9 January 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS economic reasons if they miss even one hour “for reasons such as
holidays, illness and bad weather.” That isn’t really underemployment,
No, the ‘Real’ Unemployment much less “real” unemployment.

Rate Isn’t 17.3% [Cato at What is unique about last year’s unemployment was its typical
duration — doubling the number of weeks people remain on the dole.
Liberty‘Real’ Unemployment Because those who have been unemployed 12–18 months do not leave
the ranks of the unemployed until their benefits are about to run out
Rate Isn’t 17.3%] (after an unprecedented 79 weeks or more), it doesn’t take many newly
JAN 08, 2010 07:27P.M. unemployed to push the rate above 10%. Congress tripled the number of
weeks people collect unemployment benefits (describing that and other
By Alan Reynolds transfer payments as a “stimulus”) and now wonders why so many
people take so long to accept a suitable job offer. If you subsidize
Nearly every economic commentator from Fox News (on the fair and something, you get more of it — and that applies to unemployment too.
balanced side) to Paul Krugman (on the unfair and unbalanced side) is Many of those same clueless legislators may be equally surprised to find
eager to tell you that the “real” unemployment rate is not 10% but 17.3%. themselves out of a job next November.
The latter figure is the largest of six offered by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. But that does not make it more meaningful.

Many people believe (incorrectly) that unemployment is a measure of FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
how many jobs were lost. But people can also be unemployed because
they quit their job, or because they never worked before, or haven’t The Department of Sneak-a-
worked in a long time. Job losers accounted for 63.7% of the unemployed
in December, down from 66.1% in September. If we counted only those Peek [Cato at Liberty]
who were unemployed because they lost their jobs, that measure of JAN 08, 2010 07:06P.M.
unemployment was 6.3% in December — down from 6.7% in October.
By Jim Harper
The 17.3% figure, by contrast, starts with those looking for jobs during
the past month and adds “all marginally attached workers, plus total
employed part time for economic reasons.” That phrase “marginally
attached” means people who looked for work at some point during the
past year, but not lately. Contrary to press reports, relatively few of the
“marginally attached” are those discouraged about job prospects. Adding
discouraged workers would only push the unemployment rate up by half
a percentage point, to 10.5%. And even that small number of discouraged
workers is not simply those who could not find work, but those who
simply “think” no work is available, or think they are too young, too old,
or that they lack the necessary schooling or training.

The rest of the “marginally attached” don’t even think they can’t find
work. Instead, they are not looking for work “for such reasons as school
or family responsibilities, ill health, and transportation problems.” To The Drudge Report’s provocative banner this afternoon combines with
describe such people who are not available for work as “underemployed” other news to suggest a homeland security trend: sneakin’ a peek.
(much less unemployed) is an abuse of the language.
The other story is the question whether the nominee to head the
As for those “working part-time for economic reasons,” only a fourth say Transportation Security Admnistration violated federal privacy laws as
they could only find part-time work. Those who normally work a 9-to-5 an FBI agent, then omitted key information in reporting it to Congress.
schedule (35 hours a week) are counted as working part-time for

