Jim Miller on Politics

Krauthammer Judges Obama On Foreign Policy:  The columnist doesn't give a letter grade for the first nine months, but it isn't hard to guess what it would be:   F.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today.  The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it.  It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity.  In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Obama and his team have been just as naive, just as amateurish, in their dealings with Iran and China, and have gotten the same results with those two nations.

Obama's foreign policy failures would be funny, if the possible consequences for us, and for the rest of the world, were not so horrific.

Many Earmarks Are Wasteful:  Some are disgusting, as well.

Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.

Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

(Emphasis added.)

While Hugo Chavez Is In Power:  No property in Venezuela is safe.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said he seized the landmark Hilton hotel on Margarita Island because its owners dared to impose conditions on its use by his government to host a summit there last month.

"To hold the conference we had to ask for permission. . . and the owners tried to impose conditions on the revolutionary government.  No way," said Chavez.

"So I said, 'Let's expropriate it.'  And now it's been expropriated."

Just like that.

Expect a beach shortage at the property soon.

(The Venezuelans made a serious error after Chavez tried to overthrow the elected government in 1992.  They should have executed him, or, at the very least, exiled him for life.)

If you need an explanation of the beach shortage, or just want to read some Cold War era jokes, go here.  (I have seen about half of the jokes before.)

Stimulus Efficiency?  The Obama administration has a very preliminary estimate.

The first direct stimulus reports showed that stimulus contracts saved or created just 30,083 jobs, prompting more Republican criticism of the $787 billion package.

The data posted Thursday was the result of the government's initial attempt at counting actual stimulus jobs.  Obama administration officials stressed that data was partial -- it represented just $16 billion out of the $339 billion awarded -- but they said it exceeded their projections.

According to my calculator, that's more than a half a million dollars per "saved or created" job.

(I love the false precision — 30,083 jobs — in that estimate.)

Wall Street Is Doing Fine:  (The survivors, anyway.)  The Wall Street Journal has an estimate showing just how well the major firms are doing.  Most of the article is behind the subscriber wall, but you can see the first two paragraphs:

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture.

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Those bonuses wouldn't bother me if I didn't have the feeling that the firms owe some of their profits to government intervention.

(You can see some examples of those profits in this article.)

Value-Added Tax?  Fine, economically, says economist Greg Mankiw, as a replacement for our current federal taxes.

My bottom line: If I could replace our current tax system (including the personal income tax, corporate income tax, payroll tax, and estate tax) with a VAT, I would gladly do it.

But dubious, politically.

Why do some conservatives hate the VAT?  For political reasons.  They fear it would be a new tax, hidden from many voters, used to expand government.  They fear that rather than replacing our existing tax system, a VAT would add to it.  Indeed, that is precisely what [Henry] Aaron and [Isabel] Sawhill are proposing.

And nearly everyone else who is currently backing a VAT.

A VAT, by itself, would be regressive, like almost all sales taxes.  Nations that use VATs almost always combine them with various forms of income redistribution.

If you visit a nation that has a value-added tax, you see its effects immediately; most prices are higher than in the United States, even for identical items.  In Britain, you can sometimes see the effect even more directly in advertisements.  Personal computers, for example, are often sold with two prices, with the VAT and without.  The differences are substantial, as you can see from this ad.  (As I understand it, you can evade the tax if you are buying the computer as an investment for your business, rather than for personal use.)   But usually the VAT is hidden from consumers, which is one reason why those who want higher taxes are so fond of it.

(You can find a critique of current proposals here, and the Wikipedia article on VATs here.)

Media Lynch Mob:  "Mainstream" journalists go after a competitor — without bothering to check the facts.

Which public figure can be quoted as having said something bigoted and disgusting and it doesn't matter whether he did or not because he might have?  Who can Big Media brand a racist without checking the facts?  Who has to prove he did not say something racist, rather than the accuser proving he did?

A pat on the back for anyone who guessed the answer: Rush Limbaugh (OK, the blog headline was a clue).

As the Telegraph's Toby Harnden goes on to say, those who spread these falsehoods are — so far — "brazenly unapologetic".

So far, because we do have libel laws in this country, though they provide little protection for public figures.  But they provide some, and I would guess that lawyers at CNN, MSNBC, and the Post-Dispatch are already getting nervous about possible financial consequences.

(For those who have never listened to Limbaugh, some additional facts about the man:  Although Limbaugh is often provocative, I have never heard him say anything racist.  His chief call screener for many years has been a black man, James Golden, better known as "Bo Snerdley".   One of Limbaugh's frequent guest hosts is Walter Williams, a black economist.  Limbaugh does, like most Americans, oppose racial quotas.  And, like most conservatives, he believes that American blacks have been victimized by leftist (he would call them "liberal") policies.)

These attacks on Limbaugh were intended to keep him from buying a share of a National Football League team, and succeeded.  He has been dropped from the group hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams.  (The NFL has worse problems than having a conservative talk show host owning part of a team.)

More from Mark Steyn and John Hinderaker.

The Scores On The National Math Test Are Out, And The News Is Mixed:   Here's the summary headline from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Mathematics scores up since 2007 at grade 8, but unchanged at grade 4

Another, somewhat more positive, way to put it, would be to say — correctly — that the test scores are at all-time highs.  But it is also true that the scores have not risen as quickly in the last two years as they did between 2000 and 2007.

Fourth grade test scores have risen since 1990, when the test was first given, for all major ethnic groups.  Gaps between groups persist but are smaller than they were in 1990.  (Black fourth graders are now scoring slightly higher than white fourth graders did in 1990.)

Eight grade test scores have risen since 1990 for all major ethnic groups.   Gaps between groups are about the same as they were in 1990, though Asian/Pacific Islanders are beginning to pull away from whites.  (And everyone else.)

There is one constant in the results:  In 4th grade and 8th grade, year after year, boys score about 2 points higher than girls.  (It would be interesting to know whether the boys get better grades in math.  I suspect not.)

(The earlier scores may not be strictly comparable with later scores, because some test takers can now get "accomodations", that is, more time, or individually given tests, or something similar.)

Sweden Has Amended Its Wiretapping Law:  But the government still has significant powers, in principle.

The law, which went into effect in January 2009, gives FRA -- a civilian agency despite its name -- the right to tap all cross-border internet and telephone communication.
. . .
Among other things, the amendment specifies that only the government and the military can ask FRA to carry out surveillance, that a special court must grant an authorisation for each case of monitoring, and that all raw material must be destroyed after one year.

It also limits eavesdropping to cases defined as "external military threats", "peacemaking or humanitarian efforts abroad", "international terrorism", and "development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction", among others.

Even amended, the law was supported only by members of the governing center-right coalition.

Judging only by this account, the Swedes seem to have reached a reasonable balance, one not too different from our own.  (I am dubious about the requirement that raw materials be destroyed after a year, since intelligence operations often go on for many years, slowly putting together patterns.  But that limit may not mean much in practice.)

Still Another Estimate On The Cost Of Medical Malpractice Lawsuits:   This time, a range.

Ninety-three percent of doctors say they have practiced defensive medicine, and the real cost savings from reforming malpractice liability stem from curbing such wasteful practice.  Academic researchers have reached different conclusions on how much money tort reforms save by preventing defensive medical practice, ranging from 2 percent of all health costs in some studies to as much as 9 percent in others.

And an example:

And the cost of this litigation matters, too.  From 1992 to 2003, the cost of litigation per nursing-home bed rose 700 percent.  When trial lawyers almost sued the vaccine manufacturers out of existence in the 1980s, they drove up vaccine prices as much as 4,000 percent.

After that vaccine-liability crisis, Congress acted responsibly to establish an alternative compensation system outside the tort system, which hurt the trial bar's profits but preserved the vaccine markets.  But Congress will not take any meaningful steps to curb lawsuit abuse as a part of comprehensive health reform this year, notwithstanding that 83 percent of the American public wants them to do so.

James Copland says that the reluctance of Congress to support reform is easy to understand; lawyers gave more to congressional campaigns "than doctors and health professionals, hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceutical companies and HMOs, combined".

Paglia Is Asked, But Doesn't Really Answer:  Hermes Diaz asks Paglia why she still supports Obama, considering all her criticisms of the administration.

Here's the best she can come up with:

Opponents of Obama are perplexed by the disconnect in polling between Americans' rejection of Obama's policies and his personal popularity.  Count me among those who are very critical of many of Obama's actions or evasions but who continue to like him and to believe in his potential as a world leader.  It's true he has accomplished nothing thus far and did not remotely deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, a gift carrying a terrible curse.

It's fun to watch her struggle, from month to month, with the evidence.  I like Paglia enough to think that the evidence will win, eventually.

(Later in the piece, Paglia has some good things to say about the "elitist insults flung at Sarah Palin".)

