Coyote Blog

Previously, I thought I was on the hook to pay 8% of wages only if I did not offer a health care option.  But it turns out that even if our company offers a health care option, we STILL owe the 8% if the employee chooses not to avail him or herself of the company plan.  From the legislation, page 145:

Beginning with Y2, if an employee declines such  offer but otherwise obtains coverage in an Exchange participating health benefits plan (other than by reason of being covered by family coverage as a spouse or dependent of the primary insured), the employer shall make a timely contribution to the Health Insurance Exchange with respect to each such employee in accordance with section 313.

Beyond the costs, the record-keeping requirements are staggering.  I have to keep track of how every employee chooses to get their health care, and have to pay different private and public agencies based on these individual decisions.  Beyond this, for my part time employees (which is everyone), the maximum amount I have to pay varies by the hours worked, meaning the legal requirement for employer health care contribution will vary from employee to employee, and may be different, and change year to year, for all 500 of my employees.

Most of my employees are either on Medicare (which presumably has been paid for with their lifetime Medicare taxes) or on a private retirement health plan.  I have been reading the plan for hours and have not figured out if I will owe money for employees on either of these programs.  Anyone with an insight into this is welcome to email me.

You can actually read the health care bill.  Here.

Hat tip to Radley Balko, from 1150 WDEL

And, the leader of an anti-drunk driving group hopes those images don't send the wrong message to the millions of young people who saw the president drinking on TV.

Nancy Raynor is president of the Delaware chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

She says her group isn't "prohibitionist," but it is is concerned about what teens and childrens take away from seeing the president drinking on TV.

Kids would have seen the President drinking a very modest amount of alcohol, and then not driving. And this has what to do with drunk driving? Answer: nothing. Because despite her protestations, MADD has become a prohibitionist organization.

Over the last few years, Republicans have tried to wrap themselves in the flag of the First Amendment, arguing that they were the true defenders of free speech against political correctness.  But while the left certainly has attacked speech on certain fronts, the right has been no less busy, particularly in areas related to sex, crime, and security.   One example, via Overlawyered:

Two Lee County, Florida men face possible prison sentences of five years because their MySpace pages show them making hand gestures that prosecutors say are associated with street gangs. "Their prosecutions are the first under a state law passed last year that criminalizes the use of electronic media to "˜promote' gangs." The bill's sponsor, state legislator Rep. William D. Snyder, R-Stuart, says in response to charges that the measure violates the First Amendment by criminalizing expression: "none of our freedoms are absolute, and the freedom of expression is not absolute"

I had read a couple of articles positing that by destroying low value cars in the "cash for clunkers program,"  the government was hurting the poor by removing the supply of sub-$5000 used cars from the market.  But what I did not realize is that this program further requires that the engines themselves be rendered useless, so that they cannot be used for parts or rebuilt replacement engines.

The automotive death sentences are meant to ensure that gas-guzzling old models make no return to the road. As sodium silicate disables an entire generation of junkyard-bound cars, the price of used engines will likely skyrocket, predicts Michael Wilson, executive vice president of the Automotive Recyclers Association. "It's the law of supply and demand."

Good plan.  The Journal has a good article about how this sodium silicate process was selected to destroy cars.  I am left wondering if engine parts can even be recycled economically for their metal after the treatment.

Added a link on the right for phone numbers and emails of all Congress members.

Today, here on Cape Cod, where every car has an Obama sticker, I was struck by two cars which had Obama stickers as well as this same slogan, a paraphrase of a Ben Franklin bon mot:

Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security.

I have absolutely no problem with this bumper sticker in its original context, which I presume was to protest things like the Patriot Act, indefinite detentions, and wiretapping during the Bush Administration (and all retained, so far, by this Administration).

But my question back to them would be -- do you still support this statement in the context of pending health care legislation, which is yet another example of trading individual liberty for security, albeit security of a slightly different type?

John Stossel has a post on Dan Rather's really bad idea to have the government restructure and, presumably, fund the media.

A press that is financially dependent on the government cannot be free. Even if it had formal protections against micromanaging by elected officials, socialized journalism would inevitably be compromised journalism. It would be no more independent than a subsidized farmer or a defense contractor.

Perhaps an even better example are state governments.  There are explicit protections - not just legal, but Constitutional - of state's authority vs. those of the Federal government.  Theoretically, it should be impossible for the Federal government to impose, say, seatbelt laws or restrictions on drinking age, as those are clearly in the purview of states.

