Obamacare: What Will Be The Reasoning Of The "Liberal" Justices?

The latest court challenge to the so-called Affordable Care Act ("ACA" or "Obamacare"), called King v. Burwell, is scheduled for argument before the Supreme Court on March 4.  This is the case where the Petitioners assert that the government cannot provide Obamacare premium subsidies to healthcare purchasers unless the policy in question was purchased on an exchange "established by the State."  Turns out that some 36 states never established these exchanges.  When those states refused, the federal government stepped in and set up its own exchange to be used by the citizens of the refusing states.  The IRS then promulgated a regulation providing that Obamacare's premium subsidies are equally available whether the exchange where you bought your policy was established by a state or by the federal government.  But can that IRS regulation be squared with the language of the statute?

This turns out to be a great issue to examine the two fundamental ways of looking at the world.  In one worldview, the limitations on the government's powers are fundamental to our freedom and our success, and as one example the government cannot spend any money unless by statute duly approved by Congress.  In the other world view, there is a tremendous moral imperative requiring the government to do everything possible to achieve economic fairness and equity, generally to be done by passing out government money and benefits, and all statutes must be interpreted toward that end, no matter what they actually say.

The basic argument of the King Petitioners is that the statute clearly says that the subsidies are only available to policies purchased on state-created exchanges.  From page 18 of their brief:

The ACA grants a tax credit “equal to the premium assistance credit amount,” which is the sum of monthly assistance amounts for “all coverage months of the taxpayer” during the year. 26 U.S.C. § 36B(a), (b)(1). A “coverage month” is one in which “the taxpayer … is covered by a qualified health plan … enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311 of the [ACA, 42 U.S.C. § 18031].” Id. § 36B(c)(2)(A)(i) (emphasis added).  These provisions are thus perfectly clear: Unless a taxpayer enrolls in coverage “through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311 of the [ACA],” he has no “coverage months” and therefore no “premium assistance amounts.”

Did it make sense for the ACA to restrict the subsidies in that way?  Well, there's this famous quote from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber from 2012:

In the law, it says if the states don’t provide [exchanges], the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.

So I've been spending some quality time with the government's brief and with the many, many briefs from amici supporting the government (all available here).  And what is remarkable to me is the extent to which they steer away from arguments directed to the statutory text and toward arguments having little or nothing to do with the law and everything to do with what they see as the moral imperative.  Children will die!  Old people will suffer!  Everyone will be sick!  OK, I exaggerate somewhat, but not by much.

For example, from a brief for AARP, National Health Law Program, National Council on Aging, and others:

Lack of adequate and affordable health insurance among pre-Medicare adults results in worse health outcomes and death, and negatively impacts financial stability, the health care system, federal programs, and the national economy.

Or from the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians, and many others:

Petitioners' construction of the ACA could deprive millions of children of insurance coverage and access to affordable healthcare.

Or from America's Health Insurance Plans:

Premium assistance tax credits in federally facilitated exchanges are an essential safeguard against the destabilization and failure of these essential insurance markets.

And there are a couple of dozen more like these.  Guys, would you care to address the law even a little?  Oh, did I mention that essentially all of these guys supporting the government are on the receiving end of big payments from the subsidies?

The government, to its credit, does take a stab at a statutory construction argument, which appears at pages 20-25 of its brief.   It's too long and convoluted for me to go into detail here, but read it yourself and see what you think.  The gist is that an exchange established by the federal government is an exchange "established by the State" because . . . well, because.  And then they continue with lots more about how the "structure and design" of the Act should trump the actual language.  Of course, Mr. Gruber has articulated why the "structure and design" of the statute are consistent with the opposite construction.

But the funny thing about this kind of case is that you can predict which way the Justices are going to come out by their political leanings much more than by anything about the merits of the legal arguments.  In other words, which of the two views of the world do they subscribe to?  I have no doubt that Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor will vote to uphold the IRS regulation.  In their heart of hearts, they know that Congress must have meant to get the subsidies to everyone who might need them, and they can't let this critical statute get tripped up by what can only be some technical drafting glitch.  The question I have is, what will be the basis for their decision?  I predict an opinion with lots about suffering children and dying old people.  I hope I'm wrong, but I'll bet I'm not.  
 

On Mayor de Blasio's New Budget And Housing Plans

When Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York a little over a year ago, many on the right predicted some kind of imminent disaster for the City.  But not me.  These things don't happen that fast.  It takes a long time to undo the good work in public safety and (to a lesser degree) in budget control bequeathed to de Blasio by his two predecessors; and yet another long time for the incentive effects of bad policy to have noticeable impacts on the economy and success of the City.

So walking around the streets of New York you won't notice that much has changed.  In fact, there's something of a boomlet going on in housing construction, and job creation continues to be decent if not strong.  Still, it's worthwhile making a few comments on de Blasio's recently-articulated housing and budget plans.

De Blasio continues to flog "affordable housing" as his signature initiative, supposedly to address the "tale of two cities" and income inequality -- although how construction of subsidized housing is supposed to alleviate income inequality is never actually spelled out.  Here's what de Blasio had to say about housing on February 3 in his "State of the City" address:

[W]e are following through on a plan to build and preserve affordable housing on an unprecedented scale. We’ve committed to the construction of 80,000 new units of affordable housing by 2024. . . . Increasing the overall supply of housing is critical to serving New Yorkers at all income levels — and to assuring we can accommodate the work force who will continue to grow our economy.  So we plan for the construction of 160,000 market rate units as well.

Let's put this in a little perspective.  According to data from the NYC Comptroller's Office here, the number of housing units in New York City exceeds 3.2 million.   De Blasio proposes 80,000 affordable units to be built over 10 years -- that's 8,000 per year, or 0.25% of current stock per year.  Barely enough to notice.  Except, as I have pointed out many times, we're talking about annual subsidies of something in the range of $50,000 to $100,000 per family for every family that gets in on the boondoggle.  Plus, these families are then stuck in the apartment they get in their first draw, and remain as officially-designated second-class citizens for the rest of their lives.

And how about that 160,000 units of market rate housing?  De Blasio gives no indication of where he came up with that one, or what if anything his initiatives will have to do with it.  Does it sound like a lot?  Actually, it's pitiful -- It's over 10 years, so about 0.5% of current stock per year.  Those familiar with New York housing history know that in the decade of the 1920s New York built over 800,000 units of housing.  That's 80,000 per year, five times the pace suggested by de Blasio, and in a city just over half the size (although rapidly growing).  And that was without any of the subsidies, tax breaks, rent regulation, landmarking and any of the other crazy quilt of restrictions and incentives we deal with today. 

Well, how about pensions?  As with last year's speech by de Blasio, I can't find a mention of the subject.  In his February 2015 Financial Plan,  if you make it all the way to page 44, you'll find a chart that projects total pension expense for the City for the years 2015 through 2019 at basically a flat $8.5 billion per year.  No explanation of how they come up with that, although they do say that future contributions have been somewhat reduced due to the good stock market returns of 2014.  Over at the site for the New York City actuary, I can't find anything to back up these numbers.  Are they paying any attention at all?  I don't have any reason to think they are.  But again, these things play out over a very long time horizon.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part IV

As discussed here in three previous posts, over the past few years, several independent researchers have laboriously compared raw archived temperature data at numerous stations with adjusted data used by U.S government agencies NASA/GISS and NOAA/NCDC in calculating world temperatures and making declarations of "hottest year ever."  The researchers have included Tony Heller of the Real Science web site, Paul Homewood of Not a Lot of People Know That, and Joe d'Aleo of ICECAP.  In examination of data from scores of weather station sites, they have uniformly found that the adjustments have been to cool temperatures in older years and warm temperatures in later years, thereby creating or adding to a warming trend that does not exist in the raw data.  Many of the adjustments have been significant -- 1 deg C or more -- and some have approached 3 deg C.  The web sites in question contain links to the raw and adjusted data used in the calculations, so anyone with knowledge of any particular site could come forward and say, for example, that the raw data they are using for Reykjavik is wrong, or the adjustment for 1932 is justified by a move of the site from point A to point B in that year, or some such thing.

But I can't find any such challenges to the work of these researchers.  In fact, most remarkable to me is the almost total silence from GISS and NCDC.  As I mentioned in my July 2014 post, politifact had put a series of questions to NCDC on the subject of some specific adjustments at sites in Kansas and Texas, and their response can be found here.  The response is extremely terse and the key quote is "our algorithm is working as designed."  Judith Curry of Georgia Tech and the Climate Etc. site had said that "NOAA really needs to respond."  But we get nothing in the way of specific justification for any adjustment, no code, no explanation.

Looking around in the last couple of days for any kind of response to very credible allegations, the closest I can find is a post from some scientists at Berkeley Earth that appears at Ms. Curry's web site.   Berkeley Earth, for those unfamiliar, claims to be an "independent" organization, and is run by father and daughter Richard and Elizabeth Muller.  They publish their major funders on their web site, and you can see that they have received significant amounts from the U.S. government, but more from various foundations, and they are not a U.S. government agency.  Muller father claims to be a former climate skeptic who converted.  I can't find any good evidence that he was ever a skeptic, and I would call him a global warming activist, but I'll let you do your own research and form your own conclusion.

Anyway, the Berkeley Earth response, dated February 9, appears at first blush to be long, detailed and technical.  But I would call it hand-waving.  The gist is, we've looked at these accusations and there's really nothing to them because overall they don't add up to any meaningful change in the overall world temperature series, so there's really nothing here.  Trust us.  Key quotes:

In general, noise and inhomogeneities in temperature data will make a temperature field rougher while homogenization practices and spatial averaging will make it smoother. Since the true temperature distribution is unknown, determining the right amount of homogenization to best capture the local details is challenging, and an active area of research. However, as noted above, it makes very little difference to the global averages.

In summary, it is possible to look through 40,000 stations and select those that the algorithm has warmed; and, it’s possible to ignore those that the algorithm has cooled. As the spatial maps show it is also possible to select entire continents where the algorithm has warmed the record; and, it’s possible to focus on other continents were the opposite is the case. Globally however, the effect of adjustments is minor. It’s minor because on average the biases that require adjustments mostly cancel each other out.

OK, I'm in the litigation business, and that goes exactly nowhere with me.   Specific allegations demand a specific response, and no judge or jury I've ever been before would take this as a credible answer to the charges.  Here are some specific questions that must be answered or no one who pays attention is going to believe a word you are saying:

• For each station where the independent researchers have demonstrated that adjustments have created or added to the warming trend, give us a specific justification for the adjustment.  That justification must also support the specific magnitude of the adjustment.  For example, what is the specific justification for adjustments coming to 2.26 deg C for Luling, Texas, or 5 deg F (2.6 deg C) for the state of Maine?
• You say that there are stations where the adjustments go in the opposite direction and that the total of all adjustments essentially cancels out.  OK then, give us a list of stations where the adjustments go in the opposite direction, and enough of them with large enough quantitative adjustments to cancel out what the researchers have presented.  How come nobody but you knows about them?
• Numerous adjustments have been identified that cool the past by multiple degrees, often 50 to 100 years after the fact.  I can't think of any possible justification for this, and I'm not alone.  Let's hear it! 
• Address the arctic specifically.  I note that a huge percentage of your warming trend has taken place in the arctic (north of 65N) and Homewood has attempted to go through all of those stations and has found uniform large adjustments to increase warming and not a single one in the other direction.  Instead of addressing the arctic, you address "selected regions", leaving out Siberia and Canada entirely and blending the remainder with sub-arctic areas.  Don't think we don't notice tricks like this!
• Let's see the code for your "homogenization" algorithm.

The Berkeley Earth post suggests that they may be coming forth with some of this information at some point in the future.  We're eagerly awaiting it.  In the current state of affairs, I would say that Goddard, Homewood, d'Aleo, et al. are way ahead.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part III

A few weeks ago, in mid-January, you would have had a hard time missing the big shouting and celebration in the global warming alarmist camp of 2014 being the "hottest year ever."  As just a few examples, there was Scientific American on January 5 ("2014 Officially Hottest Year On Record");  the BBC on January 16 ("2014 warmest year on record, say US researchers"); or the New York Times on January 16 ("2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics").   There were plenty of others like those.

If you read all of those articles, without doubt you will come away asking yourself one glaring question, namely:  So what did the satellites show?  Not one of these articles, or for that matter any of many others from the alarmist camp that I have looked at, so much as mentions the satellite data.  But anybody who follows this issue even a little knows that beginning in 1979 the U.S. government at great taxpayer expense has put up satellites with sophisticated instruments to get much more accurate measurements of world temperatures than previously available.  The alternative networks of ground based thermometers still exist, but have widely scattered coverage and are subject to large inaccuracies (like from having cities grow up around them, or having their sites moved over the years).  So SA, BBC, NYT: How could you insult our intelligence with articles trumpeting "hottest year ever" without telling us what the satellites say?

Luckily it's not too hard to figure out what the satellites say -- their data is published monthly by two sources, UAH and RSS.  Here's an article summarizing the results from both.  Of course it's exactly what you knew it would be as soon as you saw that the likes of the liars at SA, BBC and NYT wouldn't tell you what the satellites say:  2014 was not the hottest year, nor close, but rather tied for 6th/7th place in the 36 year record from RSS, 0.3 degrees C cooler than the warmest year, which was 1998 -- 16 years ago.  Now 0.3 degrees C may not be a lot, but it's also not a little in a record that only varies by about 1.2 degrees C from coolest to warmest year.

But it gets worse.  Regular readers of this blog know that there is a gigantic issue out there of the extent to which the ground thermometer records can be trusted because the guardians of the data (who are the same people putting out the press releases about 2014 being the "hottest year ever") have been systematically tampering with the data to make the earlier years cooler and therefore make the present appear warmer by comparison.  I previously wrote about this issue on July 3, 2014 ("What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part II") and on July 19, 2013 ("What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?")  Those articles name names, both of the crooked U.S. government paid fake scientists who "adjust" the raw thermometer data without explanation to fit the desired narrative of "hottest year ever," and also of the independent researchers who laboriously track down old archived temperature records to uncover the tampering.

Just today this issue is starting to explode.  It was at the top of Drudge earlier today, although now gradually falling back.  Drudge linked to an article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph from Saturday titled "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever."  (Wait, are they stealing their headlines from me?  OK, not quite.)  Booker discusses the work of Paul Homewood, reported on his blog notalotofpeopleknowthat.  Sample (from Booker):

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

Homewood has also uncovered massive tampering from Paraguay.  John Hinderaker of Power Line includes numerous animated GIFs from Homewood demonstrating the data tampering from Paraguay.  Homewood adds his work to the extensive output of Tony Heller (who blogs under the name Steven Goddard) of realscience.  Heller has uncovered and reported on data tampering at dozens of sites.  Just today he reports on Addison, New York.  In every instance, whether Siberia, Paraguay, or upstate New York, it's always the same thing -- the past has been cooled to make the present look warmer by comparison.  But how could the past somehow have suddenly gotten cooler, 50 or 80 or 100 years after the fact?

Lots and lots of people have demanded an explanation from the guys at NCDC/GISS who put out the adjusted/tampered data and then claim "hottest year ever."  They won't give any.

So, Scientific American, BBC, New York Times, and all the rest of you who uncritically report the greatest scientific fraud of all time as if it was the truth:  When are you going to tell us the real story?

How Stupid Are Our Economic Forecasters?

Following up on yesterday's post, I thought it would be interesting to look at the economic forecasts of the geniuses who make those things for our government, and see how well they did at forecasting the effects of the 2009-2011 "stimulus" and of the 2013-2014 "sequester."  Turns out that economist Scott Sumner at the Library of Economics and Liberty had already done the work for me.  You literally will not believe how bad this is.

To understand this nonsense (OK, it's in the nature of nonsense that it's not really possible completely to understand it) you need to know a few things about the world view of these people.  They are "Keynesians."  In Keynesian world, the size of a government's fiscal budget surplus or deficit is thought to determine the degree to which the government is giving "stimulus" to its economy, or alternatively imposing "austerity."  More spending and lower taxes constitute "stimulus"; less spending and higher taxes constitute "austerity" (or sometimes, "fiscal tightening").  They then cook up forecasting models in which "stimulus" causes the underlying economy to grow and "austerity" causes it to shrink.  In other words, the more money the government wastes and the faster they waste it, and the more debt they run up, the more successful the country will be!  You would think it would not be possible for people in positions of high responsibility to believe such things, but you would be wrong.  180 degrees wrong.

In the second half of 2012, Congress and the President had previously agreed on a budget-control program known as the "sequester," which was scheduled to take effect in January 2013 unless the two first came to some other agreement.  In August 2012, supposedly to inform the debate, the Congressional Budget Office came up with forecasts of how the economy would perform under two scenarios, one assuming that the "sequester" occurred, and the other assuming that it did not.  At the time of the forecasts, Fiscal Year 2012 was nearing a close (FYs end on September 30), and the deficit for that year was looking to come in at somewhat over $1 trillion.  (The final deficit for FY 2012 was $1.087 trillion, per numbers here.)  The CBO looked at the various spending cuts and expirations of tax breaks scheduled to occur as part of the sequester, and projected that with the sequester the FY 2013 deficit would be $641 billion, and without the sequester the FY 2013 deficit would be approximately $1 trillion.  In other words, there would be a difference of close to $400 billion of "austerity."

Here is the CBO August 2012 forecast of how the economy would perform under the "austerity" conditions of the sequester:

The deficit will shrink to an estimated $641 billion in fiscal year 2013 (or 4.0 percent of GDP), almost $500 billion less than the shortfall in 2012.   Such fiscal tightening will lead to economic conditions in 2013 that will probably be considered a recession, with real GDP declining by 0.5 percent between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013 and the unemployment rate rising to about 9 percent in the second half of calendar year 2013.

And here's the CBO forecast of how the economy would perform in the alternative scenario where the sequester was averted and the deficit was allowed to continue at about $1 trillion:

The economy would be stronger in 2013: Real GDP would grow by 1.7 percent between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013, and the unemployment rate would be about 8 percent by the end of 2013, CBO projects.

No real-world economic experiment is ever completely perfect, but this one is about as close as you can get.  The sequester ended up getting delayed a couple of months to March 2013, but otherwise largely implemented, and the final deficit for FY 2013 came in at $680 billion, which is just slightly higher than the $641 billion used by the CBO in its projection for the sequester scenario.  So did the economy go into recession as they predicted?  Sumner:

Obviously the economy did much better than the negative 0.5% RGDP growth and 9% unemployment in late 2013 that were expected by the (Keynesian) CBO. But even more strikingly it did far better than the 1.7% RGDP growth and 8% unemployment at yearend in the alternative scenario.  In fact, RGDP grew 3.12%, and unemployment fell to 6.7%.

It's almost impossible to believe how badly wrong they could be.  And this is what passes for the advice that our Congress gets in trying to decide how much of the taxpayers' money to spend.

So, you ask, is this just an aberration, or are they always so bad?  Obviously you don't pay close attention to these things.  They were absolutely just as bad the previous time they had to make a call that really counted, namely in advising as to the effect of implementing a "stimulus" package as the economy entered recession in 2008/09:

Do you remember the Great Stimulus Experiment of 2009? The time that the unemployment rate didn't just rise much more than expected in response to the stimulus, it rose far more than expected under the alternative scenario of no stimulus!

Arnold Kling comments that "Facts do not change minds."  And remember, it's not just the American CBO that has drunk the Keynesian Kool-Aid in economic forecasting.  It's all of Europe, Japan, and for that matter the IMF in all of its advice to poor third-world countries.

And to end, should we quote Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman on his February 2013 prediction as to the effect of the upcoming sequester?

[T]he legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history. . . .  [T]he doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week.. . .  We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.. . .  This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice.

And lots more hyperbole and invective where that came from.  Facts will never change his mind.

Government Spending And The U.S. Economy

Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman begins his New York Times column today as follows:

On Monday, President Obama will call for a significant increase in spending, reversing the harsh cuts of the past few years. He won’t get all he’s asking for, but it’s a move in the right direction.

I love how the term "cuts" never appears alone, but always paired with "harsh."  It's like sunrise in Homer -- never just the "dawn," but always the "rosy-fingered dawn."  Is there any possible reduction in government spending that Krugman would ever concede was not "harsh"?  Doubtful.  Anyway, Krugman goes on to argue, as usual, for vast added government spending to eliminate the remaining slack in our economy.

But what is the actual recent evidence of the effect of government spending on the U.S. economy?  If you read Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian commentariat, you very likely have the impression that the sharp recession of 2008 was cured by the "stimulus" of 2009, and then things improved until the "harsh cuts" of the "sequester" of 2013 ruined everything.  Does the evidence match up with that narrative even a little?  The short answer is: No.

Here is a chart from the Tax Policy Center of actual federal government spending by year.  They give it in both nominal and inflation-adjusted dollars.  I'll type out some of the relevant numbers, and hope that the format comes out somewhat comprehensible:

                                                 Current dollars                           Constant 2009 dollars

FY 2007                                    2,728.7                                          2,829.7

FY 2008                                    2,982.5                                          2,988.5

FY 2009                                    3,517.7                                          3,517.7

FY 2010                                    3,457.1                                          3,416.8

FY 2011                                    3,603.1                                          3,492.4

FY 2012                                    3,537.1                                          3,365.2

FY 2013                                    3,454.6                                          3,234.0

FY 2014 (est.)                          3,650.5                                           3,367.3

FY 2015 (est.)                          3,901.0                                           3,532.5

To my somewhat jaundiced eye, what that looks like is that the "stimulus" caused a jump in government spending of around $500 billion per year in 2009 and 2010, and then the spending just ratcheted up to the new level and never went back down like it should have.  Wasn't the "stimulus" supposed to be just a temporary thing to get the economy going again?  And then the so-called "sequester" of early 2013 looks here like a just-perceptible dip of about a $100 billion cut in spending, immediately overcome with increases the following year.  (However, holding the line on spending has had the effect of reducing government spending as a percent of GDP from a peak of 24.4% in 2009 to about 21% today.)  Today constant dollar spending remains multi-hundreds of billions higher than the pre-stimulus baseline of 2008.  Can you spot the "harsh cuts"?

And how did employment react to the changes in government spending?  Here's a chart from the good people at Department of Numbers showing the two U.S. employment surveys -- green line representing the household survey, and blue line representing the employer survey.  (What, you didn't know that our government publishes two different series for the number of jobs, and that they differ by about 7 million in any given month?) 

Sure looks there like the number of jobs just kept falling during the first year of the "stimulus" (approximately March 2009 to March 2010) and was rather flat during the second year (March 2010 to March 2011), particularly in the broader household survey.  But there is relatively steady job growth, and certainly no diminution, after the "sequester" kicked in in about March 2013.

Unemployment rate?  According to BLS data here, during the "stimulus" period (approx. March 2009 to March 2011) it actually increased from 8.7% to 9.0%.  Since the "sequester" began in March 2013, it has gone down from 7.5% to 5.6% -- almost 2 full percentage points in the right direction.

We'll soon get another real-world experiment from Greece on the effects of blow-out government spending.  Time to place your bets on how that one will work out.  I know what my bet is.