All Right, What Do The Norwegians Think?  That's my question after reading about this pair of polls.

Either side of the Atlantic, the majority of the voting public is believes that Barack Obama was not a deserving candidate for the Nobel Prize, according to new PoliticsHome research.

In the UK there is a stronger feeling that Obama did not deserve the prize, with sixty two per cent of voters taking this view.  The comparable proportion in the US was fifty two per cent.

News of the committee’s decision came as a shock in both countries: eighty nine per cent of the British public, and eighty eight per cent of voters in the States, were surprised that the President was chosen.

Now, if the Norwegians agree with Britons and Americans, then maybe the Nobel committee will think twice about their decision.  (Or maybe not.  They don't strike me as a group given to second thoughts.)

It's just a guess, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Norwegians have opinions similar to those in the United States and Britain, maybe not so strong, but similar.

Birmingham, UK May Give Up Voting By Mail On Demand:  Five years ago, the Labour government in Britain decided to introduce voting by mail for everyone in Britain.   In some British cities, including Birmingham, that has not worked out well.

Postal voting on demand was introduced by the Government five years ago to encourage more people to vote after seeing turnouts at elections plummet over many decades.

But in Birmingham this led to industrial scale fraud in Aston and Bordesley Green in 2004 where postal votes were farmed from communities.  Despite pledges from the main parties in Birmingham and a voluntary code to stop fraud, allegations seem to surround almost every inner city poll.

Such as this recent by-election.

So Birmingham leaders from several parties are asking that on-demand voting by mail be banned in the city.

I am not a fan of the Respect Party, but this leader has it about right.

Coun[cillor] Yaqoob said: "I am very concerned that so many postal votes were rejected by the returning officer.  An investigation must be held.  If it turns out that fraud was involved, anyone responsible should face prosecution.

"But the truth is that the whole postal vote system is wide open to abuse.  For so long as it remains, someone, somewhere, will find a way to bend the rules.

It is almost eerie how similar their problems with on-demand mail ballots are to ours.

(Wonder about the ethnicity of the area with the problems?  The candidates' names will give you a hint.)

Kristof Versus Samuelson On Health Insurance "Reform"  (Samuelson wins.)  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof makes an honest argument.

Health care has often been debated as a technical or economic issue.  That has been a mistake, I believe.  At root, universal health care is not an economic or technical question but a moral one.

(Well, mostly honest.  He does write "universal health care", when he means "universal health care insurance".  But I have become so used to that particular distortion that I often pass over it.)

In other words, Kristof believes that all of us should be insured by the taxpayers, not because we would be healthier, or better off financially, but because it is wrong for a modern society not to provide insurance for its citizens (and, if I know Kristof, for its residents, legal or not).

I like the fact that Kristof has made a mostly honest argument.  (And I think he is expressing a view common among those who share his ideology, though seldom expressed this directly.)  I don't like the fact that Kristof does not admit, in this column, that requiring all of us to have government-approved health insurance will damage our economy, and restrict our freedoms.

Robert Samuelson understands what we may lose, economically, if Kristof, and others like him, force us to follow their morality.  The costs are heavy.

Downward mobility is possible.  Expanding health spending would raise taxes (to pay for government insurance), lower take-home pay (to pay for employer-provided insurance) or increase out-of-pocket medical costs.  Other drains also loom: higher energy prices to combat global warming; higher taxes to pay for underfunded state and local government pensions and repair aging infrastructure; higher federal taxes to cover deficits and payments to retirees (much of which reflect health spending).  The pressures will undermine private living standards and other public services (schools, police, defense).

The young's future has been heavily mortgaged.  Taken together, all these demands might neutralize gains in per capita incomes, especially if the economy's performance, burdened by higher taxes or budget deficits, deteriorated.  One study by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a consulting firm, examined just health spending.  The continuation of present trends would result in "falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution.  These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades."

Those costs may not matter to Kristof, and others like him.  For them, it is a matter of right and wrong, not gains and losses.

But there are also powerful moral arguments against Kristof.  Many people who can afford private health insurance choose not to buy it.  They may be foolish not to do so.  (Or they may not buy health insurance because so many states restrict the kinds of insurance people can buy, so the buyers have few good choices.)

I have thought very hard about this question, and I am unable to think of a moral argument for forcing those people to buy health insurance, as most of the Democratic plans would do in one way or another.  If John Doe prefers not to buy insurance, Kristof and company would take his money and buy it for him, or even put him in jail.  That isn't a safety net; that's a safety straitjacket.

