National Political Polarization And The Boundaries Of Legitimate Debate

With Congress deadlocked and the government "shut down" now for several weeks, the latest fashion is lamenting the terrible partisan divide that has the country so terribly polarized.    According to a July 2013 survey from the Pew Research Center here, partisan polarization in Congress and among the public is the greatest it has ever been in the U.S.  "From immigration reform to food stamps to student loans, it almost seems as if congressional Republicans and Democrats inhabit different worlds."  And they don't even mention Obamacare!

Why can't we all just get along here?  How could Congress be so irresponsible as to fail to come to a deal to run the government? -- isn't that their number one job?

Here's the problem.  There really are two views of the proper role of the federal government, and they are not compatible.  One view, exemplified by the Democrats, is that the proper role of the central government is to solve all the personal problems of the people and to remove all downside risk of human existence.  The other view, far less well-exemplified by the Republicans, is that the government does not have the ability (let along the constitutional authority) to solve all human problems, is way too big, and needs to shrink.

Is there actually an appropriate compromise between those two views?  On the one hand, we have Nancy Pelosi and those like-minded with her, who would gladly see the government double in size, and then double again.  On the other hand, you have myself, who thinks that the government needs to shrink substantially.  Until recently the Republicans were not actually pushing for shrinkage, but rather, most of the time, for sort of holding the line.  For decades this led to a  "compromise" between these two sides that the government always grows, generally somewhat faster than GDP, although less fast than its most extreme advocates would like.   And the result was that an already too-big government became gradually bigger and bigger as a part of our economy and of our lives.  Here is a chart of post-war federal spending as a percent of GDP, going from about 16% in 1947 to almost 26% in 2009-11.  (It was well under 10% before the New Deal.)      

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But now we have some substantial voices for actual shrinkage entering the debate -- for example, the TEA Party and some Senators like Cruz and Paul.  For literally my whole life, the boundaries of civilized discussion of the role of government have been defined by a relatively narrow band between growth and more growth -- Should we grow spending by 5% this year, or 10%?  OK, we'll compromise at 7.34958%.  Done!  But what's the compromise between the side wanting 20% growth and the side wanting big shrinkage of, say, at least 20%?  Not so easy.  If you think the government needs to shrink, and by a lot, the idea of a "compromise" at 7+% growth is just fundamentally not OK.  

The whole idea of shrinkage poses an existential threat to those living well off the government, most notably its senior bureaucrats and hangers on in and around DC.  They're not going down easily.  The main effort at the moment seems to be to rule the whole idea of shrinkage -- that any program can be reduced by even a dollar, let alone eliminated -- as off limits of legitimate discussion.  Thus the favorite epithet of the DC establishment is that the Republicans are "extremists" for holding out for the idea that the government should be funded by anything other than one gigantic continuing resolution that continues every single program and of course most notably Obamacare.  See for example E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post here.  Or how about this from Nancy Pelosi on September 23:   

But for many of them, I call them legislative arsonists. They're there to burn down what we should be building up in terms of investments in education and scientific research and all that it is that makes our country great and competitive.

And those are the polite ones.  Other terms applied to anyone seeking to shrink any government program by even a few percent include "repugnant," "repulsive," "cruel," "devastating," "disastrous," "mean," and plenty more, as I noted in my post about food stamps a few days ago.

Well, the problem is that the government needs to shrink.   Food stamps just grew from $40 billion per year to $80 billion in 5 years of supposed economic recovery on Obama's watch.  Recruiters comb the country looking for new people to enroll.  Home equity and retirement accounts in unlimited amounts will not disqualify you.  Does anyone really think this can continue?  Medicare and Medicaid have grown at approximately 8% compound annual growth rates since inception in the 60s.  If not fundamentally restructured, they will swallow the whole economy at some point during the 21st century.  The cash-basis federal deficit is around $900 billion this year, but the far-more-honest accrual basis deficit would be more like $5 - 10 trillion.  You can try for a while to keep the forces of shrinkage at bay by calling them names, but in the end, it's only a question of when it happens, not whether. 

I say we should establish new boundaries of legitimate debate.  To count as civilized, you must propose shrinking the federal government by at least 20%, and proposals for shrinking up to 50% are perfectly reasonable.  So you think the government should grow??????  That's "extremist," "irresponsible," "arsonist," "repulsive," or whatever other name you want to come up with. 

