Responding to the question: "If the health care system is changed, do you think … will get better, worse, or remain the same?":

Responding to the question: "If the health care system is changed, do you think ….. will get better, worse, or remain the same?"

A line-by-line YouTube demolition:

In a paper for the Washington Legal Foundation (PDF), Trenton Norris and James Speyer of Arnold & Porter analyze recent developments in the battle to contain California’s famously wide-ranging Unfair Competition Law. “As several recent California Supreme Court rulings reflect,…

From the “Gaming the System” files, an investigation by CBS Atlanta has exposed some double-dipping in the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department:

Last month CBS Atlanta’s Wendy Saltzman exposed employee’s double dipping – getting both a pension and a paycheck.

It might sound pretty good to get paid both a pension and a paycheck from the same boss, except that Fulton County Sheriff Ted Jackson has been warned that it’s against the county’s policy.

13 double dippers in his agency were told to resign or lose their county funded pensions. All 13 resigned after the pension board ordered them to choose between their current jobs or their pensions, but a CBS Atlanta investigation found 10 of them back on the payroll. They were rehired as “independent contractors.” [...]

Pension board chairman Jim Stephens said that still violates pension rules and the sheriff may have been breaking other county policies as well.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, it gets worse. One spillover effect of the Department’s foray into questionable personnel practices is that it’s now left with inadequate security for the County courthouse. According to Fox Atlanta, the courthouse is now only able to man one security screening checkpoint at the building, creating a bottleneck that had citizens lined up around the block to get inside for court hearings and other routine business.

Just goes to show that whenever the public sector tries to game the system, taxpayers end up losing every time.

Terry Anderson at PERC in Montana discusses an existing "public option" in health care, the Indian Health Service here.

Unfortunately, Indians are not getting healthier under the federal
system. In 2007, rates of infant mortality among Native Americans
across the country were 1.4 times…

Political observers know that mid-term elections typically break for the party that doesn't occupy the White House. One exception was 2002, when Republicans retook the U.S. Senate and strengthened their majority in the House, despite the fact that Bush was president. 9/11 had much to do with that.
Contrary to the '02 anomaly, however, the mid-terms next year are shaping up to follow…

Last week, Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute released his annual review of federal pay and benefits relative to the private sector and finds that the gap is large and getting larger. Federal workers averaged $119,982 in wages and benefits in 2008, over twice the private sector average of $59,909. Edwards goes on to argue for a freeze in federal wages and some scaling-back of benefits, noting that the high-level of job security in government positions already represents a major benefit.

Critics like Gregg Carlstrom at the Federal Times have taken Edwards to task for his methods, writing that Edwards’ comparison is not apples-to-apples since it compares a federal sector where two-thirds of employees are in professional/management positions to a private sector where nearly two-thirds of employees are in low-wage jobs.

In response, Edwards defended his analysis here:

First, people accuse me of producing distorted data somehow. Actually, it’s essentially just raw Bureau of Economic Analysis data, but the data is usually overlooked by the media because I don’t think the BEA puts out a press release on it. Anyway, the average wage data is from BEA Table 6.6D. The average compensation data is simply total compensation (Table 6.2D) divided by the number of workers (Table 6.5D).

Second, people argue that reporting overall averages for wages and compensation is somehow illegitimate. People email me comments like “my federal salary is only $50,000, yet you claim that federal workers make $79,000.” All I can say to folks like this is that there must be a federal worker out there making $108,000 who balances you off.

Third, people argue that a better analysis would be to compare similar jobs in the private and public sectors, rather than looking at overall averages. I agree that that would be very useful. Unfortunately, the BEA data is not broken down that way. At the same time, the BEA data provides the most comprehensive accounting for the value of employee benefits of any data source. Benefits are a very important part of federal compensation, and so that’s why I look to the BEA data.

Fourth, many people argue that the federal government has an elite workforce with many highly educated people. Certainly, that’s an important factor to consider. However, that is the reason why I focused on the pay trend over the last eight years. The federal worker compensation advantage rose from 66 percent in 2000 to 100 percent in 2008. Has the composition of the federal workforce really changed that much in just eight years to justify such a big relative gain? I doubt it.

Read the whole thing. Even if the available data don’t support the “ideal” analytic approach, IMO Edwards is doing a huge service by hammering this issue. Not only does the federal fiscal crisis demand scrutiny of such a massive portion of the budget, but it also highlights a major—and undiscussed—problem with the Obama administration’s push to arbitrarily bring contracted jobs back in-house (see discussion in Reason’s Annual Privatization Report 2009), without any prior analysis of cost effectiveness.

Presumably, the adminstration believes that it can get a better price in-house for this contracted work, but with the public/private sector pay gap already so high and continuing to rise, it seems fair to argue that any potential cost savings might be quickly evaporated by rising pay and benefit costs. And yet again, taxpayers would pay more and get less, all in the interest of appeasing public employee unions.

» Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report 2009
» Reason Foundation’s Privatization Research and Commentary

Bill Leonard, who sits on the CA Board of Equalization, has a weekly newsletter in which he often comments on state budget and tax issues. His latest includes these comments on the state’s revenue estimates.

This goes even further back but remember in February the Administration and 2/3s of the Legislature said raising the sales tax would bring in billions more revenue and help balance the state budget?  Since then sales tax revenue is down more than 12%.  A month ago, the Administration and legislative members emerged from all night sessions to say they had successfully addressed the $26 billion structural deficit only to be told last week by Standard and Poor’s that we are still $15 billion out of balance.

Last week it was announced that the annual adjustment to the state income tax brackets has been adjusted down for deflation.  When there is deflation in the overall economy those brackets go down, which is not a good result for taxpayers but it is consistent.

The Administration anticipated there would be deflation but their forecast was way above what has actually occurred.  The Administration booked the extra revenues as if they were actual and that is now going to be another addition to the state’s deficit.   

Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer had this quote in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“We thought (deflation) would be 2.2 percent,” says H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance. Because deflation was only 1.5 percent, “There is actually going to be a marginal hit to the state’s bottom line.”

Estimating revenues in a dynamic economy with volatile taxation policies is doomed to failure.  It is an argument for a substantial reserve and lots of flexibility in government spending levels because revenue estimates are generally not to be believed.

This continues a long running problem that a “balanced” budget is passed using rosy revenue projections.  In theory if revenues fall short, there should be a “mid-year correction” in which spending is reduced to be in line with actual revenue.  But since spending cuts are virtually anathema in Sacramento, this no longer happens. Instead more accounting shell games or more debt have become the answer.

Until real spending and debt limits are established, I see no reason to expect this to change.

We’ve spent a lot of time covering efforts by our neighboring states to boost the New Hampshire economy by continually raising their tax rates. They’ve certainly done more to create jobs in the Granite State than our own spendthrift Legislature.

Now comes word from the Portsmouth Herald that a group of citizens in Maine is trying to lower its tax rate through the petition process.

The voices of these men and women have convinced us that a petition drive currently under way to repeal a new tax reform law has merit. The law, passed in the waning days of the legislative session last in June, reduces the state income tax on all but the wealthiest Mainers, by instituting a flat tax of 6.5 percent. Currently, income taxes top out at 8.5 percent.

Petitioners must get 55,087 verified signatures to the secretary of state by Sept. 11. If they are successful, the law will be put in abeyance and voters will decide whether to repeal it next June.

The Herald editorial page comes out in favor of the effort, which is fine for Maine taxpayers. But what about us? How will New Hampshire be able to keep raising its taxes, fees, and budgets if our neighboring states start lowering theirs?