Spoiled Brat Corporations Whine Again

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Immediately after the health care bill passed, some major corporations complained that the bill would cost them millions of dollars. AT&T claimed it would suffer a $1 billion loss. A new article in Fortune says these companies are considering dropping their employee benefit health insurance and paying the fine instead. They think it might be cheaper to “pay” than to “play.”

The Fortune writer, Shawn Tully, wrote “The legislation eliminated a company’s right to deduct the federal retiree drug-benefit subsidy from their corporate taxes.” Read that carefully. The corporations were deducting a government subsidy from their corporate taxes as if it were a cost. They’ve lost that “deduction,” which was actually bare-assed corporate welfare.

They’ve been doing this since January 2006, when the Medicare Part D act went into effect. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) had the government reimbursing employers 28 percent of the cost of retiree drug benefits that met certain requirements. But the same act also allowed employers to deduct 100 percent of the cost of prescription drug benefits, including the 28 percent that was subsidized by taxpayers already.

As Brad DeLong pointed out, this meant that for companies in the 35 percent tax bracket, $63 of every $100 spent on prescription drug benefits was being paid by taxpayers.

The just-passed health care reform bill closed the “double dip” and allows companies to deduct only that part of their prescription drug benefit costs they paid themselves. And now some of these companies are complaining that their business models will just about collapse if they can’t continue to deduct the subsidy, because just deducting the amount they actually spend on drug benefits will break them.

Of course, a gaggle of rightie bloggers jumped on this article as proof that Obamacare will destroy America, screaming about taxes and penalties, when what really happened is a cut in corporate welfare.

Now, it may very well be true that dropping employee health benefits and paying the penalties would be more cost effective for these companies, but it would have been even more cost effective for them to drop employee health benefits before there were any penalties. And they didn’t. And they didn’t because it would be harder for them to hire quality people if they don’t offer benefits. As long as that’s true, they’re going to offer benefits.

The other Big Lie implied in the righties’ screeds is that the health reform law will drive up health care costs more than they would have gone up otherwise. Ain’t so. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that without reform the average cost of an employee benefit family policy could go from $13,375 (the average in 2009) to $30,803 by 2019.

The Evils of Mirandizing

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Apparently, mirandizing doesn’t stop people from talking:

According to all reports, Mr. Shahzad started talking even before he was read his rights (“the law enforcement approach” allows investigators to question suspects immediately if there is an imminent threat to the public). When he was read his rights, Mr. Shahzad seems to have kept talking. The Times reported on Wednesday that he waived his right to a speedy arraignment — to go on talking.

And, you know, we can’t have people talking. We’re supposed to give Congress new constitutional authority to strip Mr. Shahzad of his citizenship and send him to Gitmo without due process of law, where he can be tortured into an incoherent pulp from which no accurate information can be extracted. And we’re supposed to do this in the name of protecting our freedoms.

Naturally, America’s Most Annoying Senator® wants the federal government to have the power to strip an American accused of a crime of his citizenship so that he can be deprived of due process of law. Even more naturally, the same crew forever yammering about the evils of big government and fascism approve of this.

The proposed law would make it illegal for an American citizen to join a foreign army except Israel’s. Violators will lose their citizenship. So, boys, no more running off to join the French Foreign Legion, the Royal Highland Fusiliers, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police no matter how romantic it sounds.

From the other side of the aisles, someone suggested stopping people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns. As attractive an idea as that might be, it’s still constitutionally iffy. Further, the fact is that firearms are so easy to obtain in this country that making it harder for potential terrorists to purchase guns legally will just send them underground to purchase them illegally. However, I wish that whenever someone on a watch list makes a firearm purchase, all kinds of alarms would go off in national security agencies. Apparently that didn’t happen with Shahzad.

Righties believe that if someone can be denied the right to purchase a firearm by being on a watch list, the Obamaführer will declare all conservatives to be potential terrorists so they can’t purchase arms. I’m serious. However, depriving a citizen of his citizenship on suspicion of a crime is OK.

Anyway, apparently the talkative Mr. Shahzad is telling people he was trained to make bombs by the Pakistan Taliban. If so, either Shahzad is not much of a student, or the Taliban doesn’t know how to make bombs. The Pakistan Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the not-bombing last week, is denying any connection to the incident this week.

When Reality and Expectation Don’t Meet

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This is actually funny. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute for years has been a big promoter of “school choice,” meaning he thinks parents should get vouchers so that taxpayers can pay for their private school education. He has an op ed in today’s New York Times called “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test” about the effectiveness of the Milwaukee voucher program, which has been in effect since 1990.

A recent comprehensive study found Milwaukee “voucher” kids, many of whom attend charter schools, do no better on standarized tests than kids who stay in the public schools. Reports like this come out from time to time, and righties always explain them away. But for once Murray seems willing to accept defeat —

This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.

Then comes the next paragraph —

So let’s not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another?

And from there, Murray goes on to extol the glories of “school choice,” free of the need to weigh down the sales pitch with tiresome stuff about “facts” and “proof.” Charter schools are better just because they must be better.

If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea.

The real reason seems to be that charter schools teach what parents want their kids taught. The “greater good” of tax money supporting an educated public doesn’t enter into it, he admits. “The supporters of school choice need to make their case on the basis of that shared parental calculation, not on the red herring of test scores.”

Test scores don’t mean anything, anyway, he says —

This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.

From here he goes to a study done in 1966 that shows all of these factors don’t change test scores. Of course, when someone has to go back more than 40 years to find a study that matches his conclusions, there’s probably a rat around to be smelled. Sure enough, a few seconds of googling turned up a whole bunch of studies done since 1966 that showed a strong correlation between smaller class sizes and higher test scores.

He also argues that the biggest determinant of how well a kid does in school is his home environment, anyway.

What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

But if a “good” school cannot prove by any objective measure that it is better than a “lesser” school, what then is the real difference between “good” and “lesser”? Other than the subjective views of the observer, of course?

Murray’s final pitch is that it doesn’t matter whether vouchers increase the quality of education. What matters is that the purpose of tax money for schools is to fulfill the desires of parents, not to benefit society by providing an educated population.

Charles, fail is fail. Deal with it.

Righties on the Side of Terrorism

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Regarding the arrest of a suspect in the Times Square not-bombing, I’m of the same opinion as Steve M — if that’s the best the Jihadi Islamic Menace (JIM) can do, they aren’t that much of a menace. High five, everybody.

Naturally, the fact that JIM in America is too incompetent to build even a simple fertilizer bomb has not stopped the rightie blogosphere from going into mighty orgasms of JIM hysteria. If you aren’t whipped into a state of high terror, buckaroos, you must not love America. Or something.

Further, righties want to honor the alleged perpetrator by sending him to Gitmo to face a secret military-tribunal type trial, instead of a mundane, pedestrian, inglorious civilian criminal trial. I’m with c u n d gulag — “Now, we try him in a court of law. And, if guilty, sentence him to the appropriate prison. Not Gitmo. No martyr. No hero. Just a criminal.”

They’re also screaming that this arrest somehow signals some kind of incompetence on the part of the Obama Administration. Actually, seems to me things have gone pretty smoothly. Bombing attempt on Saturday, no one hurt, New York shrugs it off, arrest made Monday. System functioning.

For lo these many years, when any of us on the Left pointed out that the Bush Administration had all kinds of screaming neon warnings about an imminent terrorist attack in 2001 and took no steps whatsoever to prevent it, we were told we were crazy. But because the FBI didn’t bother to personally keep surveillance on one of millions of Middle Easterners in the U.S., somehow this is incompetence. Right.

(Somebody should ask these geniuses how high they want their taxes cranked up to pay for all this individual surveillance.)

