If the police found a dead body in the back of your car, hands tied behind the back, with a hole in the head, and your defense was that the person shot himself, how do you think they would react?

And yet this has happened in police cars at least three times. This time, in Durhman, North Carolina, a teenager, searched, arrested, handcuffed behind his back, shoved in the back of a police car, supposedly shot himself in the head with a firearm the police apparently had failed to find. If the cops’ story is true, we have a case of a suicidal young man who could have easily made a fortune on the Vegas strip mimicking David Copperfield, or at least done well as a contortionist on a traveling circus act.

The police chief explains: “I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed behind the back. . . . While incidents like this are not common, they unfortunately have happened in other jurisdictions in the past.”

Yes, they’ve happened in other jurisdictions. Or so other police have said.

Now, one doesn’t have to be a paranoid troublemaker to suggest another possible scenario.* A good detective would consider alternatives in the case of any homicide, and if a non-police officer were found with a body in the back of his car, the presumption would probably not be suicide. Of course, it is at least possible that the cops in this case are simply lying—that they had held the gun to the boy’s head to instill fear in him, and they accidentally fired the weapon, killing him, and came up with a ridiculous story to cover it up—one so ridiculous it just might work, as it’s apparently worked before. The other possibility, which in a sane world anyone would realize is also much more likely than suicide, is that a police officer simply murdered the kid in cold blood, execution-style, for whatever reason.

Despite Dianne Feinstein’s claims to the contrary, there’s no actual evidence that the U.S. surveillance apparatus has foiled any actual, independent plots of terrorism. There is, in fact, far more actual evidence that the surveillance state has missed numerous signals of plots: from 9/11 to the Boston bombings.

In its latest attempt at P.R. smoke-and-mirrors, the FBI ensnared a Wichita, KS airport employee, Terry Lee Loewen, in an FBI-created conspiracy and “sting” operation. The FBI stalked Loewen for six months following their seeing allegedly positive online comments he made about jihad.

An FBI agent befriended Loewen:

In September, the undercover agent told Loewen he had returned from overseas after meeting with individuals connected with al Qaeda. The agent told him the “brothers” were excited to hear about his access to the airport and asked Loewen if he would be willing to plant some type of device, according to court documents.

Other FBI agents joined in the fun, posing as conspirators, and developed a plot for Loewen to use his airport employee access card to plant explosives they would provide him.

I’m not sure who raised these FBI guys, but my parents taught me it was unkind to take advantage of the gullible. The FBI specializes in such tactics, and gets higher budgets and lots of good press as a reward. Apparently, we can classify Senators and the vast majority of the mainstream media in the gullible camp as well.

If even the Wall Street Journal offers biased coverage on reforming the tax code to allow individuals to own their own health insurance (and it does), we have a bigger hill to climb before we can eliminate the discrimination against individually owned health insurance. According to the WSJ, Congressional Republicans are more gun-shy than ever of a reform that would give households tax credits to buy health insurance — a sensible alternative to the current policy of tilting the tax code in favor of employer-based benefits.

The Republicans’ political risk-aversion is a consequence of Obamacare causing millions of people to lose their health benefits. Although many of these victims have individual policies, many are also insured through their employers. Because President Obama’s guarantee that “if you like your coverage, you can keep it” has been exposed as false, Republicans have been freshly reminded how fearful people are of change.

This has pushed them back into a corner, prompting them to defend the tax discrimination that favors employer-based benefits and to oppose individual tax credits, according to the WSJ.

This is a real shame. Individual tax credits were a feature of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid and President Bush’s agenda in 2007, and were proposed as long ago as 1995 by John C. Goodman and Mark V. Pauly.

Tax credits should not be that hard to sell. I will offer a couple of very straightforward points, which any reformist politician should be able to transform into good sound-bites.

Spending more and getting less—it’s an increasingly common refrain in education circles these days. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the performance of American 15-year-old students, who slipped in the latest international reading, math, and science rankings, a portrait of stagnation.

Every three years since 2000 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). More than 500,000 students from in 65 countries and economies participated in the 2012 assessment. Key findings released last week for the United States include:

• Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 …and around average in reading and science.
• There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
• The U.S. spends more per student over the course of their elementary and secondary school years  than most countries but does not perform better: the Slovak Republic, which spends around $53,000 per student , performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over $115,000 per student.
• American students do not report strong motivation towards learning mathematics: only 50 percent of students agreed that they are interested in learning mathematics, slightly below the OECD average of 53 percent.

