Month: February 2014

After attending the massive Moral Mondays protest in Raleigh this weekend, Dahlia Lithwick considers the role of the faithful in the liberal coalition:

Progressives are not used to so much religion in their politics. I met someone who planned to avoid Saturday’s protest because of the God talk, and it’s clear that for many liberals, it’s easier to speak openly about one’s relationship with a sexual partner than a relationship with God or spirituality. But there are a lot of liberals who live on the seam between faith and politics. And one of the core messages of Moral Mondays is that ceding all talk of faith and morality to the political right in this country has been disastrous for the left. …

As discomfiting as it may be to hear the Bible quoted alongside the Federalist Papers, the truth remains that for most people of most faiths, kicking the poorest and most vulnerable citizens when they are down is sinful. Stealing food and medical care from the weakest Americans is ethically corrupt. And the decades long political wisdom that only Republicans get to define sin and morality is not just tactically wrong for Democrats. It’s also just wrong. This is a lesson progressives are slowly learning from nuns and the new pope. When we talk of cutting food stamps or gutting education for our poorest citizens, we shouldn’t just call it greed. We should call it what it is: a sin.

The question begging here is about that “we”. And it’s not as simple as Dahlia would have it. As Christians, it seems to me, our faith may inform our politics, but not dictate its contents or permit us to use theological claims in civil debate. So, for example, there is no disputing Jesus’ teachings about the poor. But Jesus had no teachings about government‘s relationship to the poor, no collective admonitions for a better polity. On the countless occasions he was asked about such issues, he was remarkably consistent: do not confuse Caesar with your own soul.

Now Catholic social teaching may look at a society and see grotesque inequalities and injustices, but it does not have a pre-made, uniform prescription for them.

What the Church can and must do is draw our attention to, say, soaring inequality or long-term unemployment or resilient poverty and challenge us to see if these evils can be prevented or ameliorated. What it should not do, it seems to me, is grant any political movement – let alone a political party – to represent in policy or political terms what our actual response should be. For that we need civil debate over political and policy ends – and Christians may well take different prudential positions in that debate and draw different conclusions.

It seems to me you can resist the politicization of religion by the right without committing the same category error on the left. In fact, it seems to me vital for the restoration of a living Christianity that it not be drawn into these political struggles. But if you do want to conflate Christianity with leftist politics, as Rod Dreher notes, you may come to regret it:

OK, fine. I don’t have a problem with using that kind of rhetoric in principle. But if you’re going to go that route, you lose your right to complain about religion interfering in politics.

No more griping about how conservative Christians are trying to impose their morality on the rest of us. That’s exactly what the progressive religious leaders in North Carolina are trying to do. And more power to them, sort of. I mean, I don’t know much about what’s going on in NC, and chances are I oppose most of what the Moral Mondays coalition is after. But I think they are doing the right thing in bringing their religious convictions to the public square to influence the political debate.

But let the Left be on notice: if you endorse this kind of thing, don’t ever open your mouth to complain about conservatives doing it. You can’t complain about the Religious Right bringing their faith to the public square when you don’t like their politics, and praise the Religious Left for doing the same thing when it suits your goals.

On Sunday, Swiss voters narrowly approved a referendum to place a cap on immigration. What this means for its relationship with the European Union:

Switzerland is not an E.U. member, but it has a bilateral agreement on free movement with E.U. countries. European citizens can freely move and work in Switzerland, as can Swiss citizens in the E.U. The immigration cap is clearly incompatible with this agreement, and as all the agreements between the E.U. and Switzerland are tied together by a so-called “guillotine clause”, the E.U. could potentially revoke all of them, including crucial agreements on banking and taxation.

The vote’s outcome has severe economic consequences for the Swiss economy even aside from its relationship with the E.U. Switzerland is has one of the highest share of immigrants relative to all E.U. countries: 23 percent of the population does not have Swiss citizenship, and 63 percent of these residents come from E.U. or European Economic Area countries. Immigration from E.U. countries, particularly from Germany and Portugal, has played a large role in sustaining domestic demand in recent years.

Walter Russell Mead calls the vote irrational but understandable:

No other country benefits economically as handsomely from its migrant population as Switzerland does, but it would be misleading to try to view the vote in overly rational terms.

It is better understood as a primal scream rather than a calculated policy. The Swiss voted with their guts, not with their heads, and in so doing they followed a deeper instinct felt by many of their European peers. As German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble perceptively commented on the outcome of the referendum: “Of course it shows that in this globalized world, people are increasingly uneasy about unrestricted movement. I think that’s something we must all take very seriously.”

Ryan Avent thinks it may have something to do with Switzerland’s expanding welfare state:

I’m more interested in, and perhaps worried by, the (possible) interaction of the Swiss immigration vote with a fledgling movement within Switzerland for a universal basic income.

The basic income plan is anything but a sure thing, and residence does not equal citizenship. But at a time at which economic conditions—like stagnant wages, falling employment rates, and declining labour share of income—make extension of the safety net look reasonable, a large foreign-born population may come to look like an obstacle to such extensions: either because making the safety net available to migrants is socially and financially impractical or because the idea of a second class of poor migrants is unappealing.

Cowen wonders if there is an upper limit to immigration levels:

In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.

