Eugene Volokh hosts a genuinely excellent recap of the issues in the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court, written by Stanford law professor Michael McConnell. Professor McConnell identifies four questions the Supreme Court must consider:

(1) Could Hobby Lobby avoid a substantial burden on its religious exercise by dropping health insurance and paying fines of $2,000 per employee?

(2) Does the government have a compelling interest in protecting the statutory rights of Hobby Lobby’s employees?

(3) Would a ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby give rise to a slippery slope of exemptions from vaccines, minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination laws, and the like?

(4) Has the government satisfied the least restrictive means test?

His answer to each of those questions is “No” and he goes into some depth in the reasoning behind his answer. Here’s a brief sample:

Even accepting (arguendo) the notion that insurance coverage for contraceptives is a compelling interest, it is hardly obvious that the least restrictive way to provide that coverage is by forcing employers to provide it. Indeed, the government’s argument that Hobby Lobby should just drop insurance altogether demonstrates that the government actually does not view it as essential that people receive insurance through their employers as opposed to from other sources. The important point for the government, it seems, is that employees who work at Hobby Lobby have access to this coverage from some source.

This could be structured in any number of ways. The government could extend the same accommodation to the small number of businesses with this conscientious objection that it already has to religious employers. It could subsidize the contraceptive coverage directly. Employers with conscientious objections could compensate for not providing contraceptive coverage by adding other valuable coverage to the employees’ plans, thus ensuring that the employer receives no financial benefit from the objection and that the employees bear no net burden. The government could allow employers to substitute cash for coverage on a tax-free and tax-deductible basis.

If you’re at all interested in this case, whether in agreement with the government’s position, disagreement, or simple curiosity, you owe it to yourself to read this post.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

Where Is Transnistria?

The future may hold a lot of vehement arguing over some very insignificant bits of territory.

Robert Kagan notes that President Obama’s attempts at giving Americans the foreign policy that they want isn’t working out particularly well for him:

The majority of Americans have opposed any meaningful U.S. role in Syria, have wanted to lessen U.S. involvement in the Middle East generally, are eager to see the “tide of war” recede and would like to focus on “nation-building at home.” Until now, the president generally has catered to and encouraged this public mood, so one presumes that he has succeeded, if nothing else, in gaining the public’s approval.

Yet, surprisingly, he hasn’t. The president’s approval ratings on foreign policy are dismal. According to the most recent CBS News poll, only 36 percent of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing on foreign policy, while 49 percent disapprove. This was consistent with other polls over the past year. A November poll by the Pew Research Center showed 34 percent approval on foreign policy vs. 56 percent disapproval. The CBS poll showed a higher percentage of Americans approving of Obama’s economic policies (39 percent) and a higher percentage approving his handling of health care (41 percent). Foreign policy is the most unpopular thing Obama is doing right now. And lest one think that foreign policy is never a winner, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy ratings at roughly the same point in his second term were quite good — 57 percent approval; 34 percent disapproval — and Ronald Reagan’s rating was more than 50 percent at a similar point in his presidency. That leaves Obama in the company of George W. Bush — not the first-term Bush whose ratings were consistently high but the second-term Bush mired in the worst phase of the Iraq war.

His explanation for the “paradox” is that Americans are ungrateful louts. I think it’s more that Americans are conflicted about foreign policy or as it’s sometimes put have cognitive dissonance about it.

On the one hand the default position for most Americans is non-interventionism, differing from the default position of American elites and opinion-makers which pushes us towards intervention. On the other we want things to go well, both for us and, mildly and at a distance, for others.

What I think have been missing from the discussions of foreign policy that have been fomented by the Ukraine crisis are the ideas of path dependency and opportunity costs. “Path dependency” is the idea that one course of action precludes another. The path in Syria that would have produced the least carnage was supporting Assad at least tacitly. It was impossible to oppose Assad and minimize bloodshed. We had to choose.

