Time to repeal ObamaCare. | Wellesley, you're doing it wrong. | Who created the sensitivity bureauracy? | Gorsuch will bring independence to the Court. | Minimum wages hurt job creation. | Chicagoans flee high taxes.
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March 25, 2017 |
The bill that the House didn’t vote on Friday failed to repeal Obamacare—and not because they didn’t vote on it. Higher education is supposed to teach you how to consider, weigh, analyze, and test ideas—in short to think. But at Wellesley College, thinking about arguments you don’t like is a burden from which they will protect you. How did education become an expensive babysitting operation? Probably because the federal government has subsidized the creation of sensitivity bureaucracies. Neil Gorsuch will bring less deference and more judging to the Supreme Court. States that raised their minimum wages in January are lagging in job creation. High taxes are chasing people out of Chicago—and the city’s taxes are set to go higher still. |
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Still waiting for a bill that repeals Obamacare. The American Health Care Act, a vote on which was canceled on Friday by House Speaker Paul Ryan, fell short of repealing Obamacare because it left in place the provisions responsible for making health insurance more expensive. As Drew Gonshorowski writes: “Obamacare caused premiums to rise for various reasons, chief among them being the vast new regulations the law imposed on insurance markets. A new analysis from Milliman backs this up. The study provided estimates of the average impact that various Obamacare regulations had on premiums. These estimates are reflected in the chart below.” Edmund Haislmaier adds: “Voters elected candidates who pledged to repeal Obamacare because they understood that pledge to mean, first and foremost, a commitment to undo the cost-increasing mandates and regulations that Obamacare imposed on their private health insurance. “The best course now would be for House leadership to draft a new bill that takes as its starting point the repeal of those Obamacare provisions that dictate the benefits and design of private insurance plans, and which have driven up coverage costs. “Doing that would be a case of good policymaking for good politics.” [The Daily Signal]
Go to Wellesley and be protected from ideas. “There is no doubt that the speakers in question impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley.” So says a committee of six professors at Wellesley College who want to impose themselves onto students seeking to bring guest speakers to campus. In an email to fellow faculty, the professors—who form the Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity at Wellesley—lament that Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis was allowed to speak on campus. Kipnis is a critic of various feminist orthodoxies, especially as they relate to higher education. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which obtained a copy of the email and published it online, points out, the professors’ call for vetting future speaker invitations according to “standards of respect and rigor” “would, in itself, establish a campus orthodoxy and a climate in which any speaking invitation might be subject to prior review by a select few faculty.” [Foundation for Individual Rights in Education] The six professors who authored the email—Diego Arcineagas, Beth DeSombre, Brenna Greer, Soo Hong, Michael Jeffries, and Layli Maparyan—are failing at their job, part of which is to teach students how to engage intellectually with ideas. Unlike most people who fail at their jobs, however, these professors face almost no risk of losing their jobs for their failures.
Where did the campus safe space culture come from, anyway? Mitch Pearlstein finds a clue in the work of Neil Gilbert, the Milton and Gertrude Chernin Professor of Social Welfare and Social Services at the University of California, Berkeley. Pearlstein sums up Gilbert’s argument in his article “Institutionalized Discontent,” (Society, August 2016) this way: “‘Over the last several decades federal regulations and funds have created an alternative bureaucracy within universities that is devoted not to the core academic mission of teaching and research, but to improving the social climate of university life.’ The ‘legitimacy and power’ of this new bureaucracy, he writes, ‘depend on heightening the perception that academic life involves a dangerous environment, from which students need protection.’ This perceived need, he continues, has led to campaigns for ‘safe spaces’; efforts to help students ‘recognize micro aggressions’; educating and training them in ‘sexual assault prevention’; and demanding faculty participation in ‘sensitivity training.’ Among other rote requirements. “How big is this new bureaucracy? Neil reports that between 2000 and 2015, ‘the number of full-time, ladder-rank teaching faculty at Berkeley increased by 1%, while the number of full-time staff providing student services and health care increased by more than 100%, at which point they outnumbered the teaching faculty by 13%.’” [Center of the American Experiment]
Gorsuch would bring less deference and more judging to the Supreme Court. As a federal circuit court judge, Neil Gorsuch has criticized the Chevron Doctrine—the idea that judges should defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous laws—as being an abdication of the court’s duty to exercise independent judgment. Thus, if his nomination to the Supreme Court is confirmed, the Chevron Doctrine is likely to get a reexamination. And, as Philip Hamburger writes, the separation-of-powers problem isn’t the only problem with the Chevron Doctrine: “[W]here the government is a party to a case, Chevron requires judges to defer to the agency’s interpretation. This amounts to a precommitment to the government’s legal position. Chevron, in other words, forces judges to engage in systematic bias favoring one party — the most powerful of parties — in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process of law. Chevron deference is thus Chevron bias. “Of course, judges regularly defer to precedent, but that is deference to the judgment of another judge. It is quite another thing, and clearly unconstitutional, for them to defer to the judgment of one of the parties — indeed, to favor its legal position whenever it comes into court. “Chevron therefore cannot be reduced merely to the separation-of-powers concern — important as that is. Chevron bias also raises serious civil liberties issues, because each party has a constitutional right to an impartial judicial proceeding. “Although the Supreme Court has carefully avoided any resolution of the civil liberties questions, it has already been quietly backing away from Chevron. The only difference with Judge Gorsuch on the court is that, in light of the views he has expressed on the 10th Circuit, he would probably reject Chevron openly.” [The New York Times]
States that raised their minimum wages this year are underperforming in job creation. Ben Gitis notes recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data: “The leisure and hospitality industry most frequently employs low-wage workers and consequently its workers are most likely to be directly impacted by the January minimum wage increases. In 2015, for instance, the leisure and hospitality industry employed 57 percent of all workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage. […] “In the states that implemented new minimum wage laws in January, employment in the leisure and hospitality industry fell by 4,300 jobs. This is a significant break from the rest of the United States and from employment changes in previous Januarys. Across all 50 states and DC, employment in leisure and hospitality grew by 19,500 jobs in January. In the states that did not implement new minimum wage laws, leisure and hospitality employment grew by 23,800 jobs. […] [T]he 4,300 employment decline was equivalent to 22.1 percent of all net leisure and hospitality jobs added in January. […] [In the three previous years,] the twelve states were responsible for 31.8 percent to 44.7 percent of all leisure and hospitality jobs added in January.” [American Action Forum]
From July 2015 to July 2016, more people left Cook County Illinois than left any other county in the country. Reports Michael Lucci: “[T]he people leaving Cook County aren’t showing up in other parts of Illinois when the net movements of people are considered. In fact, most of Illinois is depopulating – 93 of Illinois’ 102 counties are experiencing net out-migration, and 89 of Illinois’ 102 counties have shrinking populations. Illinois’ dysfunctional government, weak job creation and ever-increasing tax burden help explain why. A Paul Simon Public Policy Institute poll released in October 2016 found that taxes were the No. 1 reason people want to leave Illinois.” [Illinois Policy Institute] To be fair, Cook County, which contains the city of Chicago, is the second biggest county in the country. But if taxes are the biggest reason people are leaving now, what will happen when the city’s latest round of tax increases—amounting to nearly $1,700 per year per family—take effect over the next few years?
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