KrisAnne Hall puts Liberal Attorney in his place

Moneyball and Politics

You probably read Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball years ago. Or if you didn't read it, you saw the movie version, which was adapted by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. But if, for some reason, you missed the Moneyball revolution, the short version is this: Statistical analysis can be a powerful tool for understanding—and mastering—systems that appear to be governed by subjective norms.

Which is the fancy way of saying that when you look at a "system"—like, for instance, baseball—sometimes it’s better to evaluate players by creating complicated statistical measures (such as "On-Base + Slugging," "Wins Above Replacement," or "Value Over Replacement Player") than it is to actually watch the players and judge them with your eyes.

That was the big insight of statistician Bill James, which he passed down to Oakland A's manager Billie Beane. Lewis wrote Moneyball after following Beane around and watching how he used all of those statistics to create a winning team in Oakland, despite having one of the smallest payrolls in baseball.

Moneyball changed everything about sports. It changed the way teams were managed and the way fans observed the game. James's insights quickly became dogma in baseball, and then they spread to other sports: basketball, football, hockey, and tennis all use rigorous statistical analysis these days. It’s a measure of how total the Moneyball revolution was that today, teams and players don’t use statistical analysis to get ahead—they have to use it just to keep up. Because everyone is doing it.

And in 2012, Moneyball came to politics. We saw it in the media in the competing analytical worldviews leading up the election, which pitted historical/observational models against more complicated Monte Carlo regression models. And after the election we saw a raft of stories explaining how Obama won the election by turning loose an army of quants to mine data and find hidden advantages.

Earlier this month MIT put on a conference about Moneyball and the Heritage Foundation's Robert Bluey came away from it with some developed thoughts about what the stats revolution really means for politics.

Bluey has two key insights. The first is that while analytics can be powerful, they're only helpful if the overall organizational structure is built to take advantage of them. A campaign that's smart enough to do analytical research, but not nimble enough to make use of it, might as well not bother. Here's Bluey describing how the Obama team was built:

Each night in the final stretch of the race, Obama's analytics team ran 66,000 simulations through its computers to have a fresh perspective on the battleground states. That real-time data then drove decisions on how to spend money and make it count.

Bluey's other insight is that the decision to invest in the numbers—and to pay attention to them—has to come from the top of an organization. And in this respect, the Romney campaign's failure in the 2012 election is particularly striking.

As a businessman, Romney had a reputation for being obsessed with data. But his presidential campaign foundered almost completely because he failed to turn out his own voting coalition. Obama's total number of votes fell from 2008 to 2012, as did his percentage of the vote. Obama lost ground with almost every group of voters, and particularly with independents. In this weakened position, Obama basically abandoned attempts to compete with Romney for voters. Instead, he turned the election into a turnout contest. And it was here that Obama triumphed while Romney barely showed up.

Of course, the Moneyball method can be oversold. Andrew Sharp covered the same MIT conference and came away with a slightly more jaundiced view:

Analytics have value as we try to learn more, and anyone who really cares about sports will end up using them in one way or another. But in the end, all the data and process revolves around humans, and there's a big part of this that'll always be a guessing game.

That last link is worth reading in its entirety. Consider it the first part of this week's Required Reading.

www.weeklystandard.com

Social Security now Federal Benefit Payment

"Pay attention to your next Social Security income, whether you get a check or an electronic deposit....note what it is now called...see below.. Have you noticed, your Social Security check is now referred to as a "Federal Benefit Payment"? I'll be part of the one percent to forward this. I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you. Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it. The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a “Federal Benefit Payment.”This isn’t a benefit – its earned income!Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too.It totaled 15% of our income before taxes.If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both you and your employer’s contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved! This is your personal investment.Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month. That’s almost three times more than today’s average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration (Google it - it’s a fact).

And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you're 98 if you retire at age 65)!I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madoff ever did.They took our money and used it elsewhere. They “forgot” that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn’t have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn’t pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently, they’ve told us that the money won’t support us for very much longer. But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now, to add insult to injury, they’re calling it a “benefit,” as if we never worked to earn every penny of it. Just because they “borrowed” the money, doesn't mean that our investments were a charity!"

In an interview with former Bill Clinton apparatchik George Stephanopoulos aired on ABC Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama shared his beliefs about where the nation stands financially.

The takeaway quotes from that sit-down concern Obama’s unserious take on the size and grave nature of the federal government’s annual deficits, which have exceeded $1 trillion during each of the past four fiscal years, and the national debt, which, at $16.71 trillion as of Tuesday, has increased by over $6 trillion since he took office less than 50 months ago:

And, y– you know– I think what’s important to recognize is that– we’ve already cut– $2.5– $2.7 trillion out of the deficit. If the sequester stays in, you’ve got over $3.5 trillion of deficit reduction already.

And, so, we don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt.

