Monday, August 3, 2015

07/30/2015

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a final rule revising its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation to clarify and streamline what local communities must do to use HUD funds.

Specifically, communities will have to examine whether their investments have helped provide all residents — including minorities and other groups that have historically faced discrimination — with access to better opportunities. The new rule was designed after careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of previous rules and made improvements where needed.

While these types of rules are rarely implemented without detractors, the arguments against AFFH that appeared in a July 9 editorial titled "HUD's Own Study Dashes Utopian Dream Of Cross-Neighborhood Prosperity" attempt to use an evaluation of a HUD demonstration program — Moving to Opportunity (MTO) — to suggest that this effort and all future programs are doomed to fail.

As an assistant secretary for the HUD department that oversaw the study, I penned the foreword and summarized this analysis. Since my words were the key supporting detail in the editorial's theory, I feel it is important that I respond to set the record straight.

First, the MTO evaluation found many benefits that your editorial staff overlooked. Those who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods experienced significant reductions in diabetes and obesity, two conditions that are often precursors to chronic health ailments.

These improvements reduce the need for health services, thereby reducing health care expenditures and limiting expenses associated with Medicare and Medicaid.

These are important benefits that should not be written off.

Second, the record on the demonstration is far from settled.

You should not have interpreted my forward to that study as the final word on the subject, as it simply summarizes the study's contents and is not a definitive statement.

Indeed, many other researchers studying MTO have found evidence suggesting that the demonstration resulted in substantial income and other benefits for families who were in the program.

For example, a recent study by Harvard economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz found that children, particularly those who moved when younger and thus had more ability to take advantage of the better educational resources, had incomes 31% higher than those who remained in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods by the time they were in their mid-20s.

This is a big effect, and the authors suggest that mobility may be an important component of a strategy to end poverty's persistence across generations.

So I would suggest that the claim of "failure" is at best overblown and more likely just flat-out wrong.

Third, and quite importantly, your suggestion that the HUD regulation is new social engineering that mandates outcomes in jurisdictions is also just wrong.

The regulation revises procedures that have been in place for decades; the mandate is not new.

In fact, I was tasked with helping conceive of the new approach and so am well-versed in its goals and structure.

The new regulation streamlines the process so that communities can better assess their efforts to improve the quality of life of their citizens and consider new strategies in those cases where some residents — often minority residents — have not benefited as much as they might otherwise.

Communities that want to do right by all of their residents will clearly benefit by these revisions. Hopefully, those not so readily inclined will start doing better.

Moreover, under this new regulation, communities will have broad discretion to craft a locally appropriate strategy to ensure that all citizens have access to opportunity.

In some cases, it might involve locating affordable housing in more affluent areas. But in many cases, it will involve investing to improve schools, transportation linkages to job opportunities, or other revitalization strategies.

There are many possible approaches, and HUD clearly recognizes this. The opening paragraphs of the regulation make this point explicitly.

Finally, while I am happily and proudly an African-American economist, highlighting that fact in your editorial was wholly inappropriate, as it implied that academics, government officials and African-Americans neither respect evidence nor develop opinions based on evidence.

This is a low blow that is wrong on all counts. I hope that in the future, the IBD editorial staff will not demean itself by using such transparent race-baiting tactics.

• Bostic is director of the University of Southern California Bedrosian Center on Governance and former assistant secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Immigration As Obama's Vehicle For 'Fundamentally Transforming' America

256 Comments

07/30/2015

Immigration: The open borders movement has long been suspected as a scheme to turn red states blue to ensure permanent Democratic rule. A slew of new reports shows that the plot is real — and may be succeeding.

Democrats have long had trouble selling undisguised socialism to the voters, but are not without ideas. If U.S. voters won't buy the bigger government programs they seek, well then importing new voters from elsewhere might just work. After all, socialism is attractive to many poor people from less-developed nations, and that's who gets visas these days.