The "Respected" Met Council And Sheldon Silver

In reading about the Rapfogel embezzlement scandal at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty,  you can't get through an article without the author somewhere mentioning how "respected" the Met Council was here in New York.  The Daily News here on August 15 calls the Met Council "one of New York's once-most-respected charities."  The New York Times on September 15, commenting on the failure of government "oversight" to catch this long-running scam, says "There was little reason to wonder about the integrity of Met Council, a respected 40-year-old organization."  And even the Post on September 25 describes Rapfogel as "head of the well-respected Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty."

This is just another difference between me and almost everyone else here in New York.  The Manhattan conventional ignorance is a complete sucker for anything that sells itself as doing "good," without applying even a hint of critical thinking.  Long before it was caught in the current scandal, I thought that so-called "anti-poverty" non-profits like the Met Council and its ilk were bad, even despicable. 

The Met Council fundamentally is and always was an entrenchment scam for politicians, with any help to the poor as a secondary by-product at best.  What kind of legitimate "anti-poverty" organization takes $90+ million of annual taxpayer anti-poverty funding and never raises a single person out of poverty?  A legitimate anti-poverty organization would have as its number one goal to move its clientele to middle class independence as rapidly as possible and shrink itself gradually out of existence. 

Not these guys.  Absolutely the last thing they want is for the "poverty" population to shrink.  Then the funding would go down!  The basic idea is in kind handouts of one sort or another.  As readers here know, those do not count at all in the official measures of "poverty" and therefore will never remove anyone from the rolls.  Look at their list of programs here:  "providing quality housing," "providing clothing, furniture, and help with home repairs," "assisting seniors with essential living tasks," "helping families recover from domestic violence," "enrolling New Yorkers in low and no-cost health care and food stamps," etc., etc.   There is no risk at all that these kind of things will decrease the poverty count by a single soul.   

And it's not just that the in kind handouts don't count in the definition of "poverty"; they also function as a trap that keeps people from moving themselves up the real income ladder.  Things like Medicaid, food stamps and public housing have eligibility criteria that you had better not cross by succeeding on your own.

Nobody who actually wanted to end or reduce poverty would ever design a so-called "anti-poverty" agency in this way.  But while this kind of program may not be very good for the poor, it is perfect for politicians bent on perpetuating the power of themselves and their colleagues.   The programs create a permanent class of handout-dependent people who know that if the out party ever gets in, the funding could well go away.  And that's only the beginning.  Lots of people work for these agencies.  They are reliable advocates for continuing and increasing their funding, and for the election of the politicians who promise to do that.  They also can be counted on to rally their friends and supporters to fight for continuation of their funding.  Here on the Met Council web site is the section where they urge readers and supporters to "Advocate against budget cuts."  "2000 frail homebound New Yorkers are at risk" "778 households Utilities turned off Unable to pay rent Nowhere to turn"  etc., etc.  Oh, is that advocacy paid for by the $90+ million of annual taxpayer funding for the organization?

And then there's the very best part:  political contributions to fund campaigns.  The allegation in the AG complaint against Rapfogel is that, as the Times describes it, he "conspire[d] with someone at the insurance brokerage . . . to pad the charity's insurance payments by several hundred thousand dollars a year. . . .  Mr. Rapfogel . . . pocketed some of the money and was involved in getting the rest to politicians who supply the government grants to the nonprofit organization. . . ."     

Now, even though Rapfogel's wife has been Sheldon Silver's chief of staff for decades while this was going on, I don't have any reason to believe that Silver knew the details of the mechanism by which Rapfogel stole taxpayer money and funneled it back into the political campaigns of Silver and his friends.  But here's what I do know.  I know that Sheldon Silver is a very competent man, and does his main job well.  His main job is perpetuating the large majority in the New York Assembly of Democrats, particularly Democrats loyal to himself.  And if he is to do that job at all competently, he must keep very, very close track of the flow of political money to himself and his supporters.  He must know in great detail which of the taxpayer-funded non-profits in the state come through with big contributions for his machine from their executives, their employees and their boards, and he must have that information in his head when he is influencing which of them get more and less money from the taxpayers in the coming year.  And he must see the Bill Rapfogels of the world regularly at political and social events, and he must let them know how much he really, really appreciates their contributions to help get his candidates elected, as well as their efforts to get additional contributions from the employees of the organization.  If he doesn't do these things, he's incompetent; and he is definitely not incompetent. 

A reader yesterday asked me if I thought there was any hope for cleaning up the current situation, such as through the state Moreland Act (ethics) commission appointed by the governor.  The short version of my answer is, there will be hope for cleaning this up when organizations like the Met Council are no longer "respected" in polite New York society.  We have a long way to go.  