We have been alienating, aggravating, opposing, and ignoring Russia for several decades. We should not be surprised when Russia turns and says “this far and no farther” and, given Russia’s history, we should be even less surprised that they say it by force of arms.

And courses of action have opportunity costs. Waging wars that were impossible to win in Afghanistan and then in Iraq made it much less likely that we’d want to wage any war for some time to come. You’ve got to pick your wars carefully. We do not have an infinite appetite for war.

Megan McArdle proposes three reasons for the administration’s extension of the open enrollment period for the healthcare exchanges under the PPACA:

One is that the administration fears the system will crash under the kind of demand spike they saw in the last weeks of December enrollment. This is just a prophylactic measure designed to make sure that people who genuinely tried to sign up but couldn’t get through don’t get hit by the individual mandate — and show up on television, crying, shortly thereafter.

The second is that the administration knows, or strongly suspects, that most of the people who have so far bought insurance are people who already had insurance. They’re concerned that when enrollment is closed, they’re only going to be able to point to a net reduction of a few million uninsured — and that almost all the reduction will come from people on Medicaid. So they’re hoping to get a few hundred thousand or million more uninsured people to sign up during the grace period.

The third, most worrying, possibility is that the demographics haven’t really improved substantially. A lot of commentators, including me, have been expecting the “Young Invincibles” — the younger, healthier customers whose premiums will subsidize care for the previously uninsurable — to show up on the exchanges this month. So far, only 25 percent of total signups have come from young adults. And even that may overstate things, because it isn’t unreasonable to assume that the folks who selected plans but didn’t pay for them are young and irresponsible people like … well, like me at 25.

I’ll propose another. Either the administration doesn’t understand or doesn’t believe in insurance. You can’t run an insurance plan the way the administration seems to want to. There’s no way to project your costs which means there’s no way to determine premiums.

Here’s an interesting little factoid:

The individual mandate had the least effect on those it was supposed to encourage to gain coverage—the uninsured. McKinsey & Co. surveys found that a little over one-quarter of people signing up for coverage last month were previously uninsured. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that about one million uninsured Americans will sign up for the ObamaCare exchanges before open enrollment ends. For perspective, that’s about 2% of the 48 million uninsured.

That sounds like an awful lot of energy, time, and money expended to insure .3% of the people. Do you think the additional costs will be linear or geometric to insure the reamining 16%?

Charles Lane has turned his attention to the largest single tax break that goes to benefit the wealthy—the home mortgage interest deduction:

In the debate over economic inequality, most of the discussion is about new things the federal government should do to make the distribution of our society’s resources more even: raise the minimum wage, say, or impose higher tax rates on the rich.

But what about getting Washington to stop some policies that skew after-tax income distribution upward?

Exhibit A is the tax code’s favorable treatment of residential real estate, specifically through the tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes. These are projected to cost the Treasury $70.3 billion and $31.7 billion in fiscal 2014, respectively, according to President Obama’s most recent budget proposal. Home-sale capital gains up to $500,000 are also tax-free; that’s expected to cost the Treasury $52.5 billion.

These housing breaks account for roughly 15 percent of the U.S. government’s $1 trillion in annual tax expenditures.

These tax breaks go overwhelming to the highest income earners (30% to the top 1% of income earners, 73% to the top quintile) and preponderantly to the states that vote most reliably Democratic, e.g. New York, California, Massachusetts, Washington, Washington, DC.

The choice doesn’t need to be between the present home mortgage interest deduction and no mortgage interest deduction. The home mortgage interest deduction could be capped, say, at $100,000 per year in interest. That virtually by definition keeps it in place for 97% of Americans which would seem to me to be pretty inclusive of the middle class.

The kernel of Mr. Lane’s column is that if you’re in favor of a more egalitarian society you should favor measures that actually make the society more egalitarian, even if they affect your pocketbook or your lifestyle. Sadly, he jumbles income inequality, wealth inequality, and inequality, generally. He’s also assuming that outcries about income inequality are sincere expressions of conviction rather than just finding a handy cudgel to beat your political opponents with. Or just making yourself feel good about how egalitarian you are without actually being egalitarian.