That's why immigration is rapidly emerging as a trump card for Democrats. No party has benefited as much from the million or so visas issued to new residents from third world countries each year — 29.5 million from 1980 to 2012 — nor has any other party fought so hard to extend amnesty to millions more illegals.

According to a report from Breitbart News, mass immigration has turned Virginia, long a conservative bastion, into a Democrat stronghold.

The news agency called it "a new California" which is to say that mass immigration has already turned the former state of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon into a Democratic one-party state, with votes from immigrants, legal or illegal, cancelling out the votes of the native born. It's clear from the well-sourced Breitbart report that mass immigration is a major boon to Democrats.

"The bottom line is that more immigration favors Democrats," wrote Byron York in a 2014 Washington Examiner column. "There is no prediction of Democratic electoral ascendancy that doesn't rely on demographic factors as the main engine of the party's dominance."

This calls for a re-examination of what's going on and whether it's in the broader U.S. national interest, outside of party politics.

It's long gone undiscussed that impact of current immigration policies, dating from the days of Ted Kennedy and his claims to prioritize family reunification, has had the actual effect of importing Democrats.

Now with President Obama extending amnesty to 664,607 illegals by executive order, including many with links to crime, terrorism and gangs, excluding virtually no one, it's clear that it's a vote-gathering game.

The sooner this issue is distilled to its raw political equation, the sooner we can have a national discussion about what kind of immigration benefits America, instead of what kind of immigration benefits Democrats.

ObamaCare Co-Ops Hit With Huge Losses

ObamaCare Co-Ops Hit With Huge Losses, Audit Finds

11 Comments

BY JOHN MERLINE

07/31/2015

In inspector general report released this week finds that all but one of the 23 nonprofit insurance co-ops created by ObamaCare are in dire financial straits, with several running substantial losses last year.

The IG report notes that most of the co-ops missed their enrollment goals last year, some by wide margins. Signups at three co-ops were just 4% of what they'd planned for.

The IG also found that 19 of the 23 did far worse financially than they'd expected in 2014, with more than half having net losses of $15 million or more.

This could put significant taxpayer money at risk. To get the co-ops up and running, ObamaCare provided $2.9 billion in low-interest startup and solvency loans. The IG warns that several might have trouble paying them back.

While low enrollment hurt many of the co-ops, high enrollment numbers were no guarantee of success either. The Kentucky Health co-op exceeded its 2014 enrollment goal by 83%, yet had a $50 million loss that year, the biggest loss of any of the co-ops.

The CoOpportunity signed up seven times the number expected in Iowa and Nebraska, and yet was the first one to fail when it closed shop earlier this year.

Louisiana's insurance department announced recently that the Louisiana Health Cooperative would cease operations at the end of the year. And the Tennessee co-op — which lost more than $22 million last year — had to freeze enrollment in January.

The IG notes that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs ObamaCare and oversees the co-op program, has put four of them "on enhanced oversight or corrective action plans."

The IG also found that co-ops in several states priced their plans above their for-profit competitors, despite the fact that the co-ops were created specifically to put downward pressure on premiums.

Meanwhile, 17 ObamaCare co-ops have put in for double-digit rate increases for 2016, according to an IBD review of rate requests, all of them citing ongoing losses.

Follow John Merline on Twitter: @IBD_JMerline.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

IN THE PAST, MAJORITY-CHRISTIAN NATIONS MIGHT HAVE INTERVENED TO PROTECT THEM, BUT NOW THAT’S RACIST OR SOMETHING:

IN THE PAST, MAJORITY-CHRISTIAN NATIONS MIGHT HAVE INTERVENED TO PROTECT THEM, BUT NOW THAT’S RACIST OR SOMETHING: The Islamic State’s Christian and Yizidi Sex Slaves.

Unlike Muslims, who can conform and wait out ISIS until the day it is defeated, Christians, along with “polytheist” Yizidis, can don veils and give up cigarettes and alcohol, but, as non-Muslims, their very presence is an intolerable offense to the year-old “caliphate.” These minority religious groups in Iraq and Syria, lacking protecting armies or militias of their own, find themselves in unique peril. During his Bolivian trip this month, Pope Francis called it “genocide.”
ISIS demands nothing less than the conversion of all Christians and Yizidis to Islam under penalty of death for men and enslavement for women and children. (Another frequently cited option for Christian “People of the Book”, the payment of jizya, is a ruse, for the tax is raised until it becomes unpayable and property and lives are taken after all. Hence, last summer, Mosul’s bishops chose exile for their communities, rather than attend an ISIS meeting to learn of its jizya terms.)
The beheadings, crucifixions, and other means ISIS uses to slaughter unarmed Christian and Yizidi men—from priests and bishops to destitute migrant workers—have been proudly displayed by the ultra violent group on social media and have drawn condemnations worldwide. But the Islamic State’s “revival” of the institution of chattel slavery—sex slavery of Christian and Yizidi women and girls no less—has faded from public attention.

Hey, some dentist shot a lion.

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

“SOCIALISM ALWAYS STARTS WITH THE SAME PROMISES AND END WITH THE SAME DISASTERS,”

“SOCIALISM ALWAYS STARTS WITH THE SAME PROMISES AND END WITH THE SAME DISASTERS,” Glenn tweeted earlier today, linking to a Bloomberg report that “Venezuelan soldiers seized a food distribution center rented by companies including Nestle SA, PepsiCo. Inc and Empresas Polar SA in Caracas as the government looks to boost support ahead of elections.”

Nestlé, eh? That business name rings a bell; it’s what launched Jonah Goldberg to write Liberal Fascism, which focused several chapters on a century’s worth of corporatism, the intertwining of government and corporations, much beloved by the namesake publisher of Bloomberg (and in an even more radical form by Bernie Sanders), which the post-Weimar government of Germany dubbed the Gleichschaltung. As Jonah told Kathryn Jean Lopez in 2009, at the apogee of the left’s Hopenchange Obamamania:

You know, when I first started pondering the book, I thought it might be all about economics. About ten years ago I went on a junket to Switzerland and attended a talk with the CEO of Nestlé. Listening to him, it became very clear to me that he had little to no interest in free markets or capitalism properly understood. He saw his corporation as a “partner” with governments, NGOs, the U.N., and other massive multinationals. The profit motive was good for efficiency and rewarding talent, but beyond that, he wanted order and predictability and as much planning as he could get. I think that mindset informs the entire class of transnational progressives, the shock troops of what H. G. Wells hoped would lead to his liberal-fascist “world brain.”
If you look at how most liberals think about economics, they want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities (think industrial policy), and progressive organizations to come up with “inclusive” policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism — it’s corporatism. When you listen to how Obama is making economic policy with “everyone at the table,” he’s describing corporatism, the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board — so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort — the Nazis called it theGleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along. When you listen to Obama demonize Chrysler’s bondholders simply because they want their contracts enforced and the rule of law sustained, you get a sense of what I’m talking about.
I don’t think Obama wants a brutal tyranny any more than Hillary Clinton does (which is to say I don’t think he wants anything of the sort). But I do think they honestly believe that progress is best served if everyone falls in line with a national agenda, a unifying purpose, a “village” mentality expanded to include all of society. That sentiment drips from almost every liberal exhortation about everything from global warming to national service. But to point it out earns you the label of crank. As I said a minute ago about that “We’re All Fascists Now” chapter, I think people fail to understand that tyrannies — including soft, Huxleyan tyrannies — aren’t born from criminal conspiracies by evil men; they’re born by progressive groupthink.

And they all end the same way, as Glenn noted today. In the meantime though, if anybody can up the chocolate ration, I’m sure the post-Chavez government, having seized one of Nestlé’s assets, can.

Huma Abedin's "Special" Employment Relationship

HUMA ABEDIN’S “SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP”: The Washington Post reports that longtime Clinton confidant and aide, Huma Abedin (also wife of disgraced Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner) was overpaid by the State Department and may have violated the State Department’s conflict-of-interest rules due to her “special employment relationship” with the Clintons:

In letters sent Thursday to Abedin, Kerry and the Office of Inspector General, [Senator Chuck] Grassley wrote that staff of the inspector general had found “at least a reasonable suspicion of a violation” of the law concerning the “theft of public money through time and attendance fraud” as well as “conflicts of interest connected to her overlapping employment.”
Grassley also raised the possibility that efforts to investigate Abedin’s actions were thwarted because many of her exchanges were sent through Clinton’s private e-mail server. . . .
Since 2013, Grassley has been inquiring about Abedin’s “special government employee” status, which during her final six months at the State Department allowed her to take outside employment with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm led by longtime Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band.

Paul Mirengoff over at PowerLine notes:

By allowing it, Clinton wasn’t just helping a friend boost her income. She was increasing the potential leverage of the Clinton machine, and in ways that could, and maybe did, benefit the Clinton Foundation.
The Abedin scandal is thus related to the “Clinton cash” scandal.
It is also related to Hillary’s email scandal. According to Grassley, the State Department investigators have “reason to believe that email evidence relevant to [its] inquiry was contained in emails sent and received from her account on Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, making them unavailable to [the investigators’ office] through its normal statutory right of access to records.”

It’s all just another thread in Clinton’s intertwined, rotten ball of corruption. The fact that her closest aide-de-camp has received special favors and status is par for the course.

Obama’s pathetic attempt to spin the IRS scandal

y Post Editorial Board

July 26, 2015

| 8:00pm

No sooner did President Obama claim last week the IRS scandal was just a mirage than new evidence emerged to show it was anything but.

The conservative group Judicial Watch says documents it obtained “confirm” the agency targeted the donors of certain tax-exempt organizations. And the Government Accountability Office faulted IRS procedures, saying they failed to prevent bias in the selection of nonprofits for audits. That’s key, since the agency has been accused of targeting conservative groups.

Yet here was Obama on the Jon Stewart show denying the IRS did anything wrong.

“The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there,” said Obama. “They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands.” Indeed, he added, “the real scandal” is that the agency doesn’t have the money to do more audits. Right.

So did the agency do anything wrong?

You be the judge:

First, there’s the IRS’ internal auditor charging the agency targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
Then there’s Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the heart of the scandal, pleading the Fifth and claiming her hard drive crashed, destroying all the evidence.
Later it turns out the IRS deliberately erased her backups, after the messages were subject to a congressional subpoena.
And we learn the Justice Department apparently colluded with the IRS, discussing “several possible theories to bring criminal charges under FEC law” against groups “posing” as tax-exempt nonprofits.

Of course, the biggest scandal of all is that Team Obama has managed to stonewall and leave the public hanging. And that no one has been held accountable.

Nutz & Boltz

Monday, August 3, 2015

Economist: U.S. Plan To Move Minorities To New Neighborhoods Works

Economist: U.S. Plan To Move Minorities To New Neighborhoods Works

Immigration As Obama's Vehicle For 'Fundamentally Transforming' America

Immigration As Obama's Vehicle For 'Fundamentally Transforming' America

ObamaCare Co-Ops Hit With Huge Losses

ObamaCare Co-Ops Hit With Huge Losses, Audit Finds

Saturday, August 1, 2015

IN THE PAST, MAJORITY-CHRISTIAN NATIONS MIGHT HAVE INTERVENED TO PROTECT THEM, BUT NOW THAT’S RACIST OR SOMETHING:

“SOCIALISM ALWAYS STARTS WITH THE SAME PROMISES AND END WITH THE SAME DISASTERS,”

Huma Abedin's "Special" Employment Relationship

Obama’s pathetic attempt to spin the IRS scandal

Obama’s pathetic attempt to spin the IRS scandal