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Commentary on Texas Judge's decision. (See 1 below.)
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As I have been saying, December is not the time for The Fed to raise rates. The markets , the world economy and psychology are too fragile. Err on the side of caution and patience.(See 2 below.)
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Obamacare always was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts wanted to split hairs and sought Court Comity. His real job is to interpret the law according to our Constitution and be intellectually honest.
Getting rid of Obamacare need not be a problem if there is a sound replacement waiting in the wings that will pass. The issue is whether Republicans and Democrats can stop playing with people's lives and their health and do what is right. (See 3 below.)
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Political correctness is killing more than comedy. It has basically killed/divided our country.
Salena Zito is someone I want to bring to The Landings under the auspices of The SIRC. (See 4 below.)
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Prager believes nationalism is acceptable. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) WSJ Editorial Board
No one opposes ObamaCare more than we do, and Democrats are now confirming that it was designed as a way-station to government-run health care. But a federal judge’s ruling Friday that the law is unconstitutional is likely to be overturned on appeal and may boomerang politically on Republicans.
Judge Reed O’Connor ruled for some 20 state plaintiffs that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is no longer legal because Republicans repealed its financial penalty as part of the 2017 tax reform. Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts joined four Justices to say ObamaCare’s mandate was illegal as a command to individuals to buy insurance under the Commerce Clause. “The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,” he wrote.
Yet the Chief famously salvaged ObamaCare by unilaterally rewriting the mandate to be a “tax” that was within Congress’s power. Never mind that Democrats had expressly said the penalty was not a tax. Majority Leader Roberts declared it to be so.
Enter Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argues in Texas v. U.S. that since Congress has repealed the mandate, the tax is no longer a tax, and ObamaCare is thus illegal. Judge O’Connor agreed with that logic, and he went further in ruling that since Congress said the mandate is crucial to the structure of ObamaCare, then all of ObamaCare must fall along with the mandate.
We’ll admit to a certain satisfaction in seeing the Chief Justice hoist on his own logic. But his ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius was in 2012 and there is more at issue legally now than the “tax” issue in that opinion. One legal complication is that Congress in 2017 repealed the financial part of the individual mandate, not the structure of the mandate itself. Republicans used budget rules to pass tax reform so they couldn’t repeal the mandate’s express language.
The Affordable Care Act has also been up and running since 2014, which means so-called reliance interests come into play when considering a precedent. Millions of people now rely on ObamaCare’s subsidies and rules, which argues against judges repealing the law by fiat.
Judge O’Connor breezes past this like a liberal Ninth Circuit appeals judge handling a Donald Trump appeal. He’s right that Democrats claimed the individual mandate was essential to the Affordable Care Act. But when Congress killed the financial penalty in 2017 it left the rest of ObamaCare intact. When judging congressional intent, a judge must account for the amending Congress as well as the original Congress.
In any case, the Supreme Court’s “severability” doctrine calls for restraint in declaring an entire law illegal merely because one part of it is. Our guess is that even the right-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges will overturn Judge O’Connor on this point.
As for the politics, Democrats claim to be alarmed by the ruling but the truth is they’re elated. They want to use it to further pound Republicans for denying health insurance for pre-existing conditions if the law is overturned. Democrats campaigned across the country against Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit to gain House and Senate seats in November, and they will now press votes in Congress so they can compound the gains in 2020.
President Trump hailed the ruling in a tweet, but he has never understood the Affordable Care Act. His Administration has done good work revising regulations to reduce health-care costs and increase access, but the risk is that the lawsuit will cause Republicans in Congress to panic politically and strike a deal with Democrats that reinforces ObamaCare. This is what happens when conservatives fall into the liberal trap of thinking they can use the courts to achieve policy goals that need to be won in Congress.
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2) Time for a Fed Pause
Inflation and other economic signals justify interest-rate caution.
The Editorial Board
If you think your job is tough, consider Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. He’s signaled for months that the Fed will raise interest rates again this week, but economic and financial signals suggest he should pause. Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump is beating him up almost daily not to raise rates.
What to do? The right answer is to ignore the politics, inside and outside the Fed, and follow the signals that suggest a prudent pause in raising rates at this week’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. Get the monetary policy that best serves the economy, and the politics will work itself out. Get the policy wrong, and Mr. Trump will be the least of Mr. Powell’s political worries.
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The case for pausing in its interest-rate march back to “normal” starts with the Fed’s mandate to control prices with low unemployment. There’s simply no sign of an inflation breakout.
The Fed’s favorite inflation measure, the PCE deflator, has been falling for months. The dollar is strong, both against gold and the world’s other major currencies. Gold sold for about $1,250 an ounce on Monday but six months ago it was about $1,300. Other commodity prices that are often inflation canaries, such as oil and farm products, are also down.
This is all in sharp contrast to the 2003-2005 period when the Alan Greenspan-Ben Bernanke Fed kept rates too low for too long. Then commodity prices like oil were rising sharply, and housing prices exploded.
Wages have begun to rise in a tight labor market, with average hourly earnings rising at an annual rate of 3.1%. But this is what you’d expect in a healthy labor market that is adding about 170,000 new jobs a month and a jobless rate at a historic low of 3.7%.
There is also no sign of the “cost-push” wage inflation that the Fed staff so often frets about. Recall that by previous Fed calculations the economy had reached full employment two or three years ago. Yet stronger growth continues to pull more Americans into the job market. As Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida recently noted, productivity is rising at a 1.8% rate, which suggests further room for non-inflationary wage gains.
Meanwhile, U.S. growth may be slowing. The Atlanta Fed now predicts 3% growth for the fourth quarter, which would mean the first calendar year of growth exceeding 3% since 2005. But the world economy has notably slowed, with warning signs in China and Europe in particular. The uncertainty introduced by Mr. Trump’s tariff battles have reduced trade flows and dampened investment. Housing and autos, both sensitive to interest-rate increases, are down. And a few cracks are showing in credit markets, especially high-yield bonds.
The larger argument for a pause is that the Fed is unwinding the largest monetary experiment in modern history. Central banks around the world are moving away from multi-trillion-dollar bond purchases and zero-interest rates, and they’re doing it without a road map. What is the “normal” interest rate in this post-crisis world? We don’t know, and we doubt the Fed does either.
If quantitative easing lifted risk-asset prices, then what happens amid quantitative tightening? Stanley Druckenmiller and Kevin Warsh posed that question on these pages Monday, and the answer may explain some of the stock market’s doldrums this year despite the strong economy and solid corporate earnings.
Mr. Powell recently gave a fine speech pointing out the Fed’s fallibility in previous eras—a marked contrast to the all-knowing condescension of the Bernanke and Greenspan years. If the Fed is walking in a dark room with sunglasses as it navigates quantitative tightening, then it makes sense to walk slowly. The Fed can always revisit its pause next year if the economy shows continued resilience or Mr. Trump and China agree to a trade deal.
A pause would conflict with previous Fed guidance and the famous “plot points” of FOMC members for future rate expectations. But the FOMC also claims to be “data dependent,” and if that’s true, it should follow the data. Some of our friends fret that if the Fed stops now, it will never get back to normal. But it will surely never do so if there’s a near-term recession. The best way to normalize is to keep the expansion going as long as possible without inflation.
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As for Mr. Trump, Mr. Powell can defend a pause on the merits and say explicitly that the President had no influence. Here’s one way to put it when he’s asked the inevitable question at his press conference:
“Yes, I’ve seen the President’s comments, but the Federal Reserve is an independent central bank. His comments make our job harder because they might cause some investors to think we make decisions based on political pressure. I can assure you that we make our decisions on the economic merits. Some may choose not to believe that, but they do so at their own risk.”
That won’t stop Mr. Trump, but it would help the Fed’s credibility with markets.
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3) Pig-headed Republicans are pushing America toward government-run national health care
By Will Marshall, Opinion contributor
New Texas ruling is the latest example of Republican efforts to kill Obamacare. But while the GOP is winning on tactics, it's losing hearts and minds.
What is the strongest political force driving America toward national health care? No, it’s not Sen. Bernie Sanders and his “Democratic Socialist” minions. It’s the Republican Party.