American students’ PISA performance has been flat for more than a decade—essentially average in reading and science, but below par in math. Education Secretary Duncan summed up by saying:

The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 PISA is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation. That brutal truth, that urgent reality, must serve as a wake-up call against educational complacency and low expectations. …The hard truth is that the U.S. is not among the top performing OECD nations in any subject tested by PISA—and that is the case even though U.S. students express more self-confidence in their academic skills than students in virtually all OECD nations.

Who has caught up to or surpassed us since 2009? In math, students in countries such as Ireland, Poland, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic now outperform their U.S. peers. In science, Poland, Ireland, and the Czech Republic are now ahead of us. And students in Lithuania, Italy, and Spain are now on a par with U.S. students. In reading, our strongest subject, our 15-year-olds are now behind those from Estonia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Out of the 62 education systems that administered the PISA in both 2009 and 2012, our ranking fell from 24th in 2009 to 29th in math in 2012, according to OECD’s figures. In science, we fell from 19th to 22nd. And in reading, our ranking dropped even more sharply—from 10th to 20th.

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel blames student poverty for such poor performance. In other words, until all kids are rich, don’t expect them to perform in school.

Too bad the OECD already analyzed the correlation between poverty and performance and found that a student’s socioeconomic background explains only 15 percent of test score variances. Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, also noted that upper income American students did not perform as well as their peers in other countries.

Duncan elaborated, noting that American white students lag behind several countries, including Vietnam, where 79 percent of students come from poverty. “So the real educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods,” Duncan concluded, “It’s about many kids in many neighborhoods. The PISA results underscore that educational shortcomings in the U.S. are not just the problems of other people’s children.”

But more expensive failing programs from the U.S. Department of Education are the last thing we need—especially since research shows a strong correlation between PISA mathematics improvement and economic growth.

And why do students in some countries outperform others? Other rigorous research has found that competition from private schools, high-quality standardized testing, school autonomy over hiring and firing of teachers as well as setting salaries, and minimal influence by teachers unions on curricula all contribute to higher PISA math scores. Were all these factors in place, students could score 200 points higher on PISA math, which would put American students well above top-performing Shanghai—not squarely in the middle or back of the pack where they are now.

Unless Congress decides to extend it, long-term unemployment compensation will expire on December 28.  Unemployment compensation has typically been available for up to 26 weeks of unemployment, but has been extended during the past recession to up to 99 weeks.  When you pay people to be unemployed, then not surprisingly, you get more unemployed people.  The extended unemployment compensation is responsible for a substantial amount of current unemployment.

Prior to the current recession long-term unemployment of over 26 weeks has been less than 20% of total unemployment.  During the recession in the early 1980s it did go as high as 25%.  During the previous recession it went well above 40% and right now stands at 37%.  Why?

We are paying people to be unemployed longer, so it stands to reason that more people will take up the government’s offer and remain unemployed to keep receiving unemployment compensation.

I know this is not true of everybody.  Some people genuinely have trouble finding work.  But unemployment compensation takes away some of the incentive to find a job, and the longer people are out of work, the harder it is to find one.  We are doing a disservice to many people by paying them not to work, rather than pushing them to get a job—any job—from which they can move up as the economy recovers.

The unemployment rate is currently 7%, but if we consider the normal fraction of long-term unemployed to be 20% or less of total unemployment, 17% of unemployed people are unemployed because of the long-term benefits that extend out beyond 26 weeks.  If those 17% of unemployed people were working, as the historical data shows they would be if not for the long-term unemployment benefits, today’s unemployment rate would be 5.8% rather than 7% and the economic recovery would be much further along.

There would be a substantial economic benefit to limiting unemployment compensation to 26 weeks, as it was before the recession.  Congress should let the extended unemployment compensation expire.

“No, there won’t be a doctor shortage,” wrote Zeke Emanuel and Scott Gottlieb in the New York Times the other day.

Obamacare will weather that challenge just fine. How? Nurses and other paramedic personnel can substitute for physicians, and new technology is making remote monitoring of patients easier than ever before.

All that is true. But those changes are likely to happen slowly; and even if they happened quickly, I’m afraid that it won’t be enough.

Here’s why. Two features of Obamacare will substantially increase the demand, while (surprisingly) nothing in the law increases supply. And when people take steps to increase their access in response to growing waiting times, the success of some will increase the rationing problems for everyone else.

