powerline - obamacare ruling not a commerce clause mandate

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/the-bottom-line-for-the-supreme-court.php


The bottom line for the Supreme Court


Reportedly, the bottom line in the opinion upholding the individual mandate is this: “Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.”



Apparently, then, in the view of the majority this turns out not to be a Commerce Clause case after all. A majority found that the individual mandate violates the Commerce Clause, but it still survives.



Justice Kennedy wrote the dissent. He, along with Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, would have struck down the entire Act. Thus, the always unpredictable Kennedy came through; the newly unpredictable Roberts did not.

creative class - race and gender statistics

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/06/race-gender-and-creative-class/2225/

The implications are sobering. Although the rise of the creative class has opened up new avenues of advancement for women and members of ethnic minorities, its existence has certainly failed to put an end to long-standing divisions of race and gender. While my own research has found a strong association between centers of high-tech industry and communities that are more open toward immigrants and gays, it also found a troublingly strong negative correlation between high-tech concentrations and the percentage of the population that is non-white.




On October 8, 2011, the scholar and tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa sent out an apposite tweet on this subject: “More than 50% of Silicon Valley is foreign born. Less than 5% women, almost no blacks or Hispanics, sadly. A lot needs to be fixed.”

abridged and revised excerpt of material from The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited, out this month from Basic Books.




Keywords: Jobs, race, Gender, economics, Creative Class



Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here

legaltheoryblog - supreme court obamacare decision represents gestalt shift in thinking

http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2012/06/the-decision-to-uphold-the-mandate-as-a-gestalt-shift-in-constitutional-law.html

The Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate today on a 5-4 vote. The decisive opinion by Justice Roberts reasons that the mandate was not authorized by commerce clause, but instead upheld the mandate as a tax. Justice Roberts wrote:




Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.



Individuals are not required to purchase insurance; instead they have the option to pay a tax instead. On the medicaid, issue Justice Roberts's opinion indicates that the Congress cannot encourage (or coerce) states to participate in the expansion of medicaid by conditioning their receipt of existing medicaid funds on their participation.



Had the Court struck down the mandate, it would have clearly represented a tectonic shift in American constitutional law. In the extraordinarily unlikely event that there had been a majority opinion authored by one of the four justices fromt he left wing of the Court, the decision would have cemented (at least for a time) the most common academic understanding of Congress's power under Article One of the Constitution. Roughly, that understanding is that Congress has plenary legislative power, limited only by the carve outs created by the Supreme Court's decisions in Lopez and Morrison.

On the alternative gestalt, the power of the federal government is limited to the enumerated powers in Section Eight of Article One, plus the New Deal additions. These are huge, but not plenary and unlimited.




Today, it became clear that four of the Supreme Court's nine justices reject the academic consensus. As Justice Kennedy states in his dissent joined by Scalia, Thomas, and Alito:



"In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety."



The alternative gestalt is no longer an outlier, a theory endorsed by a few eccentric professors and one odd justice of the Supreme Court. And because Justice Roberts believes that the mandate is not a valid exercise of the commerce clause (but is valid if interpreted as a tax), he has left open the possibility that there is a fifth justice who endorses the alternative gestalt.



We are only minutes into a long process of digesting the Health Care Decision. But in my opinion, one thing is clear. Things are now "up for grabs" in a way that no one anticipated when the saga of the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act began.

walter russell mead - public pension problems

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/06/25/time-to-occupy-the-pension-funds/

The biggest scam going in American financial life may be the collusive effort by Wall Street, the political class, and public sector unions to use union retirement money to prop up Wall Street speculation.




Step One: state politicians promise big pension and health care benefits to their unionized work forces, but don’t set aside enough money to fund those benefits when the bill comes due. This makes union leaders and unions look good, because they can point to the shiny new benefits they have negotiated with the politicians. Meanwhile, it makes the politicians happy because the unions support them with contributions and volunteers at election time, but because the unions don’t insist on full funding for the benefits, the politicians don’t have to raise costs or otherwise disturb the big majority of voters who don’t work for the government.

Step Two: Make aggressive assumptions about the rate of return on pension investment funds. ...[which] forces America’s public sector pension funds into the deep end of the financial markets, leading pension funds to be major investors in hedge funds, derivatives and various other not-for-the-widows-and-orphans investments.
...
Pension funds should not be aggressively invested. Retirement funds should be conservatively managed — and that means enough has to be paid into those funds so that with moderate investment results, retirees can be sure that their promised benefits will in fact be paid.