But enter Federal highway and education money.  Time and again, states are threatened by the Federal government that it will withold money from a state -- money collected from taxpayers in that state -- unless the state passes legislation of its choosing.  If the Feds can use funding to push around California and Texas, what hope does the LA Times or the Houston Post have of avoiding such control, if their survival becomes dependent on federal funds.

The author of one of the charts I criticized in the recent government climate report has responded directly to my post.    Generally unimpressed, I counter in this post at Climate Skeptic.

Hawaii 5-0?  Star Trek?  I Dream of Jeannie?

Jeannie, fresh as a daisy/Just love how she obeys me/She does things that amaze me so...

The Star Trek lyrics are awful, but you have to do a search to find them all.  The Leave it to Beaver lyrics are just ... bizarre.   Some pre-1960s hallucinogens or something.

I have been trying to find a word to describe the legislative style we have seen prominently over the last 9 months (though it was used long before this administration -- the Patriot Act comes to mind).   Unable to think of any other name, an in homage to "murder-death-kill" in "Demolition Man,"  I am going to call it Crisis-Emergency-Rush.

TARP was a Crisis-Emergency-Rush.  As was the Stimulus bill, Waxman-Markey, and now Health Care.  (The last two are particularly hilarious when one needs to evaluate the need to rush.   Waxman-Markey is implemented over decades, and the health care bills as currently written don't really begin to take effect until 2013).

So here is my prediction for the next Crisis-Emergency-Rush:  Raising taxes.  Obama already has his boys out sending trial balloons about new taxes, even beyond those required in Waxman-Markey and to fund the health care bill.  Having spent over a trillion dollars on useless spending to support favored political constituencies, Obama will now declare a fiscal crisis that can only be solved by increased taxes on his non-favored constituencies.

At the beach for a while.

The last post on Elisha Storm's blog before her house was raided and she was dragged to jail for blogging about a local drug enforcement task force.

I personally am all for more citizen imposed accountability on police forces and an tired of the police's resistance to such efforts.  I suppose one could argue that the police need some protection for legitimate undercover efforts, though Virginia apparently does not have a law on its books to this effect, so lacking such legislation it's hard to see how Ms. Storm can be prosecuted (its also unclear if the officers involved were even strictly under cover -- paging Valerie Plame).  My sense is that the courts have been very, very, very leery about applying "harassment" laws to monitoring and criticism of public employees.

Update: We had a kind of similar case here in Phoenix with the New Times and Sheriff Arpaio.

Update#2: Radley Balko has more thoughts.  He says

Assume instead that these officers were investigating organized crime, or a terror cell. What do you think of this woman's arrest? Photographing, writing about, and criticizing police officers, even by name, should of course be legal. But it's a tougher call when the officers in question work undercover. Naming them, posting their photos, posting their addresses, are all pretty clearly efforts to intimidate them, and it isn't difficult to see how doing so not only makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs, but may well endanger their lives.

I might agree with this. But then it (publishing names of undercover officers) should be specifically illegal in Virginia. There are very, very, very few and very narrow exceptions to the First Amendment acknowledged by law and the courts. A reasonable person should expect that if an exception has not been made for the specific activity in which they are engaging, that their behavior is legal.  And besides, one should never have to go to court and wait for a jury verdict for everyone to figure out if an activity is legal or not.

Update #3: I have heard it argued that she was really just tweaking these guys without serving any real positive purpose.  Maybe.  Could be she just had a grudge.  But many of her activities are virtually indistinguishable from those of someone who was really trying to impose some accountability.  I have never heard of the effectiveness of public speech being a criteria for the legality of such speech.

Dan Rather says:

"A democracy and free people cannot thrive without a fiercely independent press"

How does he want to achieve this independent press?  He wants the Obama Administration to appoint a czar or something.  Because we all know how independent GM's decision making has been since Obama dived in there.  And don't forget the fiercely independent EPA, which suppresses any internal dissent to Obama's positions.  Or the fiercely independent inspector generals who get fired when they look into Obama's friends.  And don't forget the fiercely independent John Woo, who was willing to write that just about anything the last Administration wanted to do was legal.

If the government can tax food because eating too much can increase health care costs, what about sex?  Sex leads to all kinds of medically expensive consequences (STDs, including AIDS; aborted pregnancies; childbirth).  Shouldn't we tax sex as well, by the same logic?

Mark Perry links a story on the "cash for clunkers" program, including a small taste of the 136-pages of rules, regulations, and procedures dealers must follow to qualify for the payment.

From the Anti-Planner:

Forty states have asked the federal government for a total of $102 billion for high-speed rail. This suggests that the Antiplanner's estimate of $90 billion for the cost of the Obama high-speed rail plan was low.

Secretary of Behavior Modification Ray LaHood says that this "shows that the country is ready for high-speed rail." Of course, all it really shows is that state bureaucrats are ready for free federal money.

XKCD, of course.
I really felt this way when it came time to take my first baby home from the hospital.   You can't just be letting me take him home -- I don't know what I am doing!

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am very skeptical wind will make very much sense as a major power source outside of a few niche applications.  Solar may not be economic today, but I think it will someday, and maybe even some day soon.  But I am not sure wind will ever be ready for prime time.

I thought this was pretty funny: (emphasis added)

In the space of one hour last month, electricity generated at wind farms in the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge shot up by 1,000 megawatts "“ enough to power some 680,000 homes.

Less than an hour later, it plummeted almost as much.

Sitting in front of 10 computer screens in a fifth-floor room of the federal Bonneville Power Administration headquarters in Portland, Kim Randolph had to react quickly.

Working from a keyboard, she diverted millions of gallons of water away from massive turbines spinning in Columbia River dams and sent it around the dams.

The 17-year veteran power operations specialist remembers how fast she needed to work as a wind storm caused generation to peak and fall three times over eight hours.

The article is about the difficulty for grid operators in integrating and managing wind in the grid.  But here is the part that slides by -- despite the electricity it is putting in the grid, wind is contributing...nothing.  Note that when wind production is surging, the utility is sending water around the turbines of the dam.  That lost potential energy is gone forever.  All the wind power did in this case is substitute for clean hydro power.  It has not value in this particular case (beyond the ability of the utility to put wind on its annual report and seek subsidies from the Obama administration).

Apparently the costs of trying to integrate wind into the grid is so high the utility tried to charge wind producers a higher integration charge than they do for other sources.   This attempt to set pricing equal to actual costs was apparently killed by pressure from the Obama administration, making sure that wind will continue to get preferential treatment and I presume substitute for dirty hydro power in the future.

Postscript: I just don't see how wind is ever going to work on the grid.  In this case, wind is backed up by hydro, but in others it has to be backed up by spinning, fuel-burning fossil fuel plants.  Wind makes more sense to me linked to some type of flexible local process.  Using wind to make hydrogen from water may make sense.  Wind could store its energy by pumping water backwards back up a dam to be recovered as electricity through hydro power later.  Or it could run a local process, such as water desalinization  (a good potential candidate as sea breezes tend to be more constant).

Income inequality was the topic de jour during much of the election.   The left argued that median wages had stagnated, and tried very hard to date this stagnation from 1980 so that it could be blamed on Ronald Reagan.   Others have argued that the the whole median family wage stagnation thing was overblown, as 1) families had changed alot over 30 years;  2) Compensation had changed (such that wages were less of total compensation with the rise in value of health care plans); and 3) individuals matter, not quartiles, and individuals were doing well and still had mobility between income bands.

My sense is that the income inequality numbers have always been fraught with problems.  For example, rich people have huge incentives to manage the income numbers on their tax returns, so trying to draw conclusions about top earners from their tax returns is a bit dangerous.  Just the shift from C to S corps and LLC's over the last 30 years has fundamentally shifted what income high net worth entrepreneurs show on their tax returns.

All that being said, I think it is clear the income gap has grown, and it really started growing in this country around 1970.  Whether this matters is a different story - its clear from comparing to European countries that while our gap has spread vs. their income gaps, its almost 100% because our rich are richer than their rich.  Our lowest quintile is pretty comparable (here).  If that is the case, its an interesting question to see if this bothers folks.

Anyway, I think there still is work to be done to fully explain and rationalize these income inequality numbers.  But I still find it hard to believe they are not somehow related to immigration.  After all, dropping 20 million new immigrants, many of them quite poor, into the bottom quintile of US workers over the last 20 years certainly tends to pull down medians.  Just compare these two charts, with income inequality on the top and the percentage of residents in any given year that are foreign-born (legal or illegal immigrants).  I fitted the two charts together manually to get the time scales to line up, I don't have time to replot them together as I should.  Click to enlarge.

Its hard to see, by the way, how the top chart really reflects a trend starting with Reagan (as much as the left so desperately wants it to be true).  Something happened around 1970 to reverse the curve.  I have offered one possible cause.  I do so reluctantly, because I don't want to be misunderstood -- I am a big supporter of open immigration and would hate to give the anti-immigration folks any ammunition.

Anyway, you are welcome to discuss.  It is something I am thinking about but don't have an answer for.

