Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (15216)	3/23/2010 2:15:21 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 42652

lower the deficit lololol oh stop

To: Road Walker who wrote (15216)	3/23/2010 2:17:32 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 42652

Enacting A Lie IBD 03/22/2010 06:53 PM ET Health Overhaul: Sunday's vote exposed the ugly truth that ObamaCare is not really about health care at all. It's all about who pays for it and who controls it — in effect a massive wealth-redistribution scheme. Those who believe this will lead to some medical nirvana will likely be disappointed. Fact is, this poorly designed monstrosity will lead to lower-quality care, higher costs, fewer practicing physicians, higher taxes and fewer jobs. We've done more than 150 editorials in the past year or so documenting these problems. Democrats surely understand them. Yet, despite a recent CNN poll showing that 59% of Americans oppose ObamaCare, Congress approved it anyway. Why? Because it's not really about health care. It's the largest wealth grab in American history, masquerading as health care "reform," another step in the socialization of Americans' income in the name of "fairness" and "spread(ing) the wealth around," as Obama himself has put it. That's why we call the program a lie. The idea behind all this, simply put, is control. This is a vast expansion of government that will require as much as $3 trillion in added spending over a decade. All claims of deficit neutrality are a joke. This is socialization through the tax code. That $3 trillion has to be paid for. As we showed last week, the health care bill levies $569.2 billion in new taxes over the next 10 years alone. At the same time, as noted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, it will increase U.S. budget deficits by $562 billion. Who'll pay all these taxes? Those deemed "rich" by Democrats, and businesses. Specifically, the bulk of the money comes from a special 3.8% Medicare tax on 5 million people earning more than $200,000 a year. That tax is imposed on capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties and interest — that is, investment income. Obama already has proposed boosting these taxes in his budget. So the top tax take on dividends and cap gains will rise to 23.8% from 15%, an increase of nearly 59%, while top rates on interest and rents will soar from 15% to nearly 44%, a 193% jump. About 50% of this higher-taxed group reports small business or partnership income. So don't be fooled: These aren't taxes on the "rich," but on small businesses and jobs. In ObamaCare, the taxes will be ruinous. Unlike real insurance, where individuals pay to cover their risks, this program covers everyone — including 32 million uninsured — and pays for it by a "mandate" ( read: "tax" ) and by taking money from other people to subsidize those who can't pay. And this just scratches the surface of the new taxes — we literally don't have room to list them here. Hmm. Taking money from one group, and giving it to another. That's called welfare — or, perhaps, health-fare. It's not insurance. Once the new program is finished wrecking what remains of the private health insurance industry — as it ultimately will — we'll be stuck with the government declaring that "the market doesn't work" and forcing all of us into a single-payer government plan. That's what those Democrats who back "Medicare for all" want — to kill what's left of the private market for health care, which has created the best medical system on earth, and use "reform" to expand an already-bankrupt Medicare system. The math behind this is ugly. Medicare's long-term liabilities now total $89 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Based on projected deficits, the just-passed health reform will take that to $136 trillion. It will take a lot more than the "rich," as defined today, to make up such unfathomable tax shortfalls. That's when they'll come for the rest of us — poor, middle-class and rich alike — and we all will be paying vastly higher taxes for vastly inferior medical care. investors.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (15216)	3/23/2010 2:18:26 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 42652

The math behind this is ugly. Medicare's long-term liabilities now total $89 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Based on projected deficits, the just-passed health reform will take that to $136 trillion.

To: Road Walker who wrote (15216)	3/23/2010 2:30:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The bill is structure to lower the deficit, No its structured to get a CBO score that says it will lower the deficit, which isn't the same thing. In terms of the blog post below it targets G* not G. ------------------- The Importance of Goodhart's Law March 2010 08:19AM This article introduces Goodhart's law, provides a few examples, tries to explain an origin for the law and lists out a few general mitigations. Goodhart's law states that once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place. wikipedia The law was named for its developer, Charles Goodhart, a chief economic advisor to the Bank of England. The much more famous Lucas critique is a relatively specific formulation of the same. The most famous examples of Goodhart's law should be the soviet factories which when given targets on the basis of numbers of nails produced many tiny useless nails and when given targets on basis of weight produced a few giant nails. Numbers and weight both correlated well in a pre-central plan scenario. After they are made targets (in different times and periods), they lose that value. We laugh at such ridiculous stories, because our societies are generally much better run than Soviet Russia. But the key with Goodhart's law is that it is applicable at every level. The japanese countryside is apparently full of constructions that are going on because constructions once started in recession era are getting to be almost impossible to stop. Our society centres around money, which is supposed to be a relatively good measure of reified human effort. But many unscruplous institutions have got rich by pursuing money in many ways that people would find extremely difficult to place as value-adding. Recently GDP Fetishism by David henderson is another good article on how Goodhart's law is affecting societies. The way I look at Goodhart's law is Guess the teacher's password writ large. People and instituitions try to achieve their explicitly stated targets in the easiest way possible, often obeying the letter of the law. A speculative origin of Goodhart's law The way I see Goodhart's law work, or a target's utility break down, is the following. * Superiors want an undefined goal G. * They formulate G* which is not G, but until now in usual practice, G and G* have correlated. * Subordinates are given the target G. The well-intentioned subordinate may recognise G and suggest G** as a substitute, but such people are relatively few and far inbetween. Most people try to achieve G. As time goes on, every means of achieving G* is sought. * Remember that G* was formulated precisely because it is simple and more explicit than G. Hence, the persons, processes and organizations which aim at maximising G* achieve competitive advantage over those trying to juggle both G* and G. * P(G\|G*) reduces with time and after a point, the correlation completely breaks down. ... lesswrong.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (15216)	3/29/2010 5:00:52 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

