Coyote Blog

Trump vs. Hawaii More Interesting Than I Thought

The Conservative and Progressive responses to the Supreme Court's Trump vs. Hawaii decision that upheld v3.0 of the travel ban are pretty predictable -- Progressive writers have argued that of course it violated the first amendment because Trump made clear any number of times that he was animated by distrust of Muslims, while Conservatives said it was clearly not just aimed at Muslims (he included Chad!) but anyway it was a bad precedent to infer intent from campaign speeches even before he was President.

What I didn't know until I read Eugene Volokh was that there are some really interesting precedents that make immigration law one of the few areas effectively outside the Bill of Rights.  I don't really like what I see in this, but it is an issue I never understood before.  You really need to read the whole thing to get the gist, but here is his summary:

The U.S. has nearly unlimited power to decide when foreigners are admitted to the country, even based on factors (such as ideology, religion, and likely race and sex) that would be unconstitutional as to people already in the country.

Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 In An Alternate Universe

In this case, a state worker was suing to prevent a public employee union from deducting an "agency fee" from his paycheck despite the fact that he did not want to join the union.  The union argued that the employee benefited from their collective bargaining and should have to pay something for it.  Apparently the case turned on First Amendment issues -- while technically the union could not spend these agency fees on political speech, the reality is that money is fungible and at some level almost everything a public union does is political.

As a quick background, I totally support private union bargaining as a fundamental right under the First Amendment, though we could argue whether current law overly tips the power balance toward or away from unions vs. a free market.  On the other hand, I have deep, deep doubts about public sector unions, largely because there is no real bargaining going on.  In most cases, the public sector unions and the officials they are nominally bargaining with are on the same side and opposed to taxpayer interests.

So I am not unhappy to see public unions take a hit here, but addressing my concerns should be a legislative issue (as exemplified by a number of "right to work" states that have banned this practice).  But this is a judicial case and should not be dealing with legislative issues but issues of the law, and the case confuses me because I could easily see the Right and the Left arguing opposite sides on legal issues of this case given a slightly different world.  After all, requiring employees to pay these fees is a condition of employment -- wouldn't we expect Conservatives to support the right of employers to freely set the conditions of employment?  If these are too onerous, Conservatives would argue people would just not work there.  In this world, wouldn't we expect, then, Progressives to argue against such open-ended freedom for employers to set work conditions on the argument that there is a power imbalance between employer and worker -- exacerbated because the employer is the state in this case -- and they can't easily fight these onerous conditions?  Huge swaths of employment law, written mainly from the Left, are dedicated to circumscribing allowed employment conditions.

Kevin Drum quotes favorably from Chad Terhune at the LA Times

Some insurers are chasing after much smaller customers with new plans designed to limit employer payouts for big claims using what's called stop-loss policies. This guarantees that businesses won't be responsible for anything over a certain amount per employee, perhaps as low as $10,000 or $20,000, with the rest paid by an insurer. Regulators and health-policy experts say this arrangement undercuts the notion of self-insurance since employers aren't bearing much of the risk, and it allows companies to circumvent some state insurance rules.

"This is not real self-insurance. This is clearly a sham," said Mark Hall, a professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University who has studied the small-business insurance market. "Regulators have good reason to be concerned about the potential harm to the market."

Self-insurance is attractive for many reasons, particularly the prospect of lower costs. It's exempt from state insurance regulations such as mandated benefits, granting employers the flexibility to design their own benefit package and the opportunity to reap some of the savings from employee wellness programs. A federal law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, governs self-funded plans. Some aspects of the Affordable Care Act do apply to self-insurance, such as the elimination of caps on lifetime benefits and some preventive care at no cost.

Drum agrees

Yeah, it's a scam.

In a reasonably sane world, and in all other contexts outside of health care, insurance is obtained at relatively low prices to cover only catastrophic events that would be potentially bankrupting.  Car insurance does not cover oil changes and home insurance does not cover oven repairs.  So why is it that Drum is arguing that we should ban insurance policies that only cover catastrophic losses and not routine costs?   After all, the second sentence in the first paragraph from the LA Times sure seems to define exactly what insurance should be (and is similar to my personal policy, which has a high deductible attached to a health savings account).

The problem is that when Drum and the Left use the word "health insurance" they are actually referring to a bundle of four items

• Traditional catastrophic insurance against large, unexpected, bankrupting charges
• Third party payment / capitation for entirely routine and expected health expenditures, from physicals to contraception
• Crony payoffs for favored constituencies, mainly via mandated benefits rules.  This payoff may be to consumers, e.g. young women like Sandra Fluke who have the rest of us pay to maintain her sex life; or it may be to corporate cronies, who are able to get their particular device or procedure or service included in the mandated benefits, guaranteeing a large stream of customers who don't care a bit what the product or service costs because it is now paid for by a third party.
• Social engineering, in the form of embedded incentives to promote certain favored behaviors like seeking preventative care or eating better.  And when the government is paying the bill, the policy becomes a Trojon horse for government micro-management of our lives in the name of health cost reduction.

