What Should Republicans do About PPACA

What Should Republicans do About PPACA

Because of loss aversion and because people (me for example) have changed coverage based on the law, they should take it slow and one step at a time and do the following:

• Remove the 3 to 1 rule. See here because with income subsidies I see no reason to force a subsidy of older people by younger people.
• Slowly each year raise the allowable deductibles until they get very high, like $30k per year or $250k lifetime. 
• Either fix or eliminate the employer mandates, by fix I mean, do not completely exempt part-time workers (maybe make employers pay a percent based on hours worked), and do not exempt employers based on the number of employees they have. 
• Allow insurers to create plans that only cover care with strong evidence of proven net benefits.
• Finally raise the penalty to where you are forcing most everybody to get health insurance.

Then think about how to get the states to eliminate regulations that drive up cost without providing proven net benefits. 

The Least Bad Presidents

EconTalk has an episode with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Bruce on the Spoils of War

Unlike many who commented on the podcast, I like his take even if it is flawed. It is much better to skilfully avoid war than to win wars but people who rate presidents rate war presidents higher. 

A similar thing is true for domestic issues. I think that those who created the greenback and then the Federal Reserve are to be blamed for the Great Depression and not so much Hoozer, and FDR's response to the great depression was far from great and should not make him a great president.

  I will take Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Warren G. Harding over FDR and some the other so called great presidents. 

Lincoln looks like a mixed bag, he was great in that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but in many other respects kind of bad. Maybe most of what he did, including creating the greenback, was necessary to end slavery and maybe he would have undone most of it after the war had he lived. I will call him great but not being there it's hard to say.


Jeremiah 17:9-10 - The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?  

Luke 18:19 Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone.

A Focus Change in Schooling

I think that we should take Arnold Kling's null Hypothesis in education and twin studies seriously. That it is very quixotic to attempt to accelerate improvement in education. (Some improvement will come due to learning more about how people learn.)

But even given that, we cannot get more out of our schools.

The way that schools are measured today is by PISA test, but maybe the PISA tests do not measure anything important. Maybe the PISA test and other tests like the SAT are too close to IQ tests to tell us much about schools.

If were true and we cannot teach children more what would you propose?  I would propse the following:

• If we cannot teach them more, we should focus on teaching the skills that will have the most impact on the student's lives. How to live a good life. How to be a good citizen. How fix you car and home. How to not get scammed. How to live on less. Etc. Over 90% of people do not need to know math beyond some basic algebra.
• 
  
• Some focus on improving the schools for parents. Like put the schools in more convent places. Make the hours more convent for parents.
• 
  
• Spend less money. The per student cost of school has gone up close to three fold since the mid 1960's with no improvement in those tests we use to measure. It seems like administration costs have swollen over the years, I think would could do it for less even with the expanded hours, I propose.

I am sure that others can come up with other ideas if they adopt the null hypotheses.

And lets stop beating up on US schools, they are as good as schools in any country.

Why I will not vote for Clinton

We tend especially in the this election to see the other side as all bad or at least to paint them that way to others, but everyone is a mix of good and evil and Hillary Clinton has done some good things in her life. For example, she did some good pro bono legal work especially early in her career and she has contributed to charity.

She may be a kind person on a personal level, I have no way to know, but we differ on the following political issues.


She and the Democratic party are very pro-abortion to the point of wanting to force taxpayers to pay for abortions.  Here is democratic convention abortion speech that illustrates the current Democrat party position on abortion. They used to say "Safe legal and rare" now they seem to think of abortion as just another birth control method that should be funded by tax dollars.


She is very hawkish. She voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. She now claims that that vote was a mistake, yet having seen the chaos caused by that mistake, she evidently supported bombing Libya and sending arms to Syrian rebels! Now you might say, surely she now has learned a valuable lesson and will do nothing like that ever again but she says she wants to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria NOW!

She strongly supports the war on drugs and putting young men, temped by profits to sell drugs, into prison. What makes it worse is that she is an occasional partaker in a drug at least as bad as the worst, that is alcohol and has been known to even get drunk and be ill-tempered when in that state.

She is for further taxpayer subsidization college. Which seems like a simple attempt to buy the votes young people. The Federal Government only run the Military academies and they are already free to those who attend. The state schools are run by the states, so they are a state issue. The problem with college is that the universities are spending way more than they need to and are accepting many students that they know have low chance of succeeding in getting a degree. They are taking way to many students in the the humanities. Further you are subsidizing the people most capable of earning money. The college students will pay directly or through taxes for their schooling. I think directly is better because it motivates the student to economise more. I would like to see the Federal Government stop guaranteeing student loans.  That has made many problems worse.

