and Jacob Sollum tells me how:

"For most Americans," the Court observed, "the amount due will be far less than the price of insurance." Someone earning $50,000 a year, for instance, would be subject to a penalty of about $1,000 in 2016, when the tax takes full effect. A 2011 eHealth study found the average price for an individual policy was $2,200, a number that's apt to rise under Obamacare's minimum coverage requirements, which ban no-frills, high-deductible health plans. As the Court noted, "It may often be a reasonable financial decision to make the payment rather than purchase insurance."

Even paying the penalty is effectively optional, because Congress, for political reasons, barred the Internal Revenue Service from using its most effective tools—liens, forfeiture, and prosecution—to collect it. As the Associated Press recently explained, the IRS, confronted by uninsured taxpayers who refuse to pay the penalty, must instead resort to "scary letters and threats to withhold tax refunds."

just a reminder - Go Gault .... and I don't mean Willie

Either that or e's just stupid, and I'm not willig to go there.  Josh Barro says it well. Earlier this week POTUS was pandering to Iowa farmers.  

Obama says we need to "put politics aside" and give farmers their money. This is backwards. America's food policies, which put food producers' interests ahead of of those of food consumers, are all about politics. Farmers are an effective lobby; eaters aren't.

Putting politics aside would mean getting the government out of the farm subsidy business, and forcing farmers to seek profit-making opportunities and plan for risks like other businesspeople do. It certainly wouldn't mean authorizing a new farm bill.

Read the rest here.

until the next one.

First, if you haven't read I, Pencil you should. 

Or you could read about when This guy tried to make a toaster from scratch and failed. (Note that he didn’t really start from scratch, either.) In A Brief History of Liberty, Schmidtz and I say,

…if you want pizza today, you can acquire a slice of it in exchange for a few minutes of work. But if you tried to make a pizza all by yourself, eschewing all reliance upon the division of labor, you would not live long enough. On your own, you would not even be able to smelt the iron to make the oven and other basic tools that you would need to get started. (139)

Or just skip to Jason Brennan's article.  Now.

For all the muddled pages and wasted ink, it could come down to a single word.  Section 1401 of the Affordable Care Act is, on the surface, just as exciting as it sounds. It outlines in excruciating detail the eligibility requirements for an American to receive a tax subsidy to assist in purchasing health insurance.

It starts with the the Affordable Care Act’s defining a health insurance exchange, in scintillating Section 1311, as a “governmental agency or nonprofit entity that is established by a state.”

The last three words are the crucial ones, because they indicate that only states can establish exchanges under that Section 1311. There’s a whole other part of the law, Section 1321, that allows the federal government to set up federal exchanges in states that do not take on the task themselves.

This all matters in the all-important Section 1401, where it lays out who can get a federal insurance subsidy. There, the law says that only those who are “enrolled … through an Exchange established by the State under 1311.”

If there’s a smoking gun in this case, it’s that sentence right there. It says that the only people who can qualify for subsidies are those who get coverage through a state-based exchange.

States, by refusing to set up exchanges, leave the populace with no place to go.

Massimo Pigliucci pens a critique of what he calls the Community of Reason: “the broad set encompassing skeptics, atheists and secular humanists.” It is a constructive one, in that he considers himself a member and wants to purge it of its crasser tendencies. Among these: the beliefs that science can deliver answers to moral questions (rather than simply inform those answers), that all religious education is objectionable, and that evolutionary psychology is as well established as evolutionary biology, and that science has shown there to be no free will. Interestingly, Pigluicci argues that many of these problems can be traced to a latent anti-intellectualism.

I listened to his podcast until it becam a bit too ... "we're not willing to be skeptical about the OBVIOUS stuff .... like Socialism and AGW."  Maybe I should give him another shot?

going to Harrisburg PA today.  On my last flight I was surrounded by bad Paul Rudd /  Zack Galifinakis characters. 

I'm sure He was laughing.

I wasn't

via Greg Easterbrook @ TMQ

AP Stylebook, an affiliate of The Associated Press, announced, at the annual meeting of the American Copy Editors Society, that formal writing may now misuse the word "hopefully." All but begging readers to wince, AP Stylebook said, "Hopefully, you will appreciate this update."

Common constructions such as "hopefully, I will be at the picnic" do not mean "I hope to be at the picnic." They mean, "I will be at the picnic in a hopeful manner." Grammar shortcuts are inevitable in extemporaneous speech; edited formal prose should be another matter. Yet rather than stand by disciplined use of words, The Associated Press now endorses sloppiness.

from a reader

Last week, I was re-reading Polly Adler’s autobiography, A House Is Not a Home. (Why I was doing so, don’t ask.) On the off chance you haven’t heard of her, she was a famous New York madam, presiding from the ’20s to the ’40s. At one point, she is describing her discussions with businessmen during the Depression. When I read the following sentence, I nearly fell off my seat on the train:

“. . . some of my best friends are millionaires, men like Scottie who did — and do — far more to help out the ‘submerged tenth’ than all those parlor pinks and leftist windbags whose altruistic schemes always simmer down to saving the country with somebody else’s hard-earned money.”

 

Only about a month behind now.  Let me say that I for one will NOT be participating in the POTUS' scheme.  My wife will be losing our insurance some time in November and we'll go naked for a couple of years. 

as Jacob Sollum obeserves

So how can the IRS enforce the mandate? Scary letters and threats to withhold tax refunds.

The law allows the IRS to withhold tax refunds to collect the penalty, and most filers get refunds. This year, 77 percent of the 135 million individual income tax returns processed by the IRS qualified for a refund. The average refund: $2,707.

For those who don’t qualify for a refund, a stern letter from the IRS can be effective, even if it doesn’t come with the threat of civil or criminal penalties, said Elizabeth Maresca, a former IRS trial attorney who supervises the Tax & Consumer Litigation Clinic at the Fordham University law school.

"Most people pay because they're scared, and I don't think that's going to change," Maresca said.

It should, once word gets out that the IRS is essentially powerless to collect this penalty/tax. People can even stop the IRS from taking the money out of their refunds by the simple expedient of changing their withholding so that they come out even (or owe a little) at the end of the year. (They probably should do that anyway, unless they like the idea of floating Uncle Sam an interest-free loan every year.) In practice, no refund = no tax. Yet analysts at the Congressional Budget Office predict that 4 million Americans will pay the tax in 2016, when it takes full effect. How stupid do they think we are?