I also appreciated what Roy Edroso wrote at Village Voice (and not just because he linked to me):

You may remember that right after 9/11 it became trendy for conservatives to gush over New York and Rudy “America’s Mayor” Giuliani. Then, when it became apparent that New Yorkers still weren’t going to vote Republican, they went back to their usual uncomprehending contempt toward the big, bad City (“I get the feeling these New Yorker liberals just don’t understand how 9-11 changed things. It’s like they don’t even remember it”).

But this weekend a car bomb was found, undetonated, in Times Square, and rightbloggers rushed to explain that the non-explosion was, like the crotch-bomber’s non-explosion, all Obama’s fault, and to generally try to make terror work for them, as it did back in those marvelous days of September 2001, by wrapping the city they despise in their oily, insincere hugs.

What really infuriates them about New York is that New Yorkers don’t stay terrorized. It’s a patriot’s duty to be terrorized, you know.

See also James Fallows, “If the TSA Were Running New York.”

Why I Don’t Like to Speculate

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The New York Post published a video that allegedly shows a suspect in the Times Square bomb attempt —

In a chilling surveillance video, the man is seen at the end of Shubert Alley peeling off a sweatshirt he’d been wearing over a short-sleeved red shirt, furtively glancing over his shoulder, then stuffing the sweatshirt into a bag.

Yes, some guy removing a sweatshirt on a warm spring day is certainly suspicious. So I looked at the NY Post video, which was made with a phone camera, and I have no idea why this particular guy was more of a “suspect” than anyone else seen in the video.

At times like this I think of Jean Charles de Menezes. If the name doesn’t ring a bell —

Think back to the 2005 London subway bombing. In the aftermath of the bombing, London police spotted a Middle Eastern-looking man acting very suspiciously —

[The man] was wearing a thick coat when he ran into the Stockwell subway station in south London Friday. Temperatures in London on Friday were in the 70s. Police began following the man when he left his home in an effort to arrest him as part of their investigation.

The man “was challenged and refused to obey police instructions,” Blair said. Witnesses said about 10 armed police in street clothes chased the suspect, he tripped, and, after telling bystanders to get down, police then shot him; the man died.

“They pushed him onto the floor and unloaded five shots into him. He’s dead,” witness Mark Whitby told the British Broadcasting Corp. “He looked like a cornered fox. He looked petrified.”

Whitby said the man didn’t appear to have been carrying anything but said he was wearing a thick coat that looked padded.

Another witnesses, Anthony Larkin, told the BBC that the man appeared to have “a bomb belt and wires coming out.” Sky News reported that there were no explosives found on the man after he was shot.

If you read the early news stories about the guy, he certainly sounded suspicious, if not downright guilty. However, after a few days it finally came out that the man who was killed was 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian national. Menezes had been working as an electrician in London since 2002.

His visa status was questionable; some news stories suggest his visa might have expired, but that was never completely clear. Other than the possible visa violation, however, the guy had no criminal record and no ties to any terrorist group that anyone ever turned up.

Basically, Menezes was killed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time while looking sort of Middle Eastern.

I appreciate the NYPD might have some reason to suspect the balding white guy in the video that they’re not telling us. But to call the bit of video at the NY Post “chilling” is just silly. It’s a video of an average guy taking off his shirt. And I think whipping up hysteria over this guy (going on at some rightie sites; the usual ones) is irresponsible.

The “T” Word and Times Square

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[Couple of updates below.]

On a warm Saturday night, Times Square has got to be one of the most densely packed places on the planet. Sometimes the crowds are so thick that walking just one block is nearly impossible.

So, while last night’s car bomb didn’t hurt anyone, panicking people with the “t” word — terrorism — might have been very dangerous.

New Yorkers don’t panic easily, but the Times Square crowd last night no doubt contained a high percentage of tourists. This is partly because the natives have enough sense to not go near Times Square on a Saturday night unless they have a very specific reason to be there. If you’re just out for dinner and a stroll, several other parts of the city are less crowded and have a better choice of restaurants.

The other kind of panic the city doesn’t want is the kind of panic that causes people to vacation somewhere else. NYC needs those tourism dollars. Who else is going to see all those Walt Disney musicals that have been on Broadway forever and pay $25 for a pastrami and corned beef sandwich at Lindy’s?

