On the heels of the worst jobs report in over a year, Watchdog.org’s Jason Hart reports that Americans “are footing the bill for six-figure government union pay.” As Hart explains:

Taxes siphoned by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees let the union pay its staff and officers an average of $103,623 last year. …

While private-sector union spending can harm workers, employers and hit customers with higher costs, taxpayers throughout the country are stuck with the tab for spending by AFSCME and other public-sector labor unions.

AFSCME deducts dues from members’ taxpayer-funded paychecks. In 21 states and Washington, D.C., AFSCME and its affiliates can take hundreds of dollars per year in mandatory “agency fees” from nonmembers.

As of Dec. 31, AFSCME had 1,337,126 members and 125,255 forced agency-fee payers, based on the labor union’s annual report to the Department of Labor. AFSCME’s Washington, D.C., headquarters collected $178,668,843 from its state and local affiliates.

In 2014, AFSCME headquarters paid 566 officers and employees an average of $103,623. In addition to the 10 officers and employees paid more than $250,000 each, 16 were paid between $200,000 and $250,000 and 60 were paid between $150,000 and $200,000

AFSCME President Lee Saunders was paid $348,745 last year, and last month issued a statement calling for bigger government.

With an $18 trillion debt (at last count) subsidizing government union bosses is the last thing we can afford to be doing. But there may be light at the end of the tunnel, according to Hart:

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, expected as soon as next year, potentially could end mandatory union dues for government employees nationwide.

Unfortunately, as Hart concludes:

Even if workers are given the ability to opt out of paying AFSCME — as thousands in Wisconsin and Michigan have done under reforms passed in 2011 and 2012, respectively — taxpayers still will be indirectly funding the union through payroll dues deduction from remaining members.

With tax season upon us, it’s worth keeping this in mind—especially since it now takes 114 days to reach Tax Freedom Day, which the Tax Foundation defines as the day “when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year.”

Valuing “work,” as Saunders puts it, should not mean shaking down taxpayers.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Inc., spoke recently with the Australian Financial Review. In a wide-ranging interview, Wozniak offered his thoughts on the future relationship between man and computer.

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Wozniak said. He now foresees a time when computers will mimic human consciousness, a potentially dangerous development according to Wozniak.

He admitted to not knowing exactly what the future holds for humans, but his comments suggest a pessimistic view:

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently. Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on?

Wozniak speculated that the undoing of humans might be quantum computers. Today’s computers process data using binary ones and zeros. A quantum computer would operate on qubits, which can be a one and a zero at the same time; and thus, it can execute extremely complicated calculations in vastly less time compared with current computers.

Quantum computers would allow Moore’s Law to continue beyond 2020, when some scientists predict the law will reach its limit as transistors become as small as a single atom.

“I hope it [a quantum computer] does come, and we should pursue it because it is about scientific exploring,” Wozniak said. “But in the end, we just may have created the species that is above us.”

So what do you think? Will the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence turn humans into gods, pets, ants, or something else? Share your comments below and let’s start a (polite) conversation.

A Florida appeals panel recently upheld an order to deport General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova. A former defense minister of El Salvador, Casanova is accused of gross human rights violations, including the 1980 murder of three nuns and a missionary. He was granted entry into the United States in 1989. Now, a unit of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to send him back to his native land. The message is a simple one — the U.S. government won’t tolerate or harbor human rights abusers.

Or…maybe it will.

After the end of WWII, the United States was met with a large number of people who desired entry. Individuals from all over Europe clamored to leave their war-torn homelands and start fresh. Operating under the National Origins Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on immigration based on country of origin, many were barred from entering.

Immigration during this time was (supposedly) compounded by an additional consideration. That is, the U.S. government was supposed to ensure that no former Nazis or Axis sympathizers gained entry into the country. The Allied program of “denazification” was in full effect, attempting to remove former Nazi members from positions of power and influence.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released early estimates of health insurance and access to health care for January through September 2014. The National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) is the most effective survey of health insurance, because it asks people three different but important questions: Are they uninsured at the time of the survey? Have they been uninsured for at least part of the year? Have they been uninsured for more than a year?

The proportion of long-term uninsured is about the same as it was circa 2000—about 12 percent of adults aged 18 to 64. The proportion of short-term uninsured has shrunk a little in Obamacare’s first year.

However, this masks a dramatic increase in government dependency among working-age adults, which was not primarily due to Obamacare.

The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses, opened recently across the country. I saw the film in a commercial theater on opening weekend in Tallahassee. Alone. At least at the beginning. I was joined by one other woman and a couple by the time the opening credits flashed on the screen. This is unfortunate because campus sexual assault may be one of our society’s most significant contemporary examples of the failure of civil society, and hundreds of thousands of women and men have suffered as a result.

I doubt the filmmakers had this insight in mind when they conceived, filmed, and rolled out the marketing for the film. They have said that their main goal is to create a “conversation” on campus rape. The film is much more pointed than that, and the filmmakers clearly have an agenda, but its power is in using rape survivor testimony to strip away any pretence that sexual assault on college campuses is somehow exceptional. It’s not. Almost every student will know someone who has been sexually assaulted by the time they graduate (although most will not have experienced it directly themselves). And this is a failure of civil society on our campuses.

The film itself, like many documentaries, is a call to action. Its goal is to use the injustice of sexual assault to provoke advocacy. The use of two rape survivors and activists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Andrea Pino and Annie Clark—as the primary vehicle for telling the story is both effective and important. These young women, facing intransigence, impotent administrators, and bureaucratic stonewalling, launched the initial efforts that led to the tidal wave of Title IX investigations now forcing college and university administrations to address sexual assault more forthrightly.

Opposition to the outrageous so-called Medicare doc fix bill, which will increase the federal deficit by $141 billion, is growing. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explains how this will “bust the budget.” My Forbes editor, Avik Roy, pleads that the Senate stop this monstrosity (which passed the House by a huge majority).

On the other hand, there are those unfortunate conservatives who endorsed the bill before they had read it, and before the Congressional Budget Office had announced what a budget buster it was. My friend Ryan Ellis of Americans for Tax Reform appreciates that the CBO score could give us a feeling of “whiplash”. However, he explains:

Let’s start with the CBO score. Under a “current law” baseline (wherein CBO assumes that physician reimbursements will be cut 21 percent next week and stay cut forever), H.R. 2 is a ten-year spending increase of $141 billion, because the law would do away with that 21 percent cut and the government would have to pay doctors more. Under a more realistic baseline in which doctors don’t face a 21 percent Medicare cut next week (or ever), H.R. 2 is a ten-year spending cut of $1 billion. That’s because in this scenario, elimination of the 21 percent cut is already included in the baseline, so it doesn’t count as new spending. So it really comes down to deciding which starting point (another term for baseline) you think is more reasonable. I think the more reasonable starting point is that Congress won’t let next week’s 21 percent reimbursement cut happen (a safe bet, since they’ve avoided it 17 times since 2003).

Oakland’s voters who approved the March 1 increase of the minimum wage to $12.25 apparently drank the Kool-aid that it would “help the poor.” Tell that to the working poor parents who will now be scrambling to find good, affordable child care:

Workers who benefit from Oakland’s minimum wage hike might soon lose a service that enables them to work in the first place. It turns out the well-intentioned law is putting a financial squeeze on Oakland’s child care industry, leading some providers to panic.

“Panic” may help sell newspapers, but those who have to keep their doors open deal more in Cold Hard Facts:

Revenues < Expenses = Bankruptcy

So when its main expense (labor) increases by more than 36% overnight (from $9 to $12.25 per hour), Cold Hard Facts say: Increase Revenues or Decrease Expenses.

For a non-profit early childhood development center in Oakland which had recently garnered the highest rating in the county, the only way “out” is decreased costs. Parents of the 63 children cared for there—all working poor—pay little to nothing for the care provided five days a week, every week of the year. Because it is a nourishing environment—providing professional care, guided recreation, stories, socialization and pre-school instruction—it is by definition very labor intensive. And much of that labor is provided by minimum-wage teachers’ aids. The immediate, first-year budget shortfall to meet the mandated wage increase: $146,500

But it’s really more than that: in practice, a rise in the minimum wage puts upward pressure on the pay of those employees who had been earning above minimum wage, but whose relatively higher pay has now disappeared with the mandated minimum-wage increase—so the amount needed to keep everyone equal “relatively” is actually closer to $200,000.

Unfortunately, as a non-profit, it can’t raise “prices” and it doesn’t have an angel it can tap to write a check, so cuts are the reality to keep the doors open.

Infant care, which demands a higher teacher:child ratio, will be discontinued, and staff let go accordingly.

Bottom line: the elimination of care for 11 infants of the working poor, and the jobs of three teacher aids.

This means working poor parents of infants in Oakland now have fewer sources for their care, with higher costs. And three formerly minimum-wage workers are now unemployed.

And that’s just one childcare center. The story is similar across the sector, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Will parents be able to re-juggle their household budgets and work schedules to ensure their children are well cared for while they work?

San Francisco also raised its minimum wage, and on both sides of the bay the immediate effect has been the close of a popular science fiction bookstore, restaurants—from highest rated to humble Chinatown establishments—and worsened job prospects for youth.

In any case, it’s time to wake up and face reality: raising the minimum wage is a lousy way to “help the poor.” As noted here:

…minimum-wage workers are typically not in low-income families; instead they are dispersed evenly among families rich, middle-class and poor.

Virtually as much of the additional earnings of minimum-wage workers went to the highest-income families as to the lowest. Moreover, only about $1 in $5 of the addition went to families with children supported by low-wage earnings. As many economists already have noted, raising the minimum wage is at best a scattershot approach to raising the income of poor families.

Just another tragic tale of those for whom  “Sorry, Your Minimum Wage Law Is a Nightmare.”

Yesterday’s Health Alert warned against the so-called Medicare doc fix that is being jammed through the Congress this week. More voices are rising up against this flawed legislation.

The Health Alert was written and published before the Congressional Budget Office published its estimate of the bill’s effect on the deficit. Here it is:

Over the 2015–2025 period, CBO estimates, enacting H.R. 2 would increase both direct spending (by about $145 billion) and revenues (by about $4 billion), resulting in a $141 billion increase in federal budget deficits (see table on page 2). Although the legislation would affect direct spending and revenues, it would waive the pay-as-you-go procedures that otherwise apply.

When a leading benefits consultant writes an article in the Harvard Business Review recommending that health plans cover yoga, it should be glaringly apparent that we have perverse incentives in U.S. health benefits:

Cigna insurance CEO David Cordani says the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services’ recent payment changes that emphasize quality over quantity in healthcare will shift the focus on “sick care to more well care.” But a widespread embrace of diet, fitness and other wellness programs is still a way off….

Insurers should cover “new wellness- and prevention-oriented treatments such as yoga and meditation, Sukanya Soderland,” a partner in consulting firm Oliver Wyman’s health practice, wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review. (Jayne O’Donnell & Laura Ungar USA Today)

Upon watching the first session of women’s Olympic boxing in London in 2012, leading neuroscientist John Hardy stated that,

We shouldn’t get our fun out of watching people inflict brain damage on each other. To me as a neurologist it’s almost surreal.

Indeed, boxing has a reputation for producing some real medical nightmares. Having an ear bitten off by Mike Tyson might be the least of a boxer’s problems. The force of a professional boxer’s fist is equivalent to that of a 13 pound bowling ball traveling some 20 miles per hour. While blows to the body aren’t likely to feel particularly good, it’s shots to the head that doctors find most concerning. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that repeated blows to the head aren’t a good thing.

Indeed, taking punches of this caliber to the face and head can have some truly nasty impacts. Studies have found between 15 and 40 percent of ex-boxers have some symptom(s) of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Speech difficulty, neck and muscle stiffness, memory loss, and other psychological problems have been reported and characterize what’s known as “punch drunk syndrome” or dementia pugilistica. Boxing has also been linked to other brain-related illnesses. Muhammed Ali, arguably the word’s most famous boxer has long suffered from Parkinson’s disease. His doctors have attributed this to his boxing career.

Boxing is not the only sport in which TBI is likely. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), football, cheerleading, and soccer have all come under scrutiny due to rate of head injuries among professional and amateur players.

Source: American Journal of Sports Medicine

This past July, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill prohibiting middle and high school football teams from holding full-contact practices more than twice a week, limiting the duration of said practices, and prohibiting full-contact practices outright during the off season.

While such stories have received significant attention. Nothing quite compares to what’s been said about boxing. People have likened the sport to human cock fighting. It is argued that the sport is comparatively more dangerous than others and that boxing exploits individuals who often hail from poor or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds. A variety of changes have been proposed, from requiring protective gear, to banning blows to the head, to outlawing the sport outright.

Simply put, banning boxing is paternalism writ large. These policies, like the ones placing bans on football practices is a breeding ground for “big brother” to stick his finger in someone else’s business. Moreover, such bans would likely make the sport more dangerous, not less.

The fact is, no one is forcing a boxer to get into the ring. Saying that a boxer “doesn’t know the risk” or “can’t understand” is insulting their intelligence. In reality, boxers know full well what they are doing and have determined that the risk is worth the possible rewards. In some cases, the payoffs are huge. For example, professional boxer Floyd Mayweather has cashed checks of at least $25 million for each of his fights going back to 2007. Since 1996, he’s earned some $400 million. According to Forbes, Mayweather brought in some $105 million for 72 minutes of ring time in 2014. If you break that down, Mayweather earns him some $1,458,333 for every minute he spends in the ring!

Many would say that not all boxers earn such large returns. While certainly true, consider that the sport offers opportunities for many to get out of precarious situations. Manny Pacquiao, widely considered one of the world’s best boxers, for example, was born in utter poverty in the Philippines. Boxing provided him, and others, a way out of poor financial circumstances. Given the opportunity of participating in a dangerous sport and possibly improving their quality of life, they’ve decided it’s worth it. Banning boxing would shut the doors on such options.

What those who call for bans on boxing also seem to forget is that those in charge of boxing work to make the sport as safe as possible. Amateur boxers frequently don headgear and other padding in addition to their gloves. Watch any match on TV and you’ll notice medical staff must be present at every match. The ringside doctor or the referee can (and do) end a bought if they feel a boxer’s health is in danger. Boxers are also put in different weight classes (lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, etc.). This not only makes fights more interesting with more equally matched fighters, but also significantly decreases the rate of injury.

Banning boxing would have further consequences. Just as banning drugs or prostitution doesn’t eliminate those activities, a ban on boxing or severe regulations wouldn’t end the sport. Instead, such actions are likely to drive the sport into an underground black market. Instead of occurring in a ring in Las Vegas, we’d see boxing in underground clubs. Unlike current fights with medical personnel, referees, and boxing gloves, we’d see bouts with (comparatively more dangerous) bare fists, fighters knocked unconscious, and higher rates of injury. While we can likely all appreciate the desire to increase the safety of athletes, whether boxing, football, or another sport, heavy regulations or banning the events are likely to fail in achieving the stated goals and result in perverse outcomes.