TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 250. Another big one.
Archive for 2014
January 14, 2014
FORGET IT, JAKE, IT’S CHINATOWN: Wouldn’t you know, FBI says it can’t find anything illegal in all that IRS intimidation.
Related: Bryan Preston: The Fix Is In On The IRS Abuse Scandal.
WELL, THAT’S HOW SOME PEOPLE WANT US TO HAVE MOST OF THESE “CONVERSATIONS” ON VARIOUS TOPICS: Megan McArdle: You Can’t Have A Conversation About Sexism At Gunpoint.
At some level, many of the people who do this have to know that they’re trying to have it both ways: They would genuinely like to gently convince people that there is much more subtle structural sexism out there than they understand … and they would also like to be able to get their political opponents hounded out of office for making sexist remarks. And though I will not name names, for the very reasons stated above, let me point out that many of these people seem to think that this is what a conversation looks like:
Person A: I have a grievance.
Person B: I am so sorry! What is your grievance?
Person A: Your behavior is sexist. Here’s why. [Insert description of sexist behavior.]
Person B: I had no idea! I feel terrible. I must be a terrible person. I will assiduously try to eradicate this horrible sexism from my soul.
Person A: You are not necessarily a terrible person. Everyone is a little bit sexist. We must all assiduously try to eradicate this horrible sexism from our souls.
Person B: I am so glad we had this conversation. [Hug.]
Actual conversations mean that the person you’re conversing with may have some other reaction than “You’re right, I agree, this is wrong.” But the power of an accusation of sexism, particularly when a woman is accusing a man, is such that it’s very hard to have anything approaching an actual discussion. His side is already scripted, and his lines consist of craven apology.
Men know this, of course, which is why they increasingly avoid such situations. Overall, this is bad for women. Also, I think far fewer people outside of (overwhelmingly female, and sexist, HR departments) take accusations of sexism nearly as seriously as they used to anymore. Inflated currencies lose their value.
PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Why Rent Control Hurts Renters.
AT AMAZON, Save Up To 25% On Good-For-You Groceries.
Also, New Year’s Deals in Home & Kitchen.
Plus, today only: Bowflex 1090 Adjustable Dumbbells, $210.00 (47% off).
HAPPY TENTH BLOGGIVERSARY to Ann Althouse.
SALENA ZITO: ‘6-year itch’ could fortify GOP grip in the U.S. House. Don’t get cocky, kid.
IF YOU THINK THAT COMMUNISM IS BAD FOR PEOPLE, check out what it did to the environment. “And it’s not a coincidence or accident of history.”
BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN: Germany, Homeschooling, and the Left.
JAMES TARANTO: All Your Health Are Belong to Us: An ObamaCare progress report. Well, a report.
Such results were in fact entirely expected by those, including your humble columnist, who warned of “adverse selection.” ObamaCare severely limits insurers’ ability to set premiums based on policyholders’ risk profiles. They may not charge the already-sick more than the healthy, and their ability to charge the middle-aged more than the young is highly constrained.
That means that young and healthy policyholders get soaked in order to subsidize middle-aged and sick ones, so that the former–who had a low propensity to be insured even when premiums reflected their low risk–have a strong disincentive to purchase coverage. Given such a risk pool, premiums can only become less affordable when insurers adjust them in the coming years.
Reuters’ figures are very close to those we found in November when we looked at enrollment figures from California, supposedly ObamaCare’s great success story. The Golden State was boasting that 22.5% of its enrollees were between 18 and 34, slightly higher than that age cohort’s 21% of the state population. But the proper denominator to use wasn’t the total population but the nonelderly adult (18 to 64) population, since the elderly are covered by Medicare and many children by Medicaid. The young cohort makes up 33.8% of California’s nonelderly adult population but, at the time we wrote, only 23.8% of nonelderly adult ObamaCare enrollees. Greatly overrepresented was the far more illness-prone 45-to-64 set.
The age distribution almost certainly understates the adverse-selection problem. Sick people of all ages have a far stronger incentive to buy insurance than do healthy ones–and since becoming sick no longer can result in higher premiums or make you uninsurable altogether, healthy people have even lesser incentives to buy insurance now than before ObamaCare. But no one will know what the sick-to-healthy mix is until insurers have compiled at least some months’ worth of claims data.
