, Politifact is saying that Carson’s tax plan would in fact leave the federal government with a $1.1 trillion deficit.

Politifact came to this conclusion by applying Carson’s proposed 15% income tax to this year’s expected taxable income, leaving a federal revenue of $2.6 trillion. Then they subtracted this year’s projected federal spending ($3.7 trillion) to arrive at a $1.1 trillion deficit.

But it’s not a valid analysis to apply future tax rates to the current taxable income in order to predict what federal revenue will be in the future. Lowering the tax rates would give people more of an incentive to work and to create businesses, which could lead to more economic activity and more taxable income. Time and time again, reduced tax rates have led to higher tax revenue for the federal government. So it’s not valid for Politifact to just assume that Carson’s tax plan would mean $600 billion less in revenue.

In addition, Carson has said that his new income tax rate would be “phased in over time”. The very vagueness of this makes it impossible to say with certainty how tax revenues would be affected.

Politifact also assumes that Carson’s tax plan would bring in zero dollars in capital gains taxes, excise taxes, and customs duties — even though Carson hasn’t called for an end to any of these taxes. These taxes alone bring in over $150 billion in revenue annually.

For all of these reasons, it’s a major stretch for Politifact to conclude that Carson’s tax plan would in fact leave the federal government with a $1.1 trillion deficit.

Throw on top of this the recent fraudulent Politico piece on Carson and West Point, and it’s clear to me that there’s a deliberate effort underway to paint Ben Carson as a liar.

The American people will ultimately have to decide whether Dr. Carson is trustworthy enough to win their vote. Yet something’s telling me he has less to worry about in this regard than, say, Hillary Clinton does — a recent survey found the three words most associated with her to be “liar”, “dishonest”, and “untrustworthy”.

Perspectives On Welfare

I think we'd all agree that Debra is in a rotten, uncalled-for situation; we just might disagree as to the cause of it.

Slate Magazine correspondent Katy Waldman interviewed Debra from D.C. to find out how she would cope with the recent cuts to the food stamps program — cuts that reduced Debra's intake from $203 to $135 a month. Debra said that her and her daughter's already-meager diet would be "much worse" with the cuts. The interview, titled "Meat is the First Thing to Go: What it's like to have your food stamps cut", is presented in such as a way as to blame the "largest cuts in the history of our country's food stamps program" for Debra's ongoing hardship. I contend that the root of the problem is the fact that such programs penalize finding a job.

Debra, a single mother and disabled veteran, is currently unemployed and receiving food stamps, rental assistance, Social Security, and VA compensation. She uses these benefits to provide not only for herself but also for her 21-year-old daughter, who is also unemployed.

When Debra was asked point-blank whether she has considered getting a job, her answer was clear-cut and very revealing: "Yes, I've thought about it... But my food stamps, rent, VA compensation, and social security would be affected. I'd have to make a lot of money to overcome all the reductions, something like $15 to $20 an hour." In other words, Debra has done the math and determined that if she were to take a full-time job that pays anywhere up to $15 an hour, she would lose more in benefits than she would gain in compensation. So she'd make more money by not working than she would by working even for $15 an hour, or around $30,000 a year. This means that if Debra were to take just about any of the jobs that she's currently qualified for, she'd have to get by on even less than she makes now!

Debra's 21-year-old daughter faces similar incentives. According to Debra, her daughter "wants to help and get a job, but it's a catch-22. I'm on rent assistance, and if she gets a job, my rent goes up and my food stamp money goes down." Pointing out that her daughter "can't apply for her own benefits until she's 22" seems to suggest that applying for benefits is her very plan — and can you blame her?

Our country's food stamps program is called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. This program, which by its name seems to have been intended merely to assist people by supplementing their incomes, is in reality part of a collection of benefits that has become a way of life for Debra, her daughter, and many others.

People respond to incentives, especially to short-term ones. In a system of benefits where recipients are effectively punished for choosing to work, many will choose to remain unemployed. And that's why this system is perverse; the right financial decision for recipients in the short term deprives them of the work experience that would improve their prospects for the future.

Unemployed recipients, lacking the opportunities for advancement that come with being employed, are liable to feel stuck in a lifestyle of subsistence and dependence. When Debra was asked whether she sees a way out of her situation, she said, "I've been on food stamps for two years. It is really tight. And right now, no, I don't see a way out. Unless I get a job that really pays a lot of money, but that's what everyone is looking for. There's a way to do it but I don't know what it is."