1
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
Robert O’Harrow of the Washington Post (returning to the privacy beat!)
reports that Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, made inconsistent
statements to Congress about wrongly accessing confidential criminal
records about his estranged wife’s new boyfriend. (More here.)
That was 20 years ago. Being fully transparent about it today would
almost certainly have prevented it from being disqualifying. But over the
last 20 years, data collection has grown massively, and federal access to
personal data has grown — including access by the TSA. Data about the
appearance of your naked body may be on the very near horizon.
Southers’ problem with sneaking a peek at confidential records — and
whatever cover-up or oversight in his reporting of it to Congress — signal
precisely the wrong thing at a time when people rightly want their
security not to be the undoing of privacy.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Obama Has Declared Open
Season on Golden Geese. Good
Idea or Not? [Cato at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 05:09P.M.
By Daniel J. Mitchell
Chris Edwards and I wrote a nice book on this topic, but maybe this
video gets the point across without having to turn a page.
Here’s another video, hopefully more substantive, on the issue of tax
competition. And here’s one on the perils of class warfare.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Retiring Sen. Dorgan Was Mad
about Trade [Cato at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 03:22P.M.
By Daniel Griswold
When Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, announced this week that he would not
be running for re-election in November, he explained that he wanted to
pursue other interests such as teaching and writing more books.
As a senator, Dorgan opposed almost all efforts to liberalize trade unless
it involved Cuba or the re-importation of price-controlled drugs. He
holds the distinction of being the second most frequently mentioned
politician (behind only Barack Obama) in my Cato book, Mad about
Trade, something that I’m sure the senator would consider a badge of
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9 January 2010
honor.
Here is my critical but eminently fair review of his 2006 book, Take This
Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are
Selling Out America.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
George Clooney’s Docile Body
[Cato at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 02:42P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
Running the airport maze to board my flight from Madrid back to the
U.S. last week, I found myself thinking, with no small measure of envy,
about Ryan Bingham, George Clooney’s character from Up in the Air.
The ultimate frequent flier, Bingham slides shoes and belt off, flips
laptop from case, and aligns them neatly on the x-ray conveyor in a
seamless, fluid display of security Tai Chi. He navigates from curb to gate
and back with crisp efficiency, every motion practiced and automatic.
My envy was tempered somewhat as I reread Discipline and Punish on
the trip back. Bingham’s military precision, it struck me, was the product
of a form of training implicit in the security process. As a corrective brace
“teaches” the proper posture just by making it the only comfortable one,
the screening procedures embed a set of tacit instructions, consisting of
the optimal set of motions required to pass through smoothly. And of
course, it teaches more than bodily motions: Bigham knows you don’t
stand behind the Arabs in the screening line!
That’s not to say airport security is some kind of insidious brainwashing
program, but there’s a dimension of privacy here that it seems to me we
don’t talk about nearly enough. Our paradigms of privacy harms are
invasion (the jackboot at the door, in the extreme case) and exposure
(the intimate detail revealed). We generally think of these as exceptions
— as what happens when surveillance goes wrong, either because it gets
the wrong target or, when the surveillance is universal by design, because
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
information that’s supposed to remain protected falls into the wrong
hands or is otherwise misused. Invasion and exposure may be serious
problems, but they are fundamentally mistakes — hiccups in the system
we can seek to fix.
Discipline, by contrast, is what inevitably happens when the system
functions as intended, at least to the extent people are conscious of being
(actual or potential) targets of surveillance. It is probably not as serious a
harm as invasion or exposure most of the time, but it’s also by far the
most pervasive and ineradicable effect of surveillance. It would be nice if
our debates about surveillance included not just the question “What will
be exposed?” but also “How — and for what — are we training
ourselves?”
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
This Week in Government
Failure [Cato at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 02:00P.M.
By Tad DeHaven
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this
week:
• Central Michigan defeated Troy in the “Bailout Bowl,” but
taxpayers are the biggest losers.
• The 2010 census will pave the way for subsidies to state and local
governments.
• Secure property rights and government support help make U.S.
farmland a good investment. But what about the property rights of
taxpayers?
• The federal government’s IT budget increases by $5 billion while
Uncle Sam’s private sector counterparts make do with less.
• New York’s fraud-ridden Medicaid program is a prime example
why government involvement in healthcare is part of the problem,
not the solution.
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9 January 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
De-Stimulate [Larry Kudlow’s
Money Politic$]
JAN 08, 2010 01:59P.M.
After the arrival of a disappointing December jobs report, my thought on
putting America back to work is simple: de-stimulate. That’s right. Get
rid of the Obama stimulus monster, including the government takeover
of health care, cap-and-trade, and all this nonsensical talk of creating
green jobs. Get rid of the increase in marginal personal tax rates and
capital-gains tax rates. Get rid of the payroll tax hike from the health-
care talks. Get rid of the spending that is a counterweight to growth. Get
rid of it, every part of it. It’s creating so much uncertainty that even
profitable businesses are afraid to hire new workers and expand.
It’s like business is on hold as it waits for the next Washington shoe to
fall.
Check this out. On Friday, the day of the sub-par jobs release, President
Obama comes out with a new green-jobs program that will cost
taxpayers $2.3 billion. He predicts targeted tax credits for all of his
faddish “energy savers” — presumably determined by hoards of EPA
bureaucrats — will create 17,000 new jobs. This is out of a total
workforce of 153 million.
And wait, it gets better. The average cost of these alleged new green jobs
will be $135,000 per job. It’s sorta like the $780 billion stimulus plan,
half of which has supposedly saved 1 million jobs at roughly $200,000
per job.
And on the subject of energy-related jobs, the EPA is now going to
penalize manufacturing America — or what’s left of it — with tougher
standards to reduce smog. Of course, smog has already fallen 25 percent
in the last three decades. And the EPA’s projected smog savings are so
miniscule compared to the new costs for business that the National
Association of Manufacturers, the petrochemical makers, and others are
screaming bloody murder.
This little EPA beauty could cost up to $90 billion annually. All of this
with a 10 percent unemployment rate, mind you. It’s another triumph for
left-wing social policy over economic-growth policy.
And get this. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently announced that he
is closing down federal lands for oil and gas drilling. This with the price
of oil hovering around $83 a barrel and retail gas at the pump moving in
the direction of $3 per gallon. Huh? Does anybody in Washington have
any common sense at all?
Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal just wrote a good column about
tax chaos in the new year, with small-business write-offs for capital
purchases expiring, the alternative minimum tax (AMT) un-indexed for
inflation, and no fix in place for the estate tax, which is set to rocket from
zero back to 55 percent.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com 9 January 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

And let’s not forget, as Harvard economist Greg Mankiw reminds us on
his excellent blog, that the $780 billion stimulus plan was supposed to New Movie: “Casino Jack” [The
generate a peak of only 8 percent unemployment. Not happening — at
least not yet. Club for Growth]
JAN 08, 2010 01:48P.M.
So my point is this: Get rid of all this government spending, taxing,
regulating, and meddling. De-stimulate. Let us keep our own money as From the Politico: POLITICO obtained an advance copy of the film
workers, small-business owners, and corporate employees. Stop any directed by George Hickenlooper that dramatizes Abramoff s the movie
future tax hikes. Stop them. And bring down business tax rates for large on IMDb.
and small companies, from 40 percent (federal, state, and local) to
something around 25 percent. And take a cue from FedEx CEO Fred
Smith, who wants to revive the manufacturing and transportation
industries with immediate cash-expensing tax write-offs for investment FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
in new equipment.
Weekend Links [Cato at
President Obama has talked about a zero cap-gains tax for small
investors. But why not provide more capital access for everybody, small- Liberty]
and large-business investors? JAN 08, 2010 01:31P.M.

In light of all the tax-and-regulatory threats, it’s too expensive to hire By Chris Moody
right now. So get rid of all the so-called stimulus plans and social policies
to transform the government’s relation to the private economy. Remove • Prepare for a national debate over devoting more federal aid to
these obstacles. Yemen.

Now, even with an 85,000 drop in corporate payrolls in December, • Reason Magazine: Why is Washington spending so much on the
labor-market conditions are gradually improving, however slowly. military?
Leading indicators like temporary-help workers, manufacturing
overtime hours, and jobless claims are pointing to better job creation in • An update on the ongoing tension between mainland China and
2010. But it’s painfully slow. And that’s why the tax-and-regulatory Taiwan.
obstacles from Washington must be removed to speed up the
employment-recovery process. • Top experts will meet at Cato next week to discuss the Obama
administration’s counterrorism record after one year in office.
The economy has more than enough monetary stimulus, and
corporations are profitable. The stock market rose nearly 3 percent in the • Podcast: “Indefinitely Confining the ‘Sexually Dangerous‘”
first week of the new year, and is up 70 percent from the March 2009 featuring Ilya Shapiro.
low. The recession is over. But America must go back to work to truly get
the country moving again. Unfortunately, Washington is standing in the
way.

There’s a populist wave coming, but it’s from the right, not the left. Free-
market populism emanating from the tea-party movement wants
government out of our businesses and out of our pockets. These folks are
right.