As if in answer to my questions a group of centrist Democratic senators plus independent Sen. Angus King, have produced a list of changes they’re proposing to the PPACA. Their proposed changes are:

• More alternative plans.
• Startup funds for “consumer-driven health insurance cooperatives”.
• Direct states to develop models for sale of health insurance across state lines.
• Raise the employer mandate to companies with more than 100 employees rather than 50.
• Extend the availability of health insurance tax credits for small businesses and make them available to companies with 50 or fewer employees rather than the present 25.
• Streamline reporting requirements (unspecified).
• Allow individuals to enroll in insurance programs directly through insurance companies on a permanent basis.

That raises two questions for me. First, what’s wrong with the PPACA? Second, do the senators’ proposals correct those? I don’t see it but it’s possible I have blinders on. As I see it the PPACA’s main problem is that it insures too few people for too high a cost and I see nothing in the senators’ proposals that will correct either of those problems.

I don’t oppose the PPACA. I want it to be fully implemented as soon as possible so that we can turn to the pressingly urgent problem of reforming healthcare in the United States rather than the distraction of reforming healthcare insurance. Our primary problem is that healthcare is too darned expensive. Eventually people will figure out that one of the fundamental assumptions of the PPACA—that people want healthcare insurance—is wrong or, at least, overstated. The uninsured are indifferent at best to healthcare insurance. They want healthcare to be available at an affordable cost.

Costs are an urgent problem for state and local governments which can’t wait any longer. Here in Illinois as I suspect is the case in many states we spend more on healthcare than on education or anything else on which the state spends money. The cost of healthcare continues to rise faster than revenues and faster than revenues should be expected to increase.

The senators who’ve made their proposals represent the far right among mainstream Democrats and given the state of the party leadership I’d be surprised if their proposals go much farther than being something to campaign on. It may be that I’m wasting my bandwidth even discussing them but so, I believe, are those who think that meaningful reform of the PPACA is likely for the foreseeable future.

My offhand guess about extending the deadline for enrollment in the exchanges is that there is some point at which the insurance companies will balk. It also seems to me that it raises a takings issue (if you take the insurance model at all seriously).

This afternoon I listened to Gov. Pat Quinn’s address on Illinois’s budget. I didn’t catch all of it but I caught most of it. If I had been expecting a green eyeshades-type speech, full of numbers and detail, I would have been disappointed. It was a stump speech.

Even as a stump speech it was a bit disappointing. I now know that Gov. Quinn is in favor of public education, infrastructure spending, and making the income tax hike of a few years ago permanent. I also know that he’s opposed to making services subject to the sales tax and Illinois’s excessive dependence on real estate tax. Beyond that there just wasn’t much there there.

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of how much he wanted to spend (on anything) or how much revenue would be needed.

However, as Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) said, it ain’t what you don’t know that’ll hurt you but what you do know that just ain’t so. The disinformation and misinformation in the governor’s speech was abundant.

For example, despite the governor’s frequent touting of Illinois’s pension reform most of the job is left to be done. An independent review of the pension reform measure found that its impact on Illinois’s public pension problem was negligible.

He also failed to mention that real estate taxes are the primary source of revenue for local governments and most of the real estate tax is securely in their hands (Illinois has more independently taxing institutions than any other state in the union). Whatever the state might do in this area will have practically no effectd. From the governor’s remarks you might conclude that education in Illinois was an accomplishment on which he could run proudly. The reality is that Illinois is last among the states in its contribution to public education. He emphasized how much Illinois had accomplished during his tenure in office while handily ignoring that the state’s credit rating had been lowered twice during that relatively brief tenure. There was nothing in his speech that would solve Chicago’s public pension problems, a significant portion of which has been fomented by the state, and one of the state’s most pressing problems.

Other than it it was a delightful speech, mostly serving to position the governor in his re-election campaign agaist Republican challenger Bruce Rauner.