How It Works In New York

Many people are starting to notice that, no matter how much politicians overspend the people's money and how corrupt they are, it seems to be just about impossible to vote them out and get a new bunch that is meaningfully different.   Why?  A big part of the answer is the use of public moneys in the corrupt processes of government expansion and entrenchment.

There is little systematic reporting on these processes in the media.  But here in New York, a series of corruption cases has exposed a widely-used M.O. that seems to represent the current state of the art.  The latest case has revealed corruption at a whole new level and brought it to the doorstep of the kingpin of New York State politics, Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver. 

Here's the basic New York M.O.:  Start a non-profit organization ostensibly dedicated to alleviating "poverty" among your constituents.  The public is bamboozled by fake federal statistics into thinking there are lots of people in physical-deprivation poverty, and generally supports public spending to alleviate the poverty.  The State Legislature and City Council spend public money, purportedly to alleviate poverty, by handing out large grants to dozens of non-profits in the scam "anti-poverty" biz, many of them closely associated with various state legislators and city councilpeople.  So you get your non-profit on the list.  Not one of these non-profits has ever actually removed a single person from "poverty" as measured by the federal statistics, because the services they provide are all in-kind and therefore don't count toward the official federal poverty measure.  But these non-profits are political gold.  At the minimum you have lots of employees who can be your campaign workers when that season rolls around, but that's only the beginning.  Next, you can put on the payroll your wife, girlfriend, and/or lots of relatives, not to mention yourself -- remember, state legislature and city council are part-time jobs.   Best of all, you can divert a good piece of your state or city  funding back into political contributions to your campaign to ensure that no competition against you can ever get traction.  And finally, you have no concern that your non-profit might actually cure the "poverty" and put itself out of business because none of its efforts count in the fraudulent official measure of "poverty."  Get a bigger appropriation next year!  You are fixed for life!

And if you start following this stuff, you realize that one after the other the Feds (rarely the state AG or DAs) arrest the state pols and time after time it's some variation of the same story.  To take some that have been in the news within the past year or so:

Pedro Espada was a State Senator from the Bronx, even serving briefly as Majority Leader.  He had a non-profit called Soundview Health Clinic that was the subject of repeated allegations of corruption.  According to this Wikipedia article, in 2000 he was tried, but acquitted, for diverting taxpayer funds from Soundview to fund his political campaigns; although he was acquitted, four other employees were convicted.  Subsequently, multiple state and federal investigations dogged him. In 2010, Andrew Cuomo, then state AG, accused Espada in a civil suit of allegedly diverting some $14 million from Soundview for personal expenses.  A 2010 private civil lawsuit accused him of diverting $1.35 million from Soundview to hire "Espada Management Company" to provide janitorial services to the Soundview facilities.  Ultimately Espada was convicted 2012 on a 2010 federal indictment  for embezzling money from Soundview (yes, Soundview also got Federal money).

In July 2012 Larry Seabrook, a Bronx City Councilman (and formerly State Assemblyman and State Senator) was convicted after being charged with diverting more than $2 million of public funds between 2002 and 2009 for personal purposes through non-profits.  According to the New York Post, the non-profits included a "job training program and a group aimed at bringing diversity to the FDNY."

In early 2013 State Senator Shirley Huntley of Queens pleaded guilty to diverting $85,000 to herself from a taxpayer-funded non-profit called the Young Leaders Institute in Laurelton.  I know what you're thinking -- Small time!  Yes, but don't assume that was the extent of the corruption.  At Huntley's sentencing in May where she got a very light sentence of a year and a day from Eastern District Judge Jack Weinstein, it emerged that she had been wearing a wire for some time to assist the FBI.  So more indictments may well be coming!

Then there's the case of long-time State Assemblyman Vito Lopez of Brooklyn.  Lopez's non-profit power base was something called Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, recipient of over $13 million of government money in 2011.  According to this article from the Daily News in August 2012, "with Lopez, there was always talk of one investigation or another, [u]sually [having] to do with the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council."   Among the more obvious eyebrow-raising aspects of RBSCC was that Lopez's "girlfriend, Angela Battaglia, was earning $343,000" a year working there, while his campaign treasurer was paid $782,000.  However, before any of the investigations actually caught up with Lopez, he found himself accused in a sexual harassment scandal, lost the support of powerful speaker Sheldon Silver (who stripped him of his chairmanships), and resigned from the Assembly in May.  And then he immediately ran for a City Council seat from the same area of Brooklyn, which he lost in a primary in September.  Hard to say if the investigations will continue with him gone from the political scene.

