The CBO's coverage estimates are wrong. | Entitlements are still a problem. | The courts are wrong again on the travel order. | We're in a long war. | Peter Lawler, R.I.P.
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May 27, 2017 |
The CBO’s coverage estimates are wrong. The need to address entitlements is only going to grow. The courts are wrong again on the Trump travel order. The battle against terrorism is still a long war. Peter Lawler, R.I.P. |
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The Congressional Budget Office’s coverage projections are wrong now because they’ve always been wrong. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 23 million fewer people will have health care coverage if the House Obamacare repeal bill passes. Doug Badger and Grace-Marie Turner point out that this result is at least partly an artifact of the CBO’s inflated estimates of how many people gained coverage because of Obamacare: “Agency estimates of 2016 exchange enrollment ranged from 12 to 24 million. The reality: 10 million had exchanged-based coverage as of December 2016. “No matter, CBO forecasts that this year, 15 million people will sign up for Obamacare policies. The actual number as of March 31: 10.4 million, little changed from December. But there’s always next year when, CBO assures us, enrollment will abruptly skyrocket to 18 million. “CBO measures the House-passed bill against this imaginary baseline and finds it wanting. The agency believes that 8 million fewer people will have individual health insurance coverage in 2018 if that bill becomes law. “But here’s our prediction: even if the bill doesn’t become law, 2018 enrollment may fall 8 million short of the CBO prediction.” Also, a significant portion of the drop comes not from people losing insurance, but from deciding they will be better off uninsured—now that they won’t be penalized for making that choice: “CBO isn’t predicting that 14 million will lose coverage next year if the House bill passes, despite how their estimate is habitually mischaracterized; CBO predicts people will cancel their insurance or not sign up at all. They will be covered only if the government continues to threaten them with tax penalties for being uninsured. With the penalties gone, CBO believes, they will choose to be uninsured.” [Forbes]
Sooner or later, entitlements will be cut. President Trump’s budget, writes Brian Riedl, is “the predictable result of a nation that stubbornly refuses to confront escalating Social Security and Medicare costs.” He continues: “America cannot sustainably add 77 million retiring baby boomers to a Medicare system that collects $140,000 in lifetime taxes from the typical retiring couple and then provides them with $422,000 in benefits (all adjusted into net present values) without slashing other programs to the bone. […] “And that is exactly what President Trump has proposed. “ObamaCare would be repealed and replaced. Medicaid spending, currently $389 billion, would likely fall over the next decade rather than rising to $650 billion to accommodate rising caseloads and costs. Anti-poverty programs would face significant reforms. And non-defense discretionary spending (which consists of programs like health research, education, foreign aid, homeland security, housing, and infrastructure) would be cut to 1930s levels. “Many of these reforms are necessary. Medicaid’s flawed design encourages states to overspend (and even defraud Washington) in order to receive higher federal reimbursements. Washington’s welfare system is too centralized, wasteful, and inflexible to the unique needs of low-income families. There is little reason why a 37 percent increase in the number of poor Americans since 2000 should have caused a 148 percent increase in the number of SNAP (food stamp) recipients. Non-defense discretionary spending includes many functions best left to state and local governments. “Yet enacting these deep cuts would still not solve the long-term budget challenge. The president’s proposal to cut 2027 non-defense discretionary spending $260 billion below the currently-projected level would merely finance 33 days of Social Security and Medicare spending that year (and fewer days in subsequent years). As Social Security and Medicare costs continue to soar, lawmakers would run out of other programs to cut – leaving only escalating tax increases. In other words, there is no escaping the necessity of Social Security and Medicare reform.” [E21]
Another court wrongly rules against the Trump travel order. On Thursday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a nationwide injunction on the Trump administration’s temporary halt on travel from six-majority Muslim nations. As was the case with previous rulings against the travel order, the court here is ignoring what the law actually says about the President’s authority in this area. Kevin Williamson writes: “Chief Judge Roger Gregory of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals makes a two-part argument that one must admire for its creativity: In the first part, he argues that, because of Trump’s dopey anti-Muslim comments during the campaign, it is reasonable to conclude that the travel restrictions constitute ‘invidious discrimination,’ a constitutional no-no. But the Constitution, as Judge Gregory readily admits, does not protect the rights of foreign nationals not under the authority of the U.S. government or otherwise classifiable as U.S. persons: ‘Aliens who are denied entry by virtue of the President’s exercise of his authority under Section 1182(f) can claim few, if any, rights under the Constitution.’ “Yet, he argues in the second part, failing to apply the standards of U.S. civil-rights law to . . . the entire population of the rest of the world, presumably, makes it likely that the U.S. government will violate the civil rights of U.S. citizens who share certain demographic features: ‘When the President exercises that authority based solely on animus against a particular race, nationality, or religion, there is a grave risk — indeed, likelihood — that the constitutional harm will redound to citizens.’ “So, on the one hand the judge is attempting to read the state of the president’s soul rather than the language of the executive order, and, on the other hand, he is arguing that the executive order violates the Constitution not because it violates the Constitution but because something else might violate the Constitution — someday. Trump is in effect being accused of presidential pre-crime.” [National Review]
Still a long war. On Monday, terrorists detonated a bomb at the Manchester Arena in Manchester, Great Britain, killing 22 concert goers, many of them teenage girls. Robin Simcox writes that the terrorist threat facing Britain is not going to go away anytime soon: “The U.K. must now respond to this latest outrage. Practical questions about how this attack took place need to be asked. Where was Abedi able to acquire the expertise to construct this bomb? Had he traveled abroad to receive training? Was he part of a broader network, and if so, how large is it? Are other attacks imminent? Like Khalid Masood, the terrorist who committed the attack in Westminster, Abedi was on the intelligence radar but considered a lower risk case. The British intelligence services are world class, but no agency can get it right every time—and with both this year’s London and Manchester attacks, two people on the radar have been able to carry out attacks. MI5 will be analyzing what, if anything, went wrong. Even once this is known, there is no escaping the reality that the threat picture in the U.K. is very troubling and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The intelligence agencies currently assess the overall risk of an attack to be ‘severe,’ meaning another attack is ‘highly likely.’ Part of the reason for this is that approximately 850 Brits have traveled to Syria to fight in the conflict there. Many will have joined ISIS and are returning with training and combat experience. The U.K. will remain under threat.” [The Daily Signal]
Peter Lawler, R.I.P. Peter Lawler, Berry College professor and political philosopher, died unexpectedly on Tuesday. He was 65 and leaves behind a body of work that includes 18 books and many essays examining the post-modern condition. In a remembrance, Yuval Levin identifies The Restless Mind as the place to start for those who haven’t yet read Lawler: “On its face, that book argues persuasively that the worldview of Alexis de Tocqueville was shaped less by Rousseau’s political philosophy (as most Tocqueville scholars suggest) than by Pascal’s psychology. Peter wrote or edited 18 books in the course of his productive career, but that 1993 masterpiece still strikes me as the most Lawlerian of them all. It is about much more than Tocqueville, though it has had great influence on how Tocqueville is understood. It offers a piercing assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of modern life, concluding that we who live in modern free societies are destined to be a little crazy, and that this might be a good thing. “Modern life, he suggested, is characterized by an effort to invent a highly individualistic form of the human person. This kind of person should be capable of unprecedented freedom, and therefore perhaps unprecedented happiness too. But it isn’t really possible for actual human beings to be so thoroughly individualistic. So actual human beings can never really be quite happy while playing the role that modern free societies assign them. That means they will be restless, and eager for a different role. That restlessness is a source of endless anxiety, but also of hope—because it sends us searching for a way of life better suited to who we really are. It means modernity will always be producing its own critics and always live in a kind of creative tension with itself. “That insight, already evident in some of Peter’s earliest work, is the thread that runs through his most important arguments.” [The Federalist]
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