USPS pension Ponzi scheme

This Reason magazine article is about the United States Postal Service's pension system. Its pension system has a $50 billion unfunded liability. That's an "accounting term for the gap between what actuaries expect the system to owe current workers and retirees for the rest of their lives and the revenue it's expected to take in from paychecks and investment earnings." 

If a private sector company's pension plan has a severe unfunded liability, the federal government's PBGC will intervene and shut it down. The federal government is not likewise intervening on the USPS pension plan. This shows the federal government's hypocrisy and a double standard. 

The article also refers to the $70 billion unfunded liability of the USPS fund for paying health care expenses for retired workers. There is no PBGC counterpart for private sector plans that pay such expenses. Private sector companies are not required to prefund health care expenses for retired workers mainly because they could, theoretically, eliminate those benefits at any time. If a private company terminates a plan that pays retiree health care benefits, it doesn't make a new gaping hole because the payments it makes are small. Nearly all retirees get most of their health care expenses paid for by Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and Medicare supplement insurance. In other words, there are alternative resources. However, there is no different resource for retiree USPS health care expenses. The federal government still has the funding obligation. The only way the federal government could get rid of its liability for USPS retirees is to stop paying their health care expenses. Rest assured that won't happen.

John Dewey on rights and government

Jonah Goldberg's article The Newest Deal in The Dispatch includes the following about John Dewey, a leader in the "progressive" Progressive movement during its formative years:

Philosophically, the New Deal drew on—or at least reflected—Dewey’s and Woodrow Wilson’s contempt for the outdated vision of the Founders. The Founders “lacked,” Dewey wrote in Liberalism and Social Action, “historic sense and interest.” The Burkean and Madisonian vision of government simply serving to protect liberties and enforce fair, neutral rules was inadequate next to what could be accomplished with a sufficient application of will by experts given the power to provide meaning to every individual.

This is what the lid-less, unconstrained universe had to offer planners. Indeed, even the idea of individual rights was a bygone relic. “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology,” Dewey explained. Rights can only be properly secured through “social control of economic forces in the interest of the great mass of individuals.” For Dewey, humans were “nothing in themselves”; the General Will was everything.

I have read very little by John Dewey. I don’t have a copy of Liberalism and Social Action, so I looked on Amazon to see if I could find these quotes in Liberalism and Social Action. Unfortunately Amazon does not have a "look inside" feature for the book.

Anyway, if Goldberg’s claims are legitimate enough, these quotes are enough for me to strongly disagree with Dewey’s political philosophy. The bedrock views of today's Progressives surely agree with Dewey's. The so-called General Will, even if it expresses the wants of a majority of the people subject to the government’s rules, can realistically only be wielded by politicians backed by government force.

Voting rights bill H.R. 1

The Democrats’ voting rights bill is an assault on election integrity

The Washington Compost's op-eds are mostly leftist, but there are a few to the contrary. The above by Henry Olsen is one of them.

"The bill’s primary danger lies in its virtual abolition of any safeguards to ensure that a vote represents the true desire of a single, eligible voter. States would be effectively barred from mandating the use of a photo-ID to establish that a person is the registered voter they claim to be, instead permitting a prospective voter to merely sign a sworn affidavit. States would also be required to adopt same-day voter registration in federal elections, even during early voting, so that a person could show up at a poll, sign a registration form and cast a vote without any checks to ensure the person was actually eligible to vote."

The effect is an an open invitation to (what should be) fraud -- one person can vote many times using multiple identities. It's one thing for P1 to persuade P2 how to vote. P1 voting using P2's identity -- especially if P2 is unwilling to even make the effort to vote -- is very different. It a violation of the principle of one person - one vote. Too many Democrats don't care about this principle. Winning is the primary goal; how it's done matters far less.  

Joe Biden is using his bully-pulpit to push this agenda (link).

See the section titled "The Election Bills: HR 1, the Save Democracy Act, and the Carter/Baker Commission" here for more details about the content of HR 1.

Dem Duo Deem to Destroy Democracy

GameStop and three other pols

Yellen, Waters and Pelosi and Investigation of GameStop

The three pols are Janet Yellen, Nancy Pelosi, and Maxine Waters. I didn't thoroughly fact-check the article, but it sounds truthful. Readers can judge for themselves.

The article says that Yellen collected many $$ in speaking fees from GameStop.

Corrupt Maxine Waters is chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, where she has for years "steered millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited."

"Waters allocated $12 million to the Mass. bank in which she and her board member husband held shares."

