How's That "Stimulus" Working Out For You? Puerto Rico Edition.

Advocates of ever-increasing economic "stimulus" never seem to look at the cases where their preferred economic policies are actually put into effect.  By the way, those advocates include essentially all of the cognoscenti as far as I can tell -- the entire governing class in Republican administrations (GW Bush) and Democratic (Obama), the IMF, the Fed, Krugman, all Krugman-wannabe economists, etc. 

So Kevin Williamson does a major service with his cover article in the current issue of National Review, titled Bankruptcy Boricua.  (Looks like it costs a quarter to buy the article.  Or you could subscribe to the print edition like I do.)

There are lots of statistics in the article.  The bottom line is that in Puerto Rico they have tried and tried for decades to buy a growing economy with more and more government spending, and the result is vast dependency and a per capita income level only about half that of the otherwise lowest state (Mississippi).  By 2008 Puerto Rico's government was running an official on-budget annual deficit of $3.3 billion, 44% of revenues.  A new governor elected at that time, Luis Fortuno, cut on-budget spending 20% and got the official deficit down to 7% of revenues.  He also cut taxes and to some degree went after the public sector unions.  Needless to say, he only lasted one term.  Under the new guy, the deficit and tax rates have resumed their increases.  Meanwhile, it turns out that Fortuno was only really dealing with the official part of the budget.  They also have a bunch of off-budget public agencies, like the University of Puerto Rico and the Government Development Bank.  When you combine the deficits of the agencies with the official budget, what's the real combined deficit?  Williamson says that a recent audit came up with the number $39 billion.  For comparison, that's approximately equal to the entire budget of the state of Connecticut ($37.6 billion), which has about the same population as Puerto Rico (both are around 3.6 million).  But Connecticut is a lot wealthier.

But surely all this deficit-spending "stimulus" has created lots of jobs through the famous "multiplier" effect?  Not really.  Williamson reports these discouraging numbers:  15.2% unemployment; 30% of employed people work for the government; and 51% of residents receive some form of welfare.  And did I mention that Puerto Rico's population has been declining since 2000?  It's off about 200,000, or almost 5%, from a peak over 3.8 million in the 2000 census.  Everybody who can is moving to the mainland.

You would think that there would be some level of empirical evidence that government spending cannot buy economic success that would eventually sink in to even the densest skulls.  Well, on that subject my memory is jogged by seeing the op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal by one Martin Feldstein, noted economist certainly not of the Krugman ilk, Harvard professor and one-time head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan.  Certainly not a liberal shill, you would say.  The subject of Feldstein's op-ed is not fiscal stimulus, but rather how the Fed should give guidance on monetary policy.  However,  a couple of weeks ago I attended a monetary policy event put on by something called E21, and Feldstein was the featured speaker.  After his speech (the subject of which was much like his op-ed today) somebody asked him, OK, what do you think should be done about today's sluggish economy?  And his answer?  He said that the government should increase the amount of fiscal stimulus.  I'm not making this up.  This is the unbelievable power that fallacious Keynesian groupthink is holding over economic policy today.   It's actually worse.  Feldstein went on to say that the government should do what he called "real" stimulus, which he described to mean the purchase of goods and services, as in the building of infrastructure, as opposed to transfer payments like the last round of Obama stimulus.  The reason he gave was that transfer payments are not measured as such in GDP, whereas purchase of goods and services go into GDP at 100 cents on the dollar.  OH MY GOD he has been taken in by the single most obvious and blatant fraud practiced on the people by the government.   I have written about this many times, for example here.  Martin:  The inclusion of government purchases in GDP at 100 cents on the dollar is just a completely fraudulent measurement convention, and does not make the measured increase remotely real.  Help!!!!!

Should Everything That Is Bad Be Illegal?

Read (or re-read) the Declaration of Independence, and you will be reminded that the big complaint of the colonists was the arbitrariness of rule by a king who could just do to you whatever he wanted.  We replaced that, with remarkable success, with what we call "the rule of law."  In fact, maybe the rule of law has been too successful.

Faced with a situation where the laws are viewed as basically fair and well-applied, most people show a remarkable willingness to be law-abiding.  Thus arises the fallacy that the world can be perfected if only we can enact enough laws prohibiting everything bad.  And in this game, "bad" quickly morphs from something that most everyone would agree is wrong, to whatever got a bare majority in Congress or a state legislature on some particular day. 

It may seem like most of the victimless crimes have been around forever, but look into it and you find out that this game only really got started well into the 20th century, and it only took off during your own lifetime.  Gambling, for example, was pretty much open season in the United States in the 19th century, and restrictions started proliferating in the 1920s and 30s.  Drugs were almost entirely legal at the federal level before the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 tried to make marijuana illegal by back-door means.  Only when that was struck down by the Supreme Court in the Timothy Leary case in 1969 did we then get the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the launch of the "War on Drugs."  I was in college.  Also launched in the momentous year of 1970 was the war against the victimless crime that I regard as the most ridiculous and most futile of all to try to wipe out, namely "money laundering."  The law that started it was the so-called Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.  (A better name for it would be the Bank Non-Secrecy Act -- It requires your bank to rat you out to the government on request and not tell you that they are doing it.)  And then we have the explosion of increasingly preposterous "crimes" over the past few decades:  Installing a toilet of more than 1.6 gallon flush (Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1992)!  Manufacturing a 100 watt incandescent light bulb (Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007)!  OK, make that a 75 watt incandescent light bulb!  I could go on (and on, and on).

Read the justification for any of this stuff, and you find out that freedom just isn't considered a value of any importance by many people.  And actually, it's far worse than that, because restrictions on human freedom come with untold unintended consequences as people act to evade the restrictions.  Yet it is very hard to get the unintended consequences heard as part of the debate.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the drug war.  Most of the debate is between drugs = bad and therefore should be illegal, versus drugs = good and therefore should be legal.  There actually is some to be said on the side of drugs = good, most notably medical uses of marijuana, and remarkably that is where most of the recent ground has been gained.   But I would not stand up for the drugs = good position for most people and in most circumstances.

Looking over the arguments put forth by the drugs = bad crowd, it's hard to find much if any discussion of the value of human freedom or of the unintended negative consequences of the drug war.  For example, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News has become a big advocate of continued illegality of drugs including marijuana.  Here is a 2013 column he wrote on he subject.  Excerpt:

If you have kids, you most likely prayed hard that they would avoid drugs and alcohol. Once a child becomes intoxicated, childhood is over. The young person will never be the same again.  Thus, a sane society discourages substance abuse if only to protect children. A sane society does not put a happy face on inebriation.

O'Reilly puts what he calls the "freedom issue" among the "usual excuses" put forth by the legalizers.  He completely equates "discouraging substance abuse" with necessary criminalization and putting millions of people in jail.  Or here is a relatively balanced discussion of the drug war from a high ranking official of the New York Police Department.  But at bottom he weighs freedom at zero and thinks that drugs turn the users into crazed maniacs who go on crime sprees.  Is there any actual evidence for that?

Or for that matter, is there any actual evidence that criminalization decreases the number of drug users?  A big recent study from the European Union concludes "Among the strongest and most consistent findings, eliminating punishments for possession for personal use is not associated with higher drug use."

And then there is the long list of negative consequences of the war.  Here is a roundup.  Examples:

• $51 billion annually spent on the drug war.  (I have seen higher numbers elsewhere.)
• 1.55 million arrests in the U.S. in 2012 on nonviolent drug charges.
• 658,000 arrests in the U.S. in 2012 for marijuana for possession only
• $46.7 billion foregone tax revenue (OK, that one is kind of made up, but doesn't seem wildly out of line to me.)
• 70,000 deaths in Mexico since 2006.

And they don't even mention hard-to-quantify (but also hard to deny) things like increased crime and corruption of the police.  It sure seems like a lot of the murders in places like Chicago and Detroit stem from drug turf wars, a consequence of prohibition.

And don't get me started on money laundering!

Argentina Is Joined In The Supreme Court By The Coalition Of Weasels

Another year, and the ever-entertaining country of Argentina finds itself back in the U.S. Supreme Court, trying to get the court to hear its appeal of injunctions that would force it to pay its debts.  A couple of days ago a group of friendly countries came in to support Argentina's position with amicus briefs.  These countries address the critically important question of the day: how many reasons can we think of why a country that gets tired of paying its debts should be able to walk away?  Call these countries the "Coalition of Weasels."  So far it's Brazil, Mexico (!) and France (!!!). 

OK, I shouldn't be so surprised about France.   They are well on the way to adopting the official Latin American model of economic success.  Government spending is well over 50% of GDP.  A socialist government pretends that infinite spending can be paid for by the tooth fairy.  Last year they lost their AAA rating.  Moody's rates them Aa1 "with negative outlook."  Yes, even France has reason to prepare the ground for the day it wants to default.