Adverse selection isn’t the only predictable ObamaCare problem now becoming a reality. National Journal reports that “insurance companies had to spend a lot of money adapting to Obamacare’s botched rollout. And unless the White House intervenes, the law could penalize them for doing it.”
We identified this problem back in October.
It’s I-told-you-so’s all the way down.
THAT’S FUNNY. THEY’VE ONLY JUST STARTED THEIR INVESTIGATION. FBI doesn’t plan charges over IRS scrutiny of Tea Party.
2014: The Year Millennials Revolt? “The real Pajama Boy has a 50 percent chance of being unemployed or underemployed, on average is laden with thousands of dollars of student-loan debt, and is increasingly likely to still live at home with his parents.”
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? House Democrats: Climate Change Turns Women Into Prostitutes.
THE BLAZE: Instapundit’s ‘The New School’ in 12 quotes. You can buy the book here. And you should!
TRAINWRECK UPDATE: Another Really Bad Obamacare Enrollment Report.
As many of us have expected, the exchanges aren’t even close to the number of young people the Administration claims to need to prevent an eventual death spiral.
But that’s not the really dispiriting data for Obamacare supporters. What should have them panicking is the data HHS released on subsidies. Page 11 of the report gives a breakdown. Of the 1.9 million enrollees for which there is data, about 1.65 million, or 79%, have financial assistance. That rate is probably as high as financial assistance is going to get. Despite that, enrollment of the 18-34-year-olds is, well, pitiful.
According to the Administration, about 2.7 million of the projected 7 million enrollees in the exchanges need to be 18-34-years-old—that’s about 39%. Here is the age breakdown from the report:
Only 24% of those enrolled in the exchanged are between the ages of 18-34, a far cry from 39%. Those age 54 and over—i.e., those who are likely to make the most medical claims—comprises 55% of enrollment.
The crux of the matter is if an enrollment population is comprised of only 24% 18-34-year-olds when nearly 80% of that population have subsidies, what are chances that the age mix will improve?
Especially as the “narrow networks” will mostly appeal to people desperate for any healthcare at all — i.e., sick people.
MICKEY KAUS: WonkBlog’s Red Herring.
So why did Wonkblog tell us Obamacare was in good shape when the study it cites suggests it might be in not-so-good shape if it fails to sign up enough healthy older customers? When people say Wonkblog is often an apologist for Obamacare–and they do!–this may be the sort of thing they mean. … On the other hand, the Post may simply be fixated on the young/old mix because those are the only statistics being released. Questions about health aren’t being asked of enrollees anymore. ”We’re not going to know about health mix anytime soon,” says Levitt. “Even insurers won’t know a lot when they have to set premiums for 2015.”
If you’re going to call yourself “Wonkblog,” though, shouldn’t you at least mention that the statistics you are so obsessively discussing aren’t the important ones?
One would think.
PETER WOOD: Defending the Humanities and Heather Mac Donald.
Heather Mac Donald may be the Ida Tarbell of our age: a writer who combines a meticulous eye for facts, intellectual brilliance, a sure sense of the historical moment, and deep moral seriousness. Tarbell is famous for her History of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure’s Magazine between 1902 and 1904, and is celebrated today by the Left for her having struck a blow against Big Business. She even merited her own postage stamp in 2002, along with three other women journalists.
It may be a while before Mac Donald wins such philatelic immortality. Like Tarbell, she is a deft expositor of the excesses of large enterprises that have grown unaccountable and corrupt. But Mac Donald’s preferred topics are big city government and, increasingly, academia. The Left has a hard time coming to grips with the prospect that the latter day equivalent of Standard Oil may be the University of California.
To be fair, the resulting “splenetic rage” is much more amusing than anything that ever came out of the Standard Oil Company.
January 13, 2014
BRING BACK THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS? Kirsten Powers: The New Age Of Christian Martyrdom.
Martin Roth, call your office.
OBAMA LOST IRAQ: Inside Iraq: Two years after U.S. withdrawal, are things worse than ever? By blowing the status-of-forces negotiations, Obama threw away a success.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “With casual sex, that feeling of loyalty to your partner is completely absent.”
THEY SHOULD BE: What if the rest of the alien universe was terrified of humans?