The Power of Perspective: 2nd Amendment Edition

From Apollo via Marginal Revolution:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America. 500 years ago, Machiavelli compared ancient Persia with then-modern France. Persia was highly centralized, so the emperor was firmly in control of all parts of his realm, and could muster enormous numbers of men to any part of the country. But if you could defeat that army and the central authority that raised it, then you would almost immediately control the whole nation, as Alexander showed. Medieval France, on the other hand, was very decentralized, with petty dukes controlling small centers of power throughout the country. Because of this, the king of France had only marginal control over vast swaths of his country , but no invader could stand a chance at conquering France because of all the small bands of local opposition.

I wish N.M. was around today, if only to hear the praise he would have for a nation that every year assembles and then disbands the world’s largest army purely for the purpose of managing its deer population. For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance. In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

Bending the Gullibility Curve

Brad DeLong is surprised by this bit of news:

The Obama administration will extend special bonus payments meant to reward top-performing Medicare Advantage insurers to those that score only average ratings.

The three-year plan goes beyond what the health law called for in creating the bonuses. The law says bonuses, which start in 2012, would go to insurers that scored at least four out of five "stars" on a set of quality measurements.

Instead, a "demonstration project" authorized by Medicare officials will extend bonus payments to plans that score at least three stars. Based on this year's star ratings, the change means 62 percent of all Medicare Advantage insurers — representing 84 percent of enrollees — will qualify for the quality bonuses, compared with only 14 percent of plans under the health law provisions. [...]

The total cost over the three years is $1.3 billion. Wall Street likes it: Barclays Capital analyst Joshua Raskin, in a report, called the decision a "clear and unexpected positive" for managed care stocks. But some consumer advocates expressed skepticism, wryly noting that lowering the bar for bonuses reminded them of the fictional Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. [...]

"It's only been eight days since the election," Raskin wrote in his report, "but the rollback of Medicare Advantage cuts got its first step forward."

One provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets out to fund the expansion of health care in two ways: by capping Medicare payments incrementally and by creating performance incentives for Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers to deliver higher-quality services at a lower cost. Some of those performance incentives include bonuses. Now, these bonuses will reward MA insurers to deliver not top-performing results, but mediocre results, irrespective of any cost-cutting measures.

The Incidental Economist, an expert in health care policy and a long-time advocate for the ACA, is not surprised:

[I]t's just another piece of evidence that administrative pricing doesn't work. Give administrators the authority to fiddle with payments and they're too heavily influenced by those getting paid. This has been a problem in Medicare for decades and, by the way, is a problem for Rep. Paul Ryan's plan too. [...]

This is what opponents of the ACA have been saying all along. Medicare savings are illusory. And as the Incidental Economist himself admits, administratively-set prices and compensation are ripe for political machinations, which this story illustrates perfectly. But yet, he refuses to see the real problem in the ACA:

[T]he American health system has three problems: (1) the cost is too high, (2) the quality is too low, (3) and many people lack sufficient access to care. The ACA addresses the last of these most thoroughly, though not completely. But it does so in a way that at least sets the stage to address the first two as well. There are lots of other provisions in the law, beyond those pertaining to MA, that target costs and quality, some simultaneously. Will those be weakened too?

When will we get serious about this stuff? It really matters and we're blowing it!

Really? So for him, the problem with the ACA is that we haven't started to get serious about it? Oh, brother.

No, the real question is: how is anyone surprised by this?

Marginal Taxes and Work Incentives

Greg Mankiw, writing in yesterday's NYT, provides us with a clear example of how President Obama's proposed higher tax rates will affect his incentives to work. Using his example, I'll argue that the president's plan will also affect most everyone's incentive to work.

Although he doesn't explicitly say so, Mankiw suggests that those who believe the president when he says that the top tax rate "would just go back to where they were under President Clinton," are being duped. Mankiw shows us how the math under the new plan is much different than proposed. Factoring in the reinstatement of a stealth provision phasing out itemized deductions, along with the introduction of the new Medicare taxes provided by the healthcare law, top earners will now pay close to 45 percent of their income in taxes, not an insignificant increase from Clinton-era tax rates. Adding to that the proposed increases in capital gains, dividends, and estate taxes, along with state and local taxes, top earners can face a 90 percent total marginal tax rate.

That bears repeating. The new tax proposals offered by President Obama will force top earners to pay considerably more marginal taxes -- some up to a 90 percent total marginal tax rate. Put another way, if you make 250K a year or more, under the president's plan, for every extra dollar in income you earn, up to 90 cents can be taxed.

With projected increases in federal spending driven by Social Security and to a greater extent, the new healthcare law, will taxing the top 2 percent of earners up to 90 percent of their extra income be enough? The short answer is no. Top earners do not provide nearly enough revenue to close the gap in federal spending. So that means most everyone, including the broad middle class, will face substantially higher real and marginal taxes. But don't take my word for it; let the title to a David Leonhardt piece convince you: "Like Medicare? Then Taxes Must Rise."

And here's where work incentives come into play. Faced with higher real and marginal tax rates, Mankiw turns down a lot of opportunities to work more. There's just no incentive for him to exert extra effort when doing so would provide almost no extra benefit to him and his family. He puts it this way: with a 90 percent total marginal tax rate, "is it any wonder that I turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered?"