The overriding theme of the three briefs is how terribly important it is for a country in crisis to be able to walk away from debt.   Mexico:  "The injunctions will inevitably have a negative impact on future sovereign debt restructurings and risk destabilizing the international monetary system."  I like that one about "risks destabilizing the international monetary system."  How would that work, exactly?  Nobody knows, but it sounds really scary.  Then here we have France:

If upheld, the injunctive remedy affirmed by the Court of Appeals on the basis of this ill-founded interpretation threatens significant global harm to various public and private interests.  It also would disrupt the established practice of orderly sovereign debt restructurings, in which France has acquired extensive experience as an active participant in the Paris Club.  In particular, the injunctive remedy threatens to upset the complex balance of interests between sovereign debtors and their creditors, sovereign lenders, bank lenders and bondholders that is generally achieved in a voluntary and orderly restructuring.

Never mentioned is that the "crisis" in Argentina actually consists of nothing more than that the politicians would rather spend money on various forms of vote buying than on paying their debts.   They don't have to pay for any wars.  (The Falklands war was way back in 1982.)  They haven't had any natural disasters to speak of.  Whatever crisis they have is completely of their own making, born of incompetent economic policy and waste.  Argentina is famous for an economy dominated by crony capitalism and subsidies.  Inflation is rampant -- they admit to 10.9% for 2013, but everybody knows that's fake.  The real number is more like at least 50%, according to a February article in The Economist here.   That gives a great opportunity for the old official exchange rate game, where you let your friends buy or sell dollars at a fake rate, hiding massive payoffs.  And then you hand out subsidies for everything.  How about energy subsidies for everyone!  Argentina has been deep into that one, although just in the last few days it has had to start cutting the subsidies because it is running out of foreign exchange to buy the stuff.  But don't worry, the Economy Minister promises that they will continue with the destructive economic policies:

Economy Minister Axel Kicillof says the populist government is sticking with its model of transferring wealth to help the poor and stimulate the economy.

Of course, in an official exchange rate regime, the actual primary wealth transfer is not to the poor at all, but rather to the well-connected friends of the government.  But if they say often enough that they are "helping the poor," maybe someone will believe it.

What's remarkable is that the countries that actually bite the bullet and pay their debts are the ones that are successful.  The United States literally got its start by figuring out how to pay off the defaulted Revolutionary War debt at par, even though much of it had been bought up cheaply by speculators.  Alexander Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit of 1790 - proposing to pay the debt at par - was his first big act as Treasury Secretary.  From Wikipedia's description:

Monied speculators, alerted that Congress, under the new Constitution, might provide for payment at face value for certificates, sought to buy up devalued securities for profit and investment.Concerns arose over the fact that many certificates – almost three-quarters of them - had been exchanged for well below par during periods of inflation, some as low as 10 cents on the dollar, but selling at 20-25% at the time the Report was debated.

Funny thing was, somehow paying off that debt didn't "destabilize the international monetary system."  Nor did it keep the United States economy from taking off.  In fact, if debt payments squeeze out the possibility of massive payments for crony capitalism, energy subsidies, and the like, they may be the best thing that can happen to an economy.  Don't tell Brazil, Mexico and France.

UPDATE March 28, 2014:  Many thanks to Instapundit for the link!

I should mention that the single worst thing about being a partner of a large international law firm is having to pay income taxes, not small in amount, to the government of France.  Sacre bleu!

We're Even Against Chumley's!

I've written a few times about the remarkable phenomenon that Greenwich Villagers are against everything.  For example, see here.   At least, we're officially against everything new, and everything that seems to represent change, however slight.  In the most recent twist, it seems that we're even against Chumley's. I

If you haven't heard of it, Chumley's was/is probably the most famous bar in Greenwich Village.  It opened in the 1920s, during prohibition, as a speakeasy.  Thus, no signs, and a secret back entrance.  After prohibition ended, the owners decided to keep the speakeasy atmosphere going.  You could feel that you were really "in the know" if you knew about Chumley's.

Here's an exterior picture of the old, pre-2007 Chumley's. 

86 Bedford Street, home of Chumley's, pre-2007

The building was an early style for the neighborhood, dating from about 1820 -30.  No way would you have guessed there was a famous bar in there.  That door was not the entrance.  To enter, you had to go around the corner onto Barrow Street, past the building you can see at the right in the picture above, and there you would find this unmarked alley:

Alleyway on Barrow Street leading to Chumley's.  Click to enlarge.

That alley led to a small courtyard, not really visible from the street, where was found a door that went into the back of the Chumley's building.  Again though, no sign: 

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Courtyard entrance to Chumley'

The bar was famous for its association with literary figures -- Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer.  Of course, it was a poorly kept secret.  In fact, undoubtedly it got a little touristy in its later days. 

But then tragedy struck.  In 2007 the building suffered a partial collapse, and the bar was forced to close.  They tore the building down completely, and they've been rebuilding it in a very slow process ever since.  Today, seven years later, it seems that it's about ready to reopen.  Here's the new building, looking very much like the old building:

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New 86 Bedford Street

So what is the official Greenwich Village reaction to the upcoming reopening of Chumley's?  Why, of course, we're against it!  It seems that a coalition of about 50 neighbors has filed suit to have Chumley's liquor license revoked so that it cannot reopen.  Here's a report from Grub Street in February:

A group of approximately 50 neighbors filed a lawsuit in Manhattan State Supreme Court yesterday, asking the state to revoke the liquor license at the famous speakeasy and Greenwich Village institution, which has been closed since a partial wall collapse in 2007 threatened the integrity of the building. "Bar-Free Bedford" claims that shortly before its emergency closure, Chumley's was operating not as a highbrow bar with deep literary roots, as it's often claimed in guidebooks, but as "a major destination for tourists, undergraduates and bar-hopping bridge-and-tunnel partygoers."

Mind you, this is smack in the middle of the square mile with undoubtedly the most bars and restaurants of any square mile in the entire United States.  For example, exactly two doors down we have a building with the address 12 Grove Street.  You might recognize it as the building that was used for the exterior shots to represent the home of Rachel, Monica, Joey, Chandler, et al. on the TV series Friends.  Yes, there is a restaurant/bar in this building.

The restaurant may have been there for decades, but pity these poor people if they should close it and then try to reopen.  Hey, this is Greenwich Village!

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The "Friends" Building, 12 Grove Street, corner Bedford, Greenwich Village

UPDATE March 31, 2014:  And how about Google?  The new word in the neighborhood is that Google has a plan for something new, a retail store, taking a cue from the huge success of Apple with this idea.  I'll bet you would say that any neighborhood in the country would be ecstatic to be chosen by Google for the site of its first retail store.  But then you don't understand us.

Our local newspaper The Villager first reported in its March 20 edition that Google was looking to lease space at 131 Greene Street, just half a block south of the official boundary of Greenwich Village in a neighborhood called Soho, and very close to one of the Apple stores at the corner of Prince and Greene Streets.  The Villager quotes a top retail broker, Faith Hope Consolo, to the effect that Greene Street is the hot street to be on these days:  "There are different streets that are in vogue, that have become hot, and it's just now that Greene St. has become the street in Soho."

It took just a week for the forces Against Everything to get their act together.  In the March 27 edition of The Villager we have Community Board 2 member Bo Riccobono quoted as follows:

It’s a very bad idea.  It will bring hordes of people to this quiet street with low-traffic, high-end stores. Google should be on Broadway, West Broadway or Lafayette St. on a corner near a subway.

View Larger Map">Here's a link to a picture of the street from Google maps streetview.  Yes, the street is lined with retail stores.  You can see the existing Apple store at the very left of the picture.

Climate Change And The Need To Suppress Dissent

My first recollection of use of the term "politically correct" was way back about 1970.  I was in college.  The strong connotation of the term was enforced orthodoxy.  If you wanted to be in with the in crowd, the price was toeing the party line on all important matters of politics.  The ostracism of comrades who dissented was rapid and harsh.   The university (this was Yale) made noises about being open to all opinions, but God forbid a speaker from the administration should show up to defend, for example, the Vietnam War -- he would be shouted down, if not pelted with rotten eggs.  (Recall that Nixon was the President.) 

Things may actually be somewhat better for free speech on campuses today, at least to the extent that conservatives and libertarians are sometimes allowed to speak.  (Is it only because the current President is himself politically correct?  Good question.)  But if anything, the enforcement of orthodoxy on those seeking access to the secret handshake has become even more overt and forceful.  And in no area more so than climate change.

Over at the Federalist, Ross Kaminsky has an excellent roundup yesterday of efforts of the Left to suppress dissent.  The article ranges widely over many areas -- the IRS/Tea Party scandal, efforts of Senators (led by Schumer of course) to revive the "Fairness Doctrine" to disadvantage Fox News, the FCC's proposal to put monitors in news rooms, etc.  Not meaning to minimize those, but each is a fairly discrete initiative of small number of despicable government actors.  

But then Kaminsky moves to the subject of climate change, where the efforts to suppress dissent are pervasivie and seem to come from everywhere -- government, academia, the media, web sites, you name it.  And Kaminsky doesn't even mention many of the worst examples.  If you haven't been following this subject, seeing it put together in one place really opens your eyes.  I'll take Kaminsky's list and add a few of my own:

• Kaminsky quotes Brian Stelter of CNN as recently arguing that skeptics of global warming alarmism should not be given equal time.   Not mentioned are the similar late-2013 announcements of the LA Times and Reddit that they would not publish any views of climate skeptics.
• Kaminsky cites the "Climategate" email disclosures of 2009, revealing leading orthodox climate scientists maneuvering to get themselves into the position of peer reviewer of any papers authored by those questioning the orthodoxy so that they can then have the papers rejected for publication.
• Again not mentioned is that leading web sites of the climate orthodoxy (e.g., realclimate.org, climateprogress.org) flatly refuse to accept comments or questions from anyone who even slightly questions the orthodoxy.
• Kaminsky describes the libel lawsuits brought by leader-of-climate-science-orthodoxy Michael Mann against the likes of National Review, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, seeking to use the financial pressure of litigation to silence those dissenting voices. 
• Finally, Kaminsky refers to the widely-circulated article last week from a guy named Lawrence Torcello of Rochester Institute of Technology, calling for criminal prosecution of climate dissenters.  Says Professor Torcello, "We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent."  By the way, Professor Torcello's field is philosophy, not science of any sort, let alone climate science. 
• Not mentioned is that Torcello is just one in a long line of climate crazies in high places calling for criminal action against dissenters.  For example, Canada's most prominent environmentalist David Suzuki has repeatedly called for criminal prosecution against dissenters, most recently against no less than Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  Pseudo-science blogger Greg Laden has long called for criminal action against anyone who disagrees with him on climate issues.  Or check out this UK website called Bring Climate Criminals to Justice.  And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, I think it's a pretty good principle of life that those seeking to suppress the other side of the argument have a good sense that in a fair debate they are going to lose. 

Meanwhile, in what I regard as the most important aspect of the debate, a few people other than myself are starting to notice that trying to save the climate by banning fossil fuels means consigning the poor to perpetual poverty.   For my article from February on Climate Policy And Keeping The Poor Poor, see here.  Well, just last week prominent, and generally sensible, climate blogger Roger Pielke, Jr. came out with an article for the Breakthrough Institute titled Keeping the Poor Poor:  Against Anti-Growth Environmentalism.  The dissent-suppressors had better get to work quickly on this one, because as soon as people are allowed to think about this and realize the monstrous consequences of the climate campaign, the jig will really be up.

UPDATE March 21, 2014: It seems that one of the best examples of climate orthodoxy enforcement was unfolding yesterday even as I was writing the above post.  And the example involves none other than Roger Pielke, Jr.

You may have heard of a polling and numbers guru named Nate Silver.   Silver has gotten much favorable notice for his accurate predictions of recent elections, and has a recently-launched blog called fivethirtyeight.com.  Silver is also a favorite of the New York Times, which carries a subset of Silver's blog content on its site.   So Silver aspires to be in with the in crowd.  That can be dangerous. 

The Silver blog has a science section, and one of the bloggers in that section is the above-mentioned Pielke.  On Wednesday of this week, Pielke had a post titled Disasters Cost More Than Ever -- But Not Because of Climate Change.  That was definitely not politically correct!  Hasn't he heard that the whole idea behind "climate change" is to scare the public into supporting a bigger and more activist government?

The orthodoxy enforcers immediately came out in full force.  Judith Curry of Climate Etc. has a roundup.  You should read the whole thing.  In the big pile-on, we have Columbia Journalism Review here; theweek.com here ("FiveThirtyEight's science coverage stinks of sublimated ideology."); the official climate change orthodoxy enforcer Michael Mann here.  But Curry saves most of her space for a post by one Kiley Kroh at ClimateProgress, which Curry calls "probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job I have ever seen of a scientist."

