Henninger: Big Government Implodes

"Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded," writes Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal.  That's the day a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy quietly announced that the "complexity of [Obamacare] requirements" required delaying implementation of the employer mandates for a year. Two days later, the Obama administration announced "that because of 'operational barriers' to IRS oversight, individuals would be allowed to self-report their income to qualify for the law's subsidies."

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

He notes that "ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up."

• The NSA data collection has people upset, even frightened that someone like Snowden can pull data onto a thumb drive and walk with it;
• Responding to the IRS political abuse scandal, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing;
• The nation's deteriorating weather satellites will wear out before being replaced, so government is looking at a possible 17-month gap in the availability of crucial weather data;
• The State Department failed to understand the Arab Spring despite warnings.

Concludes Henniger:

Those indispensable but dying weather satellites are a metaphor for the U.S. now. Whether ObamaCare or the border fence, Washington is winding down into a black hole of its own making. The debate's over. Liberalism will be swept into this vortex, too.

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UPDATE:  Washington Examiner editors take Henninger's point further in Obamacare: A 19th Century Answer to a 21st Century Question:

Simply put, the digitization of social interaction, economic transaction, the political process and everything in between is decentralizing the world, moving it in the opposite direction of the massive centralization of Obamacare. But nobody needs a federal bureaucrat to tell him what health insurance to buy when anybody with an Internet connection can simultaneously solicit bids from thousands of competing providers, pay the winner via electronic fund transfers, manage the claims process with a laptop, consult with physicians and other medical specialists via email, and even be operated on remotely by surgeons on the other side of the globe.

Rather than imposing a top-down, command-economy, welfare-state health care model with roots in Otto von Bismarck's Germany of 1881, a 21st-century government would ask what is needed to apply to health care access the Internet's boundless capacity to empower individual choice.

Too Many Teachers in Public Schools

"Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled — to 6.4 million from 3.3 million — and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides," writes Andrew Coulson. "Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs."

Taxpayers were promised that hiring teachers to reduce class sizes would improve student achievement. Did it work?

Hennessey: Strategy to Undo Obamacare

"In 2009 and 2010 the nation took huge steps down a path toward more government control of health care," writes Keith Hennessey in the WSJ. "A shift to the consumer-based reform path is still available—if voters want it."  It begins by repealing Obamacare in specific steps, then replacing it with these market-based reforms:

• replace the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a flat tax deduction or credit;
• allow consumers to buy portable health insurance sold anywhere in the nation, through their employer or on their own;
• expand contribution limits for health savings accounts;
• enact national medical liability reform; and
• enact Medicare [senior] and Medicaid [welfare] reforms such as the bi-partisan Wyden0Ryan Medicare reform plan, which provides a stronger system of competing private health plans as opposed to government-run "fee-for-service" Medicare.

WSJ: How High Court Could Rule on Health

The Wall Street Journal blog offers a useful summary of the 4 most likely ways the Supreme Court could rule on Obamacare and the fallout from each one: (1) found entirely constitutional; (2) insurance mandate struck down, but rest of law remains; (3) mandate and 2 related regulatory provisions struck down, but rest of law remains; and (4) found entirely unconstitutional.

Get the Economic Growth Choice Right

"Get the growth choice right, and we'll be ok," argues Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal. "Get it wrong and your kids will be talking Australia emigration."

Right now, with growth stuck below 2%, we're toast. With strong growth at 3% or better, there will be jobs. With long-term growth, Medicare, debt and the rest of the horribles that keep worrywarts awake at night are solvable. With strong growth, the U.S. will not have to cede world leadership prematurely to whichever Chinese functionary slugs his way to the top of their heap. With strong growth, your college graduate can move out of the house. With normal American growth, Europe may be irrelevant but it won't die, and a U.S. president won't look oddly small talking to the Vladimir Putins of the world.

Mr. Obama was exactly right in Cleveland when he said economic growth "is the defining issue of our time," that his and his opponents' views on growth are fundamentally different and "this election is your chance to break that stalemate." This he gets. Only the most obtuse "pragmatists" persist in believing the solution lies in a mystical center somehow combining elements from this ideological oil and water. ... Voters have to pick [between] two competing growth models, which means paying attention to what the candidates are saying about economic growth. 

Obama Administration's Faulty View of Federal Power

"As the world awaits the Supreme Court's ruling on ObamaCare," writes Ilya Shapiro, "there's a larger story that the pundits are missing: the court's rejection of the Obama administration's increasingly extreme claims on behalf of unlimited federal power. ... When the administration can't get even a single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of the law, that's a sign there's something wrong with its constitutional vision."

He cites 3 cases in which the high court unanimously rejected government's claims this year:

Women Primed to Break Glass Ceilings

From the Wall Street Journal: "The ranks of female chief executives remain thin, with women in the top spot at just 35 Fortune 1000 companies. But the pipeline is promising, says Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Frontier Communications Corp., adding that "she wouldn't be surprised if the number of major-company female CEOs doubled by 2017." Many women are already in senior management positions proving their worth:

• nearly 73% of Fortune 500 companies now have at least 1 female executive officer
• 24% of senior vice presidents at 58 big companies are women

The Wall Street Journal profiles 10 female executives "whose operational expertise and track record make them likely picks to lead a Fortune 1000 company within five years."

Read the full article, More Women are Primed to Land CEO Roles, by Joann S. Lublin and Kelly Eggers.

Tough Love for 2012 Grads

Bret Stephens at the WSJournal delivers a hard dose of reality to the Class of 2012 — one that just might help them beat the odds in today's "lousy economy."

...since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.

Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts. ... Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.

To this Stephens adds insight on prospective employers, résumés, and competition in the marketplace. A tough but valuable read.

"Why Women Make Less than Men"

"Are we really in the midst of what Pew [Research Center] calls a 'gender reversal'?" asks Kay Hymowitz in the Wall Street Journal. "One stubborn fact of the labor market argues against the idea. That is the gender-hours gap, close cousin of the gender-wage gap." She cites studies from the U.S. to Sweden suggesting that "the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap."  Simply put, women more often than not choose to work fewer hours than men once they have children:

The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage.