Three Black Op Ed Writers Make Uncommon Sense.

                                                                                                  Picture vs words!
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Some health care commentary from fellow memo readers. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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There are times when I believe an op ed is worth re-posting. Shelby Steele points out back in the 1960's  conservatives allowed liberals  to cleverly capture the high "moral" ground by encouraging minorities to become dependent and tainting conservatives with "racism." Professor Moynihan warned against dependency  and correctly predicted how negative would be the consequences. He was vilified by self-righteous liberals.

Steele suggests conservatives can re-capture the true moral high ground by focusing on "underdevlopment."

The difficulty is shaking the "bad mouth label" once you have been tagged by the phrase "racist."

The hypocrisy of liberals and destruction they have caused should be evident but arguing against "free stuff" resulting in dependency is hard to rationalize.

Conservatives have the right concept but they never seem to be able to characterize it in salable/convincing messaging. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Much of what Trump's first term has been about is undoing the damage from Obama's eight years of fecklessness and proposing solutions to major problems.

Should Trump lose in 2020, Democrats will focus on reinstating the policies of Obama and adding socialist icing and anti-constitutional, government take over cherries as topping.

This is a large part of what the 2020 election will be about. You have the choice of deciding whether you want to choose the risks that come with  freedom or the stifling challenges of enslavement. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Will Lori use  a light or heavy foot approach to Chicago's problems?

Lori Lightfoot Makes Chicago History: A Fed as Mayor 

John Kass, Chicago Tribune

And:

Steele, Riley and  Marcus are all black op ed writers.

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1)

Replacing ObamaCare takes some federal but mainly state actions

By Michael A. Walters

The WSJ opinion piece on March 28 decried a lack of consensus on how to replace ACA, and implored a solution that emphasized choice and competition.  

Proposed Georgia legislation can do more than that, meeting what the public liked about two of Obamacare’s goals: guaranteed access to basic health insurance and subsidies for pre-existing conditions (PECs). It also relies on regulated competition among free market insurers to do it efficiently, while making PEC subsidies means-tested.

It’s based on the success of auto insurance assigned risk plans, coupled with a high-risk pool for expensive pre-existing conditions (PECs). Auto insurance, with some 50 insurers competing by state, has operated for decades with overall profit margins of under 4% of premiums!

State solutions work best if federal legislation allows two things: a level tax playing field between individual and work-based health coverage and state block grants to help fund high-risk PEC pools. Congress could also incent state action by tying block grants to states providing guaranteed access and PEC subsidy pools, and allowing pricing based on actuarial principles, instead overcharging young people to pay for others.

So, let the states lead the way with innovative solutions. Some may even mandate basic coverage with a high deductible to keep hospital emergency rooms from having to subsidize coverage.

After a few years, the states with the best results can be emulated by others who can make changes to improve their plans.  One national plan, aside from not being allowed by the Constitution, is much harder to change.

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Michael Walters is a Fellow and Past President of the Casualty Actuarial Society. The solutions outlined above were presented at an annual meeting of the Casualty Actuarial Society, and discussed at numerous actuarial conferences.

1a) This health payments proposal may be an improvement on ACA. Then again, it may not, where it does not address the lack of free health marketplace and instead continues to allow insurers to create opaque formulas, to unilaterally increase health costs for all consumers (hospitals, doctors and patients). 

What we have had for decades is a private company controlled socialist system. It’s soylent green for health care. The only ones who net a true win in either the current or proposed payment system are insurance company owners. Same as with ACA. It is possible with the proposal you mention that some mix of above stated consumers will lose less than they do with ACA. But, there is little way of knowing, because we continue to normalize insurance company missiles fired into our pocketbooks.  J---

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2)The Right and the Moral High Ground

Today minorities suffer from underdevelopment, not racism. And here, at last, is conservatism’s great opportunity.

 By Shelby Steele 

As many have noted, Donald Trump’s presidency is an insurgency.

Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent, doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment. This was his appeal over a field of more conventional Republican candidates in 2016. But last year’s midterm elections were disappointing, and Mr. Trump has gone wanting for political clout in the immigration fight. His successes—a booming economy, tax reform, low unemployment, increased oil production, the abandonment of terrible treaties, new and better trade deals—have brought him little goodwill even from his own party.