Right now, Washington is completely wrong.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
On C-SPAN: What’s a Little
Promise Among Friends? [Cato
at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 01:19P.M.
By Jim Harper
My, oh my. Transparency is getting defined down to excuse a breaking
campaign promise.
At the Center for American Progress’ “Think Progress Wonk Room” blog
(or whatever it’s called), Igor Volsky makes the case against allowing C-
SPAN cameras into negotiations about the health care bill. Recall that
President Obama promised on the campaign trail to have health care
negotiations broadcast on C-SPAN.
“But if one actually considers the tone and tenor of the televised health
care debate of 2009,” says Volsky, “filming the conference negotiations
seems counterproductive.”
He does have a point. Television causes politicians to grandstand and
doesn’t necessarily improve the legislative process.
But President Obama knew that when he made the promise, and he
made the promise all the same. The credibility of the legislative process
suffers from its overall opacity, and Candidate Obama promised
different, starting with health care legislation — to progressives’ cheers
as much as any other group.
Yet he appears to be walking away from that promise. And Volsky wants
to abet him with a transparency caveat — only if it “improve[s] the
underlying bill.”
Improvement is in the eye of the beholder, of course. This is not a
welcome gloss. It’s bait and switch. “[T]he reality of politics doesn’t
square with the promises of the campaign trail,” says Volsky.
Matt Yglesias’ short post backing his co-blogger is — appropriately,
perhaps — opaque: “This is also an example of the concrete harm done to
the country by politicians overestimating the impact of campaign tactics
on election outcomes.” I don’t understand what that means.
Ezra Klein has the decency to say he’s conflicted. He admits that a
transparent health care conference might be “better than nothing,” but
he makes the same argument as Volsky: the process will change, but not
necessarily for the better. No mention that this was a promise, or that the
credibility of the president to marginal voters matters.
The argument that transparency is only useful if it leads to a better bill is
reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig’s widely panned essay “Against
Transparency.” I wrote of it:
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9 January 2010
Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls
the “naked transparency movement” — unvarnished access to
government data — “is not going to inspire change. It will
simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”
Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political
system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that
qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political
system? This pegged my bs detector.
These commentators have sounder premises, of course. They want
transparency to improve legislation.
But transparency is not simply a means to better bills. It’s a means to
better politicians — when people see one leader being smart and fair,
while others are not. It’s a means to a better organized society — if
people decide that politicians aren’t as qualified to apportion
society’s resources as they thought. It’s a means to better-run programs
— when people compare the dollars going in with the results coming out.
Heck, transparency is a civics lesson for high school students! There is a
transparency vision that these commentators eschew in favor of the
status quo.
Even good John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundation, an organization
dedicated to transparency, kicks the ground and mumbles about
televising conference committees not being a panacea. The promise was
to broadcast “negotiations,” of course, not just the formal meeting of any
conference committee. And one of the commenters on his post has the
better of it. “Open [conference committees] are not a panacea, but they
are one tent-pole,” says Sarah Welsh of the New Mexico Foundation for
Open Government. Her state mandated open conference committess last
year, for the good.
And it was a campaign promise.
“The public should have ample opportunity to review the final product
before the vote,” Igor Volsky says. Which brings us to another promise:
On the campaign trail, Candidate Obama said, “[W]hen there is a bill
that ends up on my desk as a president, you the public will have five days
to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know
what your government’s doing.”
The president is currently six for 124 on that promise, having shown
recent improvement. But one has to wonder how Volsky would caveat
away that promise and further define down government transparency.
One to watch: President Obama’s promise to “go line by line” over
earmarks, which OMB has said it will implement by collecting and
databasing Congressmembers’ earmark requests in the FY 2011 budget
cycle.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Want Happiness? Cut Taxes!
[Americans for Tax Reform]
JAN 08, 2010 01:06P.M.
Since the rising prosperity brought about by economic freedom, with
increased growth, increased living standards, and more jobs around the
world, didn’t exactly fit the left-wing narrative, some lefti...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Libertarian Surge [Cato at
Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 12:29P.M.
By David Boaz
David Paul Kuhn at RealClearPolitics sees a surge of libertarianism in
the current political scene:
The philosophical casualty of the Great Recession was
supposed to be libertarianism. But signs to the contrary are
thriving.
Americans are increasingly opposed to activist government
programs. The most significant social movement of 2009, the
Tea Party protests, grew out of that opposition. Libertarian
heroine Ayn Rand is as popular today as ever. Rand’s brilliant
and radical laissez faire novel “Atlas Shrugged,” sold roughly
300,000 copies last year, according to BookScan, twice its
sales in 2008 and roughly triple annual sales in recent
decades.
We are witnessing a conservative libertarian comeback. It’s
an oppositional advance, a response to all manners of active-
state liberalism since the financial crisis. It’s a pervasive
feeling of invasiveness. The factional bastions of traditional
libertarianism, like Washington think tank Cato, now have an
intangible and awkward alliance with a broad swath of the
American electorate….
This limited libertarian resurgence has haunted Obama’s
domestic agenda. The fundamental mistake of the Obama
administration in 2009 was underestimating the American
public’s ongoing tension with active-state liberalism, a fact
visible from the outset and one only belatedly confronted by
Obama….
Today’s limited libertarian revival is a response to a sense of
overreaching elite technocrats as well as fear of an intrusive
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9 January 2010
bureaucracy. Responsiveness is the core impulse. Rand’s
radical libertarianism, where man is an ends in himself and
the welfare state is fundamentally immoral, was a response to
the radically invasive Soviet state that weaned her as a girl.
On a drastically less extreme scale, one side of this American
debate could not exist without the other. The Obama
administration brought with it ambitions of a resurgence of
FDR and LBJ’s active-state liberalism. And with it, Obama
has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.
I’ve been struck by the fact that two recent profiles in the New York
Times magazine — one on Dick Armey and one on the rise of Marco
Rubio in Florida — have identified Tea Party protesters as libertarians,
which I think is largely right but not generally noticed by pundits who
can only hold two concepts (red and blue, conservative and liberal) in
their minds at once. It’s not that the Tea Partiers are carrying pro-choice
or anti–drug war signs, it’s just that their focus and their energy are, as
the Armey profile put it, “libertarian, anti-Washington, old-fashioned
get-out-of-my-way-and-I’ll-make-it-on-my-own American self-
sufficiency.” They’re up in arms about spending, deficits, bailouts,
government handouts, and a government takeover of health care. That’s
a populist libertarian spirit.
Kuhn describes the current mood as “conservative libertarianism,” which
he contrasts to “traditional libertarianism” that embraces a laissez-faire
approach to both economics and personal freedom. He may be right that
a lot of the Tea Partiers are not as comprehensively pro-freedom or
“anti-government” (really, pro-limited government) as I’d like. But I see
some evidence of a social libertarian surge as well, as I wrote back in
May. Polls are finding growing support for marijuana legalization and
for marriage equality, especially among young people. As young people
and independents also become increasingly disillusioned with President
Obama’s big-government agenda, this may be a real shift in a libertarian
direction. And don’t forget, at 90 days into the Obama administration,
Americans preferred smaller government to “more active government”
by 66 to 25 percent.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com 9 January 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

with CNBC’s Steve Liesman
Club for Growth PAC to Oppose
How to Get America back to Work
Sen. Robert Bennett [The Club *Peter Navarro, Univ. of California/Irvine business professor
*Robert Reich, Former Labor Secretary
for Growth] *Victor Davis Hanson, Sr. Fellow Hoover Institution
JAN 08, 2010 12:01P.M. *Steve Moore, WSJ Sr. Economics Writer

WASHINGTON S COMMITTEE. 202-955-5500. Weather Report — Florida in Deep Freeze

Why the Jobs Report is Bad for Dems, but Good for the
Country in the Long Run
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS *Mark Walsh, Founding CEO at Air America
*James Pethokoukis, Reuters Money & Politics Columnist
We’re #1 ! [Cato at Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 11:53A.M. KUDLOW’S HOTLINE

By David Boaz Give us a call! 800-800-CNBC. Phone lines open up at 7pm ET.

Cato@Liberty is the #1 U.S. political blog available on Kindle. Or at least Please join us. The Kudlow Report. 7pm ET. CNBC.
it’s the #1 U.S. blog in the “News, Politics, and Opinion” category, and
the #3 Politics blog in the same category. What’s the difference? Beats
me. So as far as I’m concerned, we’re #1.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Note that you can also get Cato Unbound on Kindle. And both the blog
and Cato Unbound are available for the low low price of just 99 cents a The Buck Stops with Obama
month!
[Cato at Liberty]
Of course, they’re free 24 hours a day right here at the Cato websites. JAN 08, 2010 11:28A.M.

And don’t forget that all recent Cato books are available in Kindle and By Roger Pilon
also as e-books from the Cato store.
Today Politico Arena asks:

Do you feel safer from terrorism today than you did the day
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS before? Assess Obama’s response.