Any wonder, indeed. But as we've discovered, it's not only top earners who will face perverse work incentives. Higher federal spending in the future means higher real and marginal tax rates for everyone. And this raises another question: will we wonder why no one will want to work more?

I'm sure there's a good essay out there that discusses this...

but things like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter seem to convince people that 1)they need to elevate the minutiae in their lives and every thought in their head into singular moments of importance, and 2)that the rest of humankind should care about those moments and thoughts.

The irony is not lost on me that it's intrinsic to this blog that I must be convinced that people should care what I have to say as well. So I suppose I'm yet more evidence of the trend. But either way, I can't see how it's good for society at large or the individual in question.

Breyer says burning Korans may not be protected speech...

I can't think of a single way that Breyer's idea makes any sense.

But here it is.

When the NY Times becomes part of the Democrat Political Machine...

I get a morning email from National Review's Jim Geraghty on his political musings of the day. This below was his first section today. I thought it did a good job of illustrating an example of what Republicans view as typical with the NY Times (namely that they come off as taking cues to help build the Democrat Party's political narrative)

1. This New York Times Spin Seems Particularly Deep


"Lobbyists" are one of those all-purpose villains who crop up as needed for a particular Democratic narrative; the moniker is now used with such Stretch Armstrong-level elasticity that whenever I hear it used, I'm ready to presume that whoever is invoking it is trying to pull a fast one. One man's organization of concerned citizens is another man's sinister, powerful special interest. The NRA has lobbyists; I like them. The AFL-CIO has lobbyists; I don't like them. Tom Daschle insisted he was not a lobbyist, even though he worked at a law firm that was (surprise) a powerful lobbying firm. As Politico summarized, "In short, Daschle, working with his firm's lobbyists, uses his decades of congressional experience to tell clients how to favorably influence policy."

"Lobby" is a verb, and while the usual connotation is cash-oriented, lobbying is essentially persuasion, the same goal had by grassroots activists, bloggers, media commentators, New York Times editorial writers, talk-radio hosts, and everyone who's ever written a letter to the editor. As much as I don't like the AFL-CIO, I don't spend much time raging against the fact that they have lobbyists working for them. It's nowhere near the injustice that, say, compulsory membership is.

So when the New York Times offers a story on how speaker-in-waiting (maybe) John Boehner is a "G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists," well, a lot of right-of-center bloggers have noted that this is a line of attack more tired than Law and Order writers, trying to find an original way for an ordinary New Yorker to discover a murder victim. ("A jogger in Central Park comes across it as the sun rises over the city!" "We've done that eleven times already.")

At the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney tears the charge apart: "If you read this weekend's New York Times' hit job on would-be Speaker John Boehner and his 'lobbyist friends,' you might think, as the reporter clearly thinks, that John Boehner is cozier with lobbyists than most powerful politicians are. But did you know: Nancy Pelosi has raised almost twice as much money from lobbyists this election as Boehner has? At least 18 House Democrats have raised more lobbyist cash this election than Boehner has. Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid have pocketed more lobbyist cash in the past 18 months than Boehner has raised in the past 6 elections, combined?"

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey is offended but unsurprised: "In this case, the use of the phrase 'especially deep' shows that the Times wanted to make Boehner look as though he was on the extreme outlier of the common practice of fundraising among lobbyists. Whatever one thinks of that practice, it's one of the truly bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill. But in this cycle, the top five recipients are all Democrats, including two in Senate leadership (Reid and Schumer), as well as six of the top ten (3 Republicans and Charlie Crist being the others), and eleven of the top 20 -- and one of the Republicans on that list, Lisa Murkowski, is no longer a Republican candidate. . . . Why did the New York Times decide to focus on John Boehner instead of all the bigger targets in the House and Senate? Quite obviously, they're attempting to run interference for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi by pushing a distorted, irresponsible, and highly inaccurate picture of Boehner as some sort of lobbyist lackey. It's exactly the kind of political reporting that we've come to expect from the Times: unethical, biased, and sloppy. In their headline, they accuse Boehner of being 'tightly bound' to lobbyists, but clearly it's the New York Times that is 'tightly bound' to this White House and the Democratic Party."

At Newsbusters, Lachlan Markay hones in on that devious word, "seems": "The Times's omissions are all the more shady given the timing of Lipton's piece -- it came mere days after the Democratic attack machine set its sights on Boehner. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs heavily promoted the piece on the White House press office's Twitter feed. This week, the DNC is slated to run a series of television ads targeting Boehner's lobbyist ties. Hypocrisy in the political realm is nothing shocking. Politicians are not 'objective,' and they don't claim to be. But the New York Times seems to be throwing its weight, and its self-proclaimed mantle of non-partisanship behind a political attack ground in total hypocrisy. Perhaps the Gray Lady should adopt a strict policy of reporting what is, not what 'seems' to be. Isn't that the purpose of the news media?"

NY Post response to the NY Times...

So we've probably all seen those NY Times commercials with various "readers" talking about their favorite sections of the NY Times. While we probably all have our own opinions on them, I hope we can agree that this parody of what a NY Post counter-ad would look like is pretty great.

I like the laughing, nerdy white guy towards the end the best. (I'm not sure how old this is, so you might have already seen it. I just came across it though)

Here's the video. (Warning: Profanity galore)

(Here's the NY Times commercial for comparison)