The key to this change is stronger regulation of government pension funds, to force them to observe the same requirements that apply to private sector pension funds as well. Amazingly, the same union leaders and lefty experts who call for tough regulations elsewhere in the economy want to keep government workers chained to the roulette wheel in the Wall Street casino: they are bitterly opposed to seriously prudential regulation of government pension funds.

atlantic - why porn and journalism have same financial problems

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/why-porn-and-journalism-have-the-same-big-problem/258893/

In fact, it's a bit like getting them to pay for a newspaper. Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web.

What holds for journalism in this case holds for sex. In both cases, the competition is so broad that customers are likely to go elsewhere rather than pay. There are, obviously, exceptions  in the case of newspapers -- the Wall Street Journal has a profitable paywall, and the New York Times appears to be having some early success with its own.

watch out for more deflation

http://pointsandfigures.com/2012/06/26/watch-out-for-more-deflation/

Maybe we should all buy some long dated out of the money puts on the S&P ($SPY, $ES_F)? The whole world has become Japan.





The government stimulus had a multiplier effect of 0. It did nothing for job growth or GDP growth in the US. Combine the inefficiency of US fiscal policy with the continued implosion of Europe, and you have a world wide malaise. In China, because of macro economic effects, wages are rising, costs to produce are increasing. Companies are also wary of both the poor property rights system and the lengthened supply chain. China is slowing down.




The economies of the world aren’t going to contract because of government spending decreasing. They are going to contract because the continued machinations of the world’s central bankers have screwed up the costs of capital normally paid by the markets. The money that they have printed hasn’t gone into the productive marketplace. Instead, it went to shore up balance sheets and sits.



Money isn’t turning over. There is no velocity.

decline in chicago gives clues to what would happen in an obama second term

http://news.investors.com/article/616013/201206251734/obama-hometown-of-chicago-in-decline.htm?src=IBDDAE

Last weekend was all too typical in Chicago these days, with four dead and 29 wounded throughout a city that's been home to one of the nation's toughest gun laws. Chicago has become the murder capital of America with a 50% increase in violence for the past year.


Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recently disclosed a staggering $108 billion debt tab across various governing bodies in the county that translates to $63,525 per Chicago household. Unfunded pension liabilities make up nearly a quarter of that. Not all the debt is Chicago's, a city with the nation's highest sales tax, but enough of it is.

Chicago lost 200,000 people from 2000 to 2009. The only one of the nation's 15 largest cities to lose people. Of all cities, it fell between Detroit, reigning champion of progressive urban decay, and hurricane ravaged New Orleans, in the number of people fleeing to greener pastures.

maurice sendak fantasized about suicide bombing bush and cheney

http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/25/maurice-sendak-fantasized-about-killing-bush-and-cheney-in-a-suicide-bombing/


Last October, Sendak was interviewed by Gary Groth of The Comics Journal. And unfortunately, he said this:



SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”



GROTH: A group hug.



SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.



GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]



SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.







Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/25/maurice-sendak-fantasized-about-killing-bush-and-cheney-in-a-suicide-bombing/#ixzz1yvBynRLD

globalwarming #fail - antarctic ice shelves NOT melting

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/

Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.
"Previous ocean models ... have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place," says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team which has obtained two years' worth of direct measurements below the massive Fimbul Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica - the first ever to be taken.

Justice Scalia Blasts Obama deportation directive

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/234571-justice-scalia-blasts-obamas-deportation-directive
The conservative justice accused Obama of selectively enforcing only those immigration laws that he deems appropriate and said states would never have joined the union if the framers of the Constitution had intended for the executive branch to wield power in such a way.



“But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforc­ing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind,” Scalia wrote.






“The delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits,” Scalia wrote.

Marginalism and higher ed paradox

http://strategyprofs.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/marginalism-and-the-higher-ed-paradox/

My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education.




Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much. As a result, the human capital difference between a college and high-school graduate has increased, because the first increments of education are more valuable on the job market than the later ones. It used to be that everybody could read and understand something like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the typical college graduates could also understand Milton or Spencer. Now, nobody grasps Milton but only the college grads can process Animal Farm, and for employers the See Spot Run–>Animal Farm jump is more valuable than the Animal Farm–>Milton jump.



