Wednesday, October 14, 2015 -- Part III; Trainwreck; The Road To New England

High Voltage Transmission Lines From Canada? 

CBR? Pipelines? New England Has It All

New England looks to Canada for more power. The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

New England’s most populous states are looking to tap Canadian dams and rivers for more of their electricity, a change that officials say would help cut greenhouse-gas emissions and help keep some of the nation’s highest power prices in check.

Canada, with plenty of water and just 35 million people, gets 63% of its power supply from hydroelectric dams, and is adding more with an eye on exports. Getting that power to New England is no easy task—one power-line proposal in New Hampshire has drawn criticism from locals—but policy makers in the region have long been tantalized by the prospect of plentiful, cheap Canadian power.

Massachusetts and Connecticut, home to most of New England’s population and power demand, could add enough new hydropower to supply millions of people through efforts under way in each state. Entergy Corp. threw those efforts into sharp relief Tuesday when it announced plans to shut its Pilgrim nuclear plant in Massachusetts by mid-2019 due to high operating costs and poor market conditions.

The shutdown “not only poses a potential energy shortage, but also highlights the need for clean, reliable, affordable energy proposals,” Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a first-term Republican, said in a statement. He cited a need for hydropower and renewable resources like wind and solar power.

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And Americans No Longer Care;

They've Moved On

ObamaCare bear market. The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

By liberal and media acclamation, ObamaCare is a glorious success, the political opposition is fading and the entitlement state has gained another permanent annex. The reality, for anyone who cares to look, is different and suggests that ObamaCare is far more vulnerable than this conventional wisdom.

As Exhibit A, note that participation on the federal and state insurance exchanges is badly trailing the original projections and declining over time. About 11.7 million people joined ObamaCare during the open sign-up period last year. But enrollment this summer slipped 15% to 9.9 million with “effectuated” coverage, meaning enrollees who were up to date on their nominal share of the premium after subsidies.

Some churn is inevitable, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated two years ago that some 13 million would participate in 2015, and its most recent revision in March of this year still pegged the figure at 11 million. The CBO nonetheless now projects ObamaCare will more than double in size in 2016 to 21 million, and such a growth spurt is probably necessary to stabilize the insurance markets.

But don’t count on the attrition problem going away given ObamaCare’s high and rising costs, as well as its low quality that is approaching Medicaid levels of coverage. The plans simply don’t offer good value for the money. [I've said from the beginning that ObamaCare is simply high-priced catastrophic health insurance.]

In a new working paper, Wharton economists Mark Pauly, Adam Levine and Scott Harrington estimate how much better or worse off the non-poor uninsured are under ObamaCare. They measure the cost of the plans, the benefits of consuming pre-paid medical care and out-of-pocket payments without obtaining coverage. They conclude that, “even under the most optimistic assumptions,” half of the formerly uninsured take on both a higher financial burden and lower welfare, and on net “average welfare for the uninsured population would be estimated to decline after the ACA if all members of that population obtained coverage.”

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6,000 Felons Head Back To Ferguson 

Just what Ferguson needs: 6,000 more felons: The Wall Street Journal is reporting on Obama’s Tragic Legacy for Black Americans -- adding to harmful policies on school vouchers and the minimum wage: a plan to free 6,000 federal inmates.

As Kanye West might say, I’m starting to wonder if the president much cares about the well-being of poor blacks.

Mr. West was remarking on the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster, but the current administration seems keen on facilitating man-made varieties.

At the urging of labor unions, President Obama has pushed for higher minimum wages that price a disproportionate percentage of blacks out of the labor force.

At the urging of teachers unions, he has fought voucher programs that give ghetto children access to better schools. Both policies have a lengthy track record of keeping millions of blacks ill-educated and unemployed. Since the 1970s, when the federal government began tracking the racial achievement gap, black test scores in math, reading and science have on average trailed far behind those of their white classmates. And minimum-wage mandates have been so effective for so long at keeping blacks out of work that 1930, the last year in which there was no federal minimum-wage law, was also the last year that the black unemployment rate was lower than the white rate. For the past half-century, black joblessness on average has been double that of whites.

Last week the Justice Department said it would release some 6,000 inmates from federal prison starting later this month. The goal, according to the White House, is to ease overcrowding and roll back tough sentencing rules implemented in the 1980s and ’90s. But why are the administration’s sympathies with the lawbreakers instead of their usual victims—the mostly law-abiding residents in low-income communities where many of these inmates eventually are headed? In dozens of large U.S. cities, violent crime, including murder, has climbed over the past year, and it is hard to see how these changes are in the interest of public safety.

I love the euphemism: "inmates from federal prison." Inmates? These are felons. To make this work, President Obama needed to grant all 6,000 a pardon, and expunge from their records any history of prison. As long as they are felons, they won't be getting any jobs.

President Obama has cleverly transferred the onus of support for 6,000 felons from the federal government to the states, to all the "Fergusons" across the country.