So, there are all kinds of practical reasons why the city of New York is reluctant to attach the word “terrorism” to the car bomb, even though by most definitions of the “t” word a car bomb automatically qualifies. There’s always a chance the perpetrator did not actually intend to terrorize anyone but was just following the orders of the voices in his head. Clearly, the perp was not part of al Qaeda’s “A” team.

Of course, these obvious and practical reasons for keeping the rhetoric toned down do not occur to rightie bloggers, who are quivering with outrage that the “t” word isn’t being plastered all over today’s headlines. They suspect some kind of cover-up. For example, the predictably thick Darleen of Protein Wisdom wrote, “With NYPD already attempting to squash any terrorism link, how much can we trust them to be honest with the findings of their investigation?”

In other words, in Darleen’s world an honest and forthright NYPD would immediately have declared the bomb a possible act of Muslim jihadists, thereby pretty much destroying the city’s summer tourism season, before they’d had time to investigate anything.

Pam Geller (do you really want me to link to her?) wrote, “Finally get out and about — Saturday night in NY — and I have to bolt home to report this story. Can we count on Muslim bombs failing? And catching every jihadi before he gets one of his balls bombs off? Is that our strategy now?” Let’s not jump to any premature conclusions or anything.

Several accounts have said the SUV that contained the incendiary device (which, experts said, would never have exploded [update: click on link in second paragraph, above, for corroboration]) was parked near the theater running the “Lion King.” Maybe the perp was a disgruntled former Disney employee.

Seriously, other than picking a very crowded area for maximum injury, I don’t see an obvious connection between Times Square and anybody’s righteous cause. The perp might be Muslim, but not necessarily. (And if he is, all the Muslim cab drivers who make a living picking up fares in the theater district might be less than approving.) But if it turns out the perp is a right-wing loon trying to purify Manhattan for Jesus, can we all count on Geller to never admit she was wrong? Of course!

I have no doubt that Mayor Bloomberg is busting chops (that’s a New York expression) right now, pushing the investigation as hard and as fast as possible, because no one wants to prevent another such incident more than he does. One car bomb is a fluke; two is a rash of canceled hotel reservations.

Update: The SUV was indeed parked right next to the Viacom building, which means one possible reason someone might have for attempting to set off a bomb in Times Square is in retaliation for South Park’s portrayal of Mohammad. However, if that’s the case someone should explain it to the Pakistani Taliban, which is claiming credit for the attempt without linking it to South Park. I suspect the Pakistani Taliban is just grandstanding, though.

Update: Newshoggers notes that there also is a Bank of America next to where the SUV was parked. This is true, but the main Bank of America building is on 42nd Street near Bryant Park; the one on 45th and Broadway is a branch. So I doubt there’s a Bank of America connection.

Doug Hughes points out (and I should have thought of this) that it’s terribly difficult to park exactly where you want to in Manhattan. If someone were determined to park a car right next to the Viacom building he might have had to drive in circles for hours until a spot opened up. It’s more likely the perpetrator just parked as close to Times Square as he could get.

Update: The average ten-year-old boy could have made a better bomb.

Insanity Nation

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By now you’ve probably heard Rush and his wingnut hoards are claiming the recent gulf oil spill was an inside job, perpetrated by the Obama White House. Further, he said, “I have been informed that President Obama is sending SWAT teams to the Gulf oil rigs.” He didn’t say who informed him of this.

And just because I’m thorough, I did a news google to find if anyone but Rush has been informed of the SWAT teams. And the answer appears to be no; everyone who is repeating this news got it from Rush. Remarkable that he would be the only one to be informed of this. (/sarcasm)

If you actually read the transcript of Rush’s radio show linked above — and I’m not necessarily saying you should — you see it’s like a rolling hallucination. The story gets better even as he tells it. He begins by saying the incident might have been either an accident or an act of terrorism, but he complains the Obama Administration would use it to its political advantage. But then a few paragraphs into it he is suddenly “informed” of the SWAT teams. Exactly why one would need SWAT teams to control an oil spill is not clear, but let’s go with that. And a few sentences later he’s saying the oil spill may have been “intentional.”