Even if the first paragraph made sense, which it doesn’t, the second paragraph doesn’t follow logically.
The $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion in “cuts” to which Obama referred are really reductions in projected spending growth spread out over the next ten years. Very little of these reductions will take place in the current fiscal year, and the vast majority of them have obviously not happened “already.” Any claims relating to reductions in future years are speculative at best, because they can either be undone by future congresses with the help of Obama himself or a future president, or undermined by slow economic growth.

In early February, the Congressional Budget Office, using fairly aggressive growth assumptions, projected that the government will run cumulative deficits during the next ten fiscals years through 2023 amounting to $7 trillion, and that the “debt held by the public” (i.e., what Uncle Sam owes its bondholders and creditors) will grow by $7.7 trillion. The fact that future annual deficits might not be quite as absurdly high as what we’ve seen during the past four intolerable years would only lead one to conclude that there’s “no immediate crisis” if the national debt were currently small. Unfortunately, it’s not.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think that Barack Obama doesn’t understand the difference between the deficit, the amount by which government outlays exceed government receipts, and the national debt, which is how much the nation owes to its creditors. Though it’s tempting to believe otherwise, of course Obama knows the difference. What he is really hoping is that the average American, or at least the average low-information voter, doesn’t, and that his “clever” phrasing will cause many to believe that both our deficits and national debt are coming down. In other words, he’s betting against the intelligence of a large percentage of the American people, while also calculating, probably correctly, that his lapdogs in the establishment press won’t call him out for doing so, and will in fact support his misdirection. In other words, he’s not governing in any real sense; he has instead embarked on a 20-month campaign to win a Democratic majority in the House in the 2014 elections.
Obama’s statement denying “an immediate (debt) crisis” is consistent with what he was willing to reveal during the 2012 presidential campaign. In October of last year, while unable to identify its amount, he told David Letterman that “we don’t have to worry about it short term.” He also said that “it is a problem long term and even medium term.”

That’s not what Obama told Stephanopoulos in his Wednesday interview. In his very next sentence following the excerpt above, the president did a complete about-face:

In fact, for the next ten years, it’s gonna be in a sustainable place.

Gosh, I had no idea that the nation’s financial situation has improved so much in the past five months. Of course, it hasn’t.

Even given his pathetic opponent, Obama’s ridiculous assertion might have buried him electorally if he had uttered it during the presidential campaign. Assuming he really believes it, he should have. Instead, as has so often been the case, he chose to mislead the American people. “Progressives” have known for decades that they can’t win elections if they tell us what they really believe.

The CBO’s projection leaves 2023 “debt held by the public” at 77 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or gross domestic product, up from about 41 percent at the end of fiscal 2008. That’s not all that far from the 90 percent of GDP threshold at which many economists consider a nation to be ”maxed out,” i.e., the point at which lenders will likely “either decide to stop lending or raise their interest rates.”

There are plenty of reasons to believe that we’ll hit that 90 percent limit well ahead of 2023. The most important is lackluster employment growth — and yes, it’s still lackluster despite last week’s news that the economy added 236,000 seasonally adjusted jobs in February and that the unemployment rate dropped to a still completely unacceptable 7.7 percent.

Job growth is not “accelerating,” the term used after the report’s issuance by the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press. The raw numbers before seasonal adjustment show that the economy lost more net jobs during the past four months than it did during the same four months a year earlier.

To the extent job growth is occurring, it’s largely part-time and temporary in nature. After seasonal adjustment, the government’s monthly Household Survey, which is the basis for the reported unemployment rate, tells us that there were 77,000 fewer full-timers in February than in January, but 102,000 more part-timers. The Establishment Survey, the basis for reported job growth, tells us that temporary help services, a sector which contains about two percent of all employment, have added a seasonally adjusted 109,000 jobs in the past 12 months. That’s over 5.5 percent of all private-sector job growth during that time.

We haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait until employers fully grasp ObamaCare’s impact on their operations. The bias towards hiring part-time workers is what will “accelerate.” Part-time workers pay less in federal income and employment taxes. This will lead to significantly lower federal tax collections, higher deficits than CBO expects, and faster growth in the national debt.

It’s still not inconceivable that we will become “maxed out” by the end of Obama’s second term — especially because the president insists, as he told John Boehner during “fiscal cliff” discussions, that “we don’t have a spending problem.” Oh yes we do — and if we don’t fix it, an abyss which no amount of punitive taxation will prevent awaits.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/obama-out-of-control-debt/?singlepage=true

Obama Administration Plans to Cut Medicare Advantage Reimbursements

The Obama administration is planning new cuts to Medicare, a federal regulatory filing reveals, cuts that could mean higher premiums or seniors losing their coverage altogether.

The new cuts come in the form of a planned reduction in the reimbursement rates the government pays to insurance companies that operate Medicare Advantage plans, which are services administered by private for-profit or non-profit providers that offer additional services than can be found in traditional Medicare.
In a Feb. 15 regulatory filing, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the surprised rate cuts of 2.3 percent – meaning it would pay health care providers 2.3 percent less for providing services to patients.

CMS said it was cutting payments because it foresaw the overall costs of the Medicare Advantage program shrinking by 3.2 percent, despite the fact that health care costs – the driver of all federal health care program costs – are only rising.

Medicare Advantage is like traditional Medicare except that its plans are administered by insurance companies, who are paid a per-enrollee reimbursement fee by the government. If insurance companies can provide care to seniors at less than what the government pays them for it, they make a profit.

Medicare Advantage provides coverage for approximately 28 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, offering them higher-quality services and additional benefits, such as vision and dental care, than the traditional government program at slightly higher cost.

The Obama administration already plans to cut the Medicare Advantage program by $200 billion as part of Obamacare. However, the proposed reductions it announced in February are new, and will cut the program in addition to the planned $200 billion in Obamacare cuts, most of which are delayed in 2014.

The new cuts are also scheduled to go into effect in 2014, but as a function of the normal rate-setting process for that year, not a political effort to delay financial pain for seniors past an important election, as apparently was the case with the original Medicare cuts that Obama signed.

In its regulatory announcement, the CMS said it was assuming that reimbursement payments in traditional, government-run Medicare will be cut, and cited that as justification for cutting Medicare Advantage.
However, while those cuts to traditional Medicare have been set into law for more than a decade, Congress has never allowed them to happen, instituting what is known as the Doc Fix every year, to keep reimbursement payments the same.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote to the CMS urging them to consider political reality and reverse their planned Medicare Advantage cuts.

“This assumption is highly problematic because – even though it almost certainly will turn out to be wrong – it translates into lower funding to support the health benefits of the 14 million Medicare beneficiaries who are currently enrolled in MA [Medicare Advantage] plans,” Rubio wrote on March 8.

In other words, if the Obama administration continues with its proposed new Medicare cuts, some or all of the 14 million seniors who get health care through the MA program could be negatively affected, that is, paying higher premiums or possibly losing coverage.

This is because the proposed cut could make the program unprofitable for insurers, who would be forced to either stop offering MA plans or pass the increased costs on to seniors in the form of higher premiums.
One health insurance provider told its shareholders that the proposed rate cuts could mean the end of Medicare Advantage all together.

“There are going to be some markets that at these rates, if they go the way they’re going, it’s going to be very hard for Medicare Advantage to survive,” Universal American Corp CEO Richard Barasch said in a February 19 conference call with shareholders, the industry publication Health Plan Week reported.
“I think it’s going to be sort of a market-by-market, company-by-company exercise,” Barasch said.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-administration-plans-cut-medicare-advantage-reimbursements

The Man who would be King

It must be quite nice to be king. Or at least think of yourself as king. Dear Leader Barack Obama exhibited that behavior while at a "working lunch" hosted by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) last Wednesday (March 13). The food consisted of Maine lobster salad, Fox Family Potato Chips (from Maine), wild blueberry pie, and Gifford's Ice Cream (made in Maine) for the pie.

But, Obama could not partake of any of the food because (seriously) his personal taster was not present. Collins pointed out

"... directly to him that all present in the room were 'tasters', and if it was poisoned or something they'd have all already 'keeled over'... yet - after stating 'you have better food than the Democrats do' - he STILL refused to eat a single bite without his own food taster...[.]"

So, according to Collins, Obama

"... looked longingly at it [the food]. He honestly did look longingly at it, but apparently he has to have essentially a taster,...[.]'

This audio has Collins' complete description of what occurred.

The US Secret Service, according to their policy of discretion on all security related issues, refused to confirm that US presidents travel with a food 'taster'. But Obama's actions at the lunch certainly did not help keep Secret Service's policies secret. And, when Obama eats away from the White House, he's accompanied by a military chef from the White House's Navy Mess. The chef doesn't always taste the food, but always oversees the preparation. Accompanied by a chef? It must be quite nice to be king.

This meal declination came after the March 6 meal at Washington D.C.'s The Jefferson Hotel's Plume restaurant. Obama and twelve moderate Republican senators dined while trying to determine ways to reduce the federal budget. The menu, prepared by executive chef Chris Jakubiec, consisted of lobster (no mention of origin) thermidor prepared with white wine and saffron glaçage, Dijon mustard and herbed butter potatoes. Maryland crab risotto and filet of prime beef were also on the menu. At least Obama (meaning us taxpayers) paid for the meals. I wonder if his personal taster was present for that meal?

I wonder if sequestration will cause Obama's personal food taster to be cut? After all, he (and his health) are much more important than lowly White House tours.

But that's just my opinion

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/the_man_who_would_be_king.html#ixzz2NkOXMf7n