While one federal court delivered the most significant rebuke to date of ObamaCare, another came to an opposite conclusion, setting the stage for more legal uncertainty. First up, the DC Court of Appeals ruled against the Obama Administration in Halbig v. Burwell. (The ruling is in this PDF link.) At issue: Does the Affordable Care Act–particularly, its individual mandate and the means-tested subsidies to purchase insurance–apply […]
John LaPlante
About John LaPlante
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Search warrants required for cell phones: SCOTUS ruling
The Supreme Court has ruled a ruling with some significant implications for policing and personal privacy. To quote from a review from the Washington Post, “In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court holds that searching a cell phone incident to arrest requires a warrant.” A few comments on the ruling: First, the analysis comes from Orin Kerr, a contributor to the Volokh […]
Saving money on college, extreme edition
Many people who attend college will be saddled with large debts and unmarketable degrees. One Minnesota man, though has found one way around it: Load up on college classes while still in high school. The Northfield News reports on one local resident who has earned a high school diploma and a college diploma in the same year. David Greer used Post Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) a program under which […]
National sovereignty is not a sufficient reason for “the ultimate sacrifice”
Today is Memorial Day. It’s common to confuse it with Veterans Day. One example comes from the Twitter feed of one business, “Today we honor all Veterans, including those on our Staff here, we thank all of those who have served our country, and we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.” There was a letter-to-the-editor someplace that captures the distinction nicely. It was posted […]
Divided we live: Political, economic, racial polarization in Milwaukee metro
One concept from graduate school (political science) that has stuck with me is the benefit of cross-cutting cleavages, which has nothing to do with “wardrobe malfunctions.” (See Wikipedia for an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-cutting_cleavage.) The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, however, has produced an analysis of its readership area, showing that there are plenty of “reinforcing cleavages,” or as we might call it outside of academic journals, polarization. Republicans and Democrats […]
Leftist leanings in academia: Yet another chapter
It’s fine if people in a particular profession lean this way or that in their political views. There’s nothing particularly appealing about an ideological quota, after all. Sometimes, the leanings are simply driven by logic. I would not expect that people who believe that the use of fossil fuels is a moral assault on Gaia or future generations of humans, for example, to rush into […]
Switching from DC to DB after turning down repeated opportunities
A county commissioner in Hennepin County, Minnesota, has been given plenty of chances to switch from a defined contribution retirement plan to a defined benefit one. He’s refused the chances each time. Now he wants to switch. The Legislature appears to be crafting legislation to let him do that. Is this any way to operate an employee benefits policy? Given the unrealistic expectations that Minnesota […]
Google follows Microsoft to Washington
A group of nerds get together to start a company. They become wildly successful by focusing on their business. Then they go political. Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Oh wait. You have. In the 1990s, there was Microsoft, which had a tiny presence in Washington DC, until its competitors egged on the US Department of Justice to pursuit anti-trust actions against the […]
Less bureaucracy, lower costs: Imagine that
The world of health care finance is one giant Rube Goldberg machine, with any number of third parties involved. Through Medicare, the U.S. government is the dominant player in setting prices for thousands of medical treatments. Corporate plans and private insurance companies add themselves into the mix, and of course the Affordable Care Care (ObamaCare) adds even more moving parts. But there’s a small movement […]
The war on e-cigs
So-called e-cigarettes, or e-cigs, are a curious product. They are called cigarettes, but they don’t contain tobacco, and people who use them don’t set anything on fire–except perhaps the desire of neo-prohibitionists to regulate them as if they were cigarettes. Have they been proven completely safe? No. But then again, we know that real cigarettes are harmful. If e-cigs, or electronic nicotine delivery systems as […]