Fortunately, there are ways to help those in need without counteracting their natural incentive to work. For one, benefits programs could be reconstituted: anyone who loses their job could be given a fixed amount of money, regardless of when, or if, they return to work; and able-bodied people could be required to work or participate in a job training program in order to receive food stamps. There's also private charity, which Debra and her daughter receive through their church, food banks, and Meals on Wheels. Debra herself is charitable, regularly volunteering to help the mentally ill. Americans are the most charitable people in the world.¹ And because the amount of charity a person receives isn't based on whether he's employed, private charity doesn't discourage people from seeking a better way of life.

Any extension or expansion of benefits programs that penalize recipients for working will result in more and more people choosing to remain unemployed, leaving them less qualified for quality jobs and likely in need of additional assistance, and thus continuing the vicious cycle of dependence.

1. Charities Aid Foundation. "World Giving Index 2013: A global view of giving trends."

The Medicare Debate, Part II

It barely made a blip on the news, so you may not have heard that the U.S. credit rating was just downgraded again for the fourth time in the past fourteen months. Downgrades are dangerous because they signal to other countries that the U.S. is now a riskier place to invest in, and this raises our cost of borrowing money. But the bigger problem for Americans is the reason for the downgrades: our government is less likely to pay its debts, and is therefore less likely to honor its commitments to people who are counting on government assistance in their senior years.

One of our biggest obligations is Medicare. It's the third-most expensive federal program ($560 billion spent in 2011, or about $3000 per working-age adult¹), and due to the wave of retiring baby boomers its cost is expected to nearly double within a generation.² Our current path is unsustainable — and will result in millions of people shelling out more for their medical care than they've been planning on.

So what do we do about it? The status quo approach is to cut costs by reducing pay for doctors who treat Medicare patients...but this would also reduce the quality of care (see my last post). VP candidate Paul Ryan has an alternative plan, one that's been both attacked and championed by people who probably don't really understand it. (I know — I was one of them.) But now that I've read his plan, here's what you need to know:

Nothing changes for anyone currently 55 or older.

For everyone else, when you become eligible for Medicare you will choose your own health insurance plan. You can choose the traditional fee-for-service option (the way it is now, where government reimburses doctors directly), or you can select from among a variety of private insurance plans within the new Medicare Exchange.

Every year, each insurer in the Exchange will declare the price that they must be paid in premiums in order for them to cover enrollees' medical costs. Medicare then pays for all or some of your premiums depending on your income and the price of your plan.

The "benchmark" that determines how much Medicare pays for is the price of the baseline plan, which is either traditional fee-for-service or the second-cheapest private plan, whichever is cheaper. But what's not clear is what "benchmark" means — that is, if you choose the baseline plan, are your premiums fully covered or not? What is clear is that of the people who select the baseline plan, Medicaid-eligible seniors will have no out-of-pocket expenses, other low-income seniors will receive additional assistance, and high-income seniors will have to pay a share of their premiums.

If you choose a plan that's more expensive than the baseline, you'll have to cover the difference. Choose a plan cheaper than the baseline and you'll receive a rebate for the difference.

Each insurer in the Exchange must abide by two ground rules. First, they have to cover at least the actuarial equivalent of the fee-for-service benefits package. This means that while each plan will provide different coverage, every plan's coverage will be at least as valuable as traditional Medicare and you'll know upfront what's included in your plan. Second, they have to accept all applicants regardless of any high-risk/pre-existing conditions. Medicare will support this provision by paying for the increase in premiums that's necessary for high-risk individuals and by regularly transferring money from plans with more low-risk seniors to plans with more high-risk seniors.

The vision here is to have companies compete for customers by thinking of creative and efficient ways to cover medical expenses for less than it costs Medicare to do so today. If this plan fails and the anticipated cost reductions don't pan out, there's a provision to cap Medicare expenditure growth at nominal GDP growth plus 0.5 percent. This means that if insurance prices rise faster than that upper growth rate, some seniors (Medicaid-eligibles excluded) would have to cover the spillover costs. Whatever the merits, this is a more truthful way of dealing with ballooning costs than trying in vain to hide the problem from seniors by paying doctors less.

No plan will magically wipe away the underlying problem of having an increasingly strapped government provide for an aging population...but applying the tried-and-true principles of competition and personal choice/responsibility is a step in the right direction.

1. There were 183.9 million U.S. adults ages 20-64 in 2009.
2. Peter G. Peterson Foundation. "Budget Explainer: Medicare."