Hang on, don’t Republicans stand foursquare against a government takeover of the entire U.S. health care system? So they say. But the GOP’s pig-headed opposition to less drastic ways to make sure everyone has coverage is stimulating Americans’ appetite for a bigger government role in health care — and it will only be fueled by a federal judge's ruling Friday night that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
In a recent poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, for example, voters by a margin of 54 to 46 percent, including nearly half of Republicans, favored changing "the current health system so everyone gets health care through Medicare instead of through people’s place of work or instead of buying it directly." A more general "new government health care program" drew even more support, including 52 percent of Republicans.
Such findings should be taken seriously, but not literally. When you present voters with facts about the astronomical cost of nationalizing health care — $32 trillion over 10 years — and tell them they’d have to give up their job-based health plans, their enthusiasm for a Medicare-for-all “single payer” scheme starts to melt away.
Still, the public’s receptivity to more government intervention in health care markets shows that U.S. conservatives are losing ground on health care. And Republicans, the drivers behind the lawsuit in Texas, have only themselves to blame.
Read more commentary:
Health care coverage — its high cost and the fear of losing it — was voters’ top concern in the 2018 midterm elections, especially for women, as our poll found. The issue played heavily to Democrats’ advantage, as Republican candidates struggled to explain their support for the Trump administration’s efforts to either kill or eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, such as by undoing the law’s popular protections against high premiums and coverage denials for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
In fact, the Trump Republicans’ obsession with sabotaging the ACA has succeeded where Democrats failed — it’s made "Obamacare” popular with most voters. Support spiked to 54 percent in 2017, as Republicans were trying and failing repeal the ACA, and that's roughly where it remains.
As Democrats prepare to take control of the House, the party’s left wing is eager to open a new front in the health care wars. Emboldened by midterm gains and polls that show voters favor major changes in the U.S. health care system, they are demanding that party leaders make “Medicare for all” a top priority in the new Congress.
Republicans are losing the health care war
Given the softness of public support for a health care system wholly controlled by government, Democrats should proceed with caution. But what’s striking is how the Republicans’ obdurate refusal to work with Democrats to make sure everyone has affordable health coverage keeps racheting the debate to the left. On health care, as on cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage, the GOP wins many a tactical battle while losing the war for Americans’ hearts and minds.
In the early 1990s, the GOP monolithically opposed a Clinton administration plan to achieve universal coverage. That no doubt played a role in the GOP’s big 1994 victory, but public pressure for health care reform didn’t go away. Three years later, Congress passed President Bill Clinton’s children's health care program, now covering 9 million kids, on a broadly bipartisan basis.
President George W. Bush in 2003 pushed through Congress a largely Republican bill adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare (Part D). Evidently, the GOP preferred conferring new benefits on health care “haves” (seniors covered by Medicare) to helping “have nots” (workers with no insurance at all).
Next came President Barack Obama’s push to cover a big chunk of the uninsured and harness the power of choice and competition to hold down private insurance costs. Although the ACA preserved America’s hybrid, public-private insurance system, Republicans from the start disingenuously demonized “Obamacare” as a socialist boondoggle.
Nay-saying, obstruction and no health solutions
Amid all their nay-saying and obstructionism, Republicans never managed to coalesce around a credible alternative to Democratic reforms. They view any attempt to cover the uninsured as an intolerable infringement on Americans’ sacred right not to be protected against ruinous health bills.
In days past, Republicans came to Washington to solve national problems, not just prevent Democrats from trying to solve them. When Congress approved President Lyndon Johnson's landmark Medicare plan in 1965, more than half of House Republicans and nearly half of GOP senators voted in favor. Today’s Republican Party, however, has abandoned governing in favor of a polarizing and ultimately futile struggle for total domination. America’s constitutional order just isn’t built for one-party rule.
By resisting every reasonable effort to find common ground on universal coverage, Republicans have sapped public confidence that our hybrid health system can deliver what America needs: affordable insurance for all. That’s how the GOP has become Bernie Sanders’ unwitting ally in pushing America toward national health care.
Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute. Follow him on Twitter: @Will_PPI
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
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