Every Democratic plan would restrict our freedoms in many other ways, from fertility treatments to end-of-life care.  That does not bother Kristof, but it should bother anyone who values our freedoms.

(Kristof cites a study published in the American Journal of Public Health claiming that "nearly 45,000 uninsured people die annually as a consequence of not having insurance".  I have not read the study, but I know that critics of bureaucratizing health care still further are not impressed by it.)

Where Has The Reid-Pelosi-Obama Stimulus Money Gone?  Mostly not to "shovel-ready" construction projects.  In fact, most of the stimulus money has not been paid out yet.   The Department of Transportation, where you would expect to see the most "shovel-ready" projects, has been especially slow at getting money out to construction workers.  So has the Department of Interior, which is always complaining about not having enough money to maintain our national parks.

None of this will surprise students of government bureaucracies.  Typically, government bureaucracies are good at spending money for the same things, year after year, and poor at spending money for new things.  (Corporate bureaucracies often have similar problems, though theirs are usually less severe.)

The best way* to stimulate the economy quickly would have been to cut wage taxes temporarily.   But that wouldn't have been the best way to reward the interest groups who helped give Reid and Pelosi their majorities, and helped elect Obama.

By way of Bryan Caplan and Russ Roberts.

(*Perhaps I should have said the best practical way.  We could, in principle, have stimulated the economy even more by deregulating, but I don't see any practical way we could have done that quickly, even assuming the Democratic majorities in Congress and President Obama understood how deregulation could help the economy.

For what it is worth, the Canadian government seems to have done better at getting stimulus money out to their infrastructure projects.)

Zero Tolerance, Zero Common Sense:  Delaware schools are being kept safe from Cub Scouts.

Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy.  But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary's offense?  Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school.  He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch.  School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district's reform school.

You can understand why lawmakers and bureaucrats impose zero tolerance laws and regulations:  They don't trust the teachers and principals to use common sense.  And sometimes they are right.   But the answer to that problem is not to impose zero-tolerance rules, but to hire teachers and principals who can be trusted.

Update:  Zachary can go back to school, and the school district is planning to rewrite its rules.  All in all, a good ending to this story.  (One thing I am still not clear about: just how the state's laws and the school's rules combined to produce the original suspension.)

Weird Bounces:  Here's what happened in the Washington-Arizona game last Saturday.

So while the Huskies had been dominated statistically, they were only down by five points when Arizona quarterback Nick Foles tried to throw a bubble-screen pass to receiver Delashaun Dean on a first-down play with 2:49 left in the game.

It was a play Arizona had run successfully maybe a dozen times, and Huskies linebacker Mason Foster said he was intent on stopping it this time.  Sarkisian said an unsung hero on the play was VA, who the coach said "went and took away the initial bubble screen that made the quarterback pull the ball down."  That forced Foles to throw to Dean.

"I jumped it, just trying to make a play, take a shot," Foster said. "It worked in our favor."

The ball glanced off Dean's left hand, then his left foot, then up to Foster, who gathered it and ran down the sideline for a score with 2:37 left.

Foster probably didn't plan for it to happen exactly that way.

Here's a picture showing the bounce, and here's a video with highlights, including that miraculous interception.

Worth Reading:  Lewis Sorley's op-ed on the real lessons of Vietnam.

Sample:

By the time of the enemy's 1972 Easter Offensive virtually all U.S. ground troops had been withdrawn.  Supported by American airpower and naval gunfire, South Vietnam's armed forces gallantly turned back an invasion from the North amounting to the equivalent of some 20 divisions, or about 200,000 troops.

Sorley believes that, had we kept our commitments to South Vietnam, they could have defeated the 1975 North Vietnamese invasion, as well.

(Here's Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam.  It's a book I may have to read.)

"No Battle Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy"  Or even, sometimes, with events.  Yesterday, I had planned, if the weather was good, to drive clockwise around Mt. Rainier, photographing as I went.  Listening to the morning news, I learned that Highway 410, which I planned to follow for the first part of my circuit, was blocked by a large landslide, east of the mountain.  The blockage was not on part of my route, but I checked the Mt. Rainier automated phone message anyway, and was relieved to learn that the highways I would be taking (410, 123, 706) were all open.

And they were, when I called.  By the time I got up to the intersection of Highway 410 and Highway 123, the latter had been closed for repairs.  It was late enough so that doing most of the circuit counterclockwise before dark was impossible, by automobile anyway.

So I changed my plan and drove back along 410, and then up to the visitor's center in the northeast corner of the park, Sunrise.  I still had time for a four mile hike, and a few pictures, though I can't say that any of them are spectacular.  It was enjoyable, but not what I had planned.

There's nothing extraordinary about the way I had to adapt my plan, but there is a lesson in it.  For instance, if I had had real time information, I could have changed my plan sooner, and avoided an hour or so of pointless driving.  (I was listening to traffic updates on a news station, but they would be unlikely to know about the closing of 123 unless the park officials had told them.  Oddly enough, during the day, the station kept running a story recommending the route I had planned to take, if you wanted to see fall colors.)

Though real-time intelligence is often what we need, it is usually unavailable.  We would like, for instance, to know what is happening in our economy, but most economic statistics are a month or two out of date, and only approximate.  (Some still think we can "fine tune" our economy; that strikes me as about as plausible as the idea that we can steer a supertanker, relying on week old reports of its position.)

(Here's are more pictures of the landslide, and an explanation of rotational landslides.

The quotation in the title is from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who knew a little about battle plans.)

Canada Gained Jobs in September.

Canada's jobless rate unexpectedly fell last month, signaling that the U.S.'s largest trading partner has begun an economic recovery that may lead the central bank to increase interest rates within the next year.

Employment rose by 30,600, six times more than forecast, on new jobs in construction and government, Statistics Canada said today.  The jobless rate fell to 8.4 percent from 8.7 percent in August.

Again.

Canada added a better-than-expected 27,100 jobs in August, one of the biggest gains since the recession began in the country last fall.

If the US economy were doing as well, we would have added about a half a million jobs in August and September.

We shouldn't ascribe all these Canadian gains to government policies.  Canada's banks did not behave as foolishly as many American banks did, and Canada is still benefitting from the run up in oil prices.

Even so, I think we can give some credit to Prime Minister Harper, as I said last month.  And I don't think we should be surprised to see an economist produce a better economic plan than a lawyer (Harry Reid), a socialite (Nancy Pelosi), and a lawyer (Barack Obama) did.

(Incidentally, the Canadian recovery is good news for the United States, since they buy so much from us.)

"What Happened To Global Warming?"  The BBC asks the question many of us have been wondering about.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true.  For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

The BBC reporter, Paul Hudson, then goes on to describe some of the challenges to global warming models from skeptics.  He gives, as far as this non-expert can tell, a fair description of the arguments on each side.

Two points I've made before deserve repeating:  First, if the earth does not warm, at some point* the climate models that predict warming must be modified, or even abandoned.  Second, we should not make too much of this pause in warming — yet.  The earth is still warmer than it was fifty years ago.  (We could be seeing a combination of a warming trend from CO2 and a natural cycle, with the two temporarily cancelling each other out.)

That said, though my opinions on this controversy are still mixed, I am a little more skeptical about the models than I was five years ago.

(*How many years should we wait?  I haven't been able to find an answer to that from the climate modelers.  Meanwhile, there are subsidiary predictions made by the models, which can and should be checked now.

Here's a comparison of temperature trends and predictions for the current decade.)

Salmon Days In Issaquah, Washington:  And the salmon were entertaining thousands of visitors last Sunday.

I celebrated by walking through the crowds, doing some people watching, talking to some local Republicans — and eating a little smoked salmon.

(Those are Chinook salmon in the picture; the Sockeye salmon will begin returning this week, according to the guides.

Since they are returning to the hatchery where they were born, they all have tags.  In fact, according to one of the guides, the nose tags the salmon wear on leaving the hatchery even identify which pond they were raised in, so the hatchery can compare different ways of raising the fish.)

Many Fashion Designers Dislike Women:  That's a cliché, but it's a cliché that deserves repeating from time to time.  For evidence, see the pictures in this New York Times article, and in the slide shows that accompany the article.  (Partial exception:   Some of John Galliano's designs.)

(Am I making a political point, indirectly?  Perhaps.)

Is Swine Flu Dangerous?  Yes, but less so than ordinary seasonal flu.

Repeat, there is no flu epidemic.  There will be, but only because we have one every year.

The CDC no longer publishes specific data on swine-flu cases or deaths.  But the FluTracker Web site (flu- tracker.rhizalabs.com/) does.  As of last Friday, it listed 680 total US deaths compared to 644 the week before.  That's just 36 deaths in a week -- or about the number the CDC estimates die every four hours of "regular" flu during the season.
. . .
New York City data indicate that swine flu is perhaps a tenth as lethal as the seasonal variety.   Plus, government Web sites from such southern hemisphere countries as Australia and New Zealand, whose flu season is now ending, show fewer flu deaths than normal.

So, don't panic.  If you're in one of the higher risk groups, you'll probably want to get vaccinated, but you shouldn't worry more than you usually do about the flu.

(Full disclosure:  Although I am old enough so that many doctors would recommend that I get vaccinated, I don't plan to, mostly because I have been in excellent health in recent years.   But you should consult your own doctor rather than relying on my atypical experience.)

That CBO Estimate On The Baucus "Bill"?  Even the man who made it knows it's bogus, though he has to say so indirectly.

These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation.  For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare's payments to physicians has frequently been modified (either through legislation or administrative action) to avoid reductions in those payments.  The projected savings for the proposal reflect the cumulative impact of a number of specifications that would constrain payment rates for providers of Medicare services.  The long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if those provisions were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.  (If those changes arose from future legislation, CBO would estimate their costs when that legislation was being considered by the Congress.)

(Emphasis added.)

For instance, suppose more clinics follow the Arizona Mayo clinic and drop out of Medicare.  Will Congress just keep trying to reduce payments, or will they respond to their constituents, and raise payments, as they have so many times in the past?

Doug Elmendorf knows this, but the Congressional Budget Office rules prevent him from saying so directly.  He must use the assumptions he is given for his estimates, however ridiculous those assumptions may be.

(By way of Arnold Kling.)

How Funny Was The Nobel Peace Prize Award?  So funny that George Stephanopoulos is passing on a joke collection about the choice.

(I haven't checked to see whether anyone has called Stephanopoulos a racist yet for posting this collection.)

Arizona Mayo Clinic Drops Medicare Patients:  Here's the story.

One of the Mayo Clinic's two family-medicine practices in Arizona soon will stop accepting Medicare, leaving thousands of patients to pay out of pocket for routine doctor's visits or find a new physician.

The changes, which go into effect Jan. 1, apply only to primary-care services offered at Mayo Clinic Family Medicine-Arrowhead.

Mayo will accept Medicare for critical care and specialty services at its north Phoenix hospital.   Lab services, physical therapy and X-rays at the Glendale family-practice office also will continue to be covered.
. . .
[Dr. R. Scott] Gorman said Medicare reimbursement rates have remained stagnant over the past decade, while inflation for medical services has increased 4 percent to 8 percent annually.

"Medicare now only covers about half our costs," Gorman said.

And I don't suppose they can make up those losses on volume.

As I understand it, many doctors are in a similar position.  They may subsidize some Medicare patients by charging higher fees to their private patients, but there are limits to how many they can accept on those terms.

Mayo Clinic is often described as an especially efficient, as well as an especially competent, operation.  If they are having trouble living on Medicare payments, many others must be as well.

(Here's a link to the clinic.)

Check The Water In Oslo:  That's my advice to Norway, after reading this news.

U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew criticism as well as praise.

The decision to bestow one of the world's top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, provoked gasps of surprise from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.

(The nine months is a little misleading.  Obama made the "short list" some time in February or March.)

They should check the Oslo water because you never know when some joker might put hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply.

Most people outside Oslo seem more sensible.  For example:

Issam al-Khazraji, a day laborer in Baghdad, said: "He doesn't deserve this prize. All these problems -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- have not been solved...The man of 'change' hasn't changed anything yet."

Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing "joke.

An earlier prize winner was shocked by the news.

Poland is stunned to see the Nobel Peace Prize given to U.S. President Barack Obama.  You can always count on Poland's outspoken ex-president and its best-know Nobel Prize laureate Lech Walesa to be undiplomatic:

"Who?  What?  So Fast?"  a shocked Walesa said when reporters told him about the latest Obama win.

"Well, there's hasn't been any contribution to peace yet.  He's proposing things, he's initiating things, but he is yet to deliver," he said.

Even supporters of Obama were embarrassed by the award.  Mickey Kaus suggested that Obama decline the prize.   (An excellent idea.)  Maria Farell of Crooked Timber was startled.  Brett at Harry's Place wonders whether the Nobel committee is "insane", and suggests a better recipient.

You can find roundups of reactions here and here, and a good discussion of the reasons for the award here.