So the value of a college education has increased even as its rigor has declined, because willingness to pay for quality is really willingness to pay for incremental quality.

Obama merely mimicking mannerisms of intellectuals

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/112109/

December 26, 2010


JUAN WILLIAMS says that Sarah Palin can’t stand on the same intellectual stage as Barack Obama. He offers no evidence, however, for the proposition that Obama is particularly bright, and I can’t say I see a big difference.



Obama’s former colleague Richard Epstein says:





I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.



Personally, I think Richard Epstein’s a better judge of who’s intellectual than Juan Williams is. But I think most of the press — for whom the phrase “an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual” may also apply — is easier to fool.

Hotair - David Brooks - Dumb to assert Executive Privilege

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/24/brooks-gee-it-was-pretty-dumb-to-assert-executive-privilege-huh/

“I think politically it’s stupid, because it is one thing if you’re invoking executive privilege over some national security issue. This is a policy everybody admits was profoundly stupid. Why are you not saying, ‘OK, this was a stupid policy, let’s get it out there and let’s figure out how it came about.’”

TaxProf - Winners of 'Dinner with Obama" subject to $560 tax bill

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2012/06/dinner-with-.html

William Jacobson (Cornell) blogs the tax consequences of the Obama campaign's Dinner With Barack fundraising raffle. Three winners and their guests will receive:




•Roundtrip airfare (valued at $1,200)

•One night in a hotel ($200)

•Dinner with President Obama ($200)

The rules state that "all federal, state and local taxes associated with the receipt or use of any prize are the sole responsibility of the winner." The $1,600 is includible in each winner's income under § 74 -- at the 35% rate, that results in $560 of federal income tax.

Hollywood's White House

http://freebeacon.com/hollywoods-white-house/

What Spielberg and Katzenberg should know is that a film can have an expensive and superb marketing campaign, an A-list star, tremendous special effects, and a big-time budget, but still flop spectacularly if it does not tell a compelling story. All of Hollywood’s script doctoring cannot rescue this particular tale of a failed presidency—the story of how a young, ambitious, liberal Democratic senator promised a dispirited American people a new era of bipartisan reform, and then handed the controls of government to hard-knuckle lefty partisans such as Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Barney Frank, and Harry Reid. No amount of glitz and glam can mask a four-year decrease in per capita disposable personal income and household wealth, decelerating economic growth, rising health care costs, and financial downgrades.


The result is an over-budget, half-baked mess of a film, with a premise that overpromises but under-delivers, and a leading man who grows more annoying by the hour. Obama for America 2012 may appeal to niche audiences, but it is underperforming its 2008 box office, and may be limited to select theaters in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Some critics may enjoy the lavish but ultimately rather pathetic spectacle. I am waiting for The Dark Knight Rises.

Reason - Can we get by with fewer teachers

http://reason.com/archives/2012/06/22/could-we-really-get-by-with-fewer-teache

When it comes to teachers, in 2008 (the last year for which the federal government lists actual data), there were 15.3 pupils per teacher in public K-12 schools. That's the lowest recorded number. In 1998, the number was 16.4 and in 1978, it was 19.3. Over this same time period, the amount of money per student has increased tremendously and scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have stayed flat at best. Since 1970, the number of public-school students has increased by about 9 percent while the number of public-school employees (teachers plus everyone else) has increased by 96 percent. Something ain't right there. It seems quite plausible that states and local school districts can lose a good chunk of teachers without significantly impairing the quality (that may not be the right word) of K-12 public education.




What about cops? According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1992 there were 332 "full-tme state and local law enforcement employees per 100,000 residents." By 2008, that number had jumped to 373 full-timers. To be fair, crime has been declining over that time frame, so maybe the extra cops have really made a difference. Yet most experts point to factors other than the sheer number of law enforcement employees to explain the decline. The population is aging, which correlates with less crime; the sorts of gadgets and gizmos that get ripped off are more affordable for everyone, leading to less crime; surveillance cameras (both private and public) seem to have chilled thefts and assaults; and more. So there's every reason to believe that we can scrimp on high-cost uniformed cops and not be met with a crime wave that will turn even Smallville, USA into Gotham City any time soon.