Today’s leftist cultural hegemony squeezes President Trump—and conservatives generally—into an impossibility: No matter what they achieve, they are always guilty of larger sins. Make the economy grow if you must, but you are still a racist.

So there is a distinct vulnerability that trails Mr. Trump and his conservative allies. And even being right—especially being right—is of no help against it. This vulnerability follows from a conviction that first flowered in the 1960s: that America’s magnificent founding principles were not enough to ensure a free and morally legitimate society. Once such issues as civil rights, women’s rights and even the Vietnam War become preeminently moral issues, it was clear that freedom itself required a moral as well as constitutional underpinning.

Suddenly our institutions, our politics and our cultural life all had to be morally accountable. This was the great cultural shift that left modern conservatism vulnerable.

You could see this as far back as Barry Goldwater’s infamous acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention. At that historical moment the country was overwhelmed with evidence of America’s immorality. Two weeks earlier, Martin Luther King had won a moral concession from America in the form of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which Goldwater voted against). There followed riots in the streets, an antiwar movement, the beginnings of a women’s movement, and America’s immorality was the subtext of it all.

Yet at the podium, Goldwater was all principles and rectitude. He was a good man, but he was also a man out of time. He seemed to be celebrating a rigorously principled conservatism—a conservatism that was stymied by the ’60s. What Goldwater failed to understand was that in the flux of that decade, adherence to conservative principles was not the point. Evil was the point. And the evil that America owned up to in that era was more than a match for principle. It could destroy whatever principle built. Evil had given us slavery in the middle of a principled democracy. The ’60s gave America the idea of its own evil—and we have not been the same since.

This turn of events opened an extremely prolific vein of power that the left seized upon immediately. Admitting evil obligated America to seek redemption by actually earning an innocence of past sins. Proving your innocence in this way earned you moral authority and, ultimately, political power.

So out of nowhere in the mid-’60s came the Great Society, the War on Poverty, forced busing, public housing, affirmative action and so on—a proliferation of redemptive actions meant to reify innocence as a currency of power. Liberalism became essentially a moral movement more informed by ideas of the good than by constitutional principles—more in thrall to innocence than to freedom.

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Mr. Trump’s border wall “an immorality,” she was smearing him with the evil of racism and thus implying that resisting him was innocence itself. The new liberal motto, “Resist,” is firstly an assertion of innocence.

Conservatism’s vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the ’60s—no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants. Thus conservatism’s heretofore lackluster showing in our continuing culture war.

But today there is a way for conservatism to overcome its vulnerability. The world has truly reformed since the ’60s. Racism remains a dark impulse in humankind, but America has already delegitimized it. Today minorities suffer from underdevelopment, not racism. And here, at last, is conservatism’s great opportunity.

Conservatism is the perfect antidote to underdevelopment. Its commitment to individual responsibility, education, hard work, personal initiative, traditional family values and free markets is a universal formula for success in a free society.

Coming at the end of 60 years of liberal failure, conservatism is now “the new thing” in many minority communities. Liberalism’s greatest sin was to incentivize minorities to reject these values and urge them into dependency. But, given this failure, these values now have an air of historical inevitability about them. Not coincidentally, Mr. Trump’s approval among blacks has risen; one poll had it at 40%.

Justice was always the lens through which the left examined inequality. Justice logically seemed to answer injustice, so it gave the left a framework for understanding the fate of blacks and other minorities—they were victims who had to be socially engineered into equality. But this only put the left on its path to failure.

In reality, justice is both amorphous and impossible. Martin Luther King did not win justice; he won freedom. Justice-focused groups today, like Black Lives Matter, keep casting minorities as victims of America’s old injustices, the better to work white guilt—to extract payoff of some kind. But blacks make little to no progress and, worse, the preoccupation with injustice only leaves them eternally inconsolable and cut off from their own best energies and talents.

Suppose American conservatism begins to argue for progress as the best way to overcome inequality—not to the exclusion of justice, but simply as America’s guiding light in social reform. Progress is possible, measurable and most of all doable. Rather than fight over “microaggressions” and “triggers,” why not, as Booker T. Washington so beautifully put it, “cast down your bucket where you are”?