If you read Kroh's post you will see that it is entirely about appeals to authority (e.g., Michael Mann is a "top climate scientist," John Holdren offers a "scientifically grounded explanation of how climate change is worsening western drought," etc.) and no actual presentation as to the merits of the argument.

Well, Silver, you have strayed.  Welcome to ostracism.  Curry's conclusion:

Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.

Is The Number Of People Without Health Insurance A Crisis?

Having been around when GW Bush was President, and even immediately after the election of Obama, I clearly remember that the greatest crisis facing the country was the number of people without health insurance.  Or at least that was the official line.  There definitely was a constant drumbeat of reports from the great and the good, government and non-government advocacy groups, citing the number of people without health insurance and calling the situation a crisis.

As a couple of examples, consider this study from the University of Missouri's Center for Full Employment and Price Stability from 2007, title: An Introduction to the Health Care Crisis in America.  Or, for the official government version at the time immediately after Obama was elected and before Obamacare was passed, consider the report from the Institute of Medicine from February 2009 titled America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care.  To help you remember the rhetoric of the time, here is the intro to that IOM study:

The growing number of uninsured Americans--totaling 45.7 million as of 2007--is taking a toll on the nation's health. One in five adults under age 65 and nearly one in ten children are uninsured. Uninsured individuals experience much more risk to their health than insured individuals. In its 2009 report America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care, the Institute of Medicine points to a chasm between the health care needs of people without health insurance and access to effective health care services. This gap results in needless illness, suffering, and even death.

Well, that's rather over the top naked advocacy for government expansion from an organization supposed to be neutral policy advisers.  Of course the whole notion that lack of health insurance results in worse health outcomes has since been more or less completely debunked by, among other things, a large random study out of Oregon.  The IOM 2009 study didn't have those data or any other, but they don't let that kind of thing get in the way when they can utter phrases like "needless illness, suffering, and even death."

But anyway, here we are several years later and just short of four years since President Obama signed Obamacare into law, and you don't see much any more about the "crisis of the uninsured."  Well, the whole idea of Obamacare was to get everybody insured, so, you might be thinking, undoubtedly that must be what has happened.  Think again.

So let's just go and look up the latest government figures for the number of Americans without health insurance.  Well, try to do that and you'll find out that the government isn't putting out any figures on that just now.  Are you suspicious yet?

However, HHS Secretary Sibelius gave a press conference on Tuesday, and she talked about the number of uninsured.  Here's a report on the press conference at the Health Exchange web site.  Where did she get her numbers?  From a poll done by Gallup, and reported in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index on Monday.  Yes, the number of uninsured was the greatest crisis facing America, and we enacted a government takeover of a sixth of the economy to fix it, and the government now can't be bothered to collect data as to whether the "crisis" is being solved or not.

According to Secretary Sibelius in the press conference, based on Gallup data, the percentage of uninsured has declined to 15.9% of the population in early 2014, down from 17.1% in the last quarter of 2013.  Sibelius credits the Affordable Care Act: "That didn't just happen on its own."  This was of course spun as a big achievement.  ABC News reported it as "Health Law Cited as US Uninsured Rate Drops."

It doesn't sound like much of a change to begin with.  And can we please go back and look up where the number of uninsured stood back when GW Bush was President and this was the greatest crisis facing the country?  Turns out that the percentage of uninsured was below where it is today for all eight years of the Bush presidency. Here are the official data from the Census Bureau.  No, I can't explain why the official Census Bureau data ends in 2009.  But the percentage of uninsured Americans according to these data ranges from 14.1% in 2001 to 15.4% in 2008.

Now maybe, although I haven't heard them say it, the official administration view is that it doesn't matter any more whether you have insurance, because after all now we have guaranteed issue and you can buy the insurance after you get sick.  If you think about that one, you'll realize that they really can't put it quite that way without admitting that the whole thing can't work.  Instead they are out on their ridiculous fraudulent promotion campaign to try to trick young people into signing up and overpaying.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post yesterday gives what is, from an administration supporter, a rather balanced picture of where Obamacare is today.   Milbank notes that the administration has said that it needed about 7 million sign ups by the end of March, of which about 40% or 2.7 million would have to be young adults in the 18-34 age range.  According to the recent announcements, the number of the young adult sign ups is 1.08 million.  That's not too close.  Milbank's take is that the "millennials have abandoned Obama."  In terms of how they vote, that remains to be seen.  But the idea that you could just order people to buy a way overpriced product and they would do it because they like you -- that was never going to happen.