Mailing a letter is about to get a little more expensive.
Regulators
on Tuesday approved a temporary price hike of 3 cents for a first-class
stamp, bringing the charge to 49 cents a letter in an effort to help
the Postal Service recover from severe mail decreases brought on after
the 2008 economic downturn.
Many consumers won’t feel the price increase
immediately. Forever stamps, good for first-class postage whatever the
rate, can be purchased at the lower price until the new rate is
effective Jan. 26.
The higher rate will last no more than two years, allowing the Postal
Service to recoup $2.8 billion in losses. By a 2-1 vote, the
independent Postal Regulatory Commission rejected a request to make the
price hike permanent. (PK'S NOTE: Riiiiight)
The higher cost “will last just long enough to recover the loss,” Commission Chairman Ruth Y. Goldway said.
Bulk mail, periodicals and package service rates rise 6 percent, which
is likely to draw significant consternation from the mail industry.
If your New Year’s resolution is to change your light bulbs, don’t worry—the federal government’s here to help.
Beginning January 1, 2014, the federal government will ban the use of 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent light bulbs.
The light bulb has become a symbol in the fight for consumer freedom
and against unnecessary governmental interference into the lives of the
American people.
In 2007, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law
an energy bill that placed stringent efficiency requirements on
ordinary incandescent bulbs in an attempt to have them completely
eliminated by 2014. The law phased out 100-watt and 75-watt incandescent
bulbs last year.
Proponents of government-imposed efficiency standards and regulations
will say, “So what? There are still plenty of lighting options on the
shelves at Home Depot; we’re saving families money; and we’re reducing
harmful climate change emissions.”
The “so what” is that the federal government is taking decisions out of the hands of families and businesses, destroying jobs,
and restricting consumer choice in the market. We all have a wide
variety of preferences regarding light bulbs. It is not the role of the
federal government to override those preferences with what it believes
is in our best interest.
Families understand how energy costs impact their lives and make decisions accordingly. Energy efficiency has improved dramatically over the past six decades—long before any national energy efficiency mandates.
If families and firms are not buying the most energy-efficient
appliance or technology, it is not that they are acting irrationally;
they simply have budget constraints or other preferences such as
comfort, convenience, and product quality. A family may know that buying
an energy-efficient product will save them money in the long term, but
they have to prioritize their short-term expenses. Those families
operating from paycheck to paycheck may want to opt for a cheaper light
bulb and more food instead of a more expensive light bulb and less food.
Some may read this and think: Chill out—it’s just a light bulb. But it’s not just a light bulb. Take a look at the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program. Basically anything that uses electricity or water in your home or business is subject to an efficiency regulation.
When the market drives energy efficiency, it saves consumers money.
The more the federal government takes away decisions that are better
left to businesses and families, the worse off we’re going to be.
Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers, and lifelong and renewable.
.By John H Cochrane
.....The U.S. health-care market is
dysfunctional. Obscure prices and $500 Band-Aids are legendary. The
reason is simple: Health care and health insurance are strongly
protected from competition. There are explicit barriers to entry, for
example the laws in many states that require a "certificate of need"
before one can build a new hospital. Regulatory compliance costs,
approvals, nonprofit status, restrictions on foreign doctors and nurses,
limits on medical residencies, and many more barriers keep prices up
and competitors out. Hospitals whose main clients are uncompetitive
insurers and the government cannot innovate and provide efficient cash
service.
We need to permit the
Southwest Airlines,
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Wal-Mart,
WMT +0.35%
Amazon.com
AMZN +0.41%
and Apples of the world to bring to health care the same dramatic
improvements in price, quality, variety, technology and efficiency that
they brought to air travel, retail and electronics. We'll know we are
there when prices are on hospital websites, cash customers get
discounts, and new hospitals and insurers swamp your inbox with
attractive offers and great service.