The second item seems to be a paradigm embedded in the mind of everyone in the US today, that health plans somehow need to cover every imaginable health-related expense.  Outside of an HMO model where these expenses are managed, this is a recipe for a cost explosion.  If we all had pre-paid car policies that bought our cars for us with low deductibles, no one would be driving a seven-year-old Nova.  The third and fourth items are Trojan horses for state control and cronyism that politicians are desperate to preserve.   So it is not surprising that efforts to roll back insurance to just be, well, insurance is met with anger by would-be authoritarians.  The question is, why do we listen to them?

Chad Graham of the Arizona Republic writes an article this week that begins with this headline:

Phoenix can learn economically from robust Seattle and Austin

Already, my BS antenna are deployed.  Why?  I don't know anything about Mr. Graham, but nearly every 20- or 30-something journalist would like all the world to be hip and freaky and trendy and cool like Seattle or Austin (or Boulder or San Francisco).  So they have a natural predisposition to writing a story and interpreting facts to say that Phoenix (or whatever uncool city they hail from) should do everything it can to emulate Seattle or Portland or whatever is the hip city of the moment. 

I have lived in Phoenix and Seattle and Boulder, and have done business in Portland and Austin.  And if you want to find a really great music club, Austin would be your place.  And if you are a really rich guy who wants a unique lake front home and a dock for his floatplane, Seattle would be the pick.  But if you were a middle class family trying to get the most home for your money, you would take Phoenix all the way.  And if you wanted to start a real business that makes stuff, you would be insane to do it in any of these cities except Phoenix (and perhaps Austin).  Portland and Seattle and Boulder and (more recently) Austin are what one might call rich snob - poor snob towns.  They appeal to the millionaire with the fractional ownership jet and the pierced and tattooed slacker club goer.  Which is fine, but does every city really need to be like them?

Unlike the Valley, some parts of the U.S. such as Seattle and Austin
have been only slightly affected by the national economic slowdown.

Neither area has experienced the Valley's level of falling home prices, increased foreclosure rates nor its slowed job growth.

Those regions are places that Phoenix could learn from as it charts
a future based less on housing and growth and more on competing in the
global economy.

OK, lets start with the home thing, since the article focuses A LOT on housing.  I am willing to concede that in some recent period Austin and Seattle had less of a home price drop than Phoenix.  Ignoring for a moment the absurdity of extrapolating 30 year trends from 6-12 months of data, we should look structurally at these housing markets.  It turns out that Seattle, for example, has MUCH higher median home prices than Phoenix, in large part due to structural regulatory factors that I would presume the author would like Phoenix to emulate. 

As a result, the median home price in Seattle is about $450,000 while the median in Phoenix is closer to $275,000.  In fact, the Seattle median is very close to the Phoenix 75th percentile.  [note figures do not match those in article - I could not find any two median home price numbers that were the same for a market] One comment on Seattle housing was this:

The pattern is very strong: In Seattle you have affluent, largely
single people chasing a small supply of urban housing. The result is
small household size, an exodus of families to the suburbs, and very
high housing prices in the city.

Is this really what Phoenix should emulate, just because our home prices dropped more over a 6 month period?

One year ago, the Valley's job growth ranked No. 7 among
metropolitan markets with more than 1 million workers, according to the
latest Blue Chip Job Growth Update released by the W.P. Carey School of
Business at Arizona State University.

It now ranks No. 20, while Seattle is  No. 2.

In job markets with less than 1 million workers, Austin ranks  No. 14.

So, until recently, Phoenix led both cities in job growth.  In the last year, we have fallen behind.  Can anyone on the planet tell me why the last year of data is more relevant than the previous five, or ten, when Phoenix dusted these markets?  One year of downturn and suddenly Phoenix's economy needs to be restructured by some massive government 5-year plan?

But here is the really funny part.  Let's take Seattle, the economic juggernaut with which the author is so enamored.  In 1960, Seattle had a population of about 550,000 people.  In 2000, Seattle had a population of about.... 550,000.  In the same time period Phoenix grew from 726,000 to 3.2 million.  Wow, that Seattle is a growth juggernaut.  But it is hard to get apples and oranges on MSA's and such, so here is data from a single source:  From 1990-2000, the Austin MSA added 400,000 people, Seattle MSA added 382,000 people and Phoenix added 1.01 million, more than the other two combined.  Presumably, most of these folks found work, so where are all the jobs being added?

