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The Rise of the Risk Management Industry

As he was leaving office, Dwight Eisenhower felt a responsibility to warn the nation of coming threat from within, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” These turned out to be words booth wise and unheeded, as our military expenditures now total nearly that of the rest of the combined nations of the world.

I’m seeing a new threat from within, rising and to some extent already risen. The risk management industry, with insurance companies at its core, has wormed its way, insidiously and  in many layers, throughout nearly every industry and organization in these United States. This cancer has grown much deeper, though through much the same mechanism as the military industrial complex; by taking advantage of fear, both that of the general populace and corporate and government entities.

A friend of mine recently posted a saying: “A book is the only thing you can buy that can make you richer”. I would argue that another profitable purchase would be a Congressman. While I do think there are some career fence sitters in office who pretty much just vote in whichever direction offers them the most favors, I like to think most individuals in government feel like they are doing the right thing, though I think getting to that coveted and contested office nearly requires one to be of the opinion that the ends justify the means, and that it would be distasteful to look too closely at how the sausage was made.

Unlike these individuals, organizations, such as corporations, unions, and political parties, are generally run or heavily influenced by committee and legal advisers. The people of these committees see it as their job to do what is in the interest of those they represent. If, for example an industry of large donors made it clear that their donations to a political party would keep coming so long as the party voted in their favor, then it is quite likely that the party would choose to endorse candidates who have agreed to vote accordingly. They justify this by telling themselves that if they don’t go along, then the other party will, and will win, which logically they would see as being a worse choice than taking the support themselves and  then trying to enact their own ideology. The beauty of this situation from the donor’s perspective is that they really can’t lose. All they need to do is give support to both sides and threaten to withdraw it from the one who gives them the least in return.

These days, everyone in business is obsessed with avoiding liability. The blame usually comes down on people who start frivolous lawsuits, but really, the system is designed to encourage such things. There are three main players in this: businesses trying to avoid being bankrupted by a large lawsuit, insurance companies trying to sell coverage without actually having to pay anything out, and the individual or government agencies trying to get money for a perceived violation.

Kaufman’s Law: A policy is a restrictive document to prevent a recurrence of a single incident, in which that incident is never mentioned.

Business will hire people to keep track of regulations and create appropriate policies, and it isn’t just legal regulations they are following. Insurance companies have their own regulations, some of which must be followed to get coverage, and others which will nullify their responsibility to pay if they are not followed. The nature of such preventative policies is that they raise both the cost and the complexity of doing business to the point where it is nearly impossible for a small business to be competitive. The regulations have gotten so thick that no one even knows them all. This is of course fine with government and insurance companies alike, since anyone not knowing they have violated a regulation is still going to end up paying a fine or be denied coverage as a consequence.

The profit motive of insurance companies should not be discounted. If nothing else, the mere fact that they are profitable means that they are an inefficiency in the system, a middleman who increases wait times, and decreases care options. Obamacare pretends to be a cost saver in the system. The early claims were that it wouldn’t raise costs to taxpayers, that the healthy would be made to pay for the sick. I was disgusted to read this piece of economic ignorance on CNN Money:

“Getting subsidy-eligible people to enroll is important for the overall success of the exchanges. The first to sign up are likely those desperate for health insurance, so they are a sicker and costlier population. They’ll pay for insurance with or without subsidies. But they must be balanced out by younger and healthier folks, many of whom are likely to be enticed by subsidies, experts say. The subsidies were expected to be very popular: The Congressional Budget Office projected that 86% of the 7 million people enrolling in the exchanges for 2014 would be eligible.”

The second problem is one of outreach. Many people, particularly among the lower income, don’t know that they are eligible for subsidies or even that they have to sign up for insurance, said Dan Mendelson, chief executive of Avalere Health, an advisory company for insurers.
“This requires aggressive messaging,” he said. “They need to go into these communities and get them to sign up. The president has been spending his time apologizing.”

So first, the healthy were going to be made to pay for the sick. Now the healthy will have money taken out of their taxes and handed back to them, only to be forced to give it to the insurance companies. And then there is this article in Businessweek, showing that there is a provision in the bill making sure that if the insurance companies find their costs to be too high, that the government will backstop their losses, and also that there are cost saving measures set to make everything seem cheaper at the beginning, which fade out after three years.  Combine this with the website problems and various postponements, and it really looks to me like they are trying to stall until the midterm elections and put forward the appearance that things are great and they are just working out a few minor glitches, rather than making a bubble that will lead to bailing out the insurance companies that we have already paid three times over.

How many times over do we need to pay for our health care? Back in the day a patient went to the doctor with an ailment, saw them promptly, made decisions between the two of them and then the patient payed a reasonable fee. Now we pay insurance companies, our doctors and hospitals pay insurance companies, the government pays insurance companies, and in return, the insurance companies make us go to a doctor who is in their network, they decide what care to pay for, and if you have a problem with your bill, they leave you on hold until the creditors show up. And if that weren’t bad enough, we can’t even wash our hands of the whole thing and take care of ourselves. We’re mandated to pay for the care we don’t use.

National Budget Vs. Personal Budget

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 • National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Got it?

OK, now let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

• Annual family income: $21,700 • Money family spent: $38,200 • New debt on credit card: $16,500 • Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710 • Total budget cuts: $385

I’ve seen the above posted on a number of sites recently. I think it’s valid to think of the budget in these terms.

Sure, there are differences, such as our government’s ability to legally launder money, but the basic principles of home finance do relate, and taking eight zeroes off helps make things imaginable.

Considering that there are approximately 300,000,000 Americans, around half of whom don’t pay income taxes, it isn’t even too far off for figuring your own percentage of the debt.

Gimmicks aren’t going to change this chart. You can tax the people to give out loans (more debt) to small businesses, but that is mostly zero-sum. You can tax the people to pay for unemployment to encourage the unemployed to spend money to stimulate demand for products and thus create jobs, but that is like buying your employer’s product on your credit card in order to keep them paying your paycheck; It gets you nowhere or worse. You can tax the rich dry and barely make a dent in that number.

Just like in your personal finance, if you want to gain wealth, you need to provide something that someone else needs. If we aren’t selling more to foreign nations than we are buying, we are losing.

This isn’t so much a supply or demand problem as it is a relative value problem. If we are going to be on the losing side of this equation, we need to be printing money rather than borrowing it. This may not be fair to the savers, but they will fail right along with the rest of us on the current course.

Printing money eventually devalues it. A devalued currency will make imports more expensive and exports more affordable, putting us to our rightful place in the market again.

I would also support an eye-for-an-eye tariff policy to prevent socialist nations from taking advantage of us. Until one or both of these things are instituted, our economy will continue to decline.

Even with those changes, we also need to reduce our spending on the military, foreign aid, micromanaging regulations, incarceration, social programs for non-citizens, and benefits for public employees.

Why Has Going to College Gotten so Expensive?

If you went to college before the turn of the millennium and you are now trying to convince your kids to go to college, it may be worth more careful deliberation. There was a time when college was the path to a wealthy future. Back then it was one of the only ways to get a decent education.

With the advent of the internet, knowledge in many fields is at your fingertips. Unless you want to be a doctor or something similarly carefully regulated, chances are you can learn most of what you need online and at your own pace, and nearly free.

Contrast that with the current college system. Colleges are putting professors on furlough and reducing the amount of education they produce each semester. Meanwhile tuition is going up far faster than the rate of inflation. College loans have increased over 500% since 1999.

Why? What is it in the system that is justifying tuition going up while quality of education is dropping? In this case I believe it is actually a self-defeating government subsidy. Credit is tight right now. If you want a loan for most things, you have to first prove that you don’t need it. This credit crunch has hit every sector but education, in which government loans are still easily available and low interest. Combine this with the lack of work, and people are going back to school and living off loans. The natural result of this is that colleges raise tuition, since the students can afford it.

Looking back a decade, government-sponsored enterprises gave out adjustable rate mortgages to the poor, and once they had them on the hook, raised the rates. What they didn’t take into account is what would happen when they took it too far and people just defaulted and walked away. This time around, they are ensuring that it doesn’t happen again. Federal student loans follow you till you die. Bankruptcy doesn’t help. What will happen when all of this debt comes due? Will people spend the rest of their lives trying to get above water? Will the government forgive the debt on the backs of the taxpayer? Will the next credit bubble use your children as collateral? When will they stop trying to hide the debt and start working to correct it?

What still doesn’t make sense is the furloughs. If tuition is up, and full time attendance is up, and professor salaries aren’t skyrocketing, then why the furloughs? It’s because we are becoming a nation of administrators. Less than a third of your tuition goes into educating you, and the percentage of funds going to college  administrative costs is going up at a truly unreasonable rate. I’m not even saying anyone is getting fat here, just that as a society, we are spending far more on administrating producers than we are on actually producing anything.

What we need now is some transparency. Unfortunately, creating the Office of  Administrative Overview Regulation or some such won’t help. What we need is simple disclosure. Let the resulting outrage do the rest.

For Everyone Else, There’s WikiLeaks

I haven’t spoken much about WikiLeaks, but I’m glad that such organizations exist to shine some sunlight on the back-room dealing of those in power. It’s a sad day when the truth is a crime.

Our secrets are a weakness, not our power. Who can be blackmailed, if they have no secrets? Who embezzles money in the light of day? If torture is humane and effective, then why don’t we do it publicly? What investor invests in a market they know is overvalued?

If the state of our Union is strong, don’t tell us it is strong, show us it is strong. Open the books. Knowing that the data they see is the truth will brink confidence in our Dollar and our nation, not chase it away. Besides, if you don’t open the books, Assange will do it for you.

I also think it’s key, when the media and politicians talk about the damage done by a Wikileak, that we assess for ourselves whether that damage is at the feet of Wikileaks or those who perpetrated what they have exposed.

Wikipedia keeps a current list of all of the major stories they’ve broken here.

California Affiliate Tax

The helping hand of the law - affiliate tax edition

California’s latest budget deal continues their now-familiar trend of chasing small business out of the state. In a desperate and unconstitutional power grab, they are saying that any business that is even affiliated with anyone in California has to pay sales tax on everything sent to customers in the state. This affiliate tax is toxic to the digital economy.

I’m most often complaining about Congress overstepping their bounds in controlling the states, but this is a rare case (Like Arizona’s recent immigration laws) where the opposite is true. Interstate commerce is squarely under the jurisdiction of Congress. Let’s say that a product is manufactured in Texas, sent to Colorado to an Amazon distributor, and then shipped to a customer in California; what’s to stop Texas from saying they can charge sales tax on the item because they made it? Or Colorado to charge it because they are where the sale was shipped from, or every state in between because it passed on through? The Federal government is there primarily for two purposes, foreign policy, and making sure states don’t enact anti-competitive laws that interfere with the commerce between the states, thus, states were only allowed to regulate transactions from those companies which they have jurisdiction over because of a physical presence in the state.

California is now claiming that I, along with ten thousand others are ‘sister companies’ of Amazon, because we are paid to advertise for them. I’m nobody’s ‘sister company’. I have no Obligations to Amazon, they don’t tell me what to do, we don’t have any claim over each other’s assets, I just post a link to Amazon on my page, and Amazon reimburses me for doing so when paying customers arrive there through my sites. I’m no more connected with Amazon than television networks who advertise for them, UPS who carries their products, or Visa, who handles their transactions.

Living in an extremely liberal town, I hear a lot of people cheering this affiliate tax as somehow sticking it to the evil corporations and finally making them pay their fair share, but that isn’t what is going to happen out of this. Amazon has already announced that they will end their business dealings with everyone in California, which means not only are ten thousand more Californians now very suddenly out of work, but California won’t see a cent of it, since the companies won’t actually be taxed after cutting ties, and California will be out the revenue from those people and quite possibly paying to add them to its welfare rolls. Also, it isn’t legally Amazon’s responsibility to pay sales tax on your purchases, it’s yours, so if you aren’t paying taxes on your online purchases, then point the finger at yourself first.

I wish I’d seen that this ship was sinking before I bought a home here. If it were any easier to leave, I would.

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