But all this is just the prelude to the Big One.   On September 24 one William Rapfogel was arrested on corruption charges, this time by state (AG) prosecutors (!).  Rapfogel had been head of something called the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty -- yes, it's precisely one of those completely cynical so-called "anti-poverty" agencies that provides in kind services and therefore never actually gets anyone out of officially-measured "poverty."  (Don't believe me?  Check out their list of programs on their website here.)  But this is no small-time operation.  According to the New York Post today, it has recently been the recipient of some $90 million annually of taxpayer funding.  Oh, and did I mention that Rapfogel's wife Judy is long-time chief of staff to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver?    So it comes as no surprise that the "Met Council" was one of Silver's favorite non-profits for the direction of state funds.  (From the Speaker's perspective, what's not to like about being able to claim that he is spending a lot of money to "help" people in "poverty" without any risk that the number of people in official poverty might go down and undermine the spending machine?)   According to this article at Newsday (unfortunately behind pay wall), none other than Judy Rapfogel was the regular representative of the Speaker at the legislative meetings where state "anti-poverty" funds were whacked up among the various competing non-profits.  But don't worry, when the Met Council came up, she didn't speak, although it was known that the Met Council was one of Silver's favorite non-profits.  (And, of course, Silver has the power to strip Assemblymen of committee chairmanships that carry extra pay.)       

Some great alleged details of the Rapfogel story are in the allegations of the Criminal Complaint.  The basic idea is the the Met Council paid inflated insurance premiums (with taxpayer money), and then the insurance companies kicked the money back to Rapfogel, much of it as cash in envelopes.  The Complaint alleges that some $400,000 in cash was recovered by prosecutors from the Rapfogel's homes, and that the total amount stolen was "in excess of $5,000,000."

But the best part is the allegations about how Rapfogel then turned the kickbacks into political donations in small amounts from so-called straw donors.   According to unnamed confidential sources cited in the Complaint, Rapfogel would divert money from the kickbacks to reimburse individuals who made small political contributions, particularly to candidates for city office.  Why in small amounts?  For those who don't know, New York City matches donations up to $175 per candidate per election on a 6-1 ratio.  And thus, if divided into pieces of $175 and under, can $1 million of taxpayer funding for an "anti-poverty" program turn into $6 million of political contributions to keep your friends in power.

Well, how exactly are challengers supposed to compete effectively with an incumbent-entrenchment system at that level of uber-corruption?  But don't worry -- so far at least, Judy Rapfogel is saying that she knew nothing about this.  I guess that means that Silver didn't either.  Yup.  It's just how it works in New York.

Argentina Bond Default - Now It Starts To Get Interesting

In the competition for the world's most incompetent and irresponsible economic policy, Argentina struggles for the lead against the likes of Venezuela and Greece.  (Cuba and North Korea are in yet another category, an economic fools' lifetime Hall of Fame.)  We are soon to see if Argentina can put a few lengths between itself and its rivals.

If you have been following the long-running saga of the Argentina bond default, you know that Argentina defaulted on close to $100 billion of external debt around the end of 2001.  Then in 2005 and again in 2010 it put out take-it-or-leave-it exchange offers, and got some 93% of the holders of the defaulted debt to turn them in for new "exchange" bonds with face value of about 25 cents on the dollar, and other less favorable terms.  But that left about $7 billion of the defaulted bonds outstanding.  Argentina passed a so-called "Lock Law" that flatly prohibits payment on the defaulted bonds, but those bonds by their terms are payable in New York and governed by New York law.  Holders of those remaining bonds have been relentlessly pursuing their lawsuits in the Federal courts in New York.  Argentina has lost at every turn in the Southern District and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and after many years we are coming up on the end game.  Most recently Argentina put its hopes on a long-shot cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.  This morning the Supremes denied cert.  

Now it starts to get interesting.  It's been some eight years of litigation, but believe it or not Argentina is starting to run out of options.   The Southern District court has not only granted summary judgment to the holders on their bonds, but has also granted equitable relief ordering that Argentina must pay the defaulted bonds any time it makes a payment on the exchange bonds, and further that it may not "take any action to evade the directives" of the court.  Argentina wished to keep paying on the exchange bonds and keep not paying on the defaulted bonds, so it then in August came up with the idea of exchanging the exchange bonds yet again for new bonds payable in Argentina, thus outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. judges.  

