Archives: 09/2016

You Ought to Have a Look: All Eyes on Hermine

By Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger

You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.

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This week, all eyes have been on Hurricane, now-Tropical-Storm, Hermine.

Since the Hermine coverage has been non-stop and ubiquitous, instead of highlighting anything in particular on the intertubes, we thought we’d give you our specific take on the events of this (and next) week. Here goes.

We’re about to take the national Rorschach test that accompanies headline storms, as the leftovers from Hurricane Hermine are going to spin away for a week off the mid-Atlantic coast, generating humongous seas and climate change blathering.

Dealing with the former won’t be better informed by the latter—an uneccessary and largely unjustified interloper/distraction.

The storm will be the result of an unhappy marriage between a hurricane or tropical storm remnant and a garden variety upper-atmospheric low pressure system. For reasons having everything to do with bad luck, the jet stream is going to be “blocked” in place for nearly a week, so that anything that would normally be steered from west to east is just going to sit. And sit.

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It Couldn’t Happen Here?

By David Boaz

Dilma Rousseff was never as popular as the president who anointed her as his successor. Despite her intelligence and diligence in numerous official posts, she lacked his warm personality and flair for campaigning. But she ran a very professional presidential campaign, with lots of celebrity supporters, and the vigorous support of her predecessor, and she won the election and became Brazil’s first female president. In office she pursued policies of easy money, subsidized energy, and infrastructure construction, which initially boosted her popularity. As is so often the case, though, those populist programs eventually brought inflation and a slide into economic contraction. Simultaneously, allegations of corruption and cronyism hurt her reputation. Impeachment proceedings were brought against her, focused on her mismanagement of the federal budget, particularly employing budgetary tricks to conceal yawning deficits. “Experts say Ms. Rousseff’s administration effectively borrowed some $11 billion from state banks, an amount equal to almost 1 percent of the economy, to fund popular social programs that have been a hallmark of the Workers Party’s 13 years in power.” Some said that such fiscal mismanagement and dishonesty were common in presidential administrations and should not result in impeachment. But the Senate convicted her and removed her from office, making her bland vice president the new president.

Thank goodness nothing like that could happen in our own country.

Topics:
Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration

Forced Labor In Venezuela — and In Postwar Britain

By Walter Olson

As Venezuelan socialism descends into tyranny, hunger, and chaos, a milestone came in July when a government ministry announced Resolution No. 9855, under whose provisions, quoting CNBC, “workers can be forcefully moved from their jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days.” Amnesty International says the decree “effectively amounts to forced labor.” Strongman Nicolas Maduro has likewise imposed harsh legal penalties on businesses that close down their operations.

It all echoes the Directive 10-289 (all workers “shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment,” with businesses similarly bound) from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Readers may assume that Rand based her fictionalized directive on the track record of the sorts of dictatorships that outlaw political opposition. But in fact elements of forced labor have cropped up in socialist experiments even in nations with strong track records of constitutional government and civil liberties, such as postwar Britain.

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Topics:
Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration

When Exchanges Collapse, ObamaCare Penalizes You Even If Coverage Is Unaffordable

By Michael F. Cannon
MIAMI, FL - NOVEMBER 02: Martha Lucia (L) sits with Rudy Figueroa, an insurance agent from Sunshine Life and Health Advisors, as she picks an insurance plan available in the third year of the Affordable Care Act at a store setup in the Mall of the Americas on November 2, 2015 in Miami, Florida. Open Enrollment began yesterday for people to sign up for a 2016 insurance plan through the Affordable Care Act. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In opeds at Time and National Review Online, I discuss how ObamaCare’s health-insurance Exchange has collapsed in Pinal County, Arizona, throwing some 10,000 residents out of their ObamaCare plans. Charles Gaba of ACASignUps.net and Cynthia Cox of the Kaiser Family Foundation asked me to explain a claim I make in the NRO piece:

Obamacare will still penalize those residents if they don’t buy coverage — even if the amount they must pay increases tenfold or more.

Before I explain, let me first apologize on behalf of the Affordable Care Act’s authors for the complicated mess that follows.

ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalizes taxpayers who fail to purchase health insurance. But there are so many exemptions that of the 33 million or so people who lacked insurance in 2014, the IRS levied the penalty against only 6.6 million tax filers (which actually represents a larger number, maybe 17 million people).

For example, the Affordable Care Act exempts “individuals who cannot afford coverage” from the penalty. You qualify for this exemption if your “required contribution” exceeds roughly 8.13 percent of your household income. For individuals who don’t have access to a suitable employer plan, the “required contribution” is equal to “the annual premium for the lowest cost bronze plan available in the individual market through the Exchange in the State in the rating area in which the individual resides,” minus “the amount of the credit allowable under section 36B for the taxable year (determined as if the individual was covered by a qualified health plan offered through the Exchange for the entire taxable year).” In other words, if you would have to pay more than 8.13 percent of your income for an ObamaCare plan, even after accounting for premium subsidies, then coverage is unaffordable for you and ObamaCare doesn’t penalize you for not buying coverage.