Journalists and free speech

Journalists celebrate the destruction of others' free speech

"Last year [ ] police were lambasted for trying to control violence at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. Journalists disdained tear gas and arrests in favor of addressing the "systemic racism" supposedly responsible for the disorder. After the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some raised questions about police failure to stop the mayhem, but once again, progressive journalists are focusing elsewhere. They've identified a new root cause of mob violence: free speech."

"They've cheered the social-media purge of conservatives and urged further censorship of "violent rhetoric" and "disinformation." It's a remarkably self-destructive move for a profession dependent on freedom of speech, but the journalists now dominating newsrooms aren't thinking long-term — and can't imagine being censored themselves. The traditional liberal devotion to the First Amendment seems hopelessly antiquated to young progressives convinced that they're on the right side of history." 

To which I add, "And feeling morally superior!"

"It wasn't enough to ban Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter if he and his followers could move to Parler — so Parler had to be shut down, too. Big Tech obliged, succumbing to pressure from the media and their Democratic allies in Congress. (Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon forced Parler offline by booting it off its web servers.) This unprecedented suppression was denounced by conservative and libertarian publications like the Wall Street Journal and Reason, and by a few independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, but the usual solidarity among the press against censorship was missing."  

Democratic bullies

Dems Urged Not to ‘Waste a Second’ Negotiating 

This is the preferred way of far too many Democrats. Throw money at it. Bullying. Authoritarian. A reasonable compromise is off limits. Bernie Sanders and his ilk epitomize their attitude.

American Thinker: Democrats’ Version of Unity Means ‘Us against Them’

Biden undoes Trump

Biden undoes some Trump reforms and plans more with Executive Orders. Biden’s transition team announced he would end three significant policies designed to protect America.

1. Travel Ban. The first is a reversal of the so-called “travel ban.” Signed in the early days of the Trump administration, the president banned people from several Muslin countries. At the time, Democrats labeled the policy as racist and discriminatory despite the fact that the vast majority of Muslim nations were unaffected by the executive order.

2. Southern Border. Biden said he wouldn’t end Trump’s southern border policies during the election. However, a new statement from the Biden transition team told thousands of migrants in Central America not to come to the US “at this time.”

3. Paris Climate Accord. The third Trump policy that Biden says he’ll undo is on climate change. On day one, Biden will sign an executive order that puts the United States back in the Paris Climate Accord initially signed by former President Obama in 2016.

These are only a few of the changes Biden plans to make in his administration’s early days. However, many more are being announced. Biden wants to undo the Trump tax cuts, be friendlier with Iran, China, and the United Nations organization like WHO, stop the Keystone XL pipeline, make college educations free and more. Biden is and will be the puppet of Progressives and other power-hungry statists.

Canada is the USA’s largest foreign energy supplier. That won’t change with the end of Keystone XL, but it does mean a lot of Canadian oil will have to be inefficiently moved in tanker trucks, causing unnecessary pollution for the sake of a political gesture. Biden's pandering to environmentalist will also cause the loss of 1,000s of well-paying jobs. What a jerk!

This might exaggerate, but the numbers are still significant.

Pre-existing conditions

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Compost says that soon-to-be ex-President Trump has lied about pre-existing conditions. Link. 

Far more truthful is that Kessler's article is a big fat lie, as was Kamala Harris saying basically the same thing while debating before the November election last year. Both Kessler and Harris talk as if pre-existing conditions is a widespread concern, whereas in fact it is an extremely narrow concern. It pertains to so few people that Kessler and Harris make a mountain out of an ant hill.   

Like I argued here, Harris absurdly claimed that Trump/Pence would take away health insurance from people who have pre-existing conditions. Harris' vague lie said, "you have Donald Trump who is in court right now trying to get rid of – trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which means that you will lose protections, if you have pre-existing conditions. ... If you have a pre-existing condition, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, they're coming for you."

Trump/Pence have not done or advocated any such thing. They got rid of one small part of the ACA --the mandate to buy health insurance by reducing the penalty to $0 for non-compliance. They did nothing to eliminate the ACA's health insurance exchanges, or cancel the insurance of people with pre-existing conditions. Insurers on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges cannot refuse an applicant for pre-existing conditions and are prevented by law from ending somebody's coverage because the insured has pre-existing conditions.

Insurers who sell Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement policies cannot refuse coverage to a person when they first become eligible for Medicare. Medicare itself does not deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. These rules concerning Medicare, Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement policies existed long before the Affordable Care Act. A total repeal of the Affordable Care Act would thus not alter those programs.

In summary pre-existing conditions pertain to only a very small segment of the population -- those below age 65 trying to get individual insurance outside the the Obamacare health insurance exchanges and those over age 65 who have a Medicare supplemental policy (not Medicare Advantage) and want to switch carriers. These are the only two situations an insurer can underwrite and decline to provide new coverage. 

Even when people lose health insurance due to a job loss, insurance in the form of Medicaid or CHIPs (link) may be obtained not subject to pre-existing conditions.

Kessler falsely asserts, "Trump had nothing to do with the ACA, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010." That is irrelevant. When the ACA was modified like Trump wanted, nothing about pre-existing conditions was modified. 

Kessler asserts, "Before passage of the ACA, even minor health problems could have led an insurance company to deny coverage." This makes a mountain out of an anthill, due to the very few times an insurer can decline to provide new coverage.

Ironically then, Kessler's article is worth four Pinocchios.

Teachers unions and political power

John Stossel: Teachers Unions Fail Science. Stossel echoes Thomas Sowell (link) on the effects of poor public school education on black American children. The following in italics are quotes from the article.

Is your child's school open now?

Probably not — because teachers unions say that reopening would "put their health and safety at risk."

Closed schools hurt low-income students most because they have fewer learning alternatives. The privileged get around union restrictions.

Almost all of California's government-run schools are closed, but California Governor Gavin Newsom sends his kids to a private school that stayed open.

Union demands include all sorts of things unrelated to teacher safety. The Los Angeles union demands: defunding the police, a moratorium on charter schools, higher taxes on the wealthy and "Medicare for All."

It's revealing that government-run schools fight to stay closed, while most businesses — private schools, restaurants, hair salons, gyms, etc., fight to be allowed to open.

Why is that? [Heritage Foundation's Lindsey] Burke points out that government schools "receive funding regardless of whether or not they reopen."

So, union workers get paid even when they don't work. Not working seems to be a big union goal.

Yet, the teachers unions keep winning. They will win more now that Democrats control the federal government. Congress' last stimulus package forbids any funds to be used to expand school choice: no "vouchers, tuition tax credit programs, education savings accounts, scholarship programs, or tuition assistance programs."

So, students lose. Parents lose. Taxpayers lose. America loses.

Unions win.

Thomas Sowell: Is Truth Irrelevant?

Thomas Sowell: Is Truth Irrelevant?  Thomas Sowell notes how many noticed the riots which took place January 5, but paid so little attention to the riots that took place in various cities across the country last year. For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars. The following in italics are quotes from Sowell's article.

Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well. 

Unfortunately, too many American educational institutions — from elementary schools to universities — have become indoctrination centers. The riots that swept across the country last year are fruits of that indoctrination and the utter disregard for other people's rights that accompanied those riots.

At the heart of that indoctrination is a sense of grievance and victimhood when others have better outcomes — which are automatically called "privileges" and never called "achievements," regardless of what the actual facts are.

Facts don't matter in such issues, any more than facts mattered when smearing [Abraham] Lincoln.

Any "under-representation" of any group in any endeavor can be taken as evidence or proof of discriminatory bias. But those who argue this way cannot show us any society — anywhere in the world, or at any time during thousands of years of recorded history — that had all groups represented proportionally in all endeavors. 

Whites are "under-represented" in the NBA and NFL. About 80% of players in both organizations  are black. Is that due to discriminatory bias?

Thomas Sowell: A Vote at the Crossroads

Thomas Sowell: A Vote at the Crossroads

Thomas Sowell says how Democrats will take advantage of its political power in the Senate and beyond now that they have won the two Senate seats for Georgia. When he wrote this, the seats were not yet decided. The following in italics are quotes from Sowell's article.

Senate Democrats' leader, Senator Charles Schumer, has already announced what he has in store, if the Democrats get a majority in the Senate. So has President-elect Joe Biden. And it goes way beyond specific policies. It includes institutional changes that can be permanent, and almost guarantee one-party rule in this country, as far out as the eye can see.

Among the groups likely to be hurt most by Democrats' dominance of both houses of Congress and the White House is the black population that has been the most loyal to the Democrats for many generations.

There is no more vital interest of black Americans than the education of black children. The whole future of the race depends on the quality of that education, more than on any other single factor.

In many public schools in low-income minority neighborhoods, most of the students cannot pass tests in mathematics or English. In some ghetto schools, nobody passed either test.

When charter schools succeed where traditional public schools fail, that is welcome news to everyone to whom black education matters. But it is bad news to failing public school bureaucrats and to teachers unions, since charter schools attract students from unionized public schools.

These politicians are almost all Democrats. President-elect Biden has already assured teachers unions that there will be no more federal money for charter schools.