At this point we have no idea how many people will become newly insured under Obamacare. For the first year out, the number of people with insurance may actually go down! But the administration’s goal is to insure an additional 30 million people, and eventually a lot of those people will acquire health plans. When they do, the economic studies predict that they will try to double their use of the health care system.

Back in 1993, the economists Jonathan Gruber and Brigitte C. Madrian highlighted the problem of “job lock,” a consequence of employer-based health benefits. Job lock referred to the fact that the U.S. Internal Revenue Code does not tax employees’ health benefits if they are provided through employers’ group plans. However, if employers gave the equivalent amount of cash to their employees, it would be counted as taxable income. Gruber and Madrian figured that people who were ill, and therefore subject to medical underwriting for health insurance if they left their jobs, would stay in jobs they would otherwise have left.

In one widely cited paper, Madrian estimated that this drawback reduced the proportion of workers who switched jobs in a year from 16 percent of the workforce to only 12 percent. So, job lock was a problem in the labor market, but it was not a massive problem. In another paper, Gruber and Madrian concluded that laws requiring continuity of coverage greatly minimized the problem. These laws consisted of state laws plus COBRA, a 1986 federal law that allowed a former worker to keep her previous employer’s group plan for a period of time, if she paid the premiums herself.

Further, the portability characteristic of continuation of coverage was enhanced in 1996 through HIPAA, a federal law which required employers to offer benefits to new employees on the same term as incumbent employees, without medical underwriting, if the new employees had previous long-term coverage without a significant lapse (literally, at least six months coverage without a lapse of more than 63 days).

The introduction of HIPAA reduced job lock even further below the small level that Madrian had estimated. Indeed, the latest thorough review of the literature, by Inas Rashad and Sara Sarpong (full text by subscription), concluded that the economic evidence of job lock was mixed, largely due to inconsistent use of datasets.

And yet, one justification for Obamacare was that it would end the (perhaps non-existent) problem of job lock.

The Congressional Budget Office has just published a study, The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010, which shows that the top 40% of income earners paid 106.2% of total federal income taxes, while the bottom 40% paid -9.1%.  This isn’t the study’s headline, so you have to dig a bit to get that information, but look at Table 3 on page 13 of the study to find that information.

The Table shows that the top 20% of income earners paid 92.9% of total income taxes in 2010 (the latest year available), and the next-highest 20% paid 13.3% of total income taxes, so the top 40% paid 106.2%.

Because of refundable tax credits like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, the bottom 20% got more money refunded to them than they paid in taxes, so paid -6.2% of total taxes.  The next-lowest 20% paid -2.9%, so the bottom 40% paid -9.1% of total income taxes.  More than 9% of total income tax payments go toward paying out money directly to people who get more back than they paid in.

Another Table in Box 1 on page 7 of that same study shows that households in the bottom 20% of income received an average of $22,700 in government transfers.  The federal government’s official poverty threshold for a family of four in 2010 was $22,050, which was less than the average family received in government transfers.  (Note that some of those transfers, such as Medicaid benefits, are not counted as income for purposes of calculating the poverty threshold.)

President Obama has frequently said the rich should pay more in taxes.  That apparently means the upper 20% of income earners should pay more than 92.9% of total income taxes, and the upper 40% should pay more than 106.2%.

Meanwhile, if we are really concerned more about the poor than the rich, note that under the Obama administration the official poverty rate has risen from 12.5% to 15% of the population.  Imagine the outcry if this had happened under a Republican president.  The president talks as if he cares about the poor, but they have fared badly under his administration.  Results should matter more than intentions.

From a policy standpoint, it appears that President Obama’s route to increased income equality isn’t to bring up the poor, but to bring down the rich.

Years ago, Milton Friedman was asked at a conference what he thought about different schools of economics (Chicago school, Austrian school, etc.) Friedman replied, “There are only two kinds of economics: good economics and bad economics.”

I’m reminded of this by Krugman’s Monday column, in which he asserts that there is a Republican economic theory of unemployment.

Here’s the world as many Republicans see it: Unemployment insurance, which generally pays eligible workers between 40 and 50 percent of their previous pay, reduces the incentive to search for a new job. As a result, the story goes, workers stay unemployed longer. In particular, it’s claimed that the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which lets workers collect benefits beyond the usual limit of 26 weeks, explains why there are four million long-term unemployed workers in America today, up from just one million in 2007.

