Radioactive Communist Zombies

Public Jobs are Killing the Economy

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Health Care Deform Surprise

The health care reform bill was something like 1,000 pages long and very few people (if anyone) knew all that was in it.  So now that it's passed, we're learning what little land mines are in it.  According to the Olympia Business Watch blog, there's a provision that has little to do with health care but will cost employers (link original):

Section 4207 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act amends the Fair Labor Standards Act to require employers provide rest breaks and facilities for nursing mothers to express breast milk. 

These facilities can't be a bathroom and have to be a place where the employee is out of sight and won't be disturbed.  In other words, it has to be a special room with a door that can be closed.  Got a spare private office?  No employer is exempt unless they have under 50 employees and can show "undo hardship" with complying.

This isn't a too awful requirement, but it will cost employers money to provide this place to express breast milk.  But the question remains, what other surprises do we have in store?

Obamacare: Soak the Rich

If Obamacare weren't bad enough (See here, here, here, and here and, oh yeah, here for example), it also includes a great deal of "soak the rich" taxes.  There's at least three problems with that: 1) it's unfair, 2) it will decrease economic growth, and 3) it won't work.  As Alan Reynolds writes in today's Wall Street Journal:

[T]he government is counting on squeezing an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes.

But it won't work:

Punitive tax rates on high-income individuals do not increase revenue. Successful people are not docile sheep just waiting to be shorn. 

Rich people (and under this scheme $200,000 a year income makes you rich) can and will take steps to minimize or avoid taxes.  For example, they could invest in tax-free municipal bonds rather than stocks.

So then the tax hikes have to move down the income level to hit the middle class to pay for Obamacare (which will cost more than they are projecting now, anyway).  And that probably means a VAT tax.

Obamacare is bad medicine, bad economics, and bad policy.  Only such a creature could have come from the Democrats.  Time to repeal and replace. 

Premiums are Going Up (Despite what Obama Claims)

We were told that under health care deform, premiums would not rise (in fact, some claimed they would drop up to 3000%!)and we could keep our health insurance if we liked it.  Both statements are in fact, not true.  That according to the CEO of Aetna, (one of those evil insurance companies):

Will insurance premiums go up?
The answer is yes, and some of the things that will drive those premiums are significant additional taxes the industry will ultimately have to pay in the first year.

The President said that this bill would not have any impact on people who already had coverage, that it was about the uninsured, that there would be no change. Will this legislation change the coverage of people who are already paying for it?
My perception is, yes, things will change. You might not have a plan that includes the exact same doctors. You might have plans that have richer benefits, and therefore you're going to pay more for benefits you may or may not want. It would have been a better message to say, we're going to make certain you maintain your eligibility.

So, what do we do now?  Repeal and replace!

Netflix's Latest Trick

I've been a member of Netflix since January of 2002.  I've been throttled and I've managed not to be throttled through judicious sending back of discs.  I've found (on the 3-at-a-time plan I'm on) that if I only send back two discs a week, I usually don't get throttled.  (Throttling is where Netflix doesn't send you new releases right away but makes you wait for them, sometimes a long time.)  And two discs per week is what I calculated (long ago) is how many I need to watch and send back to make Netflix cost about the same as going to the local video store. 

I learned that if I get discs back to Netflix on Monday, I usually get the new releases that release on that Tuesday sent to me (unless I'm being throttled).  Getting the movies back on Monday means sending them on Saturday (from where I live). 

I really like Netflix (which is why I've stayed with them so long).  I like that I can get old movies, television shows (right now I'm going through the first season of Fringe), and new releases.  I like the convenience that the only trip I need to make is to the mailbox. 

But now Netflix seems to have a new trick.  According to ads I've seen and Amazon.com, The Blind Side released on DVD and Blue-ray March 23rd.  But according to my Netflix queue, it releases April 20th (as shown in this screen capture; click for larger version):

And according to Amazon.com, Sherlock Holmes releases this coming Tuesday, March 30th.  But according to my Netflix queue, it releases sometime in April (most likely April 27th):

 

So what is this?  Is this their new way to throttle me or are they doing this to all customers?  It's a bit confusing.  So while I really like Netflix, I still have to say caveat emptor when it comes to using them.

True Cost of Health Care Reform

I didn't blog yesterday 'cause I was in mourning for my beloved UW Huskies and their loss in the NCAA tournament.  Well, that and I was having one of those "we're all doomed" moments when everything just seems to be too bad to even get my arms around, let along blog.

But today let's discuss health care deform (a/k/a Obamacare) and what it's going to cost.  The CBO put out some projection of $900 billion (about) over the next ten years.  Assuming that's correct (and it probably isn't) that's just what it'll cost the Federal government (i.e., you and me taxpayer).  But there's other costs involved.  Already Caterpillar and John Deere have said health care deform will cost their companies hundreds of millions of dollars.  And AT&T says it will cost them $1 billion.  You're thinking "so what, greedy corporations need to pony up their fair share"?  Well, according to one study, health care deform will cost $14 billion in corporate profits.  And those profits are what drive the stock market, and dividends, and returns on investments.  This will a) make your 401(k) or IRA grow slower (if at all) and b) reduce investments by corporations that would have created jobs.  And so the economy stays in the porcelain convenience.

Meanwhile, Mitch Daniels, governor of Illinois, relatesthat Obamacare is going to force states to increase taxes (sub probably required): 

Start preparing voters for a state tax increase . . .  [W]hen we are forced to expand Medicaid to one in every four citizens, the cost will add several hundred million dollars to the budget.

So your state, too, will be raising taxes.  This on top of the Federal taxesin Obamacare.

We've been sold a bill of goods.  We were told Obamacare would reduce the debt (it won't).  Now we have ancillary costs to contend with.  The only thing to do is repeal the bill.  But that can't happen until we vote the bastards out of office come November. 

It's Warmed Up How Much?

According to global warming true believers, it has warmed 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1950.  That's about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit.  Yes, that's the warming we're all in a panic about.

However, according to Patrick J. Michaels writing on National Review Online, a lot of that warming is artifacts of mismeasurements and other causes not related to anthropogenic global warming:

• A cold bias in sea temperature measurements in the 1950s and 60s drops the temperature rise to 0.55 degrees Celsius
• Changes in land use and weather station maintenance problems drops the temperature rise another 0.08 degrees to 0.47.
• "Earlier this year, Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a bombshell in Science in which she argued that the lack of recent warming was likely due to fluctuations in water vapor way up in the stratosphere — changes that bear no obvious relationship to greenhouse-gas emissions. Given the limited stratospheric data that we have going back to 1980, her finding reduces the remaining trend to 0.41 degrees Celsius."
• And a finding that soot may be causing about 25% of global warming.

That leaves the rise in temperature that greenhouse gases are supposedly responsible for to 0.31 degrees.   And that's without bringing variations in the sun's output.

All this while the EPA is getting ready to regulate greenhouse gases under their "endangerment" finding.  Will this stop the EPA?  No.  They have too much bureaucratic momentum going to be stopped by the facts.

Obamacare will Not Reduce the Deficit

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The Loss of Medical Privacy

Ever worried about what you told your doctor might leak out and cause you embarrassment or other problems?  According to Deborah Peel, writing in the Wall Street Journal (sub may be required), it's common:

I learned about the lack of health privacy when I hung out my shingle as a psychiatrist. Patients asked if I could keep their records private if they paid for care themselves. They had lost jobs or reputations because what they said in the doctor's office didn't always stay in the doctor's office. That was 35 years ago, in the age of paper.

Now imagine all your medical records are electronic, able to be hacked into, shared, mistakenly revealed.  That's a problem, and just one problem with Obamacare.  Electronic medical records are touted as solving all sorts of problems.  But:

But electronic medical records won't accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing information with doctors because they know it isn't private. When patients realize they can't control who sees their electronic health records, they will be far less likely to tell their doctors about drinking problems, feelings of depression, sexual problems, or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. In 2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns . . . Electronic record systems that don't put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health information.

And do you really want the government to have access to your health records?  You know it'll come to that, sooner or later.

There are solutions:

The solution is to insist upon technologies that protect a patient's right to consent to share any personal data. A step in this direction is to demand that no federal stimulus dollars be used to develop electronic systems that do not have these technologies.

But they would require the Congress and President to do something they probably don't want to do: then they couldn't have control over you.

Recycled Paper is Bad For You?

The European Union (EU) has rules about recycling.  In fact, they require it.  From their website:

The European Commission has defined several specific 'waste streams' for priority attention, the aim being to reduce their overall environmental impact. This includes packaging waste, end-of-life vehicles, batteries, electrical and electronic waste. EU directives now require Member States to introduce legislation on waste collection, reuse, recycling and disposal of these waste streams. Several EU countries are already managing to recycle over 50% of packaging waste.

But now there has been identified a problem in the recycle of packaging.  It seems recycled paper used in food packaging might be bad for you.  The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) is concerned that mineral oil in recycled food packaging might be migrating into food:

The German risk assessors expressed concern over the significant amounts of mineral oil in cardboard boxes made from recycled paper. This mineral oil, which is thought to come from ink used in newspaper printing could potentially contaminate food products and pose human health risks, said the BfR. It recommended that inner bags be used with foods that have high surface contact with cardboard - such as rice and couscous - to prevent substance migration. Using cardboard made from virgin fibres was a second strategy put forward.

Which sort of negates the benefits of recycling.

Now, I'm sure the risk is slight.  The BfR is probably worried about these mineral oils in typical bureaucratic mission creep: i.e., we have to find something to regulate.  But when government requires recycling, and government finds a danger in recycling, what are you going to do?