And then we get to:

RUSH: Wow. All right, so SWAT teams, we’re sending big sis down there, Janet Napolitano, to look at all the valves and stuff, make sure they’re properly greased. He-he-he-he. Ahem. And Lisa Jackson is doing the same thing. So obviously the regime is open to the idea that this is not an accident. The regime is open to the possibility that this could well have been on purpose. Don’t forget, the original Earth Day, 40 years ago, was inspired by the river in Cleveland catching fire. Forty years later, the day before Earth Day this year, the Gulf is on fire. Coincidence? Jury’s still out. The regime is on the case, soon to tell us what happened.

He ends by arguing that oil spills are not a big deal, because they cleaned up the Exxon Valdez spill with dishwashing liquid and paper towels, and anyway some owl once flew into the window of a fire truck in Wentzville, Missouri, and all it needed was a little rehab.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up. And I can’t make it up. But Rush can. I guess that’s why he earns the big bucks. And the fun part is that Paul Krugman predicted someone on the Right would blame the oil spill on Obama before Rush actually did it.

Meanwhile, Newsbusters is in a snit because Bill Maher called Rush “the Louis Farrakhan of White People.” Which is a funny line, even though I doubt Farrakhan is half as crazy as Rush. I take it that in Wingnut Liberty and Freedom Utopia comedians will be censored, because allowing comedians to spout ridicule of Rush Limbaugh is an affront to freedom and liberty and stuff.

Two other rightie-driven stories — you can read about the Obama sex scandal at Gawker (best comment — maybe the other woman was helping him forge his birth certificate). And the Right also is trying to pump the meme that the oil spill is “Obama’s Katrina.” But I thought the Haiti earthquake was Obama’s Katrina? I guess that one didn’t stick.

Who Gets What

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The Dems have put forth an immigration proposal that is heavy on border enforcement, as expected. But according to Greg Sargent, it “also provides a process to legalize over 10 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.,” which is sensible, but the Right doesn’t want to listen to any solution that doesn’t involve “fences” and “deportation.”

There’s a chance Goldman Sachs will get hit with criminal charges after all.

Which brings us to how these things relate. As Steve M says, some people have been waving away what Goldman Sachs did by saying it wasn’t illegal. So a few greedy people can destroy 8 million jobs and otherwise wreak havoc on the economy and the lives of countless people, but it’s no big deal because it wasn’t illegal.

But somebody’s grandma who has been living in the U.S. for 40 20 years, raised kids, held jobs, goes to church, etc., has to be deported right now because she doesn’t have a green card?

True Colors

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In a sane world, immigration reform wouldn’t be a controversial issue. There is widespread agreement across most of the U.S. political spectrum that border security is important and people shouldn’t be allowed to enter the country illegally unless they have a durn good reason, such as fleeing oppression from a totalitarian regime.

There appears to be a small “open borders” movement, but I don’t think any elected official of any party is seriously talking about open borders, and I don’t know personally of any progressive activists pushing the idea. But I’ll come back to this in a minute.

I think anyone with a lick of sense and even half a clue about the drug wars in Mexico would agree that keeping the perpetrators south of the Rio Grande should be a priority.

Further, there is supposed to be widespread agreement that illegal workers reduce the value of labor, and employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants should get smacked. This may be the real sticking point, although those doing the sticking are pretending they aren’t. I’ll come back to this.

There is disagreement over what to do with illegal immigrants who already are here. At one extreme there are those who call for immediate deportation of all illegal immigrants, and sometimes even the children of illegal immigrants who were born here and are U.S. citizens. In the real world, this would suck up an unimaginable amount of funds and other resources and is not going to happen. But the next time you see someone calling for this approach, ask him if he minds getting his taxes jacked up to pay for it.