Bryan Caplan draws the opposite conclusion:

Swiss anti-immigration voting was highest in the places with the least immigrants!  This is no fluke.  In the U.S., anti-immigration sentiment is highest in the states with the least immigration – even if you assume that 100% of immigrants are pro-immigration. The natural inference to draw, then, is the opposite of Tyler’s: The main hurdle to further immigration is insufficient immigration. If countries could just get over the hump of status quo bias, anti-immigration attitudes would become as socially unacceptable as domestic racism.

A big question is whether the referendum will embolden opponents of open borders elsewhere in Europe:

Other governments, including Norway, have suggested removing themselves from the Schengen Area, and there’s been widespread opposition to allowing recent EU members Bulgaria and Romanian to join.  EU leaders reportedly discussed scrapping Schengen and reimposing border controls in the event of Greece deciding to exit the eurozone—which for the time being appears to be a remote possibility.

The depth of anti-immigrant sentiment in Switzerland is a bit puzzling, given that with a quarter of its residents being foreign-born, it has the lowest unemployment rate in Europe at 4 percent and its economy is among the strongest. If a law like this can pass there, it seems like the dominoes could fall pretty fast for the rest of the continent and the days of passport-free borders might be numbered.

Yesterday the Obama administration announced that the employer mandate – the requirement that larger employers provide health insurance to all their full-time staff or pay a penalty – will be delayed for another year for companies with 50-99 employees. Cohn ponders what motivated the decision:

What’s the primary rationale? It’s impossible to say. The official explanation is the same as before—the move will give companies a little extra time and flexibility, easing the transition to the newly reformed health care system. That makes perfect sense. On the other hand, administration officials might also have other goals in mind. For example, they might be anxious about employers taking certain actions—like limiting the hours of workers, in order to avoid giving those workers health insurance. Administration economists have said they don’t see evidence this is happening on a large scale and the Congressional Budget Office just last week came to the exact same conclusion. But anecdotes of such decisions have been all over the media. (Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily has been tracking them.) Whether or not the problem is real, it might appear real.

Kate Pickert points out that the employer mandate “is not considered a central tenet of the law’s plan to expand health coverage”:

The vast majority of large employers already offer insurance and the mandate was mostly meant to shore up this system into the future. Still, every time more employers are exempted from the mandate for another year, the cost of the reform law increases. Before the mandate was originally delayed, budget experts had predicted the requirement would generate some $10 billion in revenue in 2014, in part, from penalties paid by employers opting not to provider insurance to workers. In addition, some workers who may have received health insurance through work in 2014 and 2015 will now instead be eligible for federal subsidies to buy coverage independently through the the law’s state-based insurance exchanges.

Kliff looks at Massachusetts’s example:

Massachusetts’ universal coverage law has an employer mandate–and, since it passed seven years ago, employer-sponsored coverage has been pretty much stagnant. Delays to the employer mandate can matter politically. But as for what they mean for who Obamacare covers, this delay will likely amount to a relatively small, if non-existent, change.

Avik Roy says “we should simply repeal the employer mandate”:

It’s a huge drag on hiring, because the mandate increases the cost of hiring someone (because on top of wages, you now have to pay for his costly, government-approved insurance plan). The House of Representatives has already proposed a bill to repeal the provision, and it would be quite easy for the Senate to do so as well.

But the Obama administration doesn’t want to do things the old-fashioned way, by actually passing a law through Congress. The President fears that by opening the Affordable Care Act to legislative changes, many more aspects of the law could get repealed or changed by Congress. So, instead he simply chooses to ignore the law. It’s up to the public to hold him accountable.

The way the administration is going about making these changes also bothers Philip Klein:

If Obama believes the employer mandate is a bad idea that needs to be repealed or severely changed, he should propose permanent changes rather than erratic piecemeal fixes. But for Obama, it isn’t acceptable for opponents of the health care law to seek changes through the constitutional legislative process. That’s sabotage. The only way to make changes to Obamacare is for him to do so unilaterally, no matter what the text of the law actually says.

Bob Laszewski argues that the piecemeal approach affects the law’s functionality:

No one has been more critical of the various requirements in Obamacare that I have. But to make an insurance system work you have to have a set of consistent and consistently applied rules. You can’t have some people choosing to be out today and in tomorrow. You can’t have a system where insurers price products based upon one set of conditions and then you keep backing off on the conditions consumers and employers have to follow.

Yuval Levin sees this as an outrageously expansive interpretation of executive powers:

We have here a written statute that levies a fine on large employers who fail to provide insurance coverage as a benefit to their employees. It defines a large employer as “an employer who employed an average of at least 50 full-time employees on business days during the preceding calendar year,” provides a relatively detailed set of criteria for applying that definition, and states that the provision “shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” We have already seen that latter date pushed back by a year without obvious legal authority, and now we see it pushed back by another year for some affected employers while the requirement is loosened for others. If this kind of selective enforcement of a public law is legitimate, then how exactly would the president describe the limits of his ability to engage in such selection? Is he bound in some definable way to the particulars of statutes as written and passed by Congress, or does he merely take them as suggestions for how he might proceed?

Gobry warns Obama’s supporters that if they are OK with this type of executive legislation now, they’ll have no standing to cry foul when a Republican president does it:

What’s striking here is that liberals have gone along with these moves from the White House. And it makes intuitive sense: they have so much invested in Obamacare’s success that, just like the Administration, they’re pretty much willing to do anything to get the law to work, no matter how far-fetched or, well, illegal.

The problem with this is that, of course, if it becomes accepted American Constitutional tradition that the President can apply whatever laws she wants, well, that tradition applies to Republicans as well as Democrats.