The
Affordable Care Act bets instead that more regulation, price controls,
effectiveness panels, and "accountable care" organizations will force
efficiency, innovation, quality and service from the top down. Has this
ever worked? Did we get smartphones by government pressure on the 1960s
AT&T
T +0.04%
phone monopoly? Did effectiveness panels force United Airlines
and American Airlines to cut costs, and push TWA and Pan Am out of
business? Did the post office invent
FedEx,
FDX +0.68%
UPS and email? How about public schools or the last 20 or more health-care "cost control" ideas?
Only
deregulation can unleash competition. And only disruptive competition,
where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower
costs and innovation.
Health insurance
should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers;
lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to
continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick.
Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary
expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine
expenses.
People want to buy this
insurance, and companies want to sell it. It would be far cheaper, and
would solve the pre-existing conditions problem. We do not have such
health insurance only because it was regulated out of existence.
Businesses cannot establish or contribute to portable individual
policies, or employees would have to pay taxes. So businesses only offer
group plans. Knowing they will abandon individual insurance when they
get a job, and without cross-state portability, there is little reason
for young people to invest in lifelong, portable health insurance.
Mandated coverage, pressure against full risk rating, and a
dysfunctional cash market did the rest.
Rather
than a mandate for employer-based groups, we should transition to fully
individual-based health insurance. Allow national individual insurance
offered and sold to anyone, anywhere, without the tangled mess of state
mandates and regulations. Allow employers to contribute to individual
insurance at least on an even basis with group plans. Current group
plans can convert to individual plans, at once or as people leave. Since
all members in a group convert, there is no adverse selection of sicker
people.
ObamaCare
defenders say we must suffer the dysfunction and patch the law, because
there is no alternative. They are wrong. On Nov. 2, for example,
New York Times
NYT +0.96%
columnist
Nicholas Kristof
wrote movingly about his friend who lost employer-based insurance
and died of colon cancer. Mr. Kristof concluded, "This is why we need
Obamacare." No, this is why we need individual, portable,
guaranteed-renewable, inexpensive, catastrophic-coverage insurance.
On Nov. 15, MIT's
Jonathan Gruber,
an ObamaCare
architect, argued on Realclearpolitics that "we currently have a highly
discriminatory system where if you're sick, if you've been sick or
you're going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance." We do. He
concluded that the Affordable Care Act is "the only way to end that
discriminatory system." It is not.
On
Dec. 3, President
Obama
himself said that "the only alternative that Obamacare's critics
have, is, well, let's just go back to the status quo." Not so.
What
about the homeless guy who has a heart attack? Yes, there must be
private and government-provided charity care for the very poor. What if
people don't get enough checkups? Send them vouchers. To solve these
problems we do not need a federal takeover of health care and insurance
for you, me, and every American.
No other country has a free health market, you may object. The rest of the world is closer to single payer, and spends less.
Sure.
We can have a single government-run airline too. We can ban FedEx and
UPS, and have a single-payer post office. We can have government-run
telephones and TV. Thirty years ago every other country had all of
these, and worthies said that markets couldn't work for travel, package
delivery, the "natural monopoly" of telephones and TV. Until we tried
it. That the rest of the world spends less just shows how dysfunctional
our current system is, not how a free market would work.
While
economically straightforward, liberalization is always politically
hard. Innovation and cost reduction require new businesses to displace
familiar, well-connected incumbents. Protected businesses spawn "good
jobs" for protected workers, dues for their unions, easy lives for their
managers, political support for their regulators and politicians, and
cushy jobs for health-policy wonks. Protection from competition allows
private insurance to cross-subsidize Medicare, Medicaid, and emergency
rooms.
But it can happen. The first step is, the American public must understand that there is an alternative. Stand up and demand it.
Why All Children Should Learn to Work
Jack Kingston’s “no free lunch” suggestion doesn’t go far enough
By Jillian Kay Melchior
Georgia Representative Jack Kingston came
under fire last week for suggesting that schoolchildren who receive free
lunches “pay a dime, pay a nickel . . . or maybe sweep the floor of the
cafeteria,” an effort he suggested would help get “the myth out of
their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch.” The proposal has
immediately drawn comparisons to Newt Gingrich’s suggestion in 2011
that poor schools fire union janitors and instead hire needy kids who
want to earn an extra buck.