At the other extreme there is no extreme that I can see, but merely a desire to find a way to allow people who are already here and who are working and tax paying and law abiding and connected to families and communities to at least achieve legitimate documented status if not citizenship. This is not just being nice; it is a far more practical approach than rounding up and deporting people. Within those parameters there is some disagreement, but nothing that couldn’t be worked out through rational dialogue were such a thing possible in the U.S.

But the Right will never stand for this, because the Right can never get past the notion that “guilty” people must be punished, no exceptions, no matter the nature of the thing they are guilty of and whether the greater good might be served through leniency. (Think Les Misérables.) So the mass deportation idea is a gold mine for wingnut demagogues who want to fire up Teh Stupid and get them to the polls in November.

However, I suspect a large number of Republicans, never mind Democrats, in Congress don’t want to take on the issue of what to do about illegal immigrants already here in a mid-term year, because in truth they don’t want mass deportation even though they might pretend they do. And they don’t want a mass deportation bill to ever come up for a vote, because then they would be forced to take a firm public stand on the issue. They like to be able to bleat vague bromides at their wingnut constituents about deporting illegal immigrants, but they prefer to do so secure in the knowledge that it won’t ever happen.

It won’t ever happen because the dirty little secret is that a portion of the American economy depends on illegal labor. I wish that were otherwise, and I’d like to make it otherwise. But, for example, fruit and vegetable growers (who, note, tend to be in the South and West) say they can’t survive economically without illegal (e.g., just this side of “slave”) labor. There are other industries in a similar fix.

You know plenty of business owners are telling their Congress critters that immigration reform had better not take away their illegals. And you know plenty of Congress critters and their more well-heeled supporters hire illegal housekeepers and pool cleaners and nannies and really don’t want to change the status quo. They just don’t want to have to admit publicly that they don’t want to change it.

For the reasons given above, I suspect the “border security first” approach will prevail this year. I predict serious work on comprehensive reform will be pushed off to next year.

Even so, the Republican echo chamber (which is run by a goodly number of people who hire illegal immigrants, notice) is keeping Teh Stupid stirred up by framing the issue within a false dichotomy — that the issue is a choice between “secure borders” and “open borders.” It isn’t at all; there is no serious support in Washington for open borders that I can see. But by keeping Teh Stupid in the dark about the real issues, it’s easier to push off discussing the illegal-immigrants-already-here issue that Republicans really don’t want to discuss.

Oklahoma: Statism on Steroids

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There are some things you can depend on. One of things is what I call the Mississippi Correlation — states with the strictest abortion laws also have the highest infant mortality rates. The same legislators who stay up all night worrying about the fates of frozen blastocysts can tolerate the unnecessary deaths of infants. (See also “Haley Barbour, Baby Killer.”)

So now we have Oklahoma with a new abortion law that mistakes women for Holsteins.

Though other states have passed similar measures requiring women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, mandating that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.

A second measure passed into law on Tuesday prevents women who have had a disabled baby from suing a doctor for withholding information about birth defects while the child was in the womb.

Oklahoma fulfill’s the Mississippi Correlation nicely. Oklahoma’s infant mortality rate has been stuck at 8.0 for the past few years. The infant mortality rate for the U.S. overall in 2009 was 6.22 (CIA World Factbook).

According to the Commonweal Fund, Oklahoma ranks 39th out of 51 (the 50 states plus the District of Columbia) in infant mortality. Oklahoma also has the honor of ranking #50 in quality of health care its citizens receive (#51 is — wait for it — Mississippi. Who else?).

But never fear; last year Oklahoma took direct action to improve its state’s shoddy health care record by passing — wait for it — tort reform. So now Oklahomans not only get substandard health care; it’s now more difficult for them to sue for malpractice. Way to go, Oklahoma! As the song says,

“We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!”

That makes you something like serfs, yes? See also John Cole.

Update: For some better news, see “‘Face’ Time: Men Convicted Of Blocking Abortion Clinic Access” at Jezebel, where I also found this video: