If you want better politicians, pay them more

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agrees with Thomas Sowell, maybe they’re worth taking seriously.

I agree with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, that members of Congress should get cost-of-living salary increases.

Of course the salary for members of Congress ($174,000 for most of them) is more than most people in the country make, but it’s surprisingly low for someone with such an important job, who’s raising a family in an expensive city, and could probably be making more elsewhere. That’s not the kind of salary that lets them get rich off government; that’s a sacrifice for public service.

And I agree with Sowell, a conservative economist who rarely calls for any expansion of government, but who argued in 2014 that raises for members of Congress (and other government officials) would improve government at a tiny cost:

What do we do when we want a more upscale product — a better house or car for example? We pay more to get it!

If we want better people in government, we are going to have to start paying them enough that people would not be sacrificing their families' well-being by going to Washington or a state capitol, or serving as a judge.

It is not a question of whether the people currently serving in Congress, the courts or as chief executives at the municipal, state or national level deserve a raise. Most of them don't. It is a question of whether we need far better replacements for them.

That means drawing from a wider pool, including people with real knowledge and expertise in the private sector, who currently make a lot more money than we are paying government officials. Cheap politicians turn out to be very expensive politicians, in the way they waste money, even if they are not stealing it.

We could pay every member of Congress a million dollars a year — for a whole century — for less than it costs to run the Department of Agriculture for one year.

The least we can do is make it harder to bribe them. Trying to bribe a millionaire would at least be harder than bribing some government official with a modest salary and a couple of kids going to expensive colleges.

Takeaway from Mark Zuckerberg's Senate hearing

Facebook needs to make sure no one says anything that makes anyone else feel bad — while giving everyone unprecedented, airtight privacy protections!

Good luck with that.

Rubio has senior-itis

“That’s why I’m missing votes. Because I am leaving the Senate. I am not running for reelection.”

Was health-care reform worth the Democrats' losing the 2010 elections?

William Saletan says yes:

Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren't going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.

And that's not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure.

I'm not convinced. First of all, to say that X is "worth" Y implies that Y somehow allowed you to obtain X. It's not clear that losing at the polls last week allowed Democrats to support health-care reform. As this NYT article that Saletan himself links to says:

[E]ven the Democrats who bucked the White House and their party’s leadership by voting against the measure gained little protection. Of the 30 Democrats who opposed the final bill and then stood for re-election, 17 lost anyway.

Indeed, among 49 Democratic incumbents who lost on Tuesday, 32 had voted for the health care law and 17 against it. . . .

Surveys of voters leaving the polls found deep division over the health law. Nearly half of voters — 48 percent — said they thought it should be repealed, while 31 percent said Congress should expand it and 16 percent said it should be left as is.

“When pollsters asked, voters listed health reform among the top issues on their mind, which is no surprise after a long, heated debate,” said Drew E. Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducts health policy research. “But there is little evidence that it was decisive in the vote.”

And if health-care reform was such a huge factor in the Democrats' losses, wouldn't you expect the one member of Congress who was most closely associated with it — Nancy Pelosi — to have performed worse in 2010 than in 2008? But just the opposite happened.

Saletan also ignores state legislatures, which, of course, had nothing to do with enacting the federal health-care law. Democrats in state legislatures still massively lost at the polls.

I also don't accept Saletan's substantive point — that the health-care law was such a great accomplishment that Democrats should feel fine about losing control of the House and getting closer to 50 than 60 Senators. Saletan flatly states that the Democrats enacted "universal health care." If I believed that, I'd agree with him: this would be good and important enough to be worth losing an election.

But I'm simply not convinced that the actual law (as opposed to Saletan's glowing description of it) is good enough to be worth enacting at all, let alone suffering a huge political loss for enacting. This New Yorker article is the best thing I've read about the health-care law. In a nutshell, the article says:

1. The cost and revenue projections rely on unrealistic assumptions and accounting tricks. If you make some adjustments for these, the cost of the plan is much higher.

2. The so-called “individual mandate” isn’t really a mandate at all. Under the new system, many young and healthy people will still have a strong incentive to go uninsured.

3. Once the reforms are up and running, some employers will have a big incentive to end their group coverage plans and dump their employees onto the taxpayer-subsidized individual plans, greatly adding to their cost.

I'm tempted to copy and paste the whole article here, but I'll just give his argument on point #2:

Consider the so-called “individual mandate.” As a strict matter of law, all non-elderly Americans who earn more than the poverty line will be obliged to obtain some form of health coverage. If they don’t, in 2016 and beyond, they could face a fine of about $700 or 2.5 per cent of their income—whichever is the most. Two issues immediately arise.

Even if the fines are vigorously enforced, many people may choose to pay them and stay uninsured. Consider a healthy single man of thirty-five who earns $35,000 a year. Under the new system, he would have a choice of enrolling in a subsidized plan at an annual cost of $2,700 or paying a fine of $875. It may well make sense for him to pay the fine, take his chances, and report to the local emergency room if he gets really sick. (E.R.s will still be legally obliged to treat all comers.) If this sort of thing happens often, as well it could, the new insurance exchanges will be deprived of exactly the sort of healthy young people they need in order to bring down prices. (Healthy people improve the risk pool.)

If the rules aren’t properly enforced, the problem will be even worse. And that is precisely what is likely to happen. The I.R.S. will have the administrative responsibility of imposing penalties on people who can’t demonstrate that they have coverage, but it won’t have the legal authority to force people to pay the fines. “What happens if you don’t buy insurance and you don’t pay the penalty?” Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s industrious and well-informed blogger, asks. “Well, not much. The law specifically says that no criminal action or liens can be imposed on people who don’t pay the fine.”

So, the individual mandate is a bit of a sham. Generous subsidies will be available for sick people and families with children who really need medical care to buy individual coverage, but healthy single people between the ages of twenty-six and forty, say, will still have a financial incentive to remain outside the system until they get ill, at which point they can sign up for coverage. Consequently, the number of uninsured won’t fall as much as expected, and neither will prices. Without a proper individual mandate, the idea of universality goes out the window, and so does much of the economic reasoning behind the bill.

Jonah Goldberg explains how the Tea Party will help more than hurt the Republican party, bamboozling Robert Wright with his choice of metaphor.

"How to fix Social Security in one graph"

That's how Ezra Klein describes the graph over there, which he gets from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The CBPP explains, based on an August 2010 report by the Social Security Board of Trustees:

The 75-year Social Security shortfall is about the same size as the cost, over that period, of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans (those with incomes above $250,000 a year). Members of Congress cannot simultaneously claim that the tax cuts for people at the top are affordable while the Social Security shortfall constitutes a dire fiscal threat.

Here are a few more points from the report, again summarized by the CBPP:

• The trustees continue to estimate that the trust funds will be exhausted in 2037— the same date that they forecast in last year’s report.

• Even after 2037, Social Security could pay more than three-fourths of scheduled benefits using its annual tax income. Those who fear that Social Security won’t be around when today’s young workers retire misunderstand the trustees’ projections.

• The program’s shortfall is relatively modest, amounting to 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next 75 years (and 1.4 percent of GDP in 2084). A mix of tax increases and benefit modifications — carefully crafted to shield recipients of limited means, potentially make benefits more adequate for the neediest beneficiaries, and give ample notice to all participants — could put the program on a sound footing indefinitely.

"'We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up.'"

Congress suppressed a federal agency's empirical study that warned of the high risk of driving while talking on a cell phone, including hands-free. The apparent reason: Congress didn't want the agency to lobby states based on the research, especially on the issue of hands-free phones.

"The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002."

If the New York Times' report is accurate down to each and every insinuation, then Congress has, in effect, chosen to injure and kill innocent Americans in order to keep voters happy.

Senate passes bill to let FDA regulate tobacco.

I'm finding this hard to believe -- it sounds almost too rational to be true:

The Senate approved landmark legislation today that would give the government sweeping new power to oversee tobacco . . . .

For the first time, the $89 billion tobacco industry would have to disclose the ingredients in its products. Under the new authority, the FDA could ban the most harmful of the estimated 6,000 chemicals used in cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products. And it could reduce the amount of nicotine, perhaps to a point where tobacco is no longer addictive and smokers who want to quit can break free more easily. The legislation requires tobacco companies to expand the size of warning labels and include graphic images of the health effects of tobacco.

Advertising and promotion will also would be restricted. Tobacco manufacturers would be unable to use the terms "light," "mild" and "low" unless they can scientifically prove that the product so labeled is less harmful than standard tobacco.