The Medicare Debate, Part I

Turn on your TV and I bet you'll hear one of the Presidential candidates claim that if we elect the other guy, Medicare patients are bound to suffer. You'll hear Romney allege that Obama took $700 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare.

It's true: Obamacare comes with a $716 billion reduction in government's Medicare expenditures over the next 10 years. The majority of these cuts will reduce how much doctors and insurance companies will be reimbursed for the care that they provide/fund.

But there's a perception out there that since these cuts are made to providers, they won't affect patients. A recent Reuters article "Top Six Myths about Medicare" says that the cuts to providers are "mostly meaningless to patients." In National Journal's "10 Things You Need To Know About The Medicare Debate", Thing #1 reads: "President Obama's cuts to Medicare do not affect any benefits." And a Washington Post analysis says "there's one area these cuts don't touch: Medicare benefits."

One of the most important medical benefits people have is the ability to be seen by a doctor when in need. Arbitrarily cutting pay for doctors could certainly impact this benefit.

If a doctor's pay per patient is reduced, he'd need to cram in more patients per day in order to earn as much as before. This trend would leave fewer available doctors for people with urgent medical needs. Some doctors would look to avoid Medicare patients altogether. A 2010 American Medical Association survey of doctors attests to this.

The broader issue here is the unwillingness of some to consider or even acknowledge the existence of unintended consequences of government intervention. And if we can disagree about the effects of this one small aspect of Obamacare, imagine what other unforeseen consequences lie within its 2,700 pages.

In my next post I'll analyze Paul Ryan's proposal for Medicare. I skimmed it the other day and it's more complicated than either side would have you believe.

Making Money

The piercing tone from his clock radio is his signal to stumble out of bed, collect himself, and get ready to face another day at work. Shower, breakfast, coffee, commute. He plans the day ahead, then spends it working hard — making tradeoffs, meeting deadlines, and trying to find some value in those unavoidable meetings. He closes up shop and drives home, eager to finally spend some time with the people who mean the most to him. And at the end of it all he lands in bed, ready or not to hit repeat.

The more money he makes during his days — and the more he’s made throughout his life — the more likely he is to hear politicians clamor for him to pay his fair share back to society. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren recently sounded off about the need for the most successful businessmen to pay their fair share in taxes, declaring, “You built a factory and turned it into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Putting aside the fact that high earners already do pay a large share of their earnings in taxes, Warren’s point and those like it overlook the reality that a person making money is in itself a benefit to society.

The vast majority of people who make money do so only because they’ve delivered goods or services of comparable value. Both parties — employer and employee — benefit from the exchange, and each side’s gain ultimately extends to society at large. An employee’s ability to meet his employer’s needs leaves the employer free to focus on growing the business in order to tackle the needs of potential new customers. This dynamic helps those folks whose needs will now be met as well as those who will be hired to fill new positions in the growing business. In addition, the wealth amassed over the course of a person’s career won’t just be spent on yachts and palaces but also invested back into the economy, spurring the growth of existing businesses and the creation of new ones. As John F. Kennedy famously put it, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

The wealthiest among us are in this way already contributing the most to society, and those contributions have little to do with taxes.

During a 2010 financial reform event in Illinois, President Obama said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

I say you can’t get enough of a good thing.

Boehner's Flaw

In discussing his latest debt ceiling plans, House Speaker John Boehner said yesterday, "Remember one of the principles here: we are not going to increase the debt limit by anything more than what we're willing to cut spending." Specifically he's proposing to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion ($1T) and to reduce future spending by around $1T. The concept sounds reassuring at first, but in practice it wouldn't come close to solving the problem we face.

The debt ceiling exists to limit the amount of debt we can carry. Our debt grows when our federal government spends more than it receives in taxes and has to borrow money to cover the difference. For each of the past 3 years the government has spent about $1.5T that it didn't have, and our debt grew by that much each year.

Boehner's proposal is to raise the debt ceiling by $1T and to cut spending by $1T over the next 10 years. That would mean cutting spending by only $0.1T each year, which would reduce next year's deficit from $1.5T to $1.4T. Well if we only raised the ceiling by $1T, those cuts wouldn't even get us through 1 year without us hitting the ceiling again, at which point Congress could just apply Boehner's principle again...and then again, and again, essentially just paving the way for more astronomical deficits.

The real flaw here is in comparing the amount of spending cuts to the amount we raise the debt ceiling. The right thing to do is to compare the amount of spending cuts to our projected deficits. If we're about to annually spend $1.5T we don't have, we need to cut $1.5T in spending per year! Accomplish that, and there would be no need to raise the debt ceiling.

Creating Wealth

There is a widespread notion that there’s only a fixed amount of wealth in the world — that one can only gain wealth at the expense of others. This belief goes hand in hand with a variety of common viewpoints: the conviction that one man’s fortune is unfair to the rest of us; the guilt many Americans feel on account of our relative wealth in the world; and the fear that immigrants who send money back home have reduced our overall wealth. But what exactly is wealth? And if the fixed-wealth view is wrong, how is wealth created?

Wealth is anything that helps a person or group meet their needs and desires. People use wealth to meet needs on their own (e.g., a house is a form of wealth that provides shelter) and by interacting with others who are in a position to help (e.g., money is wealth that can be used to buy food from a vendor). To better understand the nature of wealth, let’s consider whether a simple transaction between two people adds wealth to their community, and whether wealth has been taken from others in the process.

Let’s say that Grace needs a jacket and pays James $50 to make one for her. For simplicity we’ll assume that James already has the materials and machinery necessary for the job.

After the exchange, the community has gained one jacket at the expense of the materials required to make it. Since the jacket is able to meet needs such as warmth and comfort that the raw materials alone could not, wealth has been added to the community.

In addition, James has likely learned something by making the jacket. Perhaps he’s discovered a way to speed up the process or to improve the quality of his product. James is now better able to meet the needs of others; his newfound knowledge is a form of wealth added to the community.

The 50 dollars themselves still exist, but are they worth as much as they were before? Do transactions like this reduce the value of currency or raise it? Well an increase in the supply of a product tends to reduce its price because the additional competition among suppliers forces them to slash prices to compete for customers. And lower prices mean more bang for the buck. So this transaction is representative of the type of production that increases the value of currency, which adds wealth to communities throughout the world.

On the other hand, the machinery used to make the jacket has undergone wear and tear that will eventually take it out of service, leaving it unable to meet needs any longer. Over time, different forms of wealth are inevitably lost: products age and lose their value, and people leave the work force taking their expertise with them. But if beneficial transactions happen efficiently and often enough, overall wealth creation will outpace these natural losses.

In the end, Grace and James have added wealth to their community without taking it from anyone! Wealth has been created.

Sadly, the fixed-wealth misconception is self-fulfilling: antipathy toward achievers leads to tax-raising schemes that stifle people’s ability and incentive to create wealth. In this time of need, we should allow and encourage talented and motivated people to do what they do best.

Economics vs. Politics

In Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, Thomas Sowell illustrates the major difference between economic and political mindsets:

"Politics offers attractive solutions, but economics can offer only tradeoffs. For example, when laws are proposed to restrict the height of apartment buildings in a community, politics presents the issue in terms of whether we prefer tall buildings or buildings of more modest height in our town; economics asks what you are prepared to trade off in order to keep the height of buildings below some specified level. In places where land costs can equal or exceed the cost of the apartment buildings themselves, the difference between allowing ten-story buildings to be built and allowing a maximum of five stories may be that rents will be much higher in the shorter buildings, because land costs are now twice as high per apartment.

"Nor are money costs the only costs. With twice as many shorter buildings now required to house the same number of people, the community must spread outward since it cannot spread upward, and that means more commuting and more highway fatalities. The question then is not simply whether you prefer shorter buildings, but how much do you prefer shorter buildings, and what price are you prepared to pay to mandate height restrictions in your community. A doubling of rents and three additional highway fatalities per year? A tripling of rents and ten additional highway fatalities per year? Economics cannot answer such questions — it can only make you aware of a need to ask them.

"Economics was christened 'the dismal science' because it dealt with inescapable constraints and painful tradeoffs instead of more pleasant, unbounded visions and their accompanying inspiring rhetoric, which many find so attractive in politics and in the media. Moreover, economics follows the unfolding consequences of decisions over time, not just what happens in stage one, which may indeed seem to fulfill the hopes that inspired these decisions. Nowhere are the consequences more long-lasting than in housing, where a community can have an aging and shrinking supply of apartment buildings with accompanying housing shortages for decades, or even generations, after passing rent control laws which have a track record of leading to such consequences in countries around the world.

"The passage of time insulates many political decisions from public awareness of their real consequences. Only a small fraction of New Yorkers today are old enough to remember what the housing situation was there before rent control laws were introduced during World War II. Only a dwindling number of Californians are old enough to remember when that state's housing prices were very much like housing prices in the rest of the country, instead of being some multiple of what people pay elsewhere for a home or an apartment. These and other consequences of particular political decisions in the past are today just facts of life that new generations have grown up with as something as natural as the weather or other circumstances of their existence which are beyond their control.

"The vast numbers of frustrated California motorists who endure long commutes to and from work on congested highways are unlikely to see any connection between their daily frustrations and attractive-sounding policies about 'open space' or 'farmland preservation.' Nor are economists who point out that connection likely to be as popular with them as politicians, who are ready to offer solutions to rescue these motorists from their current problems using the same kind of one-stage thinking that created those problems in the first place."¹

1. Thomas Sowell. Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One.

Heeding Hazlitt

David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to President Obama, recently advocated the Stimulus Bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009):

"This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet, with thousands of highly-visible road, bridge, water and other infrastructure projects breaking ground across the country, giving the American people a first-hand look at the Recovery Act in their own backyards and making it crystal clear what the cost would have been of doing nothing...The Recovery Act is putting millions of Americans to work and helping the economy grow again."

Axelrod is correct in saying that the bill's spending provides employment and improves infrastructure. However, further analysis calls into question whether such spending actually helps the economy grow.

Distinguished economist Henry Hazlitt provides such analysis in his compelling book, Economics in One Lesson:¹

"A certain amount of public spending is necessary to perform essential government functions. A certain amount of public works—of streets and roads and bridges and tunnels, of armories and navy yards, of buildings to house legislatures, police and fire departments—is necessary to supply essential public services. With such public works, necessary for their own sake, and defended on that ground alone, I am not here concerned. I am here concerned with public works considered as a means of 'providing employment' or of adding wealth to the community that it would not otherwise have had.

"A bridge is built. If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary than the things for which the taxpayers would have spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them, there can be no objection. But a bridge built primarily 'to provide employment' is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. 'Projects' have to be invented. Instead of thinking only where bridges must be built, the government spenders begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built. Can they think of plausible reasons why an additional bridge should connect Easton and Weston? It soon becomes absolutely essential. Those who doubt the necessity are dismissed as obstructionists and reactionaries.

"Two arguments are put forward for the bridge, one of which is mainly heard before it is built, the other of which is mainly heard after it has been completed. The first argument is that it will provide employment. It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year. The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence.

"This is what is immediately seen. But if we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridgeworkers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.

"Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $1,000,000 taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, radio technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

"But then we come to the second argument. The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. It has come into being through the magic of government spending. Where would it have been if the obstructionists and the reactionaries had had their way? There would have been no bridge. The country would have been just that much poorer.

"Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and radios, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the unsold and ungrown foodstuffs. To see these uncreated things requires a kind of imagination that not many people have. We can think of these non-existent objects once, perhaps, but we cannot keep them before our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day. What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others."²

1. It's amazing that a book written 60 years ago directly addresses what Axelrod said just last week.
2. Henry Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics, pg. 19-21.

Freedom and Happiness

I had a great day at work the other day. After hours of trying to figure out why the software I'd written wasn't working, I finally found the error in my code that was causing the problem. As a software engineer, one of the most rewarding parts of my job is successfully debugging code — finding and fixing my own mistakes. It's strange that part of my happiness requires that I make mistakes, because those same mistakes can cause frustration and delay! It's sometimes hard to understand what makes us happy.

This got me thinking about a friend of mine who moved from beautiful Palo Alto, California to blustery Chicago. I remember asking him why he'd want to leave such a great climate for cold and windy weather, and he told me that he'd become bored of the perfect weather and that he missed the rain and the cold. It struck me as odd that even though my friend would probably prefer nice weather on any given day, he was happiest when he experienced subpar weather some of the time.

The recipe for happiness can be puzzling, and it changes from person to person and from time to time. The inconsistent and unpredictable nature of happiness underscores the importance of giving individuals the freedom to find and bring about their own happiness, and makes me wary of any mandatory government program that is claimed to make life better for all people.

Take Social Security, the social insurance program that is funded by mandatory payroll taxes. Before Social Security was signed into law, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "There is no reason why everyone in the United States should not be covered. I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn't be a member of the social security system." So FDR couldn't see any reason why people shouldn't have Social Security? Well what about if they don't want to? What if they want to spend their hard-earned money on something else? And who is anyone to say what should or shouldn't be a part of everyone else's life?

I think it's arrogant for anyone, even the President, to presume that any one thing will make life better for everybody. And while financial security can greatly improve a person's quality of life, government-imposed financial security undermines our freedom. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."