She is promising to prevent people from buying and selling to and from they want in the that see attacks free trade.

Her position on immigration is absurd. It is that we should have laws that ban people from entering the US but it you manage to sneak in and remain undetected for 2 years you should be allowed to stay. Here is my post on immigration.

Her stated position on equal pay for the sexes ignores the facts that men and women are not exactly the same. Men and to work more, at rougher more dangerous jobs and also more competitive jobs. there are many other reasons that men earn more.

Healthcare is regulated at the state level and so paying for it at the federal level make for bad incentives for state lawmakers. Already the federal Government subsidies demand for healthcare even while the states limit supply. She wants to subsidise people and limit the amount that people pay for healthcare to some percent of their income, a very bad idea.

She supports forcing people to partake in wedding ceremonies that are against their religious beliefs.

I will just throw this in, she also seems to be somewhat of a compulsive liar, even more than most politicians, for example in the wikileaks dump it was shown that she told an audience in Brazil that she was for open boarders but in the debate she claimed that she was talking about energy and seemed to be that she just thought that up on the fly. A little thought would have told her that that would not fly.

I could go on but won't.

I Kind of Liked This

For politician and most jobs principles are far more important than IQ 

The below is from an anonymous commenter:

Warren G Harding – Dolt (before you smirk look how well the country did under his normalization policy)
Calvin Coolidge - Intelligent  
T. Roosevelt - Dolt 
FDR – Dolt 
Truman - Dolt
 Eisenhower – Intelligent 
 JFK – Dolt 
LBJ – Dolt 
Richard Nixon - Genius (I think the smartest president of the modern era)
Jimmy Carter – very intelligent 
 Ronald Reagan – Dolt 
G Bush – Intelligent 
 Bill Clinton – Genius 
GW Bush – Dolt
Karl Marx – Genius for comparison

Wishful Thinking by Roberts and Deacon

Angus Deaton on econtalk  and Russ Roberts blame drug use and poor school performance by low income USAers on poverty and bad schools respectively. I do not buy those explanations.

I have known a lot of people who like to get up in the morning and start getting high (pot, THC, whatever). I have trouble relating to that because I do not have that desire at all but none of them seemed to be in any particular despair. As far as I could tell it was entertainment. So I think the opium epidemic is due to more access to opioid and people liking opioid.

Also I went to some high rated schools and some low rated schools and the only difference that I could see was the quality of the students. I think you are both putting way too much hope in schooling. I think that research shows that schools cannot really get the students to learn much more but they could improve by:

• 1. Teaching more valuable life schools. That is if you cannot get them to learn more focus on getting them to learn the more valuable stuff for their lives. Consumer and practical skills.
• 2. Change the hours of schools to better support working people. that is cover most working hours.
• 3. Focus on spending less money on administration. 

I am not happy that this is the way that it is but if you cannot solve problems that you define all wrong.

Thoughts on Trump's Success

Joseph Stiglitz pushed a story (How Trump Happened) that implies that the bad economy is the main driver of the Trump success in the republican primaries.

First I have in the past said that Trump is what many conservatives wanted all along and I still believe that is a big factor but I also think there is something else, which follows.

(Now I like President Obama as a person but, I think he has badly mishandled issues of race. He seems to me to be more decent that most politicians.)

When President Obama was elected many people hoped that he would defend the Government and whites to his black constituency but starting in the Travon Martin case and then in the Fergison case he seemed to side with the aggrieved blacks, before the evidence came in. He never pointed out that is was impossible to know if the Martin or Brown where the aggressors. He also failed to promise to blacks that he would attempt to rectify the situation from within if did turn out to be persecution of blacks so that they need not protest.

He also failed to point out that there are 340 million people in the USA 40 million of them are black and these things are bound to happen regularly, but that that does not mean whites are out to persecute blacks. It makes it worse that he has been great at understanding and presenting the statistics on Terrorism for example Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. The same is true for whites and police killing blacks, they are relatively rare events. He could be shouting that from the house tops but no.

He failed to say "Look many whites voted for me, they are not so bad", and that if I can get to be president prejudice, while it still exists, is not holding blacks back significantly. That blacks can do well in the USA and most are.

Maybe wrongfully, but when people elect a minority they expect him put great effort in to reconcile his minority with the majority, Obama failed badly with this challenge, angering people and so Trump. 

I fear Hillary Clinton will do the same always siding with women against men. For example the pay differential disappears when you factor in hours, occupations and career interruptions but she keep pushing the issue.