theatlantic.com Budget Games Mar 29 2010, 12:12 PM ET Stan Collender tut-tuts at me for saying that the CBO process can be gamed. He seems to think that I am inplying some dark conspiracy between the folks at the CBO, and Democrats in Congress. I confess, I have no idea how he derived this from an offhand observation that the CBO process can be gamed, but not infinitely. But had he read any of my other writings on the subject, he would know that I have the highest respect for the CBO. It is how the CBO is being used in the political process that I object to. Let's think about the theoretical CBO--the institution that Alice Rivlin and her merry band of madmen dreamed into being in the wake of the Nixon presidency. The idea is that Congress proposes legislation, and the CBO tells you how much that legislation costs. Maybe you modify some provisions that cost too much or increase the deficit. Then you pass the legislation. Or don't, if it turns out to be a bad idea. But that is not how it was used in the health care process. Rather, Democrats exploited the fact that the CBO has to score any law, however unlikely to be sustained, as taking effect and working as expected. This is not a flaw in the CBO--except insofar as we live in an imperfect world where we need rules that unfortunately depart from godlike efficiency. We don't want a CBO where the director starts guessing which laws are "likely" to stand, and which aren't. There's too much room for a bad CBO director to start deeming any laws he opposes as being "unlikely". However, this creates a problem when--as with this legislation--there are hard targets for cost and deficit reduction, and overwhelming legislative will to pass the bill. In my opinion, the Democrats have larded this bill with provisions that are politically very unlikely to operate as legislated. And as evidence, I offer the fact that these provisions keep getting pushed back or weakened, particularly the excise tax, which is only barely in the budget window--and only hits the last year of Obama's (possible) second term. So what you get is a piece of legislation where the actual cost/deficit reducing provisions aren't politically or even economically realistic (there's reason to be somewhat skeptical that you can simply mandate an across-the-board reduction in the rate of cost growth for various providers, while expanding coverage, as this bill does). They don't have to be. They get you the score that allows you to tell folks that you're reducing the deficit, even though you know that many of them may have to be undone later. That's what I mean by gaming the system: you pass politically unrealistic laws, which all the relevant interest groups expect to revisit before they take effect, solely in order to get a number. And then you use the number to sell the bill. That is not the fault of the CBO; they're doing their job (and a very fine job at that). I'm not even sure it's the fault of legislators--I'm not sure they necessarily understand how the constant submit-and-revise-and-submit process has essentially selected, in evolutionary fashion, for a bill that is "fit" in the rarified world of the CBO's economic model, but may be completely unfit to survive the actual political environment. But in my opinion, you will see the same thing done by Republicans, as Democrats scream that the CBO score is a meaningless piece of junk because, well, the CBO process has been gamed. Once politicians understand the CBO model well enough to start writing never-never sections into its bills which generate an excellent score even though they are virtually certain to be repealed or revised, then the core mission of the CBO will be compromised. Politicians will repeal the offending provisions, one by one, either in small chunks that don't smack us with a huge price tag, or as part of other bills. The net effect will be to ratchet government spending, and the deficit, but those proposing the bills will just keep pointing back to the excellent CBO score that their bill got. It's pretty clear to me from what Doug Elmendorf has been saying that he is also concerned about this effect; he has done everything but rent a skywriter to point out that if the revenue/cost cutting portions of the bill turn out not to be politically sustainable, we will be left with a budget-busting new entitlement. But it is certainly not his fault that his office is being used this way, and I quite agree with Stan Collender that the CBO has emerged from this with its reputation for integrity untouched. Unfortunately, I wasn't worried about the integrity of Doug Elmendorf, or his unbelievably hard-working team of analysts. It's the rest of the government that keeps me awake at night.