Then he offers this assessment:

Proponents of this story like to cite academic research — some of it from Democratic-leaning economists — that seemingly confirms the idea that unemployment insurance causes unemployment. They’re not equally fond of pointing out that this research is two or more decades old, has not stood the test of time, and is irrelevant in any case given our current economic situation.

As we have pointed out before, the best work on this subject seems to be that of Casey Mulligan, who writes for the New York Times economics blog. (That’s right, the very same newspaper that Krugman writes for!) Mulligan estimates that as much as half of the excess unemployment we are experiencing is the result of overly generous entitlements benefits.

And, no. I don’t know who Mulligan votes for.

[Cross-posted at Psychology Today and John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog]

* * *

For the pivotal alternative to Obamacare, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.

During the 2012 campaign, President Obama famously said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, someone else made it happen.”

And now, it appears, if you’ve got a business, someone else makes what you do with it happen, too.

Imagine you’re a Jewish tailor, the child of holocaust survivors. Into your shop comes a gay neo-Nazi couple demanding that you make SS uniforms for their forthcoming nuptials.

“Nein,” you say?

“Jawoll,” says a Colorado judge, the New Mexico Supreme Court, the ACLU—and so is the Civil Rights Commission expected to say next week.

The precedents:

In Colorado, a baker who refused to sell a same-sex couple a wedding cake has been ordered by a judge that he must—a ruling that makes the complainants, who must not have been able to buy a cake anywhere else, “ecstatic.”

In Washington state, a similar suit is pending against a florist who refused to provide service for a same-sex wedding (presumably the only florist available).

And in New Mexico, the State Supreme Court ruled that a photographer who declined to photograph a commitment ceremony is violating others’ rights—and that the photographer has none.

Lest you think I’m engaging in hyperbole, here—in their own words—are the justifications for the Colorado ruling:

“At first blush, it may seem reasonable that a private business should be able to refuse service to anyone it chooses,” Judge Spencer said in his written order. “This view, however, fails to take into account the cost to society and the hurt caused to persons who are denied service simply because of who they are.”

And the ACLU attorney who represented the now-“ecstatic” couple who had no choice but the one baker who refused them service, said:

…treating gay people differently because of who they are is discrimination, plain and simple.

So, if “who you are” is a Neo-Nazi, a member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or a polygamist—apparently you, too, can be protected regardless of law. After all, Colorado has a ban on gay marriage, yet its court is directing a baker to make a same-sex wedding cake.

——-

Business owners have not, of course, been free to run their businesses as they saw fit at any time in memory, and we have had principled friends who gave up their manufacturing business during World War II rather than have to run it as a munitions factory for the government. So when a service provider whose services can be got at any number of alternative sources is ordered to perform his craft for whomever’s demands the government favors today, we need, more than ever, those who understand principle to stand with us against overreaching government, the ACLU, and every misguided “rights” activist.

Arbitrary rulings such as these simply underscore the idiocy of mixing the concept of “rights” with “favor.” Free and open commerce can’t deprive anyone of rights: only the state, with its monopoly on force, can. As evidenced by the history of the fights for the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, and civil rights, it has been government’s enforcement of rights violations that has had to be overcome:

Jim Crow laws were passed to prevent blacks and whites from doing what they were voluntarily doing in the aftermath of the Civil War: intermingling, intermarrying, and engaging in commerce together. Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson broke the color bar long before the U.S. government succumbed to cultural pressure to do so. Ditto laws that prohibited women from owning property (including themselves), divorcing, or entering into contracts. And politicians passed, and their enforcement agencies carried out, anti-sodomy and other anti-gay laws.

Business owners who choose not to engage in commerce with those against whom they discriminate—whether based in religion, race, gender, or any other reason—themselves bear the economic costs of their behavior. Those seeking to maximize their profits and opportunities receive benefits from doing business free of discrimination. The baker, florist, and photographer who agree to serve the same-sex couples gain and flourish!

For blacks, women, and now gays to embrace as their protector the very mechanism that has hitherto enforced the deprivation of their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is ludicrous. Free association builds bridges and brings us closer in win-win relationships: as with the gay mother who discovers that Chik-fil-a offers a welcome respite for her road-weary family. Coercion creates resentment, fuels fear of the “other” and divisiveness.

Thus, a society free of diktat is the best guarantee that those most discriminated against at any time can still find the jobs, goods, and services they want and need. And so to our mission: to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity.