Not-my-man Mitch has announced that the state has a 2+ billion dollar surplus, and that he plans to return 100. to each taxpayer.
Let me see if I have this right: Indiana has shitty transportation, neglected parks, and substandard schools. We have a Department of Childrens Services that is so understaffed that children are literally dying. Services have suffered while public servants have been furloughed and fired. But rather than apply the surplus to any of these purposes, Daniels proposes to send each of us taxpayers a refund sufficient to buy a nice dinner.
Whoopee.
John Gregg and Vi Simpson reacted strongly–and appropriately– to the Governor’s announcement, pointing out that a significant part of the “surplus” Daniels is bragging about includes money that should have been spent by DCS on programs to protect children.
Between 2007 and 2011, DCS returned more than 234 million dollars to the state’s general fund. During that same time period, the Indianapolis Star found at least 25 Hoosier children had died even though DCS had been notified of abuse or other severe problems in their families. Gregg told of one 12-year-old boy who was beaten to death on the very same day that DCS closed its investigations into allegations that the boy was the victim of neglect and abuse. He also noted that the Department has stopped its previous practice of providing mental health services to families with children who pose a threat to themselves or others.
For years, child advocacy organizations have echoed the Star’s conclusion that the agency has too few caseworkers and is underfunded, but miraculously, it had $234 million dollars “left over” to return to the state’s general fund.
Guess what, Governor Daniels? I don’t want a refund. I want to live in a state with a reasonable quality of life. I want to live in a state with a decent educational system. And I definitely want to live in a state that takes its obligation to protect defenseless children seriously.
I have been bemused–and occasionally amused–by all the posturing over the provision in the Affordable Care Act requiring people to purchase health insurance.
How dare they!!
If you listen to the right-wing blogs and talking heads, you’ll come away believing that such a mandate is unprecedented. The government has never required us to do something, or penalized us for failing to do something.It’s unAmerican to penalize inaction. That evil Obama is introducing an entirely foreign element into American law. (The fact that Romney did exactly the same thing in Massachusetts is obviously different….)
Of course, this line of attack is entirely fanciful.
As a legal scholar recently noted, the very same week it upheld the ACA, the Supreme Court affirmed a law requiring sex offenders to register their whereabouts, employment and appearance with local authorities. If they fail to do so, the law in question imposes a penalty of ten years in prison–a bit more draconian than the ACA’s fine. The Court made it clear that this mandatory registration was not punishment for a crime –the individuals subject to the requirement have already paid their debt to society for those transgressions (a contrary construction would run afoul of the Ex Post Facto prohibition).
Courts upholding this particular type of mandate–and there have been several–have explicitly said that the only conduct being punished was the “inactivity” of failing to register.
There are many other examples–so many that a Professor at John Marshall Law School has actually written an essay on “The Incredible Ordinariness of Federal Penalties for Inactivity.”
As I have repeatedly noted, there is nothing wrong with faulting provisions of this particular approach to healthcare reform. What I find absolutely astonishing, however, are the logical contortions opponents will go through in order to attack the legitimacy of any attempt to extend access to healthcare. I have been absolutely stunned by opponents’ self-righteous denunciations of such efforts, and by their evident willingness to simply let the uninsured suffer and die.
A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association is worth quoting.
That editorial began “Physicians and hospitals have a moral duty to provide acute care and emergency care to those who need it.” Proceeding from that expressly moral premise, the editorial concluded that individuals “have an enforceable moral duty to buy sufficient health insurance to cover the costs of acute and emergency care…requiring individuals to buy health insurance is consistent with respect for individual liberty because individuals have a duty to mitigate the burdens they impose on others.”
We don’t talk much about the morality of policy. We should.
Yesterday, every single House Republican voted to take away health coverage for young adults staying on their family plans, raise prescription drug prices for seniors, end protections for those with pre-existing conditions, reinstate lifetime insurance caps, scrap tax breaks for small businesses, raise the deficit, and take benefits away from 30 million Americans. Pundits reporting the vote generally noted that it was one of a series of such votes, and that it stood no chance of ultimate passage. They spent a lot of time analyzing the politics of the GOPs message and speculating on its electoral effect.
To the best of my knowledge, none of them pointed out how utterly immoral it was.
Obama and the GOP continue their standoff over the Bush tax cuts. Obama is willing to extend those cuts for taxpayers making less than 250,000 a year, but wants to let the cuts expire for those making more–those in the top 2%. The GOP has fought tooth and nail to protect that 2% from the horror of a return to Clinton-era marginal rates of 39%, and (lacking even a superficially convincing argument for that position) they have deployed a number of rhetorical weapons intended to justify their stance.
First it was “job creators.” Raise the marginal rate to its previous low point and the wealthy won’t create new jobs! Since we have had the historically low Bush rates for nearly a decade, and the jobs have not been forthcoming, voters have begun to see through that one. (Recent studies have confirmed that job creation bears virtually no relationship to tax rates; we have had robust job growth in periods of relatively high rates.)
The curent faux concern is for “small business.” Since many small enterprises choose to be taxed as individuals, Romney and the GOP argue that a higher rate on those making over 250,000 will “target small business.”
Obviously, the word “small” means something different to Romney than it does to most of us. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that in 2013, the higher rate would affect just 3.5% of small business–mainly doctors and lawyers. As Harry Ried noted during a recent debate, the GOP’s idea of “small business” evidently includes “fabulously rich so-called small business owners like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.”
The Republicans’ insistence on protecting its wealthy donors from even a modest tax hike sure makes their rhetoric about the deficit ring hollow.
Yesterday’s post on the pros and cons of labeling foods with genetically-altered ingredients led to a back-and-forth discussion that exemplifies the real-world problems of policymaking, where matters are seldom black and white.
The discussion illustrated a contemporary reality: given the increasing complexity of the world we inhabit, in many policy domains, few people will fully understand the issues involved. Think climate change, poverty, education, healthcare…and food labeling.
Miriam’s comment raised many of the potential pitfalls involved in labeling; as she noted, in an effort to give people relevant information, we may instead end up misinforming them. In particular, her question “how far do we drill down?” is key. How much information is enough, and how much is too much? How are we defining our terms? What do we include/exclude?
Mort underscores the economic motives of the stakeholders in this particular debate, reminding us of the increasing role that money and influence play in our policymaking, often to the detriment of accuracy and the public good. (The climate change debate is an example.)
What do consumers have a right to know about the products they purchase? What do they need to know?
On the one hand, the vendor/manufacturers’ “trust us” is not only insufficient, it is contrary to the premises of our regulatory structure. On the other hand, both Miriam and Mort are undeniably correct when they point out that most consumers do not have the background and scientific training needed to evaluate technical information accurately and will either over-react to it or ignore it.
Most of us shake our heads or laugh when the stewardess demonstrates how to buckle a seat belt, or when we read the label on a ladder that warns us against falling off.
We don’t need a nanny state that overprotects us. We do need relevant information that allows us to make informed choices. Deciding where to draw that line–deciding what information should be conveyed–is the hard part.
Yesterday’s exchange reminded me of the old story of the village rabbi who is approached by two men to settle an argument. The first tells his side, and the Rabbi says, “you’re right.” The second tells his side, and once again the Rabbi says, “You’re right.” An onlooker protests: they can’t both be right! To which the Rabbi says, “You, too, are right!”
Policy is complicated. Simple answers and binary choices don’t make for good policy.
Maybe that’s one reason we don’t have much good policy these days.
My cousin, an eminent cardiologist, sent me a brief essay he recently wrote about GMs–genetically modified foods. It exemplifies the sort of appeal to science and evidence that should guide decision-making. Or so my logic tells me. Nevertheless…Well, let’s start with his essay.
“On May 25, 2012, The New York Times ran an article titled “Battle Brewing Over Labeling of Genetically-Modified Foods.” The article pointed out that for more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — cereals, snack foods, salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory. Moreover, almost all the corn and soybeans grown in the United States now contain DNA derived from bacteria. The foreign gene makes the soybeans resistant to an herbicide used in weed control and causes the corn to produce its own insecticide, thus increasing yields and reducing the need for artificially added chemicals. In addition, almost all the food derived from plants you eat has been produced by selective breeding, artificially selected for various favorable traits, including the enrichment of the content of certain proteins.
Regulators and scientists say genetic manipulations pose no danger. But as Americans ask questions about what they are eating, popular suspicions about the health and environmental effects of biotechnology are fueling a movement to require that food from genetically modified crops be labeled, if not eliminated.
Labeling bills had been proposed in more than a dozen states over the previous year, and an appeal to the Food and Drug Administration to mandate labels nationally drew more than a million signatures. The most closely watched labeling effort is a proposed ballot initiative in California prompting a probable subsequent vote that could influence not just food packaging but the future of American agriculture.
Tens of millions of dollars are expected to be spent on the election showdown. It pits some consumer groups and the organic food industry, both of which support mandatory labeling, against more conventional farmers, agricultural biotechnology companies like Monsanto and many of the nation’s best-known food brands like Kellogg’s and Kraft.
The root of this latest push is most likely fear. Anything that is unknown or perceived to be “foreign” is feared by a general public that is ill educated about the topic, and this likely leads to a form of hysteria. Perhaps it conjures up an Orwellian image of “big brother” manipulating our genes to the point of modifying our own makeup and mischievously invading our stem cells and future progeny.
And of course there is the ubiquitous presence of moneyed interests. If the California initiative passes, “we will be on our way to getting genetically-tainted foods out of our nation’s food supply for good,” according to Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association—with financial gain at stake—who stated in a letter seeking donations for the California ballot initiative. “If a company like Kellogg’s has to print a label stating that their famous Corn Flakes have been genetically engineered, it will be the kiss of death for their iconic brand in California — the eighth-largest economy in the world — and everywhere else.”
Opposing such interests are such organizations as the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the National Corn Growers Association, which stand to lose by required labeling, believing that this would seriously undermine their sales.
What is the science behind such hysteria? A recent comprehensive review* concluded that foods derived from genetically modified crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people across the world for more than 15 years and there have been no reported ill effects (or legal cases related to human health), despite many of the consumers coming from that most litigious of countries, the USA. This report pointed out the many advantages of such modification that included, among others, increasing crop yields and more nutritious contents. There are also a number of uses for plants outside of the food industry, for example in the timber, paper and chemical sectors and increasingly for biofuels. Of significance to the medical field is the use of genetically modified plants for production of recombinant pharmaceuticals. Molecular farming to produce such plant-derived pharmaceuticals is currently being studied by academic and industrial groups across the world. The first full-size native human product, human serum albumin, was demonstrated in 1990, and since then antibodies, blood products, hormones and vaccines have all been expressed in modified plants. Protein pharmaceuticals can be harvested and purified from these plants, or alternatively, plant tissue in a processed form expressing a pharmaceutical could potentially be consumed as an ‘edible vaccine’.
In conclusion, I believe that anxiety-producing labels are counterproductive, but if such ill-advised legislation results in their appearance, don’t panic—these foods are harmless! In most cases they are far superior to “organic” products that I have reviewed in a previous publication.”
Why am I not entirely convinced?
First, on general policy grounds, I favor disclosure–whether it be disclosure of political contributions, or state budget calculations, or the ingredients in my food. I may make poor decisions based on those disclosures, but that is still preferable to government exercising “father knows best” paternalism. Accurate food labeling empowers me; it provides me with the information I need to make informed decisions about what I eat–calorie counts, sugar content, or genetic modifications.
Second, while I am confident that my cousin is correct about the results of testing that has been done– science isn’t static. New genetic modifications appear with some frequency, and newer ones have not been tested over a period of years. Manipulation of genes is different from selective breeding, although both result in genetic modification. The risk may be slight, but individuals should have the information necessary to make risk calculations for themselves–including the sort of information about their safety provided by current science.
Third, call me overly cautious, but some problems take time to emerge. We are just now recognizing the deleterious effects of some pesticides and antibiotics used in large-scale farming. While those techniques to increase crop and animal yields are not genetic modifications, they too were long thought to be free of side effects. One of the reasons we trust science is that it is falsifiable–always open to revision on the basis of new evidence. The jury is always out.
None of this is intended to suggest we avoid GM food, even if we could. I am simply arguing that more information is better than less. Decisions about disclosure of ingredients in our foods should not rest with manufacturers worried about market share, just as decisions about disclosure of political contributions should not be made by those profiting from them.