To put all this on a dangerously romantic level: Why not go back to that perpetually workable thing, the American dream?


2a) Progressives Threaten to Destroy School Reform

They talk about equality, then fiercely oppose measures that stand a chance of achieving it.

By Jason L. Riley

That’s bad news for millions of inner-city minorities who lack the resources to opt out of violent, chronically failing schools. The irony is that the same progressives who obsess over inequality and statistical disparities also fume at education reforms that have helped narrow learning gaps and thus led to better life outcomes for underprivileged groups in general.

After New York City released admissions data last month for the city’s most selective public high schools, where students are chosen based on a single, race-blind test, I reached out to the Success Academy Charter Schools network to find out how their middle-schoolers fared. It turns out that black and Hispanic students at Success Academy, which chooses students by lottery rather than academic ability, were admitted to the elite high schools at double the rate of their black and Hispanic peers citywide. I wasn’t surprised. The same thing happened last year.

Bill de Blasio, New York’s progressive mayor, wants the elite schools to be more racially balanced and has called for replacing the entrance exam with what amounts to a racial quota system. This year, as usual, Asian-Americans were awarded more than half of all slots, even though they comprise only about 16% of the city’s public-school students. Understandably, Asian parents oppose the mayor’s proposal. A study released by the city’s Independent Budget Office surmised that the de Blasio plan would cut Asian admissions in half. But even some black parents have expressed concern that admitting underprepared kids to these schools for aesthetic reasons could turn them into academic failures and targets of abuse.

The obvious way for Mr. de Blasio to advance his diversity goals without watering down admissions standards or exacerbating racial and ethnic tensions would be to give lagging groups more access to schools like Success Academy. “If the city had more high-performing charter schools, the specialized schools would be dramatically more diverse,” said Seth Andrew, founder of another high-performing public charter-school network in New York, Democracy Prep. But teachers unions oppose charter schools because they don’t control them, and the mayor has chosen his union allies over parents who want more school choice. The upshot is that the city’s charter-school wait list now exceeds 50,000 children.

If anything, Democratic opposition to meaningful education reform is intensifying. In the past year, teacher walkouts have occurred in major cities like Los Angeles and Denver, as well as states including West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and Oklahoma. Union demands have included higher pay, less accountability and reductions in school choice. Wisconsin was a school-choice pioneer in the 1990s, but the new governor, Tony Evers, wants to “phase out vouchers” and cap the number of charter schools.

Mr. Evers says the issue is costs, but voucher recipients and public charter schools in Wisconsin and elsewhere typically are funded at lower levels than traditional public schools. A new study of eight major cities—Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York, San Antonio and Washington—by researchers at the University of Arkansas has concluded that charter schools are not only producing superior academic results but doing so far more efficiently than the traditional school system.

“The public charter school sectors in all eight of these U.S. cities are more cost-effective and deliver a higher return-on-investment than their respective traditional public school sectors,” wrote the authors. “In these important urban environments, there is a clear productivity advantage for public charter schools.”

That’s something cities and states with debilitating pension obligations might want to consider, but don’t hold your breath. Tuesday’s runoff mayoral election in Chicago featured two black progressives, both of whom have called for a moratorium on charter schools even though blacks and Hispanics have consistently supported school choice at higher rates than whites. Chicago’s Noble Network of Charter Schools is 98% black and Hispanic, and 80% of graduates head off to four-year colleges, compared with 42% of students who graduate from the city’s traditional public schools. Chicago doesn’t need a moratorium on Noble Network schools. It needs more of them.

Like New York, Chicago has alternatives to failing schools. And like New York, the political progressives in charge have little interest in using those alternatives, let alone scaling them up to meet demand. There’s nothing wrong with good-faith disagreements about school reform. No political party or movement has a monopoly on good ideas. But if Democrats aren’t careful, progressives will turn the school-reform movement into something no longer worthy of being called reform.

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3) Build an Iranian Sanctions Wall

Some Democrats promise to return to the Obama deal. Trump can stop them by taking action now.

By Mark Dubowitz

Democrats are talking about re-entering the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if they defeat President Trump next year. At least three challengers—Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren say they’ll do so, and the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution in February calling for a return to the agreement.

But the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is about to get sweeter for Tehran. Key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and access to heavy weaponry begin to lapse in 2020, when the United Nations conventional-arms embargo ends. By 2023 the U.N. missile embargo also disappears. Also in 2023 Tehran can begin installing advanced centrifuges, which lower the breakout time for a bomb. Because these machines are more efficient, Iran requires a smaller number to produce weapons-grade uranium and the effort is easier to hide. Even more restrictions vanish in 2025-30, as Iran will be permitted to expand its enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing capabilities, essential for the production of atomic weapons.

If the U.S. re-enters the deal in 2021, it will provide enormous sanctions relief to an increasingly aggressive adversary. Proponents of the JCPOA argued in 2015 that the deal might buy some time for the “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani to achieve reforms. Iran has only become more hostile since Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013, and his presidency ends in 2021.

In response to these realities, the Trump administration has waged a pressure campaign to hasten the regime’s collapse or at least force it to agree to a comprehensive deal addressing nuclear and nonnuclear threats. So far Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, has rejected new negotiations. And why not? With Democratic candidates signaling a no-conditions return to the JCPOA, it seems sensible to wait for a more flexible American president.

There’s plenty more the Trump administration can do. The U.S. could combine economic coercion, including driving Iranian oil exports to zero (as administration officials have promised to do), with greater support for Iranians, who have protested on the streets since December 2017. Trump officials should consider extensive support to Iranian labor unions, including paying more Iranians to go on strike through a covert fund run by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA and the AFL-CIO labor federation provided extensive technical and financial support in the 1980s for the Solidarity movement in Poland to great success, though there’s no public evidence they explicitly funded labor strikes. That might cripple key sectors of the economy and lead to larger protests, similar to those that hit the shah in 1978 and 1979. Even if the theocracy survives, the resulting economic and political instability could be leverage for a better, comprehensive deal.

The administration could also build a wall of additional sanctions that a pro-Tehran successor could not easily dismantle. These sanctions would be directed not against the nuclear program but the regime’s role as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, including its terror-financing central bank; its missile program, which is progressing toward an intercontinental ballistic missile; and its human-rights abuses and corruption.

Mr. Trump could direct the Treasury to designate the Central Bank of Iran for its role in financing Lebanese Hezbollah. When Congress imposed sanctions on the bank in 2011, it did so on multiple grounds—terrorism, money laundering as well as the financing of nuclear and missile development. In 2015, in a legal sleight of hand, President Obama classified all this as a “nuclear sanction” and lifted the central-bank sanction as part of the JCPOA. Mr. Trump reinstated it when he withdrew from the nuclear deal but a Democratic president could lift it again. New central-bank sanctions based solely on terrorism would be more difficult for a future president to remove. Though the Obama administration opposed the 2011 sanctions, they had bipartisan support in Congress and passed 100-0 in the Senate.

The government could also impose sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its entirety as a foreign terrorist organization, adding it to the same State Department list as Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda. The IRGC is the dominant force in Iran’s economy, and the U.S. FTO law is so wide-reaching and punitive for anyone providing material support to a terrorist organization that international companies would stay out of Iran. Mr. Trump could hit the regime again with sanctions for terrorism and corruption on the vast wealth held in foundations by Iran’s supreme leader and other insiders.

In addition, Trump officials could impose sanctions on key sectors of Iran’s economy, including mining and metallurgy, chemicals, telecommunications, computer science and construction, which provide critical products and technologies for Iran’s missile program.

Politically, it would be hard to make the case for dismantling these sanctions, since all evidence points to Tehran’s wrongdoing. If blocked from delivering sanctions relief to Iran, the next administration would have little choice but to wield U.S. economic leverage and negotiate a follow-on agreement that addresses the fundamental flaws of the JCPOA. Mr. Trump may well be re-elected, but the additional sanctions would serve America well in that case too.

Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive officer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.