You would think this exemption would somehow apply to the 10,000 residents of Pinal County, for whom coverage will become dramatically more expensive when the Exchange collapses. If those folks are like Exchange enrollees in the rest of the country, the vast majority of them (85 percent or so) receive premium subsidies. When their Exchange coverage disappears next year, so will those subsidies. If they wish to purchase coverage off the Exchange, they will face, for the first time, the actual cost of ObamaCare coverage. Given that the amount Pinal County residents will have to pay for ObamaCare coverage could rise by several multiples, from a fraction of the premium to the full premium, given that the lowest-income enrollees will see the largest increases, given that the large year-to-year rate increases occurring nationwide will only add to the suffering, you would think the ACA’s unaffordability exemption would somehow cover those 10,000 Pinal County residents. But you would be wrong.

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Topics:
General, Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare

“We Take Anybody” – Trump’s Central Premise Is False

By David Bier

In his speech last night, Donald Trump stated that “immigration as a share of national population is set to break all historical records” and promised to restore a “historical norm.” It is the underlying premise behind his entire speech. His “deportation task force,” E-Verify, and all the rest is all about enforcing a lower rate of immigration and ending “an open border to the world.”  “We take anybody,” he said later. “Come on in, anybody.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

The United States has accepted roughly one million immigrants per year as permanent residents. As a share of the population, this number contributes 0.32 percent of the population. The historical average is 0.45 percent—nowhere close to extreme. As you can see, the immigration norm that we abandoned in the 1920s was much higher than the levels that we are seeing today. 

Figure 1: Historical Immigration Rate (Legal Permanent Residents as a Share of U.S. Population)

Source: Department of Homeland Security

Another way to view the rate of immigration is to look at the net increase in the total foreign-born population—which includes unauthorized immigrants—as a share of the overall population. The Census Bureau’s records on the foreign-born population only go back to 1850, but the annual rate of increase in recent years is also well within historical norms. The aberration was the 1930s to 1960s when the foreign-born population shrank in size. The United States is returning to its historical average of 0.21 percent. The rate in 2014 was 0.22 percent.

Figure 2: Annual Increase in the Total Foreign-Born Population as a Share of Total Population (Decadal Averages)

Source: Census Bureau

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

Trump Doubles Down on Anti-Immigration Position

By Alex Nowrasteh

Trump’s speech last night in Phoenix confirmed that his supposed softening on immigration turned out to be wishful thinking.  After last night, nobody can claim that Trump’s position on immigration is too soft.  Trump reiterated his position paper on immigration that called for a large-scale increase in immigration enforcement along the border and in the interior of the United States through the building of a Great Wall, a tripling of ICE agents, the creation of another deportation force, and mandating the unworkable E-Verify program.  He also reiterated his support for slashing illegal immigration.

His listed deportation priorities included visa overstays who account for about 42 percent of all illegal immigrants and an increasing proportion of the total.  When combined with his call to revoke DACA, remove all violent and property criminals (wise policy to address a small problem that is already law), and for full enforcement of all immigration laws that means virtually all illegal immigrants will be deported under his plan.  

To remove any doubt of this, he also said that “no one will be immune or exempt from enforcement.”  Trump interprets enforcement as meaning, “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.  That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise, we don’t have a country.” 

Trump’s proposed restrictions on LEGAL immigration could slash the number of green cards issued by up to 62.9 percent.  If you don’t believe me and Trump’s own position paper doesn’t convince you, just look at how happy Roy Beck of NumbersUSA is by Trump’s call for cutting legal immigration:

 

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

A New Era for Brazil

By Ian Vásquez

The Brazilian Senate impeached President Dilma Rousseff yesterday, bringing an end to the era of Worker Party rule, which began there in 2003.

Rousseff and her supporters have disingenuously denounced the impeachment, calling it a coup d’état. But it is likely that her removal from office will strengthen the country’s institutions and lead to an improvement in the policies that have led Brazil into its worst recession since the 1930s and that Latin Americans in recent years considered a model to emulate because it was seen to combine economic stability and enlightened social policies.

Let’s first of all dismiss the idea that Rousseff’s impeachment amounts to a coup. Whether we favored the political trial or not, it was conducted under the rule of law, and to assume otherwise weakens the legitimacy of the Congress and Brazilian democracy. As my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo has pointed out, the Constitution clearly delineates how and in which circumstances an impeachment should be carried out, and the Supreme Court has endorsed the legitimacy of this particular case. The fact that eight out of eleven members of the court were appointed by Rousseff and her Worker Party (PT) predecessor, Lula da Silva, undermines the credibility of coup claims.

The last time a Brazilian president was impeached was in 1992 and, as analysts Diogo Costa and Magno Karl observe, it was hailed as a “Victory of Democracy,” and ended up improving the country’s policies. (And it’s not that the PT does not believe in impeachments; the party attempted to impeach the three democratically elected presidents who preceded Lula.)

This trial may also have a positive impact. It will likely reduce to some degree the crony capitalism that was the essence of the Lula and Rousseff administrations. Alex Cuadros, who will speak at a Cato book forum on September 13, describes these policies well in his new book Brazillionaires. The PT’s policies have consisted of strengthening ties between the political and economic elite and were inspired by the idea of investing in strategic industries, generating high economic growth, and funding social welfare programs such as “Bolsa Familia.” Thus, the state granted easy credit to large companies and prominent businessmen. Subsidies from public banks increased from 0.4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 9.7 percent in 2013.

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

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