[] My response:
JAN 08, 2010 11:43A.M.
So Obama tells us that the buck stops with him. Aides signaled that
in saying that, Politico reports, the president “was consciously seeking to
be the anti-Bush, airing his administration’s dirty laundry and stepping
up to take his share of the responsibility.” Yet as Arena contributor Dana
Perino notes in response, with evidence in hand, they don’t even have
their facts right. Bush repeatedly took responsibility, and for good
reason: There was much to be responsible for, not least the creation of
the intelligence bureaucracy that failed so clearly to connect the
Christmas Day dots, as discussed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

This evening at 7pm ET:

Obama’s Clean Tech Jobs

But before we heap too much blame on the bureaucracy and those who
with CNBC’s John Harward
created it, let’s recognize that this administration’s obsession with
appearing “anti-Bush,” which has been its leitmotif from the start, could

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+fisccon@gmail.com
hardly have inspired even the most conscientious bureaucrat. This is not
the place to recount the countless ways Obama and his people have
sought to downplay the terrorist threat — or “man-caused disasters” —
even as no fewer than 12 terrorist incidents, including thwarted plots,
were unfolding on American soil during its tenure, culminating
with November’s Fort Hood murders. Arena contributor Walter Russell
Mead put it well last evening: “The narrative that a lawyer-run, PC-
happy, Miranda crazed administration is coddling criminals rather than
protecting the people has been gaining a kind of subterranean credibility
out there past the Beltway.” And not without reason.
We can hope that the administration is at last taking terrorism seriously,
but there are still too many signs that it is learning on the fly, so we
will have to keep reminding Obama and his people that the buck does
indeed stop with them.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Medicaid’s Cash Cab [Cato at
Liberty]
JAN 08, 2010 10:23A.M.
By Tad DeHaven
As Congress hashes out an agreement behind closed doors to expand the
government’s role in health care, a Medicaid story out of New York
serves as another reminder that government is part of the health care
problem, not the solution. Audits released by the state’s comptroller
found $169 million in misspent funds, including a $196,000 cab bill for a
woman who took a daily $300 taxi ride to visit her son in Albany for
three years.
The following are some of the findings:
• $53 million in overpayments for Medicaid recipients who had
multiple identification numbers.
• $20 million that was nearly spent because the state’s computer
system failed to catch a clerical error. Auditors caught it before it
was paid out.
• $5.4 million in overpayments to 10 hospitals that billed for
discharging a patient when, in fact, the patient had been
transferred to another facility. Hospitals receive higher payments
for discharges rather than transfers.
• $1.2 million paid for services that were not medically necessary or
not provided.
According to the state’s comptroller, “[T]he state Medicaid system is
9 January 2010
leaking millions of dollars… Safeguards designed to protect the taxpayers
by detecting waste, fraud and abuse keep failing.” However, this is
business as usual when it comes to New York’s notoriously fraud-ridden
Medicaid program, as a Cato essay on fraud and abuse in federal
programs notes:
The former chief investigator of the state’s Medicaid fraud
office believes that about 10 percent of the state’s Medicaid
budget is consumed by pure fraud, while another 20 to 30
percent is consumed by dubious spending that might not
cross the line of being outright criminal.
A 2005 investigation by the New York Times found
remarkably brazen examples of fraud and abuse in New
York’s Medicaid. The article noted that the program has
“become so huge, so complex, and so lightly policed that it is
easily exploited… [T]he program has been misspending
billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste, and
profiteering.”
With the massive and complex expansion of Medicaid and other health
programs in the pending legislation, we can expect a gargantuan
expansion in fraud and abuse. The good news, I suppose, is that the
government will need a massive hiring of new health care auditors,
which should reduce the nation’s unemployment rate.
For more on fraud and abuse in government healthcare, see here.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Gerlach to Run for Re-Election
[The Club for Growth]
JAN 08, 2010 10:21A.M.
From Roll Call ($): Less than 24 hours after Rep. Jim Gerlach (Pa.)
dropped his gubernatorial bid, the four-term Republican will announce
Friday that he will run for re-election to the House instead. According to
a source familiar with Gerlach s decision, the Congressman is expected to
announce he will run for re-election at noon Friday. The same source
also confirmed that Gerlach will almost immediately receive the backing
of the National Republican Congressional Committee.