Month: July 2013

The ACA’s employer mandate is being delayed by a year. Ezra advocates repealing the mandate entirely:

It’s a bad bit of policy. In fact, when it first emerged during the Senate’s negotiations, I called it “one of the worst ideas in recent memory.” … By tying the penalties to how many full-time workers an employer has, and how many of them qualify for subsidies, the mandate gives employers a reason to have fewer full-time workers, and fewer low-income workers.

Cowen thinks that the administration wants to kill the mandate outright:

My view is you don’t serve up a delay and PR disaster like this, on such a sensitive political issue, unless you really wish to derail the entire provision.

Evan Soltas adds:

[T]here is a strong case for getting rid of the employer mandate. Employers shouldn’t sponsor insurance in the first place, as it masks the true cost of care to employees and creates incentives for over-insurance. It also increases the cost of hiring, locks employees into their jobs, and splits the market for insurance into one for individuals and one for employers, which impedes risk-sharing in the individual market.

If that’s where this heads, I’m all for it. Breaking the employer-healthcare connection would help generate competition and make consumers more aware of costs. Beutler notes that the employer mandate was expected to lower the deficit:

Back in 2012, CBO estimated that the employer penalty would reduce the deficit by about $4 billion in fiscal year 2014. But by zeroing out the penalty, the administration will not only forfeit the revenue it would have collected, but it will have removed an incentive for employers to provide coverage themselves. That probably means more workers than expected will land in the exchanges, many of whom will receive subsidies to purchase insurance themselves, which will increase spending under the law and diminish its deficit reducing potential.

Josh Barro also focuses on the budgetary consequences:

One of his key selling points for the law was that it would cut the deficit. Now that the law has passed, his administration is freer to pursue changes that will raise Obamacare’s cost to taxpayers but improve its effects on the economy. Delaying the employer mandate, perhaps indefinitely, is one way to do that. It’s a better reason than “we couldn’t figure out how to do the reporting.” But it’s not one you can say out loud.

Jeffrey Anderson claims that the delay is “a naked display of lawlessness”:

By law, Obamacare’s employer mandate — its requirement that businesses with 50 or more workers provide federally sanctioned health insurance — should go into effect next year.  By executive fiat, it won’t go into effect until 2015.

Chait counters such accusations:

It is true that the law calls for the mandate to take effect in January. On the other hand, administrative delays push back deadlines like this all the time. The Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions in 2007, and the Bush White House evaded that order by refusing to open an e-mail from the agency. Obama’s EPA has delayed its carbon regulation for years now, and no conservatives have demanded that Obama act faster.

The question becomes what happens after the delay is up. Ideally, we could just repeal the employer mandate. Major laws are routinely followed by legislative corrections to smooth out their glitches. But conservatives have steadfastly followed a strategy of the worse, the better, refusing to accept any changes to Obamacare short of repeal. The employer mandate was one of the few aspects of the law that seemed likely to produce real, rather than imagined, economic damage, and thus conservatives invested a lot of their train-wreck hopes in this aspect of it.

And Cohn expects Republicans to use the news to pummel other aspects of healthcare reform:

Employers might quiet down a bit, but the law’s doubters will use this as proof the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. As Sarah Kliff puts it, it’s trading one headache for another. Or maybe two. Already, conservatives like Erick Erickson are saying it’s unfair to delay the mandate on employers without also delaying the mandate on individuals. Erickson won’t be the last to make this argument, just as he already has plenty of company citing this news as proof that Obamacare is a disaster.

In our final video from Dan, he joins the “I Was Wrong” club:

Fareed Zakaria detailed his own similar misjudgment on Iraq in a recent AA here. Our discussion thread marking the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion is here. My recent AAs on the subject here and here.

Dan’s new book, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, is in bookstores now. My recent conversation with him at the New York Public Library is here. Dan’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Dish readers know the story by now. This is how the Wall Street Journal headlined the latest:

Yes, that news-editorial wall has gotten more and more porous over there, hasn’t it?

The man who threatened to bash a gay man views himself as the victim of murderous violence. Baldwin says of his homophobic criminal incitements on Twitter:

It’s just another chink in your armor for people to come and kill you.

Do these massively wealthy celebrities even hear themselves?

One argument that many people of faith cling to these days is that not all religion is inherently violent or intolerant; non-fundamentalist religion can coexist with modernity, because it can acknowledge the role of doubt and conscience in any religious calling. And yet, religion only fitfully takes this form, and seems inherently prone to controlling the beliefs of others. One argument I’ve used in the past is that if Christianity was successfully turned into a war- and torture-machine in early modern Europe, then it is no wonder that a non-pacifist fundamentalist faith like Islam could also veer wildly off course. But I long suspected that Buddhism was arguably the faith most immune to these temptations, more powerfully drawing people away from conflict and toward meditation and peaceful coexistence. Time for a reality check from Burma:

Days after Buddhist mobs tore through the central city of Meiktila in March, two trucks filled with men showed up in Mr. Nyi Nyi’s neighborhood and hurled stones at the night watchmen with slingshots. Some Muslims with means have fled to Malaysia or Singapore. Muslim-owned businesses are losing Buddhist customers. A growing Buddhist movement known as 969 that has the blessing of some of the country’s leaders is campaigning for a boycott of Muslim products and businesses and a ban on interfaith marriages.

The movement says it is not involved in violence, but critics say that, at the least, hate-filled sermons are helping to inspire the killings. “This is the first time we experience this in our lifetime,” said U Maung Maung Myint, who runs an import-export company and is one of the trustees of the Bengali mosque, which is only a few hundred paces from a Buddhist pagoda, a Christian church and a Hindu temple. He was referring specifically to the mistrust between communities.

And this is a consequence of more democracy. As in Egypt and Iraq, sudden freedom may take intolerant and sectarian religious forms. But when Buddhism becomes a vehicle for mob violence against minorities and sectarian cleansing, it truly is depressing.

(Photo: A youth watches as a structure burns in Lashio, Shan state of Burma on May 29, 2013. Burma’s government called for calm Wednesday after mobs burned down a Muslim orphanage, a mosque and shops during a new eruption of religious violence in the east of the country. By Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images.)

And Europeans are none too happy about it:

In Germany, a government investigation into what Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government knew about Prism will likely come into being this week. In Brussels, kickoff talks on the EU-U.S. trade deal could be hampered or stall out completely over fears that the U.S. government is using its spying system to steal European trade secrets. And on both sides of the Atlantic, Transatlanticists are struggling to figure out what still binds both sides.

Stephen Walt says the spying should come as no surprise to political realists:

What we are is a set of national states whose interests align in many areas, but not everywhere. And that’s also why various proposals for a global “League of Democracies” were always a bit silly: Sharing a democratic system is too weak a reed on which to rest a global alliance. Even democratic states experience conflicts of interest with each other, and as the NSA has now shown, they continue to see each other as competitors and spy on each other in order to seize various advantages. So nobody should be surprised that the United States was using its superior technical capacity to try to gain an edge on its European partners, and you can be sure that America’s European allies have been spying on the United States too, if not as extensively or as expensively.

(Photo by Mike Herbst)

A heart-breaking story about what rejecting your own gay son can lead to. This is the kind of tale that is helping evangelicals turn a corner on gay dignity and equality. Because the consequences of rejection can be so devastating.