Postscript: This is the chart comparing the top and bottom US deciles to countries in Europe on an absolute dollar basis. The conclusion I draw is that our poorest are in about the same shape as the poorest in Europe, but our rich are richer than in Europe.  Given this, does our income inequality still worry you?

The reason the analysis is done this funny way is that what one usually sees is some country like Chad with the poor at 80% of the median income.  But 80% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.  So this chart converts everyone to apples and apples - almost.  I still think it underestimates how well off the US poor are, maybe some sort of exchange rate vs. PPP problem.

Via Shorpy, Cadillac Square in 1916 Detroit.  A substantially more prosperous city than today.

Any person with a room temperature IQ can figure out that the Obama "jobs saved" metric is complete BS, a measure that is totally unmeasurable, and therefore can be set to any value the Administration wishes.

But this is, if anything, even crazier:

How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months.

But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state's accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime.

"Sometimes some work for an individual is better than no work," said Oregon's Senate president, Peter Courtney.

With the economy in tatters and unemployment rising, Oregon's inventive math underscores the urgency for politicians across the country to show that spending programs designed to stimulate the economy are working "” even if that means stretching the facts.

At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can't be verified.

On a full-time FTE basis, the report figures Oregon has "created"  215 full-time jobs.  They don't even attempt to do the math on how many jobs were destroyed when $176 million was taken from other productive uses.  But does anyone else syspect that the private hands the $176 million was formerly in probably would employ more than 215 people for that chunk of change?

Maybe I have watched too many movies, but it just does not seem like this will end well:

In its recently released "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047" report, the US Air Force details a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The Air Force says that increasingly, humans will monitor situations, rather than be deciders or participants, and that "advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input."

I will eschew some obvious Terminator clips and go a little old school

The original version of this scene actually did not make the theaters because it was too violent for the time.  If you want the full gore, .  The clip begins with the theatrical release, and then it replays the whole thing with the deleted bits.

I have written on this topic any number of times, warning that when government pays the health care bills, said payments gives it nearly infinite room to label just about any individual behavior as "costly" to the health care system and therefore fair game for micro-regulation.

Via a reader:

If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that's their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)

"Facing the serious consequences of an uncontrolled obesity epidemic, America's state and federal  policy makers may need to consider interventions every bit as forceful as those that succeeded in cutting adult tobacco use by more than 50%," the Urban Institute report says. It took awhile -- almost 50 years from the first surgeon general's report on tobacco in 1964 -- to drive smoking down. But in many ways, the drumbeat of scientific evidence and the growing cultural stigma against obesity already are well underway -- as any parent who has tried to bring birthday cupcakes into her child's classroom certainly knows.

Key among the "interventions" the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.

Please, please note the text in bold.  They have made overeating a crime with a victim - people who are thin are victims of those who are overweight, and therefore can call on the government to take swift action to protect them.  Eek!  And the LA Times is clearly in love with the idea.   Is it any wonder my chief concern about government health care is not the costs, but the threats to individual liberty?

John Stoessel has further comments.

For those of you comfortably thin who chose to ignore this as not your problem, consider this:  If an overweight person is a threat to a thin person, via the health care charges he might burden taxpayers with, what about, say, a skier?  I don't chose to participate in dangerous sports, so isn't a skier doing a crime against me by the same logic for taking a risk of a potentially expensive injury?  How about a person whose hobby involves dangerous tools.  If TJIC cuts his finger off on his band saw, isn't that costing me money in our new socialist regime?  What about bike riding, or motorcycle riding, or rock climbing, or rugby?  What about any parent that lets their kid play somewhere they could get hurt and cost us mone?

This is why government health care is so dangerous  -- it takes what should be individual decisions with individual consequences and socializes the costs of our personal choices.  Once the costs are socialized, won't control of the choices themselves follow?

Postscript: Again going into morbid mode here, obesity may increase costs for younger patients, but its higher early morbidity actually can reduce lifetime costs.  Basically, morbidly obese people tend to die more often before they grow old enough to get expensive cancers and such.  Several studies have shown lifetime costs for the obese to be lower than for other folks.

Which is not to say that obesity is good, so please do not misunderstand my point.  I would work hard to help someone I loved who was morbidly overweight to get in better health.  Obesity can be bad but its a crappy excuse to take another axe to our free society.

I had trouble believing this chart (ht Maggies Farm) until I looked at the HHS data here and saw it was dead on.  On the chart below, the width of the band at the left is percentage of the US population, and to the right is percentage of the US welfare roles.

The second biggest band, in green, I believe is New York.  Its incredible that California's financial problems can be in the news for months and I have never seen a whiff of this in the media.