Archive for 2019
June 21, 2019
AVIK ROY: Trump could revolutionize the private health insurance market.
Enter President Trump and his team at the National Economic Council, led by Larry Kudlow. The council found an elegant way to give employers the opportunity to voluntarily convert their health benefits from a defined benefit into a defined contribution. For example, an employer could fund an HRA for each worker and their family, which they could then use to shop for a plan that best suits their needs.
The administration estimates that as many as 800,000 employers — mostly smaller businesses — will choose this option, expanding health care choices for 11 million workers in the next decade. These employers will benefit from having fiscal certainty over their health expenditures. And workers will benefit from being able to choose their coverage and take it from job to job.
Furthermore, if those estimates are right, the new rule could dramatically expand the market for individually purchased health insurance, encouraging more plans to enter the market and lowering premiums for all participants. The White House estimates that the rule could expand the number of Americans with health insurance coverage by as many as 800,000.
The Trump HRA rule should be seen as the beginning — not the end — of reforms to improve the quality of private health insurance. Congress also needs to repair the individual market for health insurance by reforming Obamacare-era regulations that punish young and healthy people for buying coverage.
Faster, please.
HONG KONG PROTESTERS’ ANTHEM IS “SING HALLELUJAH TO THE LORD”: You can bet that won’t get much coverage in the media. (And, yes, we know why.)
#JOURNALISM: A Black Eye for the Columbia Journalism Review. “These are thinly coded appeals to de facto self-censorship, and it is strange to see them published by an outlet whose nominal purpose is to promote excellence in journalism.”
WITHOUT LOOKING, CAN YOU GUESS WHICH SUPERANNUATED DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE THIS HEADLINE DESCRIBES? Grampa Simpson runs for president.
MEMORY-HOLING THEIR MISTAKES: Matt Lauer Not Featured in ‘Today’ 25th Anniversary Celebration After 2017’s Sexual Misconduct Allegations.
TOM COTTON: The Dictatorship of Woke Capital.
THOUGHTS ON TOXIC FEMININITY.
June 20, 2019
BIDEN, 1992: My crime bill has so many death-penalty offenses, it does everything but hang people for jaywalking.
Weird how all this negative stuff is coming out just as the Democrats decide he might be a liability.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Trump’s Way To Victory. “Trump’s path to reelection is blazingly obvious – avoid mistakes (like some new war) while focusing on the new normal of economic prosperity. Ask the Reagan Question: ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ For Normals, the answer is yes, yes, yes.”
IT’S OKAY, SHE’S A LEFTY, SHE’LL GET A PASS: Naomi Wolf is holed below the waterline: However much she plays it down, her fatal misunderstanding of a 19th-century legal term has destroyed her thesis on Victorian homophobia.
OPEN THREAD: Because I care.
LLOYD MARCUS: Trump’s Orlando Speech: Unprecedented and Remarkable. “Trump’s speech revealed a far more ideologically conservative Trump than he was is 2016. When Trump ran for the presidency, he was not ideological. His leanings appeared to be towards the left. He probably thought conservatives were a bit paranoid and over-the-top sounding the alarm about how Democrats seek to undermine our country’s best interests. But when the American left responded with furious wrath and anger against Trump for his ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan, Trump’s eyes were opened. Incredibly, the American left’s vitriolic, insane 24/7 relentless rebuke and hatred for everything Trump does for America has pushed Trump further to the right.”
Trump’s presidency has revealed a lot. Perhaps even to Trump.
THE DEMOCRATS’ LONG KNIVES ARE OUT FOR CREEPY JOE: Biden sidesteps questions about his son’s foreign business dealings but promises ethics pledge.
MEET THE DALLAS-AREA WOMAN SHEPHERDING A ‘MOVE TO TEXAS FROM CALIFORNIA!’ MIGRATION:
But here’s what the “liberal Californians, go home” crowd misses: The vast majority of West Coast dwellers who make up Bailey’s more than 11,500 Facebook followers lean conservative.
And after spending a few days perusing Bailey’s page, I’d say this comment best sums up its audience: “We fell in love with Texas immediately … we’re conservative Christians who love God, country, freedom, family, gun rights and barbeque.”
Bailey said cost of living and taxes are hot buttons for commenters, but so are gridlocked roads, the homeless and illegal immigration.
The Realtor welcomes people of all political stripes onto her page — after all, she’s in this to make money. And she and her husband, Scott, identify as libertarian.
The political climate in Prosper and Texas suits the Baileys. “The standard in California, especially in Los Angeles, is very liberal, and we didn’t feel comfortable even sharing that we were libertarian,” Marie told me.
Billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers (depending upon the latter two’s current level of Stockholm Syndrome) should still get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea, pronto.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE? Facebook Usage Has Collapsed After Privacy Scandals, Data Shows.
Flashback (From Ed): Kevin Poulsen is the symptom, not the disease. “Excuse me, but… what? A reporter from the Daily Beast can just pick up the phone, call up Facebook, and have an official there reveal one of their user’s personal information? How does that work? One might expect that they wouldn’t be doing that for anyone other than a law enforcement official with a warrant.”
ALL THE LEAVES ARE BROWN: Stacy McCain on “California Dreamin’,” then and now.
A couple of days ago, I was driving my youngest daughter (born in 2002) to her summer internship and told her to look up “California Dreamin’” on her Spotify. Why was that song in my mind? Probably some headline I’d read about California’s recent descent into Third World chaos. It’s a forlorn bit of nostalgia to recall what California signified in the 1960s, before Democrats turned it into a socialist nightmare of typhus infections, homeless encampments and heroin needles. At any rate, the song had been stuck in my head and so I asked my 16-year-old daughter to play it on her phone — she’d never heard it before — and when it ended, I said, “That was Number One for the Mamas and Papas in 1966.”
My daughter is quite the chip off the old block, however, and she quickly Googled up the fact that “California Dreamin’” only made it to #4.
That seemed wrong, an injustice. From the first notes of the classical guitar intro to the sonic crescendo of the vocal harmony ending, “California Dreamin’” is a musical masterpiece, two-and-a-half minutes of pure genius in the key of A-minor. In 2004, when Rolling Stone published its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” this 1966 hit was #89 on the list and yet it never actually topped the charts? When I got home, I decided to explore this mystery further and, being rather obsessive about research, I dived in deep.
Read the whole thing, which is a reminder that in the 1960s, the counter-culture actually was the counter-culture, back when it still had a grownup, if rather staid, postwar overculture to push against.
SCOTT JOHNSON: What was Mueller up to? His victims speak.