3a) It Is Outrageous that Supporting Trump Is Dangerous

By Lloyd Marcus

My car, which has a “Trump/Pence” bumper sticker, was keyed. While pumping gas, a motorist seemed impressed by my courage to have a Trump bumper sticker. People have told me they are afraid to wear a MAGA cap or have a Trump sign on their lawn.

Having to feel so afraid to express our political views is outrageous. Democrats and fake news media have so twisted the meaning of “MAGA” and generated such hatred for Trump that citizens are afraid to publicly support the president of the United States. This is still America. Thugs who physically attack us for expressing our First Amendment right to free speech must be prosecuted.

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other Democrat domestic terrorists routinely beat up Trump supporters. Meanwhile, fake news media promotes their lie that the Tea Party is the violent movement. The Tea Party is totally nonviolent. Brothers and sisters, it requires courage to stand with Trump in his quest to bring America back from Democrats' destruction. I am grateful that God is on our side.

In the Clint Eastwood movie, Pale Rider, an evil businessman with an army of thugs tried to force small landowners to sell him their land. If the landowners did not sell, the businessman threatened to kill them and take their land. The small landowners voted to stay and fight for their land. They asked Preacher (Eastwood) to lead them. Preacher said, “If I lead you, some of you will die.” In other words, Preacher was saying freedom ain't free.

As we join Trump in the battle to restore America's greatness and recover our freedoms, MAGA cap wearers will be beaten, cars will be keyed. Freedom ain't free.

Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

Shockingly, it appears freedom in America is only one election away from extinction. We have a generation of dumbed-down youths who are eager to surrender their constitutional freedoms for government freebies. Most of the Democrat presidential candidates are anti-freedom and anti-American socialist/communists. If Trump is not reelected, it could end America as we know it; if not forever, at least for decades.

Illegals are invading our country via the Mexican border at its highest since 2006, averaging 3500 per day. If Democrats win the White House, they will totally ignore immigration laws. Opening the floodgates to illegals will devastatingly transform America.

Sharia Law will spread like wildfire across America if Democrats win the White House. Rashida Tlaib and bold anti-Semitic Ilhan Omar are the first two Muslim women elected to congress. They are Phase 3 (Infiltration) of a master plan for Sharia law to rule America. Tlaib and Omar's mission is to support pro-Muslim candidates, spread pro-Muslim propaganda, and file lawsuits against anything they deem Islamophobia.

Meanwhile, Democrats have intensified their war on Christianity, seeking to ban the Bible and make biblical teachings illegal

If Democrats win the White House, the murder of innocent babies will dramatically increase. Shockingly, 19 states support infanticide, leaving babies who survive failed abortions to die. Democrats are hellbent on passing new laws to murder babies after they are born for any reason. Over 60 million babies have been murdered since Roe v Wade in 1973.

Decades of allowing leftist educators to dumb down students has a disturbingly high number of American youths favoring socialism over capitalism. Youths want government to be their daddy, providing their every need and desire for free. These youths absurdly believe the way we live in the United States will cause the earth to be uninhabitable in 12 years. Consequently, these duped youths will vote for Democrats' insane economy-crushing environmental laws.

If Democrats win the White House, they will reinstate and increase the mountain of oppressive regulations dismantled by Trump. Trump eliminated over 800 Obama regulations, saving businesses $4 billion. Only Democrats and deadbeat idiots hate all business owners. Small businesses have generated 65% of the new jobs since 1995. Fifty percent of the working population works in small businesses.

Given the billions of dollars spent, the deep state's corrupt schemes, fake news media's 24/7 lie-filled reporting, and over 500,000 articles purposed to destroy him, it is beyond extraordinary that Trump has survived with a 40% approval rating. Clearly, God has a hedge of protection surrounding this remarkable man. My fellow Christians please continue praying for our president and our homeland.

Defending freedom, D-Day on the beaches of Normandy required a huge sacrifice of 29,000 American lives. I thought about our young troop's thoughts the night before they landed, knowing that the next day many of them would probably die. Freedom ain't free, folks. Freedom ain't free.

While I believe Trump will emerge victorious in 2020, we still must rally behind and publicly express our support. We must refuse to be intimidated into the shadows by the Democrats' henchmen.

I have received my red “Trump 2020” cap in the mail.

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