In Phoenix, "housing-related employment is falling fast, and the
impact on the economy is extreme since the industry comprises over 15
percent of total employment . . . compared to 10 percent nationwide,"
an April Moody's Economy.com report said.

This is hilarious.  We happen to be in a housing market downturn, so Phoenix is doomed because it is overweighted towards home construction.  But did anyone visit Seattle or Austin in 2001/2002 after the tech bubble crash?  It was a bloodbath, far worse than what Phoenix is experiencing today.  This kind of analysis is so short-sighted as to be absurd. 

Maricopa County's average weekly wages increased 3.8 percent to $822
in the third quarter of 2007, according to the latest numbers available
from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Weekly wages in King County, home to Seattle, rose 8 percent to
$1,129. Wages in Travis County, home to Austin, rose to $911, a 2.7
percent jump.

Meanwhile, Arizona's average per person income ($33,029) grew by the
smallest percentage among states in 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau
of Economic Analysis.

One word for you:  immigration.  Arizona has gotten hundreds of thousands of new immigrants with relatively low skills, so they come in at the bottom of the income scale and drive median wages down.  Seattle and Austin immigration, to the extent they have it, are high-skilled and highly paid.  Does every city have to be a high-income yuppie white-Asian enclave like Seattle?  I like Arizona and its Hispanic influences, even if this immigration means the governor can't puff her chest out at the governors' conference over average wages.

The two cities have a greater percentage of employment in tech jobs,
with 9.2 percent in Austin and 8.8 in Seattle compared with 4.6 percent
in Phoenix.

Sorry, but I have never thought it a goal of government to subsidize and maximize "tech jobs."  The other 95.4% of us in Phoenix without a job statistically categorized by the government as a tech job are happy not to be subsidizing the other 4.6%.  This is the kind of effort that does nothing to help the average person, who will never have a tech job, but makes government officials feel really good about themselves.  Another way of putting it:  The author is suggesting the government single-mindedly focus on subsidizing a class of jobs that 90+% of the people in all three cities do not hold.

Postscript: For those of you who want to laugh yourself silly, you really need to read the "vision" in the sidebar of this article.  It is the most incredible collection of politically correct notions without any relationship to real value creation that I have ever seen.  I can't really do it justice, but here are some highlights:

2010

The latest housing bust finally convinces the Arizona Legislature to
fund an aggressive international-economic-development program that
invests in science, engineering, technology and higher education.

Incentives draw nutraceutical firms, which use food substances to make
products that provide health benefits, such as lycopene.
Green-technology firms partner with universities to launch companies
that turn a profit...

2035

High-paying technology jobs are clustered in three major areas from
Prescott to Phoenix to Tucson. The economy boasts an $800 billion
nutraceutical industry and the world's largest solar facility with
10,000 acres of sun power.

I bet they include no offset in their study for lost growth due to higher taxes to fund this.  And our city of 5-10 million people is going to build its economy on nutraceuticals?  We're going to have a vitamin water business that, at $800 billion, is 6% the current size of the entire US economy?  I sure hope some of the business school students who wrote this either wise up or go into academics, because if they try to walk in to a real corporate board room with this stuff they are going to get skewered.

Yet another weird SF fan points out this example of dueling Luddites.  Here is a particularly nice example:

My favorite definition of local comes from Columbia's Gussow, a
reporter for Time in the 1950s who went on to become a local-eating
pioneer. For 25 years, Gussow has lectured on the environmental (and
culinary) disadvantages of relying on a global food supply. Her most
oft-quoted statistic is that shipping a strawberry from California to
New York requires 435 calories of fossil fuel but provides the eater
with only 5 calories of nutrition. In her memoir, Gussow offers this
rather poetic meaning of local: "Within a day's leisurely drive of our
homes. [This] distance is entirely arbitrary. But then, so was the
decision made by others long ago that we ought to have produce from all
around the world."

It is hard to even begin with statement.  First, I am not sure anyone since Ghandi has really challenged the notion of division of labor, which in fact is what Gussow is lamenting.  Second, it would be interesting to ask Gussow what residents of Chad should do for locally-grown food.  Third, the last sentence is great, in that it works from the Dr. Evil Cabal theory of capitalism, positing that current trade patterns are based on "decisions made by others long ago."  And all these complaints don't even tought the silliness of somehow comparing food calories with calories of work from fossil fuels (unless Gussow is drinking Sterno at night, which might explain a lot).