The uproar has been swift and
emotional, with critics claiming that Kingston, like Gingrich before
him, is a mean old bully, exacerbating the already awful lives of poor
kids.
“Have you ever seen what children are like?” wrote Jim Newell at Salon. “God,
they’re awful. The well-off ones would dump their whole lunch trays on
the floor and say to the poor kid, ‘Hey, Rags, clean ’er up, because ha
ha ha, your parents have a low income.’ Not only would you be scarring
poor kids for life; you’d also give a whole new generation of non-poor
kids ample practice time to develop into [a**holes].” Josh Israel at ThinkProgress
complained that Kingston’s proposal would incite truly needy children
to turn down the lunch being offered to them, for fear of being singled
out. And The Root’s Keli Goff wrote that Kingston should do
“something substantive to help these children break the cycle of poverty
so they don’t have to listen to you threatening to use their kids for
slave labor a generation from now.”
But the real problem with
Kingston’s proposal is that it doesn’t go far enough. Children —
regardless of whether or not they receive a free or reduced lunch —
would benefit from chipping in with school cleaning. Moreover, society
would benefit.
I know that from my own experience. I spent most of my elementary years
at Noah Webster Christian School in Cheyenne, Wyo. A tiny school, it
operated out of churches on a shoestring budget. Dads chipped in one
summer and built a playground for us. The education was excellent, but a
janitorial staff was far beyond reach, so we children were expected to
pitch in.
In true Mary Poppins spirit, teachers often made a
game of it: Shaving cream removes ink smudges from desks mid-semester,
and for some reason, it’s much more fun to speed-scribble multiplication
tables in the mousse-y mess than it is to write them in a notebook. But
fun wasn’t guaranteed, and chores came as regularly as homework. On
Fridays, children vacuumed and wiped down the chalkboards. And on one of
the last days of each semester, we spent the day deep-cleaning —
trotting around with plastic buckets, scrubbing floor trim and washing
the white-brick walls of the hallway.
As much as I complained at
the time, that responsibility taught us to value public property. It
also gave us a stake in our school. We worked hard to keep it clean and
functioning, and that taught us to appreciate the resources we had. The
experience also gave us practical competencies far beyond what home-ec
classes offer. Finally, it was strangely empowering: We were trusted
to mix Pine-Sol with water (albeit with supervision), and our teachers
understood that just because we weren’t yet twelve didn’t mean we were
idiots incapable of climbing a ladder to dust without falling to our
untimely demise.
The values of class-chore time were lost on me,
of course — until I transferred to public school in fifth grade.
Children made messes with reckless abandon. It didn’t matter if you left
a trail of crumbs behind you in the cafeteria or if you tracked in mud
from recess; you wouldn’t be the one cleaning it up. In contrast, in
third grade at Noah, I once spent a recess scrubbing out my desk after
I’d forgotten an apple in it over break. It had molded and liquefied,
and it smelled terrible. It was my fault, and because it was my problem
to deal with, I was more responsible in the future.
But that ethic runs contrary to the progressive mindset, which infantilizes adults — and children, much more so. The Root’s
Goff continued her critique of Kingston’s proposal by suggesting more
handouts for poor kids, including “comprehensive sexual education,
low-cost contraception and loan-free financial college aid so these kids
can have a real chance to compete.” And then she let slip the
underlying theory:
The words “personal responsibility”
should almost always be limited to adults, and to those teens nearing
adulthood who have the capacity to make informed decisions, good and
bad, and to be held accountable for them accordingly.
That’s
a radical perspective. Education has, historically, been a moral
endeavor as much as a practical one. Not only does it equip our young to
someday gainfully provide for themselves and their families; it also
prepares children to gradually assume responsibility. Good education
leads to self-government, and the education that separates learning from
responsibility does children no favors. So by all means, pass the mop
to all children, rich or poor.
