The Associated Press has a harsh fact-check of President Obama's remarks yesterday before an appreciative group of news executives at the annual meeting of the Associated Press. One of the better aspects of the AP article is a passage on the individual mandate that is part of the ObamaCare health-care overhaul:
until he became president, Obama, too, thought a mandate was a bad idea. In the 2008 campaign, it was his "core belief" that everyone would get health insurance, without the coercion of a mandate, if only high-quality coverage were affordable.
He relentlessly criticized his primary opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton in debates, speeches, ads and mailers for proposing a mandate, taking it so far that she waved one of his mailers in the air and barked, "Shame on you, Barack Obama," slamming "your tactics and your behavior in this campaign."
Two related YouTube videos from the 2008 campaign are embedded below:
The Wall Street Journal has an update on electric auto company Fisker, which got a $528.7 million federal loan guarantee, and which we wrote about here back in February. Says the Journal: "Mr. LaSorda said the production site for the Atlantic could depend on where Fisker gets new money to replace the U.S. loan. If an overseas investor emerges, the car could be built overseas, he said." The car was to be produced in Vice President Biden's home state of Delaware, and in a 2009 press release touting the Delaware plant Energy Secretary Chu declared, "We are putting Americans back to work and reigniting a new Industrial Revolution that is paramount for the economic success of this country."
"Anti-Abortion Film Is Pro-Profit" is the headline the New York Times put on a front-page news article about the movie "October Baby." The article summary on the Times Web site says the movie "deals with a young woman who identifies herself as an 'abortion survivor' and is paid to speak about her experiences." The article goes on to say that the movie, "was inspired by the story of Gianna Jessen, who says she was delivered alive at a California clinic after a late-term saline-injection abortion. As a paid speaker at anti-abortion events she tells of her struggles and medical conditions." A Times correction further clarifies, "The film is a work of fiction inspired by Gianna Jessen, who identifies herself as an 'abortion survivor' and is a paid speaker at anti-abortion events. The woman in the film, Hannah, is not paid to speak about her experiences."
Texas, alas, turns out to be no libertarian utopia, I write in my latest weekly column. The state practices taxation without representation, and even the cowboy boots nowadays come with government-imposed warnings about the supposed dangers of chemicals used to tan cowhide. Please check the column out at Reason.com here.
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at the Hoover Institution Web site, about last week's Supreme Court arguments about ObamaCare and the history of the Commerce Clause. Professor Epstein describes "the constitutional showdown over Obamacare" as "a real horse race, with a five to four vote to strike the mandate down perhaps now the most likely outcome."
"Can Privatization Kill?" is the headline over a New York Times op-ed piece decrying the privatization of prisons and border guards. The usual rule applies that if the headline is phrased as a question, the answer is probably "no." The article does do the service of highlighting what seems to be a new campaign against privately operated prisons. The Times article reports, "When Arizona's notorious SB 1070 immigration bill was passed, 30 out of 36 co-sponsors had received donations from private prison companies or their lobbyists."
This Sunday, Fareed Zakaria's show on CNN had Mr. Zakaria asserting:
In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons versus $5.7 billion on higher education.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the latest Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer to pass through the revolving door:
A Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer who played a key role in the government's crackdown on insider trading in corporate America is leaving the agency for private practice.
Andrew Michaelson, who also served as a special prosecutor for nearly four years during the criminal investigation and trial of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, is leaving the securities regulator in May to join Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP as a partner, where he will counsel clients on matters before the SEC, as well as white-collar defense and civil litigation.
The Wall Street Journal has a review of Free Market Fairness, the new book by John Tomasi, who is a professor at Brown University. I've been reading the book and enjoying it and was mildly annoyed that the Journal got its review out before I did. I've posted my own brief review of the book at Amazon.com here.
The quarterly drive for paying subscribers that we've been running here this week is wrapping up today, so this will be the last pitch. The response so far has been terrific, but we are still just short of our goal, so if you have been meaning to do this, or are even halfway thinking about it, please seize the moment. Reasons for helping were outlined earlier this week in Ten Reasons to Become a Paying Subscriber and Ten More Reasons to Become a Paying Subscriber. Bottom line: an entry-level $49 annual subscription is less than $1 a week, entitles you to receive quarterly reports sent only to paying subscribers, is crucial to sustaining the site's operations, and will send an encouraging signal of support for what we do here. Thank you to all who have already participated. The rest of you, please, help out. The link is here.
There are certain ironies in this labor agreement between Apple and its supplier Foxconn. Reports Reuters:
Under the agreement, Foxconn said it will reduce working hours to 49 per week, including overtime, while keeping total compensation for workers at its current level. The FLA audit found workers in the three factories put in more than 60 hours per week on average during peak production periods....
The agreement has not gone down well with some Foxconn workers, either.
Chen Yamei, 25, who has worked at a Foxconn factory at Longhua in southern Guangdong province for four years, complained that her salary will drop to just over 2,000 yuan [$317.50] a month from over 4,000 yuan [$635].
"We are here to work and not to play," she said. "Our income is very important."
Is Apple also going to cap the hours worked by associates at its American law firms to 49 hours a week?
David Brooks has a fine column in the New York Times this morning about Nathan Fletcher, an Iraq War veteran who was elected to the California state legislature as a Republican but is now running for mayor of San Diego as an independent. Writes Brooks:
The G.O.P. central committee and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an activist group, spurned Fletcher in the mayor's race, endorsing the more orthodox conservative, Councilman Carl DeMaio. The councilman already had much higher name identification, and this endorsement gives him a huge structural advantage. Individual candidates can only raise money in $500 chunks, but a party can raise unlimited money and funnel it to the candidate of its choice.
CBS News has a story headlined, "How GOP Candidates Get Europe Wrong." The gist of it is that the Republican candidates are wrong to warn against turning America into a European-style social welfare state:
Germany has a 5.5 percent unemployment rate, an immense export surplus, and world-leading innovative companies. And its economic system, according to former U.S. ambassador John Kornblum, is closer to what the U.S. was in President Eisenhower's time than it is to socialism.
"The governments of Europe - and especially in this country, Germany - could probably be given credit for writing half of the Republican economic policy," said Kornblum. "They believe in low taxes, saving, low government expenditures, no deficits."
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Mayor Bloomberg has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about the federal budget. It manages to be both wonderful and wrong at the same time. First, the wonderful part:
The president not only embraced the frustration expressed by Occupy Wall Street protesters—which was real—but he adopted their economic populism.
Central to fixing the country's problems, he has argued, is making the wealthiest Americans pay their "fair share," even though the top 5% already pay 59% of all federal income taxes, while 42% of filers have no federal income tax bill at all (or got a check from the government via the earned-income tax credit). Warren Buffett's secretary became the public symbol of this strategy, even appearing at the president's State of the Union address. (Mr. Buffett, of course, did exactly what lower capital gains taxes are designed to encourage: He invested!)
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