Not so fast!  The defaulted bond holders went into court and asked the judge to specifically order that Argentina could not do such a new exchange to evade his prior orders, and he agreed.  On October 3 he ordered that such a new exchange would violate his prior orders and was specifically prohibited.  Back to you, Argentina!

Might Argentina go into outright defiance of the New York court orders?  Here is a clip from the Second Circuit argument earlier this year where the lawyer for Argentina (Jonathan Blackman of Cleary) seems to be saying that they will: 

 "We would not voluntarily obey such an order."  Needless to say, this is not an everyday event in the U.S. courts.  Yes, parties do from time to time get themselves intentionally held in contempt in the District Court in order to enable an immediate appeal.  But here, all appeals have been, or will shortly be, exhausted. 

Given the breadth of the orders the courts have already shown themselves willing to issue, it appears that unless Argentina gives up and pays the defaulted bonds, the courts are heading toward cutting it off completely from the New York financial markets.  It is possible to operate a country without access to these markets -- Cuba and North Korea already do it.  Take that, Venezuela and Greece!  While you are merely impoverishing your populaces, Argentina may soon gain entry into the economic fools' lifetime Hall of Fame.    

Of course, getting cut off from credit would probably be the best thing that could ever happen to Argentina, finally forcing a reduction in its wildly bloated state sector and out-of-control crony capitalism.  But don't worry.  Without a doubt the Europeans will continue to lend to them. 

UPDATE:  Instalanche!  Many, many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.  New readers, please stay and see if you enjoy other content. 

Should We All Be Hoping That Obamacare "Works"?

I guess I already answered that question with the last post.  But a few days ago the Washington Post came out with an editorial taking their usual approach of declaring the views of all those who disagree with them to be outside the realm of legitimate debate.  The editorial is titled "Everyone Should Hope Obamacare Works."  If you're wondering why everyone should hope Obamacare works, you'll be hard pressed to find an answer in this editorial.  Here's the best reason they give that I can find:

As with any big rollout, there will no doubt be problems, many of them mundane. Computer systems will not work perfectly. Some people might have to sign up over the phone or on paper. But everyone should hope that those sorts of problems — and the overheated rhetoric of critics — do not deter too many people from buying insurance. Many Americans’ health depends on it.

"Many Americans' health depends on it."  Wrong.  There isn't any evidence I know of that health insurance status improves actual health outcomes.  See "Medical Insurance Is About Asset Protection Not Health," March 6, 2013.   

I don't even know what it means for Obamacare to "work."  Even if a lot of people sign up, it just means that we've gotten ourselves into a big unsustainable mess.  The basic idea is a massive wealth transfer to be brought about by some combination of coercion, fear mongering, and lies.  The young and healthy are to be systematically pillaged.  Bringing the United States to a utopia of perfectly fair health outcomes is not one of the possible outcomes.  The real alternatives are that Obamacare falls apart quickly, or it falls apart slowly.  Of those two, quickly is far preferable.   James Taranto of Best of the Web is onto the issue:

We hope [Obamacare] fails quickly . . .  to minimize the damage.  Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled "Everyone Should Hope Communism Works." That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn't work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.  Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. . . .  The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.

The Post's unstated goal is a world where the large majority of the people perceive themselves as dependent on government handouts.  It believes, and probably correctly, that even as the handouts sap initiative and bring about economic and population decline, such dependent people will never vote to go back to a world of self-reliance and freedom.  Detroit!  In the 2012 election, the people of Detroit voted 98% to 2% for Obama.     

The way out is for the Ponzi scheme to crash, and the sooner the better. 

The Right Strategy To Deal With Obamacare

Washington is currently aghast at the chutzpah of Congressional Republicans advancing various strategies to restrict or eliminate Obamacare.  The Republican initiatives run from the Cruz/Lee defunding gambit, to the efforts to get rid of some of the more obnoxious aspects of the law like the medical device tax, to other efforts to delay for a year or perhaps more the so-called "individual mandate."  I think that anything and everything that can be done to get rid of this disastrous government power grab should be encouraged, so I don't mean to be too critical.  But as usual, nobody is advancing what I think is the best idea.  Although I generally don't offer strategic advice to the Congressional Republicans, I'm going to make an exception this time.   

The Republicans should be always and everywhere, and as loudly as possible, screaming from the rooftops to all young people that this is a fraud and a scam directed at them, intended to take their hard-earned money away at the least-wealthy point in their lives, for nothing in return, and transfer the money to people wealthier than they are.  No young person should sign up for health insurance through the exchanges.  Actually, if the Republicans had any sense they should be organizing a boycott.  

But instead the Republicans seem to be completely pussyfooting around this one, and I don't get it.  There hasn't been one word of actual sense spoken about healthcare in this country for several decades, and this is a fantastic opportunity to get that conversation going.  Why?  Because the only way that healthcare or any other industry works is that consumers bear the costs and risks of their decisions.  That has not existed in healthcare in this country for a long time, but suddenly Obamacare makes it so greatly to the financial advantage of a large swath of the population to take on a big piece of the risk themselves that they will be crazy not to do it.  Why is that not a good thing?  Given the ridiculous financial burdens that Obamacare seeks to load onto low-earning young people, if they behave rationally we could shortly see the number of uninsured in the country shoot up.  That would mean that Obamacare would promptly be revealed as failing in its principal stated goal of getting "insurance" for everyone.  Meanwhile, there would suddenly be a huge cohort of massively price conscious shoppers for medical care.  Imagine: you might even be able to get a hospital to tell you how much a treatment will cost before they perform it!   

I have previously characterized the government's promotion of Obamacare to the young as "the most massive organized fraud in world history."  How could it possibly be wrong to point that out?  And remember, the government is gearing up to spend unbelievably huge amounts of money on obviously false and fraudulent advertising to get the young to sign up -- the AP has identified at least $684 million in state and federal budgets for the project.   There would be no need to spend a dime if this was to people's financial advantage. 

What are the possible objections to my proposal?  

From the Progressive/Democrat side, the main idea seems to be that it is immoral for the government to allow people to take on any material risk in their lives.  Even if you believe that a world where all risk is socialized can actually work, I don't see that as any justification for this kind of huge fraud.  Sorry. 

Another justification I have seen is that the "individual mandate" is now the law and so Republicans should not be seen as undermining a duly enacted law or advocating civil disobedience.  Here's the problem with that:  the "individual mandate" is not the law.  The Supreme Court struck it down.  Here's a link to the Supreme Court opinion.  I don't think I am misreading it.  The only part of the individual mandate that is still the law is the tax penalty for failure to obtain the insurance.  Oh, and the law disables the IRS from actually enforcing that penalty.   So I don't see why anybody should be deterred from advocating a boycott by the supposed "individual mandate."  If anything, the Republicans should be loudly pointing out that the individual mandate has been struck down and that the tax penalty is far less than the amount you will save by not signing up.

Looking for an actual intelligent objection to my proposal, the best I can find is from the usually thoughtful Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.  Megan says that "Republicans have been skating a thin line" between predicting that "people can game the system by going without insurance and then buying it when they get sick" and "encouraging it."  Megan says that Republicans are "wrong" to even get close to this line.  Why?

After March 2014, this is going to be a pretty dangerous game to play. You will only be able to enroll in an exchange policy during open enrollment at the beginning of each year. Now, this would actually work for a lot of conditions- -- even necessary surgery can often wait nine months, and while I really wouldn’t recommend it, it probably wouldn’t actually kill you to wait six months to get into a diabetes treatment program. But if you get into a car accident in April, the next 10 months of expensive treatment will be on your dime.

Sorry Megan, but I strongly disagree.   I don't see it as at all a fair characterization of what young people may do as "gaming the system" when the government is trying to strong-arm them into paying double or triple the fair price for health insurance, and also has a stupid rule that allows you to buy so-called "insurance" after you get sick.  The whole idea behind free-market capitalism is that people are allowed to behave rationally and are rewarded for it.  That's what distinguishes a functioning economic system from a Cuba or a North Korea.  

So how big is the risk for a young person that you take a pass on the insurance and then you have a bad accident or medical problem and go many months before you can sign up?  The answer is, no worse than things are today for the supposed 47 million uninsured.  If the accident happens, you show up at the hospital, get treated, and then don't pay.  Go bankrupt if necessary.  If you have no meaningful amount of assets, it's their problem, not yours.   I'm not saying this will be pleasant, but the tradeoff is a one or two percent chance of going through an assetless bankruptcy versus overpaying by thousands per year for medical insurance for a decade or two.  It's time to embrace a little risk!

Here's the most important part of my proposal:  When you find yourself in an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, you want it to collapse as soon as possible.  With Obamacare, the essential question is, is it going to be a painfully slow Ponzi scheme like Medicare/Medicaid that is taking at least 70 and maybe as much as 100 years to get to collapse, or can we get it to collapse in just a few years?  We want the death spiral absolutely